The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

anything to stop it.”

Aruendiel was already shaking his head. “It was almost the first thing I tried, this time. Ilissa is better prepared now. My winds cannot cross into her domain.”

“Well, what then? Why not—” Nora balled her fists, thinking in fury of how little she still knew of magic. “Why not just attack Ilissa herself? Make her drop dead? Raclin, too.”

“This calls for more subtlety. I will tell Ilissa that I must have proof that Hirizjahkinis and Hirgus are alive. And in the meantime, I will start to dissolve the spells that hold the Faitoren captive.”

“Let Ilissa go free?”

“Those spells are walls that keep the Faitoren in—but they also bar or blunt many other kinds of magic. For example, a spell to make Ilissa drop dead.” A gleam of anticipation in the pale eyes. “Or to extract a captive. Ilissa has her own defenses, of course. I must think of how best to take them apart.”

He threw himself down at the table and began to write rapidly on a sheet of parchment. Nora, after hovering for a moment, went downstairs to tell Mrs. Toristel that Aruendiel would not be leaving at present. When she returned, Aruendiel sent her down again to ask Mr. Toristel to bring out the chains from the dungeon and all the nails he could gather. “And the spikes from the old mercy bed.”

Mr. Toristel’s arthritis had been bad lately. Nora had to help carry up the biggest chains, the links as thick as her index finger. It took four trips to get it all moved into the courtyard. The spikes from the mercy bed were heavily rusted, as though they had not been cleaned after their last use.

In the kitchen, Mrs. Toristel was assembling a tray of bread and mutton for the magician. “I suppose he’ll be up all night. Make him eat something, will you?” Nora said she would, although she herself felt no desire for food. Mrs. Toristel sawed at the meat with irritating slowness.

“When I was a little girl in Pelagnia, there were elves in the forest that had black skin,” the housekeeper said suddenly. “My granny told me about them. They liked to steal little children and eat their tongues. You had to be quiet and not speak, going through the forest, so they wouldn’t know you were there.”

Nora saw where this was headed. “Hirizjahkinis isn’t a black elf.”

“No, but I always think of them when I see her.” Mrs. Toristel was silent for a moment, tearing the bread. “Those Faitoren, they put spells on you to make you look different—prettier.” She gave a sideways glance at Nora, gauging her reaction. “Will they do the same to that Hirizjahkinis? Make her skin white, maybe?”

Astounded, Nora opened her mouth to retort—she looks fine the way she is—and then closed it. If you looked past all the ways in which Mrs. Toristel’s inquiry was depressingly narrow-minded and offensive, there was a good question buried in it. What were Hirizjahkinis’s secret wishes, and how would Ilissa twist them to torture her? Nora could not say. She was fairly sure, though, that they did not include being white.

“No, Mrs. Toristel,” she said finally. “I don’t think so.”

Nora took the tray upstairs. Both tables in the library were now piled with a jumble of books, most of them lying open, and Aruendiel’s eyes were locked to the page of the folio in front of him.

“What has taken you so long?” he demanded, not looking up. “The second volume of Vros—find it, will you? I need the section on inanimate-to-animate transformations. And then Seethros on reversals. And my notebooks on Faitoren illusionwork.”

She had only begun to master Aruendiel’s library cataloging system—which grouped books by subject, by date, and also by how skilled a magic-worker Aruendiel judged the author to have been—but she found the books as quickly as she could. By then he had a new list of volumes to be fetched.

“Do you have a plan yet?” she asked him, when books covered the floor around his chair.

“Yes. Do you not see it? Are you paying no attention?” But he was too much occupied to direct any more abuse at Nora’s lapse. He jerked up from his chair after a few minutes and went upstairs to his workroom without a word. Nora, bent over a treatise by Trankias Mins on augmenting spells over distance, felt her stomach clench and roll and was thankful that she had not touched the mutton that Mrs. Toristel had prepared. Only rarely since she started practicing magic herself had Nora felt queasy in the presence of magic; whatever Aruendiel was doing up there, it was stronger magic than she had experienced before.

Sooner than she expected, Aruendiel clattered down the stairs, pausing in the library only long enough to tell Nora to follow him down to the courtyard. Outside, the day’s heavy rain had eased to a freezing drizzle. Nora shivered and hugged her elbows, but Aruendiel seemed not to notice the cold. A single torch burned in a niche, showing a rumpled mass on the ground, where Mr. Toristel had bundled the chains and nails under an oiled tarpaulin to keep them dry. Aruendiel snatched away the cover.

“I need more,” he said after a moment’s inspection.

“That’s all we could find,” Nora said.

“It’s not enough. Iron—that’s what I want. Anything made of iron or steel.”

“The old armor in the attic?” She had been sorting it all week; Mrs. Toristel was after her to polish it.

Aruendiel made an impatient gesture, as though flabbergasted why Nora was dawdling. “Bring it here.”

She came back with helmets stacked in her arms like bowls. Now Aruendiel was in the center of the courtyard, looking upward. He held something in his left hand—a fistful of iron nails, Nora saw as she came closer. Methodically, he selected a few at a time to toss upward into the air. They disappeared into the darkness. Nora found herself waiting for the ping of nails falling onto cobblestones, but there was no sound at all. Or was that a faint clanking above?

Something black flapped past Aruendiel’s head—a bat, Nora thought, recoiling instinctively. Aruendiel did not move. Not a bat, she decided after getting another glimpse of it. Not exactly.

With mounting excitement, she watched him work until she was sure. When he had finished all the nails, he began to break the smaller chains into separate links—some cleaving spell, she thought—and then he threw each piece of iron into the air.

“You’re making iron birds,” Nora said. Aruendiel nodded tersely, his eyes on the air. “That’s how you’re going to attack the Faitoren,” she said.

“It’s how I will break down the walls of the Faitoren kingdom,” he corrected. “All the spells that Ilissa has wrapped around her lands to keep me out.”

Nora clapped her hands softly. “Your birds will fly there—and iron is poisonous to the Faitoren—”

“And each one carries a reversal spell that can take apart the Faitoren magic. Then I can send a wind—or some other emissary.” Suddenly the largest chain, still lying at Aruendiel’s feet, uncoiled itself with a creak and streaked toward the gate, looking less chainlike and more serpentlike with every instant. The other big chain, studded with manacles, gathered itself, then rose on four legs and hurled itself out of the courtyard, following the serpent. “The wolf is for Raclin, the snake is for Ilissa,” Aruendiel added. “Although it does not matter if they switch.”

“Will they be there by dawn?” Nora asked. She had not checked the water clock in the kitchen for some time, but the night was advancing. The Toristels had retired some time ago.

“Oh, yes. They will attack two hours before dawn, all of them together. The timing is very delicate.” He hefted a broken link in his hand, as though weighing it, and then threw it into the air. “The Faitoren defenses must come down at once, before Ilissa realizes what is happening, and then I will have to pull Hirizjahkinis out immediately—”

“And Hirgus Ext.”

“I will save Hirgus if I can. At any rate, the hostages will have to come out quickly—”

“Before Ilissa can kill them,” Nora finished, her momentary elation draining away.

“If they are even alive now,” Aruendiel said. “Give me those helmets, and bring me more iron.”

Nora brought down the rest of the old weapons from the attic—Aruendiel reserved only a broken sword, he did not say why—and then went hunting cautiously in the kitchen and storerooms for ironware. She had a strong feeling that Mrs. Toristel would not be pleased to see her best kitchen implements given wings and sent flying away, and was grateful to find an iron cauldron with the bottom rusted out nestling in a stack of old barrel hoops.

Sometime after midnight Aruendiel let the last of the iron creatures flap away into the night. “There is no use in sending any more,” he said. “They will not arrive in time.”