Unnatural Magic Read online

  She liked to read novels the most, but she also enjoyed the sort of history books where the author included entire conversations between great wizards as if they had been crouched in the corner of the room taking notes. One of her favorites of these probably-mostly-invented history books told the story of how, after many years of her clan having ruled over humans, the great troll Cynbatren traveled the earth sharing the secret of magic with all of humankind. After that trolls could no longer have dominion over humans, and humans of every nation could at any time produce a wizard great enough to lay waste to an invading army or overthrow a cruel tryrant. It was a much nicer story, Onna thought, than the much drier and probably factual versions (that magical education had either originated in modern Nessorand and then spread along trading routes over the course of several centuries, or that powerful innate magical ability began to occur spontaneously in humans as a survival mechanism in response to a global pandemic, or both, or neither; it was a very popular argument between wizards). In any case, it was very thrilling to read all of the gory stories about humans marching about sticking their kings onto spikes before the Magical Awakening (quite interesting) and the Waste of the Gauts (wonderfully thrilling, though Onna wasn’t sure if she believed that a single wizard really could have single-handedly dissolved the skeletons of an entire occupying army), and all of the terribly boring laws and treaties and things that had come after it.

  She was, of course, very grateful to have been born into an age when attempting to steal another nation’s land or stick their king onto a spike or burn down their villages for having a different god or language or mode of dress would earn you the wrath of the entire Consortium of Nations. It was only that the poor benighted humans of the past seemed to have been witness to a great deal of excitement.

  Sometimes when she got tired of reading she would work on her embroidery, and Sy would look up and tease her about making someone a charming little wife one day. She never knew what to say to that, or indeed what to think about it. She didn’t know whether to be pleased, as she was proud of her embroidery and thought that she might make a very good wife one day, or annoyed, since it didn’t seem like the sort of thing that a boy would say to someone whom he thought of as a very talented young wizard. So she settled on “Hmm!” and ignored him.

  Eventually it came time for Sy to take the exam. He came by Onna’s house to say good-bye before he left for Leiscourt, looking a bit wild-eyed from lack of sleep. His normally ruddy cheeks had gone a fashionably unhealthy gray, and at some point in the past few weeks he had sprouted the suggestion of a thin black mustache on his upper lip. Onna couldn’t say from its appearance whether it was being cultivated, like a hedge, or was the result of neglect, like a briar patch, but in either case, as far as Onna was concerned, it made Sy look awfully dashing. He stood at the doorstep with his hands pushed deeply into his pockets, staring at her in such a pitiful way with his long-lashed brown eyes that she thought that she might burst into tears at once.

  “I’m going to fail, I know that I will,” said Sy. “I’ve already forgotten absolutely everything that you wrote onto all of those notecards for me.”

  “Listen to you talk!” said Onna. “You’re just nervous, that’s all. You’ll do beautifully, and Fairnwell and Johnson will go to stay with you in your flat in Leiscourt when you’re an important scholar, and they’ll probably end up making light effects for the pantomime and falling in love with actresses and never coming home again.” She paused. “I would invite you in, you know, but Mama and Papa are out, and I don’t think it would be proper.”

  Sy managed a wan smile. “I’m sure you’re right. I was about to invite myself in, but you always know what the proper thing is, as you haven’t got a pair of heretical Hesendis for parents. And I suppose I shall have to try my best at the exam, just so Johnson will have his chance at the gin palaces.”

  “Of course you will,” said Onna. “Here, I made this for you. For luck.”

  She pulled a small mirror from her apron pocket—she had been tidying up in the kitchen when he rang the doorbell—and handed it to him. “In a moment, tap on that with your fingertip and say sister,” she said and bustled off, leaving the startled Sy with the mirror in his hand. She hurried up the stairs and down the hall to the cramped little room she shared with her sister Gertie and snatched up another small mirror from her bedside table. She tapped it with one finger, said, “Brother,” and crowed in satisfaction as Sy’s puzzled face appeared in the glass. She waved at him energetically, then dropped the mirror into her pocket and rushed down the stairs again. Sy was still standing in the doorway, grinning. “It’s the cleverest thing I’ve ever seen! But it must have taken you an age to make them. Could I see the parameters?”

  She ducked her head, embarrassed. “Do you really like them? But it wasn’t clever at all, really; I just read in a book that they have them in Hexos and thought it would be fun to make them. Of course, I can write down the parameters for you, if you really would like to see them.”

  He smiled at her. “Only you would ever think that it isn’t very clever to read about some fiendishly difficult little construction they have in Hexos and then make up the parameters for it yourself, just for fun.” He put the mirror into his pocket, along with his right hand. “I suppose that I must be going, then.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Onna, in what she hoped was a very calm, grown-up lady sort of way. “You mustn’t be too late arriving in Leiscourt. It’s very important to get a good night’s sleep before the exam.”

  He smiled at her. “All right, then. Good-bye, Gebowa.”

  “Good-bye, Carzda,” she said. “To close the mirror you have to tap it and say good night.”

  “I’ll remember. Look at it sometimes, won’t you? So that I can see you.”

  “I will,” she said. “Good-bye, Sy.”

  “Good-bye, Onna,” he said, and left. Onna closed the door and leaned against it, crying bitterly and thinking that nothing so romantic or so terrible would ever happen to her again for her entire life.

  The next day was the first part of Sy’s exam, the written portion. Onna kept the mirror with her for the entire day, nestled safely in her apron pocket, and every time she checked it, she saw only her own face reflected back at her. Then, at around three, she pulled it out again and saw an exam question.

  It was quite ingenious of him. He had copied the question in very heavy ink so that it bled through to the other side, then stuck it to the underside of his desk and put the mirror in his lap. She could read the backward text very clearly, flipped as it was in the mirror. It was a question asking for the student to write their own parameters to address the proposed problem. It was exactly the sort of thing that Sy always struggled with; the sort of thing that they both knew would present no difficulty at all to Onna.

  She was suddenly, furiously angry, though she couldn’t understand why or at whom. She found a piece of paper and wrote out the parameters that he needed—it only took her a minute or two—and then she wrote another set of parameters for flipping the writing before setting the note in front of the mirror. There was a mean shard of pleasure in adding the mirror-writing parameter. I know what you can’t do, it said. You know what I can.

  If Sy tried to contact her over the next few days, she didn’t know about it. She put the mirror facedown on her bedside table and ignored it and set about doing her own work instead. She was thinking already of her own exam and what she would do for the practical demonstration. She thought that she would like to do an illusion. For three days she sat down every afternoon at the kitchen table—after the lunch washing-up was finished, but before anyone asked her to start slicing gingerroot for dinner—and worked out her parameters.

  Sy, when he came back, caught up to her on a walk to Mr. Heisst’s. He fell into step next to her, his shoulders bunched up around his ears. It had grown cooler again over the past two days, and Sy was wearing only a light summer jacket and skirt. Though she had meant to stare straight ahead and march briskly forward, Onna found herself slowing her pace to look at him. He cleared his throat. “You’re vexed with me.”

  She didn’t think that there was any need for her to answer this. He fisted his hands in his pockets. “I passed the exam.”

  She gave up being vexed and gave a little whoop of delight. “Really? Did you?”

  He nodded. “Only because of you, though, helping me.” He cleared his throat again. “Thank you. I know how you must have hated it to break the rules like that, but I just had to get in, and I knew that you would know the answer at once.” He blew on his hands to warm them, then said, “You look very nice today.”

  She looked as she always did; the blue-and-white dress she was wearing was one of her favorites. “Do you really think so?” she said. She didn’t know why she said it, exactly, only that it felt somehow simply, fundamentally correct in the same way that the multiplication tables were. If a young man said that a young lady looked nice, she should say, “Do you really think so?” and smile, and smooth her hands over the skirt of her blue-and-white dress. If this formula was followed, the boy would smile. Sy smiled, the one that twisted at the corner from an old scar on his lip. For a moment Onna was startled by him: by his thick black hair and decided eyebrows and that engagingly twisty smile. He was in that moment someone she didn’t know at all, someone who looked at her in a way that was completely unfamiliar.

  Sy left for Leiscourt two weeks later. Onna cried when he left and then shut herself up in her room and began to study. Her friends interpreted this as pining, and they attempted to lure her from her books with promises of dances, or county fairs, or a particularly beguiling set of new summer hats being sold by her father
at Gebowa’s Goods and Sundries. Her family at first applauded her studiousness, and then they began to fret over her neglect of herself. Her eldest aunt—who had been staying with them for several weeks—set about cooking every Awati dish Onna had ever been fond of as a child, so that the whole house was redolent with the smells of fish and nuts and spices. Her father invited her to sit by the fire while he read aloud from his latest religious book. Onna’s mother drew her warm baths and suggested that she might enjoy a day of healthy tramping about in the fresh air.

  Onna, however, could not be tempted. Studying would admit her to Weltsir, where Sy was. Whether it was to be close to Sy that motivated her, or to advance her own studies, or to please her parents with her scholastic accomplishments, or simply to prove that she was capable of it, she herself could not say. She didn’t reflect much upon it. She simply studied out of a deep and abiding faith instilled in her by her parents, by Mr. Heisst, and by every ounce of experience she had gained in her short life so far: that all problems could be solved with hard work, a pleasant smile, and advanced mathematics.

  Sy wrote to her every week, long, affectionate letters full of jokes and gossip. She responded with letters that were equally long but considerably less amusing. Often they were little more than a greeting followed by page upon page of experimental parameters. She was working, she told him, on something very special. Something that she was quite sure no one had ever done before.

  It was difficult, working on her own projects while still keeping up with her schoolwork and helping Mama around the house. Her sister Mani had just had a baby, and her mother was so busy with helping with her first grandchild that many of the burdens of the housework fell on Onna. A great number of relatives came pouring in from Lesicourt as well to see the newest addition to the Gebowa family, and though Onna was happy to see them all—and eat good Awati food and see her little cousins and laugh at the old stories her uncles and aunties told—the plain fact of the matter was that with so many people about she never had a moment’s peace, and she could not display any unhappiness over this fact to anyone for fear of being thought a very spoilt and selfish young lady, indeed.

  Her grandparents and aunts and uncles were all very much involved in Leiscourt’s close-knit Awati Elgarite Hall, and Onna often felt as if any minor misbehavior on her part would immediately attract the disapproval of at least four dozen elderly persons who believed firmly in both their Elgarite principles and their grandchildren’s ability to annoy their departed ancestors even from across a very wide expanse of ocean. It was difficult enough to be a young lady of seventeen, Onna thought, without having to also feel the weight of both her Awati ancestors and the laws of Elgarism upon her not-particularly-broad shoulders.

  Her father often chided her for reading his daily paper and getting overwrought over the news. She tended to ignore this—she thought that a young scholar ought to be well-informed—but lately the news in the papers was very disturbing. A horrible story about a troll massacring almost the entire population of a village called Coldstream in the northlands completely overtook all of the papers for weeks. One of the papers said that the attack had been unprovoked, while in another, local trolls claimed that one of the villagers had murdered and eaten a troll child, while a third claimed the entire massacre had been staged by the Daeslundic human and Cwydarin troll governments to cover up how people in the village had been poisoned by a leak of strange substances from a nearby matchstick factory. The stories nestled themselves into her head and created a sort of horrid wax mold into which her brain poured her own petty anxieties. She had strange dreams. She dreamed of being lost in an enormous house full of endless twisting passages, searching for something but terrified of finding it. She dreamed of walking through the village and finding it empty, everyone she had ever known murdered and gone. She dreamed, often, of being eaten alive.

  She didn’t mention her dreams in her letters to Sy. When she wrote of the rest of her troubles—the fantastic difficulty of her projects, the endless labor produced by her uncles and cousins and little sisters, her morbid fascination with the news reports—she wrote in an airy way that made it all sound as if she was one of those artless young brides in a story from a women’s quarterly. This was the character Onna cast herself as in her letters because she suspected that if Sy knew what she was really like—her worries, her resentment, her fevered work that kept her up past the dawn—he would draw away in revulsion.

  Matters of the heart, however, were eventually supplanted in Onna’s mind by the increasingly pressing issue of the entrance examination. Somehow, a year passed, and the exam soon overshadowed everything; no dinners or dances or deliciously beribboned bonnets or even distant terrors in northern villages or Onna’s own seventeenth birthday could obscure, for more than a moment or two, the looming threat of the exam. It sat there at the gate of summer like some fearsome dragon, and she dragged her heels through the whole of the spring until, with terrible swiftness, she found herself seated beside her mother in a twelve-hour coach headed for Leiscourt, preparing herself to face the monster.

  2

  To be introduced to a troll is a very different matter than to be introduced to a human, and all usual rules are to be disregarded. First, it is essential to remember that reigs—who are usually, but not always, of the female sex—assume most leadership roles within troll society, and that trolls therefore admire strength and decisiveness in human women. A young lady who is being introduced to a troll reig should expect to be embraced and kissed briefly on the cheek: this kiss should always be returned to avoid an appearance of haughtiness. Trolls do not generally like to smile at anyone other than intimate friends and family, and a stern countenance should not be taken as churlishness. Bold eye contact, a low-pitched voice, and good posture are all considered attractive, and modesty is not thought of as a particular virtue: compliments should be accepted with a brief “Thank you,” without demurral. A young lady who is accomplished in music or magic might find an excellent audience or conversational partner in even the humblest of trolls, and a fine singing voice is generally much appreciated and applauded . . .

  —Mrs. Barton’s Manual of Manners, Cordoline Barton, 6568

  When Tsira first heard about the murders, it was in a tea shop.

  She was picking up a new knife in Dunnhepst when she spotted another troll. A big reig, tall and good-looking. They kissed. The stranger said her name was Fyllemwydmesura. She was wearing a cloak with hems covered in the kind of embroidery that would take the vahns in Tsira’s clan months to make. Tsira tried not to think too much about how long her clan could eat if they sold something like it.

  They ended up sitting down in a little place near the village square. Tsira wasn’t really in the mood to chat with some rich city reig, but it was in custom to share a drink with a traveler.

  The owner bowed to them when he brought the drinks. Fyllemwydmesura sat back and looked pleased, like she had probably been born a reig and felt like one her whole life and never had anyone argue with her about it. She looked like someone who was used to being listened to. Not Tsira.

  Tsira knew she was meant to be a reig, but people in her clan always told her she was wrong. Acted like she didn’t know what she was. Like maybe she thought that bleeding most months or wearing a reig’s torc could make her a reig without her stepping up to the tasks of leadership and caretaking of vahns and children that came with it. Like calling herself a reig when most people were vahn meant she was stuck on herself. If she wasn’t so small and magicless, no one would have ever asked twice, but she was and they had, so she’d had to think it through. She could make the arguments. She was a reig because imagining herself doing vahn’s work—the detail-work, the patience-work, teaching children and doing embroidery and keeping accounts and all of the other vahn-chores—made her itch. She was a reig like her ma: she had the head for books, the calm steady temper, and the will to be a leader in her clan and take care of any vahns who’d have her. If they ever would have her. That was feeling less likely by the day. Fyllemwydmesura had probably never had anyone ask her if she was sure you wouldn’t rather declare vahn and get taken to clan by a kind steady reig. Tsira wanted to smack her for it.