He gave her a sideways look. “There are some old spells that call for the magic-worker to consume the recently dead. A small portion.”
“That’s such a foul idea I don’t even want to know where the dead bodies come from,” Nora said. Her idea of practicing magic someday suddenly seemed slightly less attractive.
“It’s a very obsolete branch of magic,” Aruendiel said. “Well, the children might not have known the taste of goat, either. The only time peasants like these eat meat is the Black Offering at New Year’s.” He added: “The father might have noticed something amiss—if he hadn’t been in his cups. Massy told how much he had enjoyed the stew.”
“Horrible. Poor Irseln! I don’t blame her for being angry.”
Aruendiel made a vague noise of assent and passed a hand over his face. “I will judge Mistress Massy’s case tomorrow, before we leave.” His gaze was locked on the bones, still wrapped in cloth and lying on the hearth. Suddenly the story that Hirizjahkinis had told came back to Nora, and a mad, shimmering, impossible notion took shape in her mind.
“Can you bring her back?” she asked.
The stool lying on its side righted itself suddenly, then fell over with a thud.
Aruendiel rubbed the back of his neck again. He spoke as though he were talking to himself: “Can I? The child’s spirit is here and willing; there is no need to summon it.”
“Oh, if you can, of course you must!” Nora said passionately. “Yes, bring her back! You can do it?”
“It is perilous to wake the dead,” he said, much as he had told the queen in Semr.
“But she’s already awake.” The stool rocked and shuddered as though to underscore her words. “And Irseln was only a little girl,” Nora added. “All those years ahead, stolen from her. She deserves to come back, to live her life.”
Aruendiel met her eyes with a long, pensive look. He spoke more kindly than before: “Many, many children die. They cannot all be returned to the living world.”
“I don’t know, maybe they should be,” Nora said. She dropped her gaze, annoyed at the quaver in her own voice. “But here we’re talking about just one child. Irseln.”
Aruendiel looked away, as if in search of another thought, and his crooked shoulders seemed to tighten under an invisible load. “Very well,” he said. “Fetch some wood for the fire, Mistress Nora.”
Aruendiel laid the fragile bones out carefully on a quilt taken from the bed, reassembling Irseln’s skeleton as best he could. With the kindling that Nora had brought, he filled in the missing parts of the skeleton, then scooped up the bones and twigs and dropped them into the iron pot. He emptied one of Massy’s pitchers into the vessel. Then, with a heave, he hoisted it to hang on a hook above the fire. Using his pocketknife, he scraped up some dirt from the packed earth floor and threw it into the pot.
Without a word, he went out of the hut. Nora waited, listening to the restless movements of the fire and the faint hooting of owls outside. Irseln’s stool creaked from time to time.
Aruendiel returned half an hour later, carrying a saddlebag over his shoulder and a small, stunned-looking brown rabbit pressed against his chest. The animal roused itself to a last spasm of hopeless kicking before Aruendiel killed it with a casual wrench of the neck. Like unscrewing a jar of pickles. Nora hoped he had not seen her wince.
Aruendiel put the rabbit into the pot and poked the fire. Obediently, the flames surged around the base of the pot. He watched for several minutes with an appraising eye, and then turned away. “You gave all of the ham to the dog?” he asked.
“Yes.” She added, a trifle defensively, “There wasn’t much.”
They dined on the rest of their provisions—bread, a sliver of cheese each, and Nansis Abora’s peach preserves—while the iron pot simmered beside them. After a while the meaty smell of broth filled the hut. Nora, not quite full, tried to ignore it. She was dying to find out more about what was happening inside the pot, but Aruendiel seemed disinclined to talk. The only time he responded with more than a monosyllable was when she asked how long the spell would take.
“As long as need be,” he said irritably. “Are you an idiot? How long does it ever take to die or be born?”
After that, he pushed his stool back and settled himself stiffly with his back against the wall, arms resting on his knees, his eyes half-closed. Nora waited where she was, not wanting to miss anything in case the spell took a dramatic turn, until Aruendiel frowned at her and directed her to find a sleeping place. It seemed indecorous to take Massy’s bed. Nora opted for the pile of straw, feeling somber.
It had been a long, fatiguing day, but her sleep was uneasy. She woke up several times, thinking that the spell must be over by now, that she would now find out what had taken shape inside the darkness of the closed pot, but each time she opened her eyes to see the fire still burning and Aruendiel still crouched spiderlike in the shadows across the room.
Toward dawn Nora fell into a deeper sleep and dreamed that she was about to fail a high school French exam.
The magician was gone and the fire was out when Nora awoke. Milky morning light streamed through the windows of the hut. The iron pot still hung in the fireplace, the lid firmly in place.
In the quiet of the new day, she felt faintly embarrassed to recollect how seriously she had urged Aruendiel to bring the dead child back to life. She had gotten carried away: Irseln’s death was a crime right out of one of the more gruesome Grimm’s fairy tales, and she had imagined a fairy-tale ending. If she looked inside the pot now, Nora thought, there would be only a few bones and sticks floating in a gritty broth.
The flimsy door opened and Aruendiel entered. His eyes were shadowed with lack of sleep, but he moved more easily than Nora would have expected, the way a younger man would carry himself. He grunted by way of greeting, then went over to the fireplace. Wrapping his hand inside a fold of his cloak, he uncovered the pot, but replaced the lid before Nora could see inside.
“Is she alive?” Nora asked.
“Still dead.”
“Oh.” Despite herself, Nora felt deflated. “That’s too bad.”
Aruendiel snorted and tore a piece from the loaf of bread he had brought into the hut. “They’ll bring up Mistress Massy soon to be judged. We can leave after that.”
After a moment Nora ventured to ask: “Will she be executed?”
“It’s the penalty for murder,” Aruendiel said with a twitch of his shoulder, the expression on his face so black that Nora felt disinclined to pursue the conversation.
They were finishing the bread when footsteps and voices sounded outside. It was a large crowd, judging from the noise, but only the headman, Massy and her guards, and a few others came inside. Massy’s face was drawn, her eyes reddened but dry.
As she entered the hut, the stool in the middle of the floor creaked loudly.
One of the other men was Rorpin, Massy’s husband, shaky and pale under an unkempt beard. He had obviously sobered up enough to learn exactly what had been happening in his family over the past few days. He stood a small distance from his wife, as though he could not bear to be too near her, but there was something painfully protective in how he watched her.
The headman greeted Aruendiel with more friendliness than he had shown the day before. “Here she is, your lordship,” he said. “All that’s left is for you to pronounce sentence, and then we’ll take her down and hang her. You’ll be wanting to resume your journey, I’m sure.”
“Thank you, Pelgo,” said Aruendiel, with a faint curl of his lip. “There is, however, another matter to attend to first.” He directed two of the villagers to remove the pot from the fireplace. It was only barely cool enough to handle; they let it down suddenly with a thud. “Open it,” said Aruendiel to the headman.
Lifting the lid carefuly, Pelgo stared down in puzzlement. “What’s this?” Then he gasped.
