The brave warriors are ready for battle. Their long swords are eager to spill blood and carve the flesh of the enemy.”
Nora flipped back in the book to check something—that knot of brushstrokes, was it an r or long e?—then sounded the words out again slowly. The first sentences she’d managed to read in Ors.
Nice reading for little kids. She could hardly wait to hear what happened next.
By habit Nora pulled on the ring on her left hand—still stuck there—and looked up, trying to guess the time from the sunlight filtering through the tree branches. Four o’clock? Five? Back at the castle there were beans to shell and a kitchen floor to scrub. Mrs. Toristel would be back from Red Gate soon. Nora stretched, thinking that she should get up, not really wanting to.
Some weeks back, cutting through the orchard, she had discovered a path in the tall grass that led through the sloping fields, threaded a grove of birches, and emerged on the banks of the river below the castle. Since then, Nora had gotten into the habit of walking down to the river when she had a free hour. It was always cool by the water, although no one else ever seemed to take advantage of that fact. There was one place where you could cross on stones to a small island, really just a slab of rock with a pine tree growing out of it. A good place for sitting and trying to read a book in a foreign language. The stepping-stones on the other side of the island were fewer and the water looked deeper; Nora had not yet attempted a crossing, although she could see that the path continued, carving a narrow passage through the wild black firs on the far bank.
Now, as Nora stood up and tucked the book into her basket, she looked across the water and felt a pulse of curiosity. Why not? she thought. The beans can wait. She put the basket down and walked to the water’s edge.
She stepped to the first rock, then leaped to the next one. The ankle that had been broken felt perfectly sound, Nora was pleased to note. She launched herself at the next rock.
“What are you doing here?” someone asked testily, directly ahead.
Nora checked herself in midspring, and discovered that both the rock she had left and the one she was aiming for were equally out of reach.
The water was not as deep as she’d feared, but colder. She thrashed around, fighting the current. The person on the bank had extended a hand. She grabbed it. Pulling herself upright, she recognized the magician. His black tunic was only a little darker than the forest shadows.
Nora scrambled out of the water. “You startled me.”
She thought she saw his mouth twitch. “My apologies,” he said, more cordially than before. “I did not intend for you to throw yourself into the river.”
“Neither did I.” Nora looked down at herself ruefully; her dress was completely soaked. “I don’t suppose you have any magic to dry clothes?”
“Certainly,” he said, with a lift of his eyebrows.
The water trickling out of her clothes picked up momentum; she watched the dampness recede down the length of her dress. She felt a little queasy and much warmer. “Thank you,” she said.
“I thought you didn’t believe in magic,” the magician said.
“I don’t know,” Nora said. “I just find it somewhat—unexpected.”
“That is not a bad thing,” Aruendiel said, surprisingly. “Magic is not something one should take for granted. Not at all.” Briefly, he seemed to be thinking about something else. “You haven’t answered my question yet,” he said, more sharply. “What are you doing here?”
“I come down here sometimes to see the river. I wondered where the path leads.”
He studied her through narrowed eyes. “Indeed. It is a long climb up and down the hill, no small exertion for a mending ankle.”
It was hard to tell whether the sharpness in his voice was from concern over her leg or something else. She told him that her ankle was fine, that she walked everywhere now.
“Show me,” Aruendiel said, and watched as Nora walked a few paces along the riverbank and returned. “No pain?” Kneeling, he ran a hand over her shinbone and palpated her ankle joint. “It has healed well,” he said finally, sounding more cheerful than before. “Of course,” he added, rising, “it is not so hard to set and mend one bone at a time. Mending several dozen, that is more complicated.”
Nora looked at him curiously. A war injury, Mrs. Toristel had said. He held himself with more ease and vigor than she remembered from their previous meetings, and he seemed younger, closer to forty than to seventy. She could even see a certain resemblance to that portrait of his sister. On one side of his face, the planes of cheek and brow and jaw were smooth, strong, intact. The other side was rough and broken. He might have been handsome once. But overall, there was a sense of dilapidation about his lean face and frame, an impression of odd angles, joints that were out of true, a great disorder patched together and animated in an act of unlikely improvisation.
She wanted to ask him exactly how he had broken dozens of bones at once, but instead she said, “How was your trip? I didn’t know you were back.”
“I returned today, a few hours ago,” Aruendiel said. “The voyage itself was damp. But all was resolved satisfactorily. A matter of reversing a sea god’s curse.”
“A sea god?”
“A local deity,” he said dismissively. “Now, can you cross the river without falling in again? These woods are not the proper place for an afternoon stroll.”
She turned and jumped to the island, conscious that she was making a little show of her agility. He came behind her. “Where does the path go?” she asked, picking up her basket.
At first she thought Aruendiel was not going to answer, but then he said: “Into the hills. It used to run up to the sheepfold, when we grazed sheep on these slopes.”
“But this is all forest.”
“So it is.”
To her chagrin, her foot slipped on the opposite bank, and she had to grab a root to keep from falling. Despite his limp, Aruendiel navigated the stepping-stones with a nonchalance that Nora found ever so slightly irritating. His legs were longer, she reminded herself, and he had probably crossed here a thousand times.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” she said as they started up the path to the castle. “About how I can get out of here—that is, go home. Back to my own world.”
Aruendiel cocked an eyebrow. “Well, how did you get here?”
He was the magician—why couldn’t he tell her? “I don’t know,” Nora said. “But the last completely normal, ordinary, nonmagical thing that I remember is going to the mountains with some friends, for a wedding.” She described that weekend, her walk in the woods alone, then finding her way to Ilissa’s gardens.
“You believe something happened to you on that mountain,” Aruendiel said.
“Maybe some kind of accident. I’ve wondered whether I might have hurt my head and become, well, confused. Or maybe—” This possibility had come to her in a black moment; she had tried to dismiss it, and failed. “Maybe I died.”
To her secret terror, and also relief, Aruendiel took the idea seriously. He frowned for a moment. “Perhaps. It is unlikely, however. A ghost remains a ghost in any world, and you are certainly alive in this one. There is no sign that you have died even once.”
She could not help laughing a little at that. “The graveyard, though. It could have been a sign of my death.” He wanted to know more about the graveyard. “It was just a few old headstones in the middle of nowhere,” she said, and recounted how she had gone into the cemetery to read the inscriptions on the graves.
“You read the words aloud?” Aruendiel asked. When she nodded, he said: “Some kind of spell there, cloaked in the poem.”
“Really?” Nora asked, dubious, fascinated. She ducked under a low-growing branch, trying to keep up with him.
“It’s clear enough—there’s a gateway in the graveyard that goes from one world to the next.” In a quickened tone, he asked: “Does Ilissa know about it?”
“Well—” Nora was not sure how to answer the question. “She knew about the graveyard.”
“I thought she might know of such a door to another world. She’s not from this one, we know that. But then why hasn’t she used this gateway to escape?” Aruendiel turned to look hard at Nora, as though she might actually know the answer.
“That first day, she talked about the graveyard as though she hadn’t seen it for years. And then the second time—” Nora tried to piece the memory together. “She was angry. She didn’t want me there. I remember throwing up. I was pregnant then,” she added, the last few words in a subdued voice.
“Morning sickness.”
“I guess. I never really had any, except for that one time.”
“You were fortunate,” Aruendiel said. “Well, Ilissa would not want you wandering back to your world while you were carrying her heir.”
They were coming to a subject that she preferred not to think about. But his words had triggered another memory. “Actually—” Nora said. “I could see, inside the fence, that the ground was torn up, and there was one of those yellow ribbons that they use at crime scenes. Do you know what I’m talking about?” Aruendiel shook his head uncomprehendingly.
“Never mind,” she went on. “The point is, it was from my world. I was looking through the fence at a piece of my world. Why the police tape, I don’t know.” No, she did know. It was because of her own disappearance. At some point searchers must have tracked her, probably with dogs, to the graveyard. And then what? Her trail ended. No doubt the police had never once thought to look for magical gateways to alternate universes. More likely they considered other, more reasonable explanations for Nora’s disappearance: wild animals, serial killers.
And her parents must be—Nora shoved that thought down quickly, unwilling to imagine what they must be thinking. First EJ, now this.
“The fence around the graveyard,” Aruendiel said. “Was it made of iron?” Nora nodded, and he looked very pleased with himself. “Of course. The Faitoren cannot abide iron. It is like poison to them. That was how we were first able to defeat and confine them, with weapons of iron and steel.”
It all sounded highly unlikely, this antipathy to iron—except that she had heard something like this before. “Wait, fairies! Do you mean to say that the Faitoren are fairies?”
Aruendiel shrugged. “Is that what they are called in your world?”
“Yes, except there’s no such things as fairies! They exist only in folklore, stories.” Nora added: “There is an old theory that fairies were actually a Bronze Age people in Britain who went into hiding to escape invaders with iron weapons, but that’s just a historical explanation for the legend. In my world, if you call something a fairy tale, by definition it’s not true.”
Aruendiel rubbed his chin—touching his hand to the good side of his face only, Nora noticed. “I never came across any Faitoren when I was in your world. Although that doesn’t mean that they weren’t there, or that they had not been there before.”
Nora seized upon the one notion that seemed to have some relevance for her. “This gateway, though. To get back to my world, all I’d have to do is go back into the graveyard again, right? Would you help me go there?”
A flash of interest kindled in Aruendiel’s face, but then he shook his head. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to take on Ilissa,” he said. “And I defy you to find another magician who could have extracted you from her castle. But it would be suicidal to battle her on her own turf.”
“What if I took, oh, a sword and just marched in?” Nora said. “That’s iron—steel. She couldn’t touch me, could she?”
“She could still enchant and bemuse you,” said Aruendiel with a dark smile. “As she did before, as she has done to people much older and much wiser than you.”
“Well, how else could I get back home? How did you get there?” Nora demanded.
“I was traveling, passing through the thin places between worlds, and when I tried to return home, I found myself in yours. It was no great catastrophe. I only had to wait until another thin place opened up in the skin of your world and then slip back into my own—a matter of a year or so.”
Nora was dismayed. “That long?”
Aruendiel shrugged his shoulders. “I passed the time tolerably well. It was intriguing to see how a world can be organized without magic. There was magic there, of course, but the inhabitants might as well have been blind or deaf, they were so unaware of it. Of course they were ingenious in other ways,” he added, as though making a belated attempt at politeness. “Those great ships, and the swift carriages that run on iron roads, and the mechanical devices for sending messages—telegroms, they were called—were very impressive.”
“Hmm,” said Nora. “When was this? Never mind—this thin place you used, is it still there?”
He shook his head. “It knitted up long ago. But other thin places will develop. They come and go, like little bruises, as the different worlds touch one another. My friend Micher Samle has made a study of them. He is away in another world right now—your world, very possibly. I spoke to his former apprentice, Dorneng Hul, when I was last in Semr, and Dorneng expects a way back will open within the next ten years or so.”
“Ten years? What will I do for all that time?”
“Do?” He seemed puzzled.
“Yes—earn my living, pass the time, whatever.”
Aruendiel took a minute to turn this new problem over in his mind as they walked along the stone wall that marked the edge of the upper pastures. “In your own world, what is your station?” he asked finally. “Despite your alliance with the Faitoren prince, it seems to me that you are not originally of the nobility.”
Nora smiled tightly. “Oh, can you tell?”
“But you are not a peasant, either, I think. What is your father’s livelihood?”
“My father is in IT,” Nora said, using the English abbreviation. “Don’t ask me to explain what that is. As for me, I was in school, studying various books, preparing to become a teacher.”
There did not seem to be an Ors word for “literature,” and she had some trouble making the magician understand that it was a legitimate field of study in her world. At first he had the idea that her studies consisted of memorizing long epic poems, just as, early in his education, he had had to commit to memory great swathes of works such as the magical chronicles of the Nagaron Voy and the saga of the Six Kings’ War. When he finally gathered that her work consisted merely of reading books and writing about them, he could not hide his incredulity that this was considered a fit occupation for adults.
“These are simply poems or fantastical tales that you studied?”
“Not always fantastical. The most highly regarded stories have fairly ordinary subjects—daily life, people trying to get married, and so forth.”
“But you did not read these things to extract magical spells or history and laws from them?”
“Not in my program. We study poems and stories for their own sake, to understand them better, to appreciate their craft.” At least, Nora thought, that is the theory.
Aruendiel shrugged his crooked shoulders. “You will not be able to earn your living in the same fashion here. The nearest equivalent would be the bards, who travel from castle to castle to sing the old poems and songs, but it takes years of training to learn the verses. And of course, it is not a job for a woman.”
“What does that mean?” Nora asked sharply. Aruendiel looked blank, so she went on: “Do you mean that women aren’t smart enough to learn the poems? Or they’re not allowed?”
“I’m only stating a fact. A lone woman traveling through the countryside is likely to be raped or assaulted, if not to suffer a worse fate.”
“I’ve never had any problems walking alone around here.”
“Few would dare interfere with anyone who is under my protection.”
“I don’t need protection.” They were climbing into the orchard now, facing almost directly into the light of the lowering sun. Up ahead, in the direction of the castle, the dogs were barking. On an impulse, Nora stooped to pick up a fallen apple, and then let it fly with a snap of her wrist, the way she used to pitch to EJ in the backyard. It squelched dully against a nearby tree trunk.
“Everyone in my household and on my lands is under my protection,” Aruendiel said flatly.
They walked in silence for a few minutes, the castle in sight now, and then Nora spoke again. “I was a cook once. There’s always a need for good cooks.”
“Yes, some lords in Semr keep an entire staff of cooks. It’s very hard work, I believe.”
“I don’t mind hard work,” she said, even while remembering how her feet used to ache at the end of a night at the restaurant. On a sudden impulse, she said: “Or—I could be a magician.” She wanted to see what he would say. “Whatever it takes, I could learn it.”
Aruendiel snorted, then appeared to be thinking. “We could always marry you off,” he said musingly. “There’s young Peusienith, who holds one of my manor farms. He’s a widower and a decent fellow.” The magician’s eyes flicked over her face, and she knew that he was appraising her scars, trying to decide whether they might put off a potential bridegroom.
“You must be joking!” Nora said, afraid that he wasn’t. “Marry me off! It’s been tried before, let me remind you.” She gave the ring on her left hand an angry, futile pull.
“I meant no disrespect,” Aruendiel said mildly. “It would be an easier life for you than cooking in Semr.”
“No, thanks.”
After a moment, Aruendiel said: “Well, you may remain in my household, if you wish. Mrs. Toristel would be glad of your assistance.”
“Well, it does seem to be my only choice. I mean, thank you.” She tried to make her voice register more enthusiasm. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. But this world is not what I’m used to. Where I come from, women can get educations and jobs and live where we like and travel where we like. It’s not like that here, from what I can tell.”
“No, it’s not,” he said levelly. “I have always thought it’s much better to be a man.”
Nora was about to respond that there was nothing wrong with being a woman, that it was all about how society treated women—there was a lot she could say on this subject—when Aruendiel seized her arm and jerked her to the side. He pulled her into a run, jolting her with his clumsy gait.
“What?” she got out. Just as suddenly, he pulled up. Something large plummeted out of the sky, landing on the path a hundred feet ahead of them.
A gigantic black umbrella, bent, broken by the wind, Nora thought. A limp, whitish shape dangled under the dark folds: the forequarters of a dead sheep. Then she recognized the long, narrow head; the stocky, reptilian body; the flapping, leathery wings. She shrank back.
“Your husband has come to pay us a visit,” Aruendiel said.
Under her sudden fear, Nora still found his dry, sarcastic tone irksome. Shut up, she wanted to tell him, that’s not my husband.
The monster had settled on the ground to eat the sheep, its jaws tearing lovingly at the carcass. After only a few bites, the dead animal was gone, hooves, head, and all. The creature reared up on its hind legs, beat its wings in the air, and emitted a long cry as raucous as a gull’s. Dropping to all fours, it paced back and forth, as though looking for a way through an invisible barrier. Then it settled on its haunches again and exhaled a shower of sparks and a puff of smoke. The weather had been dry lately. A bright flame sprang up in the grass.
“That’s quite enough,” said Aruendiel. He unfolded his arms and held his hand up, fingers flexing with a quick, compressed energy that made the ordinary movement seem like an obscene gesture. Instantly—without moving its wings—the creature went straight up into the air, trailing smoke, until it was so high that someone might take it for a bat or a crow.
A faint screech filtered down, and then the black speck was swallowed up by a pile of sooty clouds that had suddenly appeared in an otherwise clear sky. Thunder sounded as the clouds moved rapidly off to the north.
A splattering of rain fell, extinguishing the fire in the grass. Aruendiel was saying something with great concentration, staring after the clouds that had engulfed the creature. At first Nora thought it was another spell. Then she realized that he was swearing, with considerable fluency and detail.
She looked down at the ring on her finger, twisting it with a sense of unease.
“That sheepfucker, that woodlicker, that pus-ridden son of a slack-bagged whore shouldn’t have been here at all,” the magician said. “He shouldn’t be able to leave Ilissa’s domain, let alone come into the heart of mine.”
Nora made herself meet his pale eyes. She didn’t want to say anything, but she felt obligated to. “I wonder if this has anything to do with it.” She held up the hand with the ring.
“What is it?” Aruendiel demanded.
“It’s my wedding ring. I’ve been trying to get it off. But it seems to be stuck.”
He seized her hand and looked at the ring without saying anything. Then he touched the gold band with the tip of one finger.
Immediately Nora gulped in pain, jerking her hand away. “It’s like fire,” she gasped.
Aruendiel did not seem sympathetic. He took her by the wrist and blew lightly on the ring. This time the ring squeezed her finger a little tighter and then relaxed, almost like a living thing. She felt a twinge of nausea. He stared at the ring for another long moment, then gave it a long, hard wrench, without success. “Ow,” Nora said.
“There is certainly a spell there,” he said. “As far as I can tell, it is what keeps the ring on your finger. But why is it there?”
“I don’t know. You can’t take it off?”
“Did your husband put it on your finger?”
She nodded yes. “He’s not my husband.”
“Why do you think Raclin”—Aruendiel pronounced the name with emphasis, as though to test Nora’s reaction—“came here today?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either. But when I find you wandering at the edge of my private forest, where I do much of my work, where great power rests, without a satisfactory explanation, and then not an hour later, we encounter your husband, who makes himself so free as to devour one of my sheep and has the temerity to threaten me, the magician Aruendiel, a stone’s throw from my own castle, I wonder exactly what is going on. Did you summon him?”
“Never! That thing almost killed me once.”
“True,” he said musingly. “But it would be a cunning trick, enticing an otherwise prudent and experienced magician to take a stranger into his household by making her appear Raclin’s victim. A very clever way for Ilissa to introduce a spy into the stronghold of her most powerful enemy—don’t you agree?”
“I’m not a spy,” Nora said, hearing the menace in his tone and fighting the temptation to take a step away from him. If she did, she feared, she would not be able to stop herself from taking another step, and another, until she was running away as fast as she could.
“You might not even realize that you’re Ilissa’s tool. The ring could direct your actions at some future time, or right now.” As though to himself, he said, “I can’t believe I was such a fool as to leave you here in my castle, with my people, while I went away for weeks at a time. I should have turned you into a donkey or geranium for safekeeping or at least locked you up in the dungeon. Only the sun knows what kind of mischief you worked in my absence.
“And you even said just now you wanted to be a magician. What secrets of mine are you trying to steal?”
“Nothing,” Nora said, trying to surpress her panic. “Listen, I don’t know what this ring is, but it’s not controlling me. You would know it, the way you could tell Ilissa put those other spells on me. I would know it—I remember what it was like to be enchanted, and I’m not enchanted now.”
Aruendiel’s expression was stony. Nora added suddenly: “Besides, she’s not clever enough to come up with a scheme like that. I mean, she wouldn’t do anything that would make Raclin look bad, or ever admit that he’s less than perfect.”
“You’re underestimating her. She has carried out devious and complex schemes before.”
“I’m not her spy,” Nora said again, with some desperation. “I wasn’t trying to steal your secrets. I had no idea that your forest was private, or that it was full of, um, great power. How would I? I don’t know anything about magic.”
“No,” he said, no warmth in his voice. She could feel his eyes on her, probing, distrustful, all the way back to the castle.