mend them, if you want.”
“No,” Aruendiel said, “it would upset Mrs. Toristel, and I myself have heard enough crockery shatter for one morning. So, Mistress Nora, you wanted to know what magic is. And now you have done some yourself. Are you satisfied, now?”
“No,” she said, without hesitation.
“Good,” he said. “Come to my study this afternoon. I have another task for you.”
There seemed to be a hundred interminable chores that day, from cleaning the kitchen to sweeping the great hall to polishing the pots and pans to helping Mrs. Toristel sort the laundry to turning the ripening wheels of cheese in the buttery. The light was fading outside when Nora finally stepped through the wall and went up the winding stairs in the tower.
The magician’s study was as she remembered it, a room virtually encased in books. The rows of dark volumes along the wall and ceiling gave the room a cavelike feel, and yet it seemed almost cozy as she mounted the last steps. There was a flickering yellow glow from what seemed to be dozens of candles burning along the walls—surprisingly extravagant for Aruendiel, until Nora saw that the small lights were not attached to candlesticks. It was the pale flame that he had conjured in the library at Semr, now dispersed into luminescent droplets. Aruendiel himself was hunched over a table by the fire, two books open before him while he wrote rapidly on a sheaf of papers.
“You said you had a job for me?” Nora inquired. She had an instant’s fear that he might have forgotten.
Aruendiel raised his pale eyes for a moment as he dipped his brush into the inkwell. “Over there,” he said, nodding to the other table.
She followed his gesture and saw, among more unshelved books and scrolls, a sizable heap of broken crockery. It looked as though someone had smashed an entire set of dishes.
Nora seated herself at the table and began to pick through the fragments. A few pieces were as big as her palm, but most of the shards were tiny. She tried and failed to picture the original form of the thing she was trying to reconstruct. The broad curves of the larger fragments and the few lines of red and yellow glaze that decorated them offered no obvious clues.
“What is this?” she asked after a few minutes.
“Can you not tell?” His tone did not invite further questions.
By sheer chance Nora found two pieces that fit together. Holding them next to each other—combined, they were no larger than a quarter—she saw they bore some sort of raised pattern. She began hunting through the fragments for similar pieces. There were many, although none of them seemed to fit the ones she already had. The jigsaw puzzle from hell, she thought. Not even a picture to go by. The last time she worked on a jigsaw puzzle had been at the age of twelve, during a rainy vacation at the shore. It was a view of St. Giorgio Maggiore; she and her brother had never finished it, defeated by the luminous, identical waves of the Venetian lagoon. In the intervening years she had not once had the urge to do another.
Yet now, sorting through the broken crockery, she felt a sense of slow recognition. Her fingers had touched this clay before. It even seemed to her that she had some sort of claim on it. Is this something I made? Nora asked herself. No, it was too old for that, it had spent a long time in the form that it was in. But this clay knew her and seemed pleased to feel her touch again.
Two fragments grew together in her hand, and then without even thinking about it, she laid her fingers on a third piece that fit with them, melding seamlessly into place. She let this odd, intuitive intimacy with the clay guide her hands—the trick was not to concentrate too much—and gradually, as she added fragment after fragment, a form began to emerge from the broken pile.
An animal with a rather human, playful expression, and a mass of curls, like a great wig. “I should have known it was you,” she said, fitting part of a round ear into place. Her old friend the lion from the palace in Semr.
Footsteps sounded overhead. Nora looked up with a start as Aruendiel came down the spiral staircase. She had been too absorbed in her work to hear him go upstairs.
“You recognize that now, of course?” he said.
“It’s the statuette that Ilissa broke.”
“No, the statuette that you broke. Or, rather, that threw itself off the mantelpiece at your request.”
Nora frowned, remembering the tawny blur of movement and a secret thrill of pleasure that had seemed out of place in the middle of her fear. “Did I really do that?”
“No one else did.”
“But I certainly didn’t intend to. How could I have done it?”
“The same way that you are mending it now,” he said, with the twitch of an eyebrow. “You reached an understanding with the elements from which it is made, and they responded to your will. Of course, what you willed them to do was not very powerful or sophisticated magic,” he added, “but you have achieved the first, most basic step in working true magic, upon which everything else is built.”
Nora wanted to protest, feeling that inspiring a clay figure to animate itself and then to dash itself to pieces was magic of quite a sophisticated order, but he had not answered the question to her satisfaction. “Nothing like that ever happened to me before. Why me, now?”
“That, I cannot answer,” Aruendiel said, a shade of displeasure passing over his angular face. “You remarked at the time that you had been working in the garden. I wondered whether you had awakened some natural sympathy in the clay. If digging could produce a capacity for magic, though, there would be many more magicians and fewer farmers.
“Perhaps the Faitoren spells to which you were subjected made you more sensitive to the currents of natural magic. I know of one case in which a man developed an aptitude for magic after undergoing a powerful enchantment. Or it may be that this world remains strange to your senses in some deep way, and therefore you perceive things differently from those born here.”
It would be nice to think that being an alien here brought with it an unusual talent—some compensation for feeling like an idiot so much of the time. Privately she was not quite sure that the explanation was so easy. “How do magicians—people who want to become magicians—how do they discover that they can do magic?”
“Usually boys are sent off to school or to apprentice with a magician, and some of them discover that they can work magic and some discover that they cannot. Those who can work magic become magicians.”
“Is that what you did?”
“I went to school, yes. I had teachers.”
“And is that where you discovered you could do mag—”
“Once a person acquires some understanding of magic, the more interesting question is—what do you do with that understanding?”
“Well, I’d like to learn more,” Nora said quickly. “Become a magician.”
“Developing real skill in magic requires a great deal of work,” Aruendiel said harshly. “It is not like fitting together a few broken pieces of pottery.”
“I understand.”
“It is no trivial pastime, to be dropped whenever it becomes dull or discouraging.”
“Of course not.”
“Years of painstaking, often tedious study are needed, for true proficiency.”
“I’m used to that.”
“It is sometimes dangerous.”
Nora nodded. “I know.”
“Knowing about the risks is not the same as experiencing them.”
“It seems to me that I’ve already run into quite a lot of danger in this world by
“Hmm. Even great skill in magic is no substitute for good sense,” Aruendiel said. “That is not something that I can teach you.”
“But you can teach me to be a magician?”
“I can teach you to work magic, yes. Whether you can learn enough to call yourself a true magician, that is still unknown.”
