The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

Another situation? Another protector? Aruendiel’s words kept returning to Nora over the next few days.

She found herself taken up by a group of court ladies that included her roommate, Lady Inristian. Nora’s recent adventures—her role in the freeing of Bouragonr; her near kidnapping by the beautiful, dangerous Faitoren queen; her presentation to the king—all had made her the object of some curiosity, and Inristian was obviously delighted to find that her accidental association with Nora had become a social asset. She made a point of pulling Nora into her group’s after-dinner gossips, their pickup ben matches on the palace lawn, and their promenades to Semr’s more select shopping district, an intersection near the palace where an array of tiny shops sold cloth, ribbon, jewelry, perfume, tapestries, rugs, and gold and silver tableware.

Hers was not the most fashionable circle in the court—Nora could tell that almost at once, instinctively—but that hardly mattered. It was pleasant to be lionized, even by the B list. People seemed to be endlessly interested in hearing about Nora’s own world or about Ilissa and the Faitoren, although Nora was deliberately vague about her exact situation in the Faitoren court. It was not something she cared to discuss.

Find a protector? Even if she were inclined to, there was far too much competition. A protector was exactly what all the other young women were seeking, in the form of a husband. That was why they had left their country estates and come to Semr with their mothers, fathers, brothers, or married sisters to run interference for them. (At court, Nora discovered, a marriageable young woman could not speak to a man who was not a near relation unless chaperoned by a family member.) Inristian’s parents were dead, a handicap for her marriage chances; she had only an elderly uncle with a passion for gambling to help her find a husband.

“Once an evening, if I’m lucky, he introduces me to an acquaintance for a few minutes,” Inristian complained to Nora. “Then just when I’m at my most charming, he goes back to his game, so what can I do but go back to my seat? And then he tells me it’s a disgrace that I’m not married yet.” Her tone was light, but there was something forced about it. She was almost twenty-three, she had those pockmarks, and from little hints she dropped—and the darns in her skirts—Nora had the idea that her estate in the Valley of the River of the White Boar, wherever that was, was not very prosperous. Once, in a corridor, they passed a young woman wearing an elaborate red head-covering, and Nora saw Inristian frown and look away. Someone told Nora later that the red headdress was a betrothal veil.

Tearing through Pride and Prejudice in her spare moments, Nora found that the scene where Mrs. Bennet upbraids Lizzy for turning down Mr. Collins had a slightly different resonance now. “If you take it into your head to go on refusing every offer of marriage in this way, you will never get a husband at all,” cried Mrs. Bennet, “and I am sure I do not know who is to maintain you when your father is dead.” Mrs. Bennet had a point, although it pained Nora to admit it.

Of course, Inristian already had an estate of her own, however poor. “Maybe you shouldn’t feel so much pressure to get married,” Nora said to Inristian one day, as they were coming back from a visit to the shops. Behind them trudged the palace footman who had to escort them every time they went outside the palace walls. “You could take more time and find someone who’s really right for you.”

Inristian didn’t understand what she meant. “Oh, all the young men that I’ve met are right!” she said. “Some men at court do have very bad reputations, it’s true, but my uncle would never introduce me to them. He is careful about that, I will say. It’s only that he’s so lazy, he won’t do anything more than introducing me. It’s as though he expects me to negotiate my own marriage!”

“Well, couldn’t you arrange the marriage yourself, if you had to? That’s what we do in my country.”

Inristian looked both amused and nonplussed by Nora’s naivete. “Oh, you know,” she said finally, “a marriage is not just between a man and a woman; any prospective husband of mine will want to know, well, how my family and friends can help him.”

“A dowry, you mean?”

“More than that. Politics, you know.”

Nora had opened her mouth to reply when it suddenly struck her that for all the evident shortcomings in Lady Inristian’s method of finding a husband, it was better than Nora’s. After all, hers had also been a political marriage of sorts. Even with only an apathetic uncle to oversee the process, the countess was unlikely to find herself married to someone who turned into a flying reptile during the day. “I hope you find a good husband,” Nora said. “I’m sure you will.”

“Well, you know,” Inristian said with a giggle, “this is quite shocking, but I am almost certain that Lord Morasiv tried to catch my eye last night. He has a very nice estate in the south, smallish, but warm enough for a vineyard, is that not interesting? Of course wine can be quite lucrative. I think his chin is rather handsome. And I do like yellow hair. Have you seen him?”

Nora shook her head with a smile. But she remembered Lady Inristian’s description, and that evening, as she was passing through a crowded room in the palace, she saw a man who matched it: blond, a stalwart chin. His eyes looked a bit like grapes themselves, green and bulgy. He was talking to someone else that Nora recognized: the young man who had arrived too late for dinner a few nights before.

Nora had seen Inristian just a few minutes ago. She retraced her steps, meaning to alert Inristian. Perhaps the uncle could be torn away from his game to make an introduction.

Starting down a staircase, Nora recognized the hard, high tones of one of Lady Inristian’s friends, Baroness Fulvishin, coming from below. Then she heard her own name.

“So how did this thing Nora get the scars on her face?”

Nora’s first thought was that her command of Ors was getting to be quite good. Effortlessly, she had registered the grammatical mistake in the baroness’s question. It was an error in word choice: using a demonstrative pronoun meant for inanimate objects or animals to designate a person. That is, Nora.

But the baroness had not made a mistake, Nora reflected. She had heard courtiers use that construction a few times in the past few days, to refer to servants or peasants. She hesitated, wondering: Do I really want to hear this?

“—an accident,” Inristian said.

Another person said something else that Nora couldn’t quite catch, but that provoked a small storm of giggles.

“Honestly, Soristia!” said a fourth voice, laughing. “Aren’t you being a little—”

“Well, he murdered his wife, everyone knows that. This poor Nora thing, she must not have pleased him enough.”

“Or maybe that’s how she pleases him.”

More laughter, agreeably shocked.

“No, but to be serious.” Inristian’s voice. “At first I assumed she was, but she has shared my bedroom every night. And she has said nothing to indicate that she is his whore.”

“Oh, don’t be naive, sweet! Besides, I know what a sound sleeper you are.”

“Isn’t it obvious? He sent her off to separate lodgings so that he can sleep with other women while he’s here!”

“But he is so ugly. What woman would ever—?”

“Wizards can make anyone fall in love with them. And my grandfather says there used to be all kinds of stories about him. Even the queen—remember the portrait the other night, the one that came alive?”

“Oh, that was so boring. I wanted the dwarfs to come back—I’ve never laughed so hard in my life.”

“You know the old saying ‘Never trust a wizard’? My grandfather says that it’s because of Lord Aruendiel.”

“Did he really murder his wife?”

“Yes. And her lover.”

“Then she was a slut, what did she expect?”

“Well, I feel sorry for Nora, having to—you know—with a man like that.”

“I feel sorry for him. She’s nothing to look at, even if you don’t count the scar. And her clothes!”

Nora had heard enough. Gathering her skirts, she moved back up the staircase as quietly as she could. She tried to summon a smile at the lurid spectacle of herself and Aruendiel playing out some kind of sadomasochistic sex game. It would be easy enough to go downstairs and tell them how wrong they were. But why? She was a thing, not a person to them, no matter how often she’d gone ribbon-shopping or played