heard so much about you when I was in Semr.”
“Oh, you’ve come from Semr?” Nora asked politely.
“Yes, I arrived there just a day after you and my uncle left. Everyone was still buzzing about Uncle—and his companion. So clever of you to have found that poor wizard! I was terribly disappointed to have missed the two of you. So I decided to come pay Uncle a visit.”
Nora expressed regrets that their paths had not crossed in Semr and hoped that Lady Pusieuv’s journey had been an easy one.
“Oh, upriver was fine, but the roads past Noler have not gotten any better since I was here last, Uncle!” Lady Pusieuv launched into a rapid-fire account of a flooded ford and a broken axle. The trip, Nora thought, had obviously required a great deal of determination on her part.
Nora joined Mrs. Toristel in the kitchen a few minutes later. A dusty wine bottle stood open on the table, next to two blackened goblets. Mrs. Toristel was slicing hastily into a rather sticky-looking brown loaf. “One bottle left of the tawny Sprenen, can you believe it?” she said. “Here, you polish the goblets. He doesn’t even know we have them. He sold all the silver settings years ago, but I held back a few pieces.”
Nora fetched vinegar and salt from the pantry and began to polish the goblets with a rag. “Isn’t that the honey cake you made for Mr. Toristel?”
“Yes, and he won’t be pleased to see it go, but we don’t have anything else fit for her ladyship. You know he doesn’t care for sweets, as a rule.”
“Mmm,” said Nora, sorting out, with a little thought, the two different parties that Mrs. Toristel meant by
Mrs. Toristel sniffed. “She’s his only family left, she and her line. Lady Pusieuv used to visit at Lusul, she and her parents, when she was just a little thing,” she added, her voice softening. “Lady Lusarniev doted on her. I can see her now, letting the little girl play with her necklace.”
“So Lady Pusieuv must be well over fifty now,” Nora said meanly.
“Tsk, it doesn’t seem possible.” The housekeeper sighed again. “What a darling little girl she was.” Mrs. Toristel disappeared into the pantry and returned with a crock of the sweet-pickled blackberries. She added a generous purple dollop to the plate that held the sliced cake. “I wonder,” she said, in a crisper tone, “what brings Lady Pusieuv all this way?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s been more than a dozen years at least since she visited here last. And you heard what she said about the roads. Mark my words, she has some reason for coming here now.”
“I can tell you why,” Nora said. “It’s because of me.”
Mrs. Toristel gave her a look that, by its very neutrality, expressed deep skepticism.
“She came because of what she heard in Semr. You know, when I was there, they all assumed I was his mistress. Aruendiel’s mistress,” Nora added, to be perfectly clear. “Absurd, of course, but that’s how people there think.” She was conscious of trying a little too hard to keep her voice casual. She had never told Mrs. Toristel about the stories, true and untrue, that she had heard circulating in Semr about Aruendiel, or what he had told her himself. “So I’m sure Lady Pusieuv wanted to get a look at me. See what sort of baggage her uncle has picked up.” If she tries to pull a Lady Catherine de Bourgh and break up our impending nuptials, Nora thought, I will be pleased to set her straight.
“I’ve never known his lordship to take any interest in women since Lady Lusarniev,” Mrs. Toristel said with a sniff.
“All the more reason for Lady Pusieuv to see what all the fuss is about. She came a long way for nothing, obviously.”
“She’ll figure out which way the river flows soon enough. One look at you, she should know.”
Nora laughed, a little bitterly. “Once upon a time, before I got clawed by a monster and when I could wear decent clothes, I wasn’t considered that bad-looking.”
Mrs. Toristel looked at her critically. “Your face isn’t so bad. Those scars have faded a bit. But to think that a great lord, especially one that was married to Lady Lusarniev, would take you as his mistress—well, the folk in Semr must be as idiotic as he always says.”
“I wouldn’t dispute that,” Nora said, suppressing an urge to mention that the great lord in question had, by his own account, murdered the beautiful Lady Lusarniev. Mrs. Toristel didn’t know that. Well, she knew it, Nora thought, but she wouldn’t admit it.
That was two days ago. To Nora’s relief, she had had only the briefest of encounters with Lady Pusieuv since then. Yesterday, Aruendiel had taken his niece riding downriver—“Lady Pusieuv is an excellent horsewoman,” Mrs. Toristel murmured approvingly—and in the castle, Lady Pusieuv was little in evidence. Except for mealtimes, she spent most of her time in one of the drawing rooms on the first floor, because—Mrs. Toristel had heard her tell Aruendiel—the great hall was drafty and old-fashioned.
“But those other rooms are a mess!” Nora exclaimed to the housekeeper. “There’s no furniture! They’re a ruin!”
Mrs. Toristel laughed unexpectedly. “Not today,” she said. “For once, they’re as fine as they should be. With all the proper chairs and tables and tapestries and such.”
“How—?”
“He did it. Well, he couldn’t put her in an empty room, could he?” She laughed again, drily. “He does it every time she visits. It’s the only time he bothers.”
“Too bad he couldn’t have done the same for her bedchamber,” Nora said. The day of Lady Pusieuv’s arrival, she and Morinen had spent a hurried hour upstairs dusting, sweeping, scrubbing, and changing the linens for her ladyship.
But Mrs. Toristel, Nora suspected, would not trust magic, even Aruendiel’s magic, to provide clean sheets.
Tonight Aruendiel and his niece were dining in the great hall, as Nora waited in the kitchen, her hands sorting the broken shards of pottery. They felt cool and hard and intractable under her fingers. If Lady Pusieuv had not been here—if Nora had not been working harder than ever since their guest’s arrival—there might have been more time to steal away to a quiet place where she could be undisturbed and could focus, focus, until the magic words came into her mind, or whatever it was that would make the shattered pieces snap together.
Or maybe, she thought, they never would.
The door to the great hall opened, and she saw Aruendiel’s lean figure in the doorway.
“Where’s Mrs. Toristel?” he asked.
“She’s gone back to her quarters,” Nora said. “Do you need her?”
He made a gesture of annoyance, as though snatching at a fly. “What in the name of Nagaris did she leave for a sweet course?”
“Do you mean the pie? It’s on the table already.”
“There’s something resembling a tart, yes. It appears to be full of pebbles.”
“Walnuts. It’s a walnut pie.”
“Your handiwork?”
Nora nodded yes.
“I see,” Aruendiel said, packing an extraordinary amount of skepticism into a few syllables. Then he noticed the shards of crockery on the hearth. “You have not mended the dish yet?”
“No,” she said shortly. “Still broken.”
“Ah,” he said, with a shrug. Nora could almost hear the unspoken thought: I expected no better. “Leave that and come help me amuse my niece.”
“I wouldn’t want to intrude on a family dinner,” she demurred. Strange to hear the magician ask for help, even of the social sort.
“It is no intrusion. We have reached that stage in conversation when another party begins to be most welcome.”
At the sight of Nora, Lady Pusieuv looked surprised, then smiled graciously. She expressed equal wonder to learn that the pie was made with walnuts, that Nora had made it, and that Nora had come from another world.
Come on, Nora thought, walnuts in a pie, it’s not such an earthshaking idea. She’d simply made a pecan pie
