C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 01

by A Bad Spell in Yurt

  While waiting for the courses, we sang Christmas carols. I did a few illusions, since the old wizard was no longer there with his much better ones. I made sure that all of mine were simple and pleasant, such as a shining golden egg that broke open to reveal an adult peacock. Even the young count managed to smile fairly amiably. I had never seen the Lady Maria so gay and lighthearted, even before the grey hairs had started to appear.

  Only Dominic, heavily strapped around the body and needing help eating because his right wrist was broken, sat silent and glowering. He, at any rate, seemed unlikely to have summoned a dragon that had nearly killed him.

  When the blazing plum pudding had been brought from the stove to the table, served and eaten with more cries of appreciation than normal, the duchess said, "Why don't all of you come to my castle for the rest of the twelve days of Christmas?"

  "But we couldn't possibly leave the royal castle during the holidays!" protested the queen.

  "You can't possibly enjoy a happy holiday in your castle the way it is now," said the duchess with a laugh. "Bring everybody along! I sent my whole staff home to their families for vacation, so there should be plenty of room in my castle if we double up in the chambers. It's going to take a while to repair this castle, and you're going to have trouble hiring any carpenters or masons for the next two weeks anyway. You don't want to have to start work just when everyone wants to relax and enjoy the festivities."

  "But everything's here!" continued the queen. "The food, the decorations, even the tree!"

  "Bring them all along!"

  "And if you like," said the old count, "we can spend New Year's with the duchess and go on to spend Epiphany at our castle!"

  I was delighted with this suggestion. Even though I knew now what had been in the old wizard's tower room, I still did not know who had summoned it. If we could get everybody, really everybody, out of the royal castle of Yurt while I tried to figure this out, we might all be much safer.

  "What a wonderful offer, my lady!" I said, even though the decision was certainly not mine to make. "A week of relaxing is exactly what we all need!"

  While the queen was turning to me in surprise, startled at the loss of someone she had expected to be her ally against the duchess, the king said, "The wizard's right. Thank you for a most generous offer! We'll go tomorrow!"

  As it turned out, we did not leave until the second day. We all awoke late and irritable. Christmas was over, and the lighthearted mood of the night before was gone. The wounded complained about their cracks and bruises, and I was covered with blisters from the dragon's blood. Clearly my predecessor knew nothing about dragons. The wounded knights, the doctor from the village told us, needed a day to rest and become at least a little less stiff before they could be loaded into horse litters.

  The king directed the repairs that absolutely had to be done before we could leave: the boarding up of broken windows, the replacing of slates where the roof was only minimally damaged, the rigging of covers in those areas where it was clear that all the slates would have to be removed and some of the beams replaced.

  I spent much of the day in the kitchen, my feet up before the main fireplace, while the cook and the kitchen maids packed up the two weeks' worth of food they had stocked for the holidays. The cook got into a prolonged quarrel with the constable's wife, insisting that she had to take along her own pans, not trusting the duchess's kitchen to have what she needed. Most of the staff in the kitchen were too busy to pay any attention to me, but Gwen put poultices on my face and changed them assiduously every hour. By evening, the blisters were almost gone, even though my ribs were aching worse than ever.

  The queen reconciled herself to the trip to the duchess's castle by taking literally her suggestion to bring everything along. She and the Lady Maria spent much of the day on the stepladders, taking down all the ornaments they had put up just two days earlier, and packing them ready to go. Even the Christmas tree itself was gently lowered and strapped to a sledge with a tarpaulin over it.

  Supper was a simple meal, except for the the fruitcake. Everyone was too tired to talk very much. The chief conversation was between the queen and the constable.

  "But, my lady, someone has to stay here in Yurt."

  "No, I won't allow it. You deserve a cheerful holiday as much as the rest of us—more, in fact."

  "If the castle stands empty, a thief might break in."

  "This is a castle," she said with an exasperated laugh. "When we go, the last person out can raise the drawbridge and leave by the postern gate, and then not even an army will be able to break in. Even with the damage to some of the parapets, the walls are still sound. There used to be wars in the western kingdoms, after all, and castles were built to withstand concerted siege! Certainly this castle will be impenetrable to a common thief!"

  "In the days of sieges, there were defenders in the castle to push back the scaling ladders from the walls."

  I stayed out of the discussion. There was no way I could pretend to have the authority to decide this, and, besides, I was fairly sure the queen would prevail.

  She did in the end, but only because the constable's wife finally said, "Please, dear, I'd like to have a few more days of merry holidays myself."

  I felt relieved as I crossed the dark courtyard to my chambers, carrying a candle, even though I was aching in every bone. My breath in the candlelight made a frosty cloud around me. Zahlfast had first noticed that the supernatural influence stopped at the castle's moat, and the old wizard had told me he had put special binding spells at the castle's periphery. At the duchess's castle, we should at least be free of the direct influence of black magic, and maybe my mind would work better than it seemed to be doing today.

  Beyond the castle walls, I could hear foxes barking over the dragon's carcass. I still did not know what to make of the stranger. He had refused to let me find out anything about him by turning that sensation of evil against me like a weapon. But I was beginning to wonder if the old wizard knew something about the stranger that he was not telling me.

  The old apprenticeship system for learning wizardry had never been actually ended. It had merely withered away over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, as it became obvious that it was quicker and easier for a young man to study with the wizards in the City, where all of modern wizardry was arranged in books and coursework, than to put up with the crotchets of a single teacher. When I had asked the old wizard about studying herbal magic with him, he had referred extremely vaguely to his last apprentice.

  I had thought at the time that he must know exactly who that last apprentice had been, and now I had a suspicion why he had not wanted to talk about him. That apprentice may have taken the plunge into black magic, and the old wizard knew it.

  He must have been living in the woods near Yurt for years, maybe with the old wizard's knowledge, and maybe not. At any rate, I speculated, he had taken advantage of the few days between when the old wizard had retired from Yurt and I had arrived to move into the castle and establish himself in the cellars. When he realized I was a young, relatively incompetent wizard, he had become bold. He had broken the magic locks to get into the north tower, and had had to break my lock on the cellar door when I had inadvertently locked him out—or in.

  I lit all the magic lamps from both of my rooms and arranged them near my shoulders. I did not like to think of a wizard who had given his soul to the devil standing there in the dark, waiting, perhaps avidly, as I had blundered down the wet cellar corridors.

  But how had he squeezed in and out the small window in the iron door? In a moment, I realized this wouldn't be a problem for a highly competent wizard. He could temporarily transform himself into something much smaller, if necessary—even I could probably do so, now, though I preferred not to try. In the first transformation class they always told the story of the young wizard who had turned himself into a purple bird who couldn't form the words of the Hidden Language with its beak. It had therefore been unable to turn himse
lf back, and it had flown away in panic before any other wizards could help.

  Someone I knew, I thought, someone in the castle, must have become involved with the evil wizard. This was the point where my speculations became very difficult. This evil wizard, even if he had been living near the castle, could have no reason I could think of to put an evil spell on the king three years ago and summon the supernatural into the castle. Therefore, someone else must have wanted that spell, someone else must have asked for his help. I was brought back again, in spite of my best efforts, to the arrival of the queen in Yurt.

  I stood up determinedly to start getting ready for bed. If the stranger had been a former apprentice of the old wizard, I was impressed with the power of his magic, stronger than anything I had seen, even at the school, in its imperviousness to my best spells. The old magic still had something to offer someone trained in the City.

  With my red velvet jacket in my hands, I stopped to consider again. There ought to be some record of the old wizard's apprentices, who would after all have had to live in the castle. I pulled my jacket back on and hurried out into the night.

  The constable and his wife were not yet in bed, but they were naturally surprised when I banged on the door of their chambers. "A list of the old wizard's apprentices? You need that tonight, sir?"

  "Yes, I do. I'm sorry, but I can't tell you why, other than that it has to do with the dragon."

  "It might take a while to find the information. He never had an apprentice in the time that I've been at Yurt. I'd have to go through my predecessor's records."

  "I'm sorry, I know you're very tired, but I really need that information now."

  "I'll help you find the right ledgers if you want," the constable's wife said to him. "Can't you see how worried the boy is?"

  I was glad enough for her support not to mind being called a boy, although I did wonder if she would ever think of me as a man. The constable unlocked a cabinet, and he and his wife started taking out old ledger books.

  Previous constables, it turned out, had kept very careful track of everyone who lived in the castle; the present constable, I assumed, had noted just as assiduously the day that I had first arrived. When my predecessor had first come to Yurt a hundred and eighty years earlier, he had quickly acquired apprentices. Usually he had only had one at a time, but there were periods in which he had three or even four. Some left after only a short period; one stayed for a dozen years.

  Then, a hundred and thirty or a hundred and forty years ago, the supply of apprentice wizards had dwindled. This would have been, I thought, at the time when the reputation of the wizards' school in the City had begun to spread. I bent close over the ledger, squinting to read the faded brown ink of the then constable's tidy handwriting. For a long time the wizard of Yurt had had no apprentices at all.

  And then he had a final one, one who had stayed in Yurt for nearly ten years. "That's right," said the constable. "He was the last. He left eighty-two years ago. The final indication we have was that he had taken up a post of his own."

  This was it, I thought. It would be impossible to give the stranger a precise age, but, even though he must certainly have slowed down his own aging with powerful magic, I doubted he could be older than a hundred and twenty. "Where did he go?"

  The wizard's last apprentice, according to the ledgers, had left Yurt to become the wizard in a count's castle in one of the larger of the western kingdoms, located a hundred and fifty miles away. Even that long ago, I thought, someone without a diploma from the school would have had to be satisfied with less than being a royal wizard.

  I thanked the constable and his wife profusely and went back to my own chambers. My bones, I noticed, seemed less stiff. As soon as it was light enough for the pigeons to fly, I would send a message to that kingdom and begin to track down what had happened to the old wizard's last apprentice.

  IV

  We prepared to leave early in the morning. The sky was grey and the wind damp and chill. I sent my message by the pigeons, asking that an answer be sent to the duchess's castle. Since my message would have to be relayed through the City's postal system, I could not expect an answer for several days.

  When we had all ridden out, the drawbridge was raised, the first time I had seen it done since coming to Yurt. The gears turned with a rusty screech. The two men who had raised the bridge then came out of the tiny postern gate, and last of all the constable came after them. He locked the postern carefully and balanced on the stepping stones across the moat to join us. The castle looked dark and forbidding under the dark sky; I doubted very much that any thief would try to cross the moat and scale those high walls.

  If the old wizard's last apprentice was in the cellars, I thought, let him enjoy the empty castle. He'd certainly be able to break into the main storerooms if he needed food, but at least he wouldn't be able to enjoy any of the cook's fruitcake or Christmas candy, all of which was coming with us. I hadn't wanted to tell anyone else that someone who had sold his soul to the devil might be rummaging through their rooms while they were gone. But I myself, as well as putting magic locks on my door and all my windows as carefully as I knew how, had brought along several of my most important books, including the Diplomatica Diabolica. The stable boy who helped me load a pack horse had not commented; let him think that wizards needed mysterious heavy objects wherever they went.

  We rode as quickly as we could go with the horse litters; no one wanted to linger in the bitter wind. I rode next to Joachim, but we barely exchanged a word. He, I suspected, was wondering if I had had anything to do with the dragon's appearance. I didn't know how to reassure him that I hadn't without also confessing that I had only a guess as to who had. At least, I thought, what the wizard had told me about the old chaplain's death made it clear that the beginnings of evil in Yurt must have preceded, rather than coincided with, Joachim's arrival.

  Considering that I had been hired as the chief magic-worker in Yurt, I thought, there seemed to have been a very large number of people in the castle already who had become involved in magic. There was the stranger, who I was starting to assume was identical with the old wizard's last apprentice; there was whoever had first put the spell on the king, who I kept fearing might turn out to be the queen, in spite of what she had told me on Christmas Eve; and there was the Lady Maria, who had certainly seen or been involved in black magic at some point.

  The Lady Maria managed to position her horse next to mine after the brief lunch break. "I haven't had a chance to talk to you for two days," she said. "But I've been wanting to tell you how exciting and romantic it was to see you defeat the dragon."

  Since there didn't seem to be any good answer to this, I merely nodded gravely.

  "If the dragon had killed you," she said in great seriousness, "I would have always treated the shawl you gave me, such a short time earlier, as a sacred object."

  If the dragon had killed me, I thought, it probably would have gone on to kill everybody else, unless one of the knights had been able to get in a lucky spear thrust. In this case Maria, being dead, would not have been able to treat the silk shawl or anything else as a special object. But all I said was, "Don't let the chaplain hear you referring to a simple shawl as sacred."

  She laughed as though this were a highly witty remark and went on to tell me how excited and how terrified she had been by the dragon. Since I had seen her then, I thought excitement rather than terror had been the dominant emotion on her part, but I was not at all unwilling to confess how terrified I had been myself.

  By riding rapidly and taking the shortest rests possible, we were able to reach the duchess's castle just before the early sunset of midwinter. Her constable and chaplain, the only members of her staff to stay at the castle over Christmas, had been warned we were coming and met us at the gate.

  Our cook with her kitchen maids put together a quick supper, slowed down somewhat by her insistence that all the pans she found in the kitchen be packed up and the pans from Yurt unpacked and pu
t in their places, before she could begin. Although every effort had been made to position the injured knights carefully in their litters, several were bleeding from wounds that had reopened during the ride, and Dominic was telling anyone who would listen that he was sure there were several fresh cracks in his ribs from the jostling.

  But it was still a relief to be warm and snug in a castle without any damage done to it at all, and the next morning we all awoke more cheerful, in spite of a steady fall of sleet outside. Several of the younger ladies announced that they had been looking forward for months to a Christmas dance, and they intended to have one.

  The morning was spent setting up the Christmas tree, rehanging it with all the ornaments, including my predecessor's miniature magic lights, and putting up the rest of the decorations. The brass players had brought their instruments and could be heard practicing snatches of dance carols.

  In the middle of the afternoon, the dancing began. The ladies had unpacked their brightest dresses, curled their hair, and perfumed their shoulders. The unwounded knights were dressed more uniformly, in the formal blue and white livery of Yurt, and all seemed to be enjoying themselves hugely. I sat in a little balcony above the great hall, watching and wondering when I might expect to receive an answer to my message.

  In spite of the liveliness of the music, which had the other watchers tapping their toes and swaying their shoulders, I scarcely paid attention to the brightly-lit scene below. The best I could expect, I thought, was an answer from whoever was now count in the castle where the old wizard's last apprentice had gone, and perhaps some indication of when that apprentice had left. But the records in another castle might not be as good as the records of the royal castle of Yurt, and, besides, the count might see no reason to pull out dusty ledgers to answer the letter of a wizard of whom he'd never heard.