pointed out a castle that he had once helped capture or made an acid observation about the condition of a farmer’s livestock. By the end of the day she had learned nothing more about magic, but had picked up a few tips about siegecraft and animal husbandry that, she supposed, might prove useful someday.
On the second evening, Aruendiel arranged lodgings at a farmhouse, paying the young farmer with a silver bead and magic: spells to keep the rain out of the thatch, cure a toothache, and sweeten the well water. Nora awoke once during the night and saw, in the moonlight, that the space in front of the hearth where Aruendiel had been sleeping was vacant. She lay awake on her pallet for some time, wondering what she would do now that he had abandoned her after all. But in the morning he was lying there as though he had never stirred, his long limbs looking somehow askew even under the folds of his cloak.
As they were preparing to leave, she asked Aruendiel how much farther they had to go. About a dozen
“I could go faster if I didn’t have to ride sidesaddle,” Nora said. “It’s ridiculous to make women balance sideways.” As though horses weren’t huge and terrifying enough already.
She expected a caustic remark on her ignorance of social niceties, but to her surprise, Aruendiel smiled fractionally. “I agree with you. Women had a little more sense when I was younger. My mother never rode sidesaddle in her life.”
“Really?” Nora said, taken aback. Of course Aruendiel had had a mother, but it was odd to contemplate. “When did they start riding sidesaddle?”
“It was one of those crazes that start in the cities. It came in with the modern fashion for long skirts.”
Intrigued, Nora almost asked him for more details about this piece of fashion history, but thought better of it. “If I had the right kind of saddle,” she pointed out, “I could ride astride, and we could make better time.” Without answering, he heaved his own saddle onto his horse’s back and tightened the cinch under the horse’s belly. “Or would it be too unseemly for me to ride astride?” she asked sharply.
With a grunt, Aruendiel lifted her saddle from the fence. “There is nothing seemly about a bad rider,” he said. “You sit on the horse as though you’re made of wood. I once turned the Forest of Nevreng into cavalry for the count of Middle Duxirent. They rode much as you do.”
“Well, they didn’t have to ride sidesaddle, did—oh!” She had just noticed the saddle’s transformation. “Thank you! I don’t suppose you could shorten my skirt, too?”
“I am no tailor,” he said, frowning. “Rip the side seams out if you must.”
Riding astride on the transformed saddle, Nora did not exactly feel as though she and the horse were one, but at least they seemed to be more or less on the same team. It was easier to keep pace with Aruendiel. “There’s something I don’t understand,” she said to him. “Why can’t you just use your magic to wish us home? Hirizjahkinis moved the whole court to her country the other night and back again. Why can’t you do the same?”
“That was a temporary dislocation spell—and the Kavareen had much to do with it, if I’m not mistaken,” he said in a disapproving tone. “She is becoming far too dependent on that creature.”
“All right, but why can’t you do, um, a permanent dislocation spell, without the Kavareen?”
“Would you like me to summon up the winds to blow you to my castle, the way they took you from Ilissa’s castle?”
“No,” Nora said definitely. “That was enough excitement for one lifetime. But here’s the real question. Why don’t you use magic more often? Last night you could have changed, oh, a spoon or something into a bed for yourself, instead of sleeping on the floor. Or why even pay the farmer for a night’s lodging? You could have made him believe that you paid him, I’m sure.”
“Ah!” The question seemed to stir up a mixture of disdain and interest in Aruendiel. “The wizard Po Luin, when he traveled, used to construct a new city every night and then dismantle it in the morning. He used pebbles and twigs for the buildings, ants or field mice for the people. He disliked the country intensely; he found it dull.”
Nora wondered how interesting a city of former ants could be. But she said: “Why not do something like that? Everyday life is hard here, much harder than in my world. Why not use magic to make things easier?”
“Ilissa asked me a similar question once.”
Nora ignored the implied reproach. “What did you tell her?”
“I told her that magic was not a plaything. She found that very amusing.” He rode along for a few moments before speaking again. “I have been in worlds where people use almost no magic, like your own, and worlds where they use magic for almost everything. The Faitoren must have come from a place like the latter, originally. They cosset themselves with magic, and well, you see the result. It’s a pretty life, but none of it is real.
“Also,” Aruendiel added, his voice quickening with irritation, “it would be dishonorable to use magic to cheat a peasant.”
“I wasn’t seriously suggesting that.”
“I hope not.”
Another few minutes of silence, until Nora said: “Hirizjahkinis said that you taught her how to be a magician.”
“Yes. She was an excellent pupil.”
Before she could lose her nerve, Nora asked: “Will you teach me? I’d like to learn how—how to be a magician.”
The question amused him more than she would have liked. “A doubtful prospect. Very few are suited to become magicians.”
“What does it take?”
“Years of study and practice. But first one must know what magic is.”
The road dipped, and they splashed across a stream. “Well, what is magic? Do you command spirits, like Prospero? Did you sell your soul to the devil, like Faustus?”
Aruendiel wanted to know who Prospero and Faustus were. She tried to explain: “Magicians from stories in my world. Written, oh, some four hundred years ago.” She had never thought about it before, but surely the Elizabethans were almost the last to use magic as a plot device in serious literature. After Cervantes, the enchanters were living on borrowed time. “Prospero has a couple of magical servants,” she went on, “the most powerful being a spirit, Ariel, who can do things like raise storms and tread the ooze of the salt deep. Faustus makes a deal with the devil to acquire magical powers, but in the end he goes to hell, if you know what that is.”
“I do not command spirits,” Aruendiel said, with asperity. “It’s true, there is magic that is based on enslaving demons and spirits of various kinds, and I have studied it, but it is not the kind of magic that I practice now.”
“Well, then, what is magic? The kind that you practice now?”
He gave her a penetrating look. “Once you have worked magic, then you start to understand it.”
“That seems a bit circular,” Nora objected. Aruendiel’s only response was an impatient tilt of the head. “All right, I see,” she said. “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”
He seemed struck by the sentiment. “That is well put.”
“Thanks, but I didn’t think of it myself,” Nora said.
The countryside took on a different character when they left the lowlands around Semr. The road dwindled to a muddy track that snaked around wooded hills scabbed with bare black rock. Aruendiel said that once they crossed the Trollsblade Hills, they would enter the basin of the river Uel, which would bring them into his own lands. Nora asked, as a joke, whether there were any trolls in the area, and Aruendiel said no, not for at least two hundred years. She registered the stippling of yellow in the leaves of the trees, and was just wondering if the winters here would be as bad as Hirizjahkinis had warned, when they came into yet another tiny village.
