The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

much simpler problem.”

There were any number of questions that Nora would have liked to ask him at that point. She chose carefully. “But if you killed someone, and things became . . . too complicated, couldn’t you bring the person back to life again?”

Aruendiel drew his dark eyebrows together. “Did you not hear me say just now how difficult it is to cast a successful resurrection spell? And it’s a rare ghost who returns willingly at his murderer’s summons.

“Of course,” he added reflectively, “there is the famous case of the wizard Spornil Fivesheep, who killed his brother in a quarrel over land, and then, stricken with remorse, brought him back to life again. Some commentators, though, think that it was really an inferior Eoluthian substitution. His brother, newly revived, promptly killed him, which tends to support that theory.”

“What’s an Eoluthian substitution?”

“One life in exchange for another.” Aruendiel spoke sharply, as though annoyed at her ignorance, but his lined face was becoming more animated. “The sacrifice must be willing, or the revival is only temporary. In that case, to stay alive, the person brought back from the dead must keep sacrificing more and more people. It becomes very messy very quickly, but that never stops people from trying it. Now, a timestone—”

Nora nodded, listening hard, trying to make sense of it all. She still had no clear understanding of the nature of magic, or why it worked, but perhaps if she picked up enough of these enticing details—timestones, Eoluthian substitutions—some greater meaning would slowly unfold for her.

“—the longer one waits, the more unpredictable the results. Portat Nolu recommended that no more than an hour should elapse—”

Aruendiel was well launched. There was a long day’s ride ahead, but as far as she could tell, they would not have any difficulty filling up the hours to come.

Chapter 23

Nora pushed a stray lock of hair back from her face and grimaced, catching the smell of apples on her fingers. She had always liked the sweet, mild odor of apple flesh, but that was before she had to peel and slice a dozen bushels of apples for drying in the autumn sun, press more bushels for cider, and load still more apples into the castle cellars. Not to mention having to pick the fruit in the first place. At first their smell reminded her of Massy and her children, but now she was only sick of it.

The trip to Semr seemed to have happened a long time ago. Since then Nora’s life had been nothing but trying to wrest and preserve every last nutrient and calorie from the autumnal fields and forests around the castle. Before the apples, it was mushrooms. Before that, chestnuts and cabbages. She fell into bed exhausted every night, only to get up at first light to start working again. She had not had time to dip into Pride and Prejudice or to work ahead in the Orsian grammar or even to visit the bathhouse more than once or twice, another reason for the faint aroma of apples that clung to her skin and hair.

She had seen little of the magician since their return. He seemed to be spending most of his time in his tower workshop or in the forest. A few times he had swept past while Nora was working, slowing his pace not to greet her so much as to cast an approving eye over the foodstuffs that she was handling. It was a good harvest this year, everyone was saying.

“What did you expect?” Nora asked herself, picking up the knife again and reaching for another apple. The pile of fruit in the basket before her seemed to be getting no smaller. “That he would be your best friend? That there would be lots more little chats about magic and what have you?”

The problem is, Maggie—

She had begun writing letters to Maggie in her head again, although she was so busy that she rarely got a chance to finish them to her own satisfaction.

The problem is—I have to be honest—I have a strange sort of a crush on him.

You wouldn’t believe it to look at him. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that he saved my life a couple of times. And then we had these conversations on the ride back from Semr, mostly about magic, but other things as well, and I did enjoy talking to him.

But now I’m the invisible castle drudge again. Hard physical labor all day, no time to read or think. And this could be my life for years.

Everyone in Semr assumed I was his mistress. I’m not. And I’m not saying I’d want to be. He killed his wife—he told me so.

But I keep thinking about him, and wondering about all those stories that I heard in Semr that I can’t quite bring myself to ask him about, and wondering what it’s like to be able to do magic. He intrigues me. That’s always dangerous, you know.

It’s been years since I had a serious hopeless crush on anyone, unless you count my Donne thing. (Truly hopeless, that.) As I recall, if you wait long enough, it flames out, eventually, and you wonder what you ever found attractive in that particular person and you thank your lucky stars nothing actually happened.

Mrs. Toristel came into the kitchen from the courtyard, looking distracted, pushing the door open with her shoulder. She held a basin full of something slick, convoluted, and streaked with blood.

“Brains?” asked Nora, looking up. “Where did those come from?”

“The white calf. Broke its leg. Toristel is butchering it.”

Nice to have some meat for a change, Nora thought. “Why didn’t you ask him to fix it, though?” She jutted her chin upward, toward the tower.

“It’s the bull calf, we were going to kill it anyway,” Mrs. Toristel said distractedly. “And he hates to be disturbed for such things. Nora, you’re slicing the apples too thick.”

Nora put down her knife tiredly. “Sorry.”

“You’ll have to do those over.” Mrs. Toristel glanced at the water clock and suddenly looked distressed. “Sun and moon, here it is two hours past noon already, and I have to put these brains to soak and then help Toristel finish the butchering. The flies are something awful. Take up some lunch for him, Nora, will you? Some bread and herring. An apple or two. He won’t want much.”

With a faint flutter of excitement, Nora stood up. “How will I get in? The wall—”

“You just go through it. Now what have I done with the good knife? Not the one with the nick in the blade. Nora, have you seen it?”

After locating the knife, Nora put bread and herring and apple onto a tray, and then went to the place in the great hall where she thought the entrance to the tower was located, more or less. She tested the stone wall with her fingertips. Solid to her touch. She stood there for a moment, considering what to do.

The cat, which had followed her and the herring from the kitchen, regarded her haughtily, its tail twitching. Then it walked through the wall.

“All right then,” Nora said, taking a deep breath. She closed her eyes and stepped forward, raising an arm to shield her face.

It was a curtain of sand that she encountered, a rain of fine, cool particles sifting against her skin. Then she was on the other side, trying to make out her surroundings in the half-light of an oil lamp hanging from the wall. A staircase wound upward along the curving wall of the tower, its treads coated with dust except for a narrow path wiped clean by footsteps in the middle. The cat ran lightly upstairs.

Nora followed. Shadows flickered at the corners of her vision, but when she turned to look, there was nothing there. She climbed faster, and felt some relief to emerge into a large, round room where she could glimpse sunlight threading through narrow windows.

“Oh, it’s you,” the magician said. He leaned over the scroll open before him. “Where is Mrs. Toristel?”

“She’s helping Mr. Toristel butcher a calf. It broke its leg.”

“Oh? How did it come to break its leg?” He glanced balefully at Nora as though she might have had something to do with it.