Gwennie blushed a dark red from her hairline to the neck of her dress. “Excuse me, my lady,” she said faintly, “but I do not find that an appropriate question.”
Now she had me curious.
“Come,” said Justinia breezily, “a vizier may oft keep secrets, but not from a governor’s granddaughter-especially not one who wishes to aid her.”
Gwennie kept her eyes down. “No, my lady,” she said as though the words were dragged from her, “we are not lovers. And-” She took a deep breath. “-and I think it shows how immoral the East must be for you even to think so.”
“Nay, O Vizier,” said Justinia. It was hard for me simultaneously to stay on the elephant, to pretend to be looking around as though not hearing their conversation, and to follow it avidly. “Does not passion for him burn great within you?”
Gwennie’s mouth shaped the word No, but for a moment no sound came out. Then she took another breath and answered fairly firmly, “Such a feeling would not be appropriate. A king can love only a princess or high-born lady, his social equal, someone fit to become his queen.”
There was not even a hint in her voice that she thought Justinia would make a terrible queen of Yurt. It occurred to me that Gwennie, not in any position of real power, was much more concerned with maintaining social conventions than was someone like Paul whom those conventions were supposed to support.
“This attitude speaks well for thy training and awareness of thy position,” said Justinia thoughtfully. “But I have observed how thou watchest the king, how aware thou constantly art of his presence. I speak now as a woman, not a high-born lady. Many a king has found more solace with a slave girl than his own wife. Would not thy heart’s sorrow be eased by entering his bed?”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” Gwennie replied, in what was doubtless supposed to be a hot defense of morality and came out half-choked. “Turn the elephant back to the castle.”
“That may indeed be a difficulty,” said Justinia, as though Gwennie had said something quite different. “Thou hast always lived, I ween, here in the royal court-wert thou perhaps even once his playmate? But I have also verily observed him, how eager his youthful strength and restlessness is to turn to something deeper and stronger. If he awoke in the night to find thee beside him, it would be but a moment ere his friendship for thee turned to passion-especially when he realized how much thy love could guide him to find what he truly wishes to find.”
I wondered myself what she thought Paul was seeking.
“Thou carriest the castle’s keys at thy belt, I have noted,” Justinia continued. “It will be a simple act for thee to slip into his chamber when all are sleeping, so that none else need ever know. Thy delicacy and inexperience itself should prove an added attraction.”
“Turn the elephant back,” said Gwennie again, staring straight ahead.
Justinia laughed and said a word to the automaton, which touched the elephant’s neck with the goad. It turned obediently, pausing only to strip a trunkful of leaves from an overhanging branch before starting homeward. I remembered somewhat guiltily to probe for bandits.
And realized there was a group of riders approaching, less than a quarter mile behind us. I stiffened, summoning spells of protection. But there was something familiar about them …
“Wait a minute, my lady,” I called to Justinia, in a loud voice to indicate that I could not possibly have overheard a low-pitched conversation. “It’s the queen mother of Yurt, coming home.”
In a moment the riders came out of the trees and pulled up hard: a small group of knights with the queen and her ladies in the center. Several of the horses, eyes rolling white, reared as the elephant turned to look back at them.
Gwennie worked herself out of the housing on the elephant’s neck and would have jumped straight to the ground if I had not caught her magically to slow her fall. She sketched a curtsey, and although her cheeks were still blotched red she addressed the queen clearly and calmly. “Welcome home, my lady! This is the princess of which I told you.”
There were greetings and introductions all around. Gwennie must have telephoned the royal court of Caelrhon or sent a pigeon-message as soon as Justinia arrived, I realized. The queen and Prince Vincent, her husband, would have left for Yurt the very next day, cutting short what had been supposed to be a several-weeks visit at his family’s court. Although at first I thought that Gwennie had told them about the attack on the castle, and the queen had hurried home to assess the damage and the danger, no one in the party from Caelrhon seemed to have heard about it.
When the queen introduced a wide-eyed and rather gawky girl to Justinia, a girl who seemed to have shot up two inches since I saw her last, I understood why Gwennie had been so quick to contact the queen. It was not just the acting constable telling the queen of Yurt that her castle had company, although that was how she would have phrased it. Gwennie must have made an allusion-that the queen had understood very well-to the beauty and charm of the foreign lady. The thirteen-year-old princess of Caelrhon who some, at least, had designated as Paul’s future bride was being brought in fast before it was too late.
“And wilt thou be a queen some day, Princess Margareta?” Justinia asked the girl politely.
Margareta, in awe of the elephant, stared open-mouthed for a moment, then remembered herself and said in a slightly squeaky voice, “No! That is, my father is king of Caelrhon. But, you know, if I marry another king, that is-”
The girl stopped in confusion. Justinia, considering with a twitch at the corner of her crimson lips, seemed to have guessed almost as quickly as I had why Margareta was being rushed to the royal court of Yurt. “In the meantime,” she said with a smile, “would it bring thee delight to ride upon an elephant, O Princess?”
“Oh,” with a nervous look toward her Uncle Vincent, the prince consort, and toward the queen, “could I?”
Gwennie seemed happy to give up her seat on the elephant’s back. In a minute Margareta was seated next to the Lady Justinia, gaping anew at the automaton, and we all started homeward. I yawned and thought I might finally get some sleep once we were back at the castle.
Margareta squealed with real or assumed nervousness when the elephant began trotting, until Justinia told her rather sharply to stop scaring it. Gwennie, riding on the young princess’s horse, gave a calm and professional account of the castle’s doings in the few days the queen had been gone-except for the most crucial, the attack of the unliving warriors.
“In addition,” she finished, “there was one very sad event, and the night watchman is dead. Perhaps the king can tell you about it better than I. No, no, my lady, there is nothing to concern you now.”
Glancing surreptitiously at Gwennie, I wondered what, if any, of the Lady Justinia’s advice had gone home. That, I knew, would concern the queen if she ever learned about it even more than an attack which was now safely over.
When I awoke, aching and ravenous, in late afternoon, it was to find Antonia and her doll curled up beside me. I had been having strange, rather uneasy dreams, involving Theodora and some bones, and was glad to wake. I tried to sit up without disturbing the girl, but she rolled over and looked at me inquiringly through tousled hair. “I want to ask you something, Wizard,” she said. “Are you my father?”
I jerked upright, fully awake, and looked around quickly for Elerius. But if he was still reading old spells it was in my outer study. “What has your mother told you, Antonia?” I asked cautiously.
“She said that my father couldn’t live with us,” she said slowly, as though trying to remember all the details correctly, “but that he loved us very much, and that I would understand it all when I grew up. I want,” she added, fixing me with sapphire eyes, “to understand it all now.”
I ran a hand over my face and pushed back my hair. “So why do you think I’m your father?”
“I know you love me and Mother,” she said with great seriousness, explaining a complicated logical exercise, “and you told me y
ou don’t love other ladies. And Mother seems to love you, and she hardly ever talks about any other men-except of course the bishop.”
If our daughter thought Theodora loved me, then she indeed must. Most of the time I knew this anyway-it was just her reserve and self-reliance, I told myself, that made me sometimes doubt it. “The bishop loves you, too,” I said. “He baptized you.”
“He’s my friend,” said Antonia, nodding. “But he just told me to talk to Mother when I asked him about you. Some of my other friends on the street said they all knew you were my father.”
In spite of Theodora’s quiet determination to keep her private life private, her neighbors must long have speculated about Antonia’s parentage, and I visited Theodora too often not to have attracted notice. Even the Romneys knew she had a wizard friend.
“So are you my father?” Antonia asked, looking at me expectantly.
There didn’t seem any way to get out of answering. Theodora may have preferred not telling our daughter for fear she would tell the other children, but it seemed too late to worry about that. “Yes, I am,” I said gravely, taking her hands in mine. They were bigger than when she had been born but still tiny in my grip. “And I am very glad you’re my daughter.”
She threw herself against my chest, and I gave her a close hug. “I’m glad too,” she said indistinctly against my shirt.
“Your mother wants this to be a secret,” I said after a minute, stroking her hair, “so let’s not tell anyone here, not even Celia and Hildegarde.”
“I guessed the secret all by myself,” Antonia said proudly, looking up at me. “But my friend Jen said she thought my father was the bishop.”
The bishop? I tried to make a sudden jerk seem like squeezing her tighter.
But Antonia observed my surprise. “I think,” she said in explanation, “that’s because he visits us sometimes, and everyone knows that Mother can go visit him in his palace whenever she wants.”
If such a rumor had started, I had to tell Theodora to be a little less secretive about me with her neighbors: far better to have them know for certain what most of them had guessed anyway than to have people start believing wild things about her and Joachim.
A sudden rap on the bedchamber door interrupted us, and Elerius put his head in. “Good, I see you’re awake, Daimbert. Your young woman constable just came by with a pigeon-message she said she thought was important.”
He handed me a little cylinder of paper, all the pigeons could carry, and ducked back out. “If you’re my father,” asked Antonia thoughtfully, “does that mean you’re Dolly’s grandfather?”
I didn’t answer. The message was from Celia in the cathedral city. I rubbed grit from the corner of an eye. I had again almost forgotten she was there. If people and events would just stay where I put them, and new ones would stop showing up in Yurt, and if I ever got enough sleep again, I might be able to keep track of what was happening in the twin kingdoms.
The message was, of necessity, brief. “Have met the Dog-Man. Religious vocation seems genuine. But strange. This afternoon down by the docks he killed a pigeon and brought it back to life.”
“But strange” was right. Presumably the pigeon in question was not the same one who had brought this message? I stared unseeing at the little piece of paper until I realized Antonia was trying to read it too, then wadded it up in my fist.
“We’d better get ready for dinner,” I said, but my best effort at cheerfulness sounded forced in my own ears. I felt cold from the nape of my neck all the way down my back. Somehow this man had persuaded Celia as well as the bishop that he genuinely wanted to be a priest. What could they be teaching in seminary these days? Even a wizard knew that a humble, holy man would not try to show off his miraculous powers. And someone who had already killed a frog and a pigeon, just to bring them back to life, might have something much worse in mind.
And someone who revived dead animals, I thought, trying without particular success to duplicate what Elerius had done to Antonia’s hair yesterday, seemed too close for comfort to someone who made warriors out of dead bones-someone who had killed the watchman and not brought him back to life.
II
Princess Margareta came down to dinner with her eyelids painted an iridescent blue like the Lady Justinia’s, which earned her a look of askance from the queen, and carrying a big porcelain doll. The doll wore a lace and silk dress more elaborate than the princess’s own and had golden curls arranged around its placid face in a style that even Elerius might have had trouble matching.
The king’s Great-aunt Maria threw up her hands with delight at the sight of the doll, but Antonia frowned. “The wizard told me not to bring Dolly to the table with me,” she said to the princess in a low voice, as though warning her against possible embarrassment.
But Margareta tossed her head imperiously and said in her slightly squeaky voice, “Queen Margarithia always sits wherever I do.” She ordered a servant to bring up a stool and set the doll in it, next to her own chair. One of the castle hounds, who were not supposed to be in the great hall at meal time, came up and started sniffing, but Margareta aimed a kick at it and the servant took the animal quickly away.
“Queen Margarithia is a good name for a doll,” said Antonia approvingly.
Margareta settled herself with a complacent flounce into the place of honor, at the king’s right hand. She had first been given that place by the queen two visits ago and seemed to feel it was rightfully hers.
As the rest of us seated ourselves and started passing the platters, I noticed that the young princess, however, paid less attention to King Paul than to the Lady Justinia, sitting directly across the table from her in the secondary place of honor. When Justinia took a single piece of chicken but several scoops of vegetables, Margareta pushed the three pieces of chicken she had already taken to the side of the plate and tried surreptitiously to fluff up her vegetables with a spoon. When Justinia set down her knife and switched her fork from left hand to right to eat after cutting each piece, Margareta tried to do the same, although on the second effort she dropped her knife on the floor and blushed when a servant slipped over from the other table to give her a clean one.
Paul too gave most of his attention to the Lady Justinia. Elerius was entertaining the knights and ladies with tales of his travels, including a trip right up into the far northern land of dragons, where I had never gone. He seemed so comfortable at an aristocratic table that I wondered vaguely, as I had several times before, if the family background he had always kept secret might include birth in a noble household, or if he, like me, had learned to imitate refined social graces upon taking up a post as a royal wizard. Antonia followed his stories with such rapt attention that she almost forgot to eat, but the king scarcely appeared to hear him.
When dessert came, Elerius graciously refused requests to entertain the court with illusions, referring the company instead to me. My dragons doing the tango got a much more appreciative response here than they had received last night from the renegade magic-worker who might-or might not-have been watching me covertly.
As the servants began clearing away the plates and everyone else started back toward their chambers or else talked in small groups by the hearth, the Lady Justinia put her hand on the king’s arm. “I have a question for thee, perhaps even a suggestion,” she said with a slow smile, under the sounds of general conversation.
Princess Margareta, picking up her doll, glanced toward them. Justinia, her back toward the table, did not notice either the girl or me. “I have been at thy court long enough, O King, to learn that thou art truly a man and not a boy,” Justinia continued quietly, her lips curved into a half smile and her dark eyes holding his. “A man and a king can make his own choices in love: he is not one to let the old women decide for him. Thou and I both know, do we not, that thy own choice would never be a little girl, scarce more than a child, who still plays with dolls?”
The tips of Paul’s ears went pink as he started to smile in r
esponse. But the effect on Margareta was immediate. She blanched white and stood stark still for a moment, clutching her doll to her. Queen Margarithia wide blue eyes stared unseeing at the room, and her painted china lips continued to sketch their cupid’s-bow smile.
Then Margareta whirled around, the doll swinging from one hand, and stormed from the room. Queen Margarithia’s porcelain head struck the table leg and shattered explosively. A number of people turned at the sound, but Margareta, almost running, did not seem to notice.
Neither did Paul, although Justinia glanced briefly over her shoulder. “Who do you think then my choice should be, my lady?” he asked. My liege lord’s expression was so intense and so vulnerable that I felt almost ashamed to be eavesdropping.
“The choice is thine to make, O King,” she said, looking at him from under long lashes. “But I believe there is a heart in the castle that loves truly, has loved thee a very long time, with a care thou hast ignored for far too long.”
I turned away. The queen, frowning, was looking toward Paul and Justinia, but this was something the king would have to take care of by himself. The Lady Justinia might think she was pleading Gwennie’s cause, but to me it looked only as though she were advancing her own.
Gwennie had reasserted her authority as arranger of accommodations in the castle and had told me that a little girl could not possibly stay in my chambers with two wizards, and instead would sleep with her in her own room until the twins returned. That was fine with me-it kept her away from Elerius. Antonia had been quite smug earlier about this opportunity to sleep in three different rooms in a castle and said she could hardly wait to tell her friend Jen.
This evening, however, she kept referring to the smashing of Queen Margarithia. Antonia thought Margareta must be especially upset because she had destroyed her beloved doll herself, and when I explained that my magic would not put broken porcelain back together, she suggested earnestly that we send at once for the Dog-Man. I took her to Gwennie’s room and sat holding her hand until she fell asleep.
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