It was dark outside. Her shoulders ached. Mrs. Toristel had gone back to her quarters some time ago. The magician might not return for hours. The castle was quiet, aside from the faint rustling of mice in the wall.
Nora helped herself to a bowl of soup from the pot on the back of the stove—some of the white calf’s bones had gone to make it—and took her dinner into the great hall. She lit an oil lamp, fetched the Ors primer, and began to read laboriously about the vengeance that the wrathful Lord Devris Bearcrusher took on his ungrateful comrades. It reminded her of the first book of the
Turning the pages of a book at the long table in the dim hall was oddly comforting. After a while, she recognized why. It was like being back at school, studying under the vaulted ceiling of the reference library or in the cafeteria during the quiet hours between meals.
Devris had just decapitated his chief rival, Udidin the Fair; reclaimed his magical shield; and was in the middle of an unpleasant ritual involving the dead man’s liver and testicles—was this book really for children?— when the door to the courtyard opened and Nora heard Aruendiel’s limping footsteps. She nodded briefly as he appeared in the feeble circle of light cast by the oil lamp.
“Is there more of that?” Aruendiel asked, indicating her soup.
“In the kitchen.” After a fractional pause, she added, “Shall I get some for you?”
With a shake of his head, he sat down at the table, not in the high-backed chair at the end but on the bench opposite Nora, near the lamp.
“The boy Dandelion is improving,” he announced. “The report was wrong. The leg will not have to come off.”
“Too bad. You’ll have to wait to try your new spell.”
“There will be other opportunities,” he said as a bowl of soup appeared before him, followed by a mug of water.
She could not resist commenting on the soup he had conjured: “Isn’t that a fairly trivial use of magic?”
“Yes,” he agreed, more readily than she expected, “but I am weary tonight, and I did not come to rouse you from your dinner—”
“Thanks, I’m almost done.”
“—or your book.”
Then why did you sit down? Nora thought, but he seemed to be in no particular hurry to begin a conversation. After a moment, she bent over the book and began to read again. It was harder to concentrate now, with Aruendiel drinking broth from his bowl, not silently—they did have spoons here, so why did no one think of using them for eating soup?—but she did her best to lose herself in the cascade of Ors brushstrokes.
The action picked up again, which helped. Just as Devris was enjoying his victory meal, Udidin’s younger brother, Udesdiel the Hasty, launched a surprise attack seeking revenge. Devris, protected by his magical shield and fortified by all the fresh liver and mountain oysters he had just consumed, slew half a dozen of Udesdiel’s men and was closing in on Udesdiel, but Udesdiel had a spear that would always find its target—
Nora turned the page to find out how this would play out—her money was still on Devris, despite Udesdiel’s nifty spear—but the next page was almost completely unreadable. She gave a low, frustrated sigh. Long ago, someone had spilled a thick puddle of ink in the middle of the paper, and then, evidently reluctant to let so much fine, wet ink go to waste, had dipped a brush into it and sketched a series of energetic caricatures across the page.
She made as if to close the book, but her sigh had attracted Aruendiel’s attention. He reached across the table and took the book from her, then flipped through a few pages.
“Why are you not reading the book that you took from the palace library?” he asked suddenly, putting the book down. “That one is written in your own language, is it not?”
“I didn’t—” Automatically Nora began to deny her theft, and then thought better of it. The evidence was upstairs in her room. “How did you know? Is there some sort of magical antitheft device attached to the book? Or have you been using magic to spy on me?”
“Neither. I saw you hide the book in your bag once during the ride home.”
“It was my book originally, you know.” Although she was trying not to sound defensive, she felt a certain shiftiness creep into her tone.
“So you said.”
“The king has no use for a book written in English.”
“He has no use for books written in his native tongue, from what I can tell,” Aruendiel said. “But you have not answered my question. Why are you reading this child’s primer? It is an account of the Thelbron War. An important passage in history, but not very relevant to your concerns.”
“How would you even know what my concerns are?” Nora said—civilly enough, she thought. “I told you before. I’ve been teaching myself to read Ors. Mrs. Toristel said that she had learned out of this book, and I’ve been trying to do the same.”
“Why do you wish to read Ors?” Aruendiel speared a chunk of meat from his bowl. “What use will it be to you?”
“I don’t know,” Nora said tiredly. “I don’t like being illiterate. I need something to keep my mind occupied.” The defaced page stared up at her. “There’s no real reason.”
There was a silence. “I can remove this ink stain, if you like,” Aruendiel said. “So that you can continue reading.”
Nora shrugged. “I suppose. It’s just some child’s scribbles.”
Aruendield picked up the book again. “My sister’s,” he said. “I recognize her hand. These figures are perhaps intended to represent my brothers and myself.”
“Really?” Intrigued in spite of herself, Nora leaned forward for another look. “This was her book? Which one are you?”
“We all used this book for lessons. The smallest is me, I would think. The one who is drawn with an open mouth.”
“Huh,” said Nora, not seeing much resemblance. “You were the youngest?”
“Oh, yes,” Aruendiel said, with a trace of asperity, as if surprised at her ignorance. “That is why I am called Aruendiel—Aruen’s third son. You have not reached the section in the book that treats the grammar of familial naming, I take it.”
“No. I can’t wait.” She saw what she had not suspected, that there must be a thread of genealogical information coiled inside Ors names. Udesdiel was another third son, obviously. Another code to break, another rule to learn—and for what? So she could survive, so she could peel apples and grub turnips in this alien world for another decade, or more.
Aruendiel was turning the pages of the book. “There are one or two other grammatical topics that I particularly recommend to you for study.”
“I thought that I speak fairly good Ors at this point.”
“Better than you once did,” he allowed. “Certainly you have nearly lost that vile Faitoren accent. But you have difficulties with the future potentive, for instance. It is more correct to say, ‘I will not be able to wait’ instead of ‘I can’t wait.’”
“I was being ironic.” By some small blessing, Ors had a word for “irony,” or something close enough.
“And you are careless with the verb genders, too. Very frequently you use the masculine form instead of the feminine.”
“What do you mean?” It was news to Nora that the Ors verbs had genders. With a lift of his eyebrows, Aruendiel began to explain the language’s feminine verb prefixes. As she listened, it dawned on Nora that what she had assumed to be brief syllables of hesitancy—the equivalent of the English “um” or “ah”—in Mrs. Toristel’s or Morinen’s or Inristian’s speech was actually a construction intended to assure the world that the speaker was a woman.
“So you ought to have said, ‘I was being ironic,’” Aruendiel finished. He used the feminine form. The sentence sounded strangely tentative, coming out of his mouth.
“That doesn’t sound right,” Nora objected. “The extra syllables make the sentence seem weaker.”
“It’s the way women speak.”
