C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 01

by A Bad Spell in Yurt

  I thought briefly that the same might be said about her. "The demon will destroy them."

  "Of course," she said. "That's why you have to stop them. The king would miss his knights, and I'd miss mine, even if the young count isn't a favorite of any of us." She chuckled, but I was unable to join in.

  I had thought I had a week to decide what to do. Now I had less than a day.

  "They won't want to leave for Yurt until the boar hunt is over," said the duchess, echoing my thought but much calmer about it. "I wonder if we ever are going to flush this boar!"

  As if in answer, there was a far away blast of horns, and a much closer barking. We had been riding at the edge of the woods, and now there was a tremendous crashing in the blackberry thickets at the trees' margin. A hundred yards from us, a dark shape suddenly burst out into the fields, at least twice as big as I had expected. I had also not been counting on the vicious tusks.

  I pulled my horse up so sharply it reared, but the duchess kicked hers forward. "Head it off!" she yelled. "Try to corner it down in the streambed!" At the moment, the demon was much less interesting to her than the boar.

  I couldn't expect her to help me, I thought. Turning to her was only a last-ditch effort to find someone else to share the weight of the problem, when it was mine all along. I turned my horse to follow the hunt, turning over for the thousandth time in my mind the list of the people in Yurt. I kept coming up with the same answer as I had all the other times, that I could not imagine any of them deliberately bringing evil into the kingdom and putting a curse on the king.

  Although the duchess tried to corner the boar in the streambed, it broke through the other side, rushing up the bank with the force of a winter storm and killing two hounds in the process.

  Normally I would have been very interested in the hunt. Now I followed it because I did not know what else to do. I noted without much interest that the boar's bristles were soon streaked with blood, and that its sheer strength made it able to break away several times when someone thought he had a spear in it.

  The king and queen stayed out of the center of the action, for which I was glad; it would be no use, I thought, having had the king miraculously cured if he was then attacked by an enraged beast.

  The Lady Maria also stayed in the background, her eyes excited, but more timid of the boar than she had been of the dragon.

  "I can't remember the last time we had boar meat for dinner in Yurt," she told me. "I'm quite sure it was before you came, maybe even before the chaplain arrived. I do know I thought it very exotic the first time I tasted it—my brother's castle is too close to the City for such wild animals!"

  Since I had absolutely no interest in boar meat, in exotic flavors, or her brother's castle, I grunted, doubtless very rudely.

  She noticed my lack of interest and apparently decided to draw me out. "You were born in the City, weren't you? This country life must all seem foreign to you."

  I was touched enough by her interest to manage a smile. "I always thought of myself as city boy until I came to Yurt, but I'm starting to think that I'm not one anymore."

  "The queen herself isn't really a city girl now," said Maria agreeably.

  "I at least grew up in the City," I said, "but I don't have any family there anymore."

  "I knew you were an orphan," she said, turning wide blue eyes dramatically on me. "We orphans must keep together."

  Even the hunt itself, the long spells of watchful inactivity, the sudden yelps and shouts, and the massive form of the boar shooting out of sight again, seemed appealing in comparison to listening to her chatter. "Let's try to catch up with the others," I said. "They're sure to corner it soon, and we want to be there when they do."

  We trotted along a streambed overhung by leafless branches, passing several men on foot from the village who were leaning on massive spears and looking disgruntled.

  "Is the boar up ahead?" Maria asked them.

  They shrugged. "Could be anywhere, my lady. It's the devil's own boar, that one."

  Although I knew this was only a figure of speech, I didn't like it and kicked my horse. "Come on," I said. "The others should be just over this hill."

  And then, with a roar, the boar burst out directly in front of me. With riding skills I did not know I had, I pulled my horse aside, managed to stay in the saddle, and used my hands and weight to help the horse keep its feet on the slippery stones.

  The Lady Maria was not so lucky. As my horse came down, hers reared up, and the boar shot under its hooves. She gave a despairing scream and scrabbled uselessly at the reins. Her sidesaddle perch gave her no chance to save herself. She flew twenty feet and crashed into the blackberry bushes.

  The boar was gone. I was off my horse and beside her in a moment. My heart was pounding so hard it seemed its sound ought to summon the others.

  She was lying absolutely still. Her face was dead white, except for the drops of startlingly red blood beginning to ooze from the scratches where the thorns had caught her on the way down. Her arms and legs were spread out as limply as a doll's.

  Furiously I unbuttoned her jacket and felt for her heartbeat. Blue eyes flipped open. "Fresh," she said.

  The Lady Maria insisted on riding back to the castle. Although her horse had fallen after it threw her, it had leaped up again immediately, and it did not seem to be favoring any of its legs. The villagers helped me calm the horse, readjust the saddle, and scoop her back up and into it.

  "Are you sure you wouldn't want to wait for a litter, my lady?" I tried to urge her.

  "No," she said obstinately. "My father always said that if you're thrown you should get right back up, and he was right."

  Since she seemed to have no broken bones, it was hard to argue with her. But she showed no interest in rejoining the hunt, and I was able to lead her back toward the castle.

  By the time we got there, she was ready to admit that maybe she was slightly bruised, even though she insisted that she did not need a doctor. The duchess's lady's maid went up to help her get ready for a nap, while I sat down in front of the fireplace in the empty great hall. For much of the afternoon I sat there, doing nothing more useful than keeping the fire burning.

  Just before sunset, I heard the sounds of the returning hunting party. Even before I could hear the words, I could tell from the sound of their voices that it had been a success. With the boar dead, I feared, there would be nothing to prevent the young count from starting for the royal castle first thing in the morning.

  The duchess came in, fresh blood stains on her cloak. "I heard the Lady Maria was thrown. Is she all right?"

  "She says she is. She's been resting this afternoon."

  "I'll go up to see her." I accompanied the duchess as she strode toward the stairs; I wanted to be sure myself. "You missed a great hunt, Wizard!"

  The Lady Maria was awake, sitting up in bed and wearing what I was fairly sure was the frilly pink item I had seen her sewing last month. She blushed when I came in.

  "This wizard worries too much," she told the duchess with a pretty laugh. "It was just the merest fall, as both you and I have had many times."

  "I hear the boar almost smashed into you."

  "I know," she said. "I've especially noticed these last few months, maybe you'll laugh at me but it's true, I just seem unluckier away from home. Nothing bad like this ever seems to happen to me in the castle of Yurt."

  "Probably because there are very few wild boars in the castle," said the duchess.

  But this went beyond joking. For a moment I was unable to move or even breathe. I had been incredibly foolish, but I thought at last I understood it all.

  "Are you going to want to come to dinner," said the duchess, "or will you want a tray sent up?"

  "Oh, I'll come to dinner, of course!" She glanced in my direction. "In a minute, when you're gone, I'll get dressed and come down. I certainly will want to hear all the details of the hunt. The stratagems, the beast's last stand, who finally thrust the spear home, the heroi
sm of the villagers— I'm sure it will all be terribly exciting."

  "I have to wash and change myself," said the duchess gaily. I guessed that she might have thrust in the final spear herself, but at this point I scarcely cared. "Come on, Wizard."

  As I carefully dressed in the red and black velvet suit that had been my best suit until a short period on Christmas morning, I realized that I was looking forward to dinner in the assumption it was the last meal I would ever eat on earth.

  III

  There were indeed tales of the hunt at dinner, which I scarcely heard. At the servants' table, two of the kitchen maids were giggling and one was almost in tears because the cook, faced with five hundred pounds of pork to deal with, had discovered that her own best butcher knives had not come from Yurt, and she was not at all sure that the duchess's would do.

  The Lady Maria had come down with a slight limp and had a small bandage placed artfully on one cheek. She told the story of her fall several times, with embellishments, including the despair of "her knight," who was apparently me, when he had thought she might have been killed. When the fruitcake had been served, I whispered in her ear, "Could I come see you in your chambers, my lady?"

  She laughed and even blushed, though after all this time I would have expected her to realize that my intentions were strictly honorable. As the dessert tray went around a second time, she and I slipped away. I helped nurse the fire in her room back to life, and we were soon cozily settled in soft chairs.

  "I don't want you to go riding again," I told her.

  She smiled. "You're a dear man, but you really do worry too much. Everyone who rides gets thrown sooner or later."

  "But I think you're in special danger."

  "You're thinking of what I told the duchess? Well, we'll be back in the royal castle soon, and then I'll be lucky again."

  I was afraid I knew where her "luck" came from. Since I was also fairly sure she would not answer a straightforward question, I started telling her my best guesses, in the hope that she would confirm them. "You told me once, my lady, that you'd seen time run backwards. Was that when you had recently come to Yurt, and you and Prince Dominic tried to get the old wizard to teach you some magic?"

  "How did you know?" she said with a laugh.

  "Oh, I just guessed," I said cheerfully. "You know I told you time can't run backwards, normally, so it must have been pretty powerful magic, so I'd like to hear how it worked."

  She looked at my face, to see if I was going to accuse her of anything or scold her, but she saw only an interested smile. I did not say that I had at last realized, long after I should have, that the key event that touched off the situation in Yurt four years ago was not the arrival of the queen so much as the arrival of the Lady Maria with her.

  "Well, the old wizard told us to come up to his room in the tower," she said. "It was very exciting and mysterious, because normally he would never let anyone in his chambers. He wasn't like you that way at all."

  I decided to let this pass. It was far too late for me to become exciting and mysterious.

  "And then he said a spell, a really long spell—and I knew it must be important to get every word right, because he had it written out on a piece of parchment that he looked at just before he said it."

  The wizard might want to be sure such a critical spell was said correctly, I thought, but the Lady Maria, with her ear for the Hidden Language and her total ignorance of the dangers, would have needed no such prompting.

  "And you'll never guess what appeared!"

  "A demon."

  "No, silly!" She slapped at me playfully with a cushion. "First everything grew very dark, and then a man appeared, but a very tiny man, maybe only six inches tall. And you'll never guess! His skin was bright red."

  A demon, I thought, but said nothing.

  "The old wizard had drawn a complicated star on the floor, and the little man appeared right in the middle of the star."

  No wonder, I thought, that the old wizard had at first denied that the supernatural had ever been active in the castle. He would not have wanted to admit, even to me, that he had been showing off for Dominic and the Lady Maria. After all those years without an apprentice, and with nothing other than dessert illusions to occupy him. . . .

  "And then the little man asked if we wanted anything! The old wizard said we wanted a demonstration of time running backwards."

  "And did you get it?"

  "Well, I thought his was a pretty silly demonstration, but he did it! We each drank a glass of water, and then, it was the strangest thing, the water was coming back up our throats and into our glasses, and then we had to drink it again. And even when we poured the water on the floor, the little man made it run back up into the glass!"

  A demon, firmly within the pentagram, will, if asked correctly, perform a few very basic tricks. I personally thought even the trick with the glass of water might have been skirting the danger-line; at school they had sent the demon back as soon as it appeared, without asking anything at all. A demon may be willing to make a brief demonstration of its power for free, but very soon it will be demanding payment in human souls.

  "And what happened next?"

  "That was actually it. I'd been hoping that maybe I could ask it for something, and I was certainly planning to ask for something better than a trick with glasses! But the old wizard said some words, really quickly, and it was gone, and he rubbed out the star."

  "And what happened next?"

  "Nothing at all," she said complacently.

  Since I knew this wasn't true, I took a teasing tone. "Well, I know something else happened. You decided to try the spell yourself, didn't you! You can't hide your secrets from wizards!"

  Making jokes and coy statements was the last thing I felt like at the moment, but it worked. She laughed. "I should have known you'd guess it sooner or later. After all, you saw me repeat your spell with the telephones! By the way—did you ever get them working?"

  "No," I said, refusing to let her distract me. "Go on about how you summoned the little man yourself."

  She giggled. "Do I really have to tell you? Well, since you've already guessed most of it, maybe I do, though it's actually rather silly. I'd asked Dominic, of course, if he wanted to help me, but he seems to have turned against magic for some foolish reason, and he didn't want anything more to do with it."

  Dominic, I thought, had had the good sense to be terrified of a demon. It was at last finally clear to me why the hoped-for match between Dominic and the Lady Maria had never come about. Aside from the differences in their personalities, he would never have allied himself with someone he feared might at any time foolishly summon a demon.

  "So I had to do it myself. I made the star, just like the wizard had, and I repeated the spell."

  "And the little man appeared," I said through frozen lips.

  "And I told him I wanted to see time run backwards, but not just as a silly trick. That is, I—"

  "You asked to become younger," I said, because she seemed to be having trouble saying it herself.

  She nodded, grateful for my understanding. "And the man explained that I didn't really want time to run backwards, as that would just make everything exactly as it had been years ago, but that instead I wanted to get some extra youth."

  "And he said he could do it."

  "First, though, he said I had to rub out the star, so he could move about more easily. When I did it, he grew so that he was the size of a normal man, and his skin wasn't red anymore. He said he had to find the extra years for me."

  "And he found them."

  When the old wizard had discovered the demon, I thought, Dominic had offered to help him catch it. He had managed to keep secret the Lady Maria's responsibility for summoning it, but he had had more problem with me, since I was too obtuse even to realize what was happening in Yurt. The old wizard had retired, convinced that the demon was locked safely away, and Dominic had no reason to think it had escaped, but he could tell that the king wa
s continuing to grow weaker. He would have had to admit his own original involvement to tell me openly that there was a demon in the castle, but he certainly hoped I would be able to overcome its evil magic, prompted by his hints.

  The Lady Maria looked at me with eyes that were suddenly brimming with tears. "He found some extra youth for me for a few years. But when I talked to him most recently, he said that it was too late for that—"

  I had been a fool since the day I arrived at Yurt. It should have been obvious at once where the demon had gotten the extra years he had given the Lady Maria. He had taken them from the king.

  When the saints had intervened and saved the king from death, her years had been reclaimed from her, and the demon couldn't get them back again. This was when she had decided to ask for something entirely different. This was when she had told the demon she wanted to see a dragon.

  "You fibbed to me," I said, shaking my finger at her until she giggled. "You told me no one had been in your chambers that day, when actually you were requesting things from your magic man."

  Did she realize that her "request" had nearly destroyed the castle? Since the dragon's presence had been extremely exciting, even romantic, and since, as it turned out, no one had been killed and the damage to the castle all seemed reparable, she was just delighted to have been able to see a real dragon.

  "Maybe he couldn't make me younger anymore after he had been back in that star," she said thoughtfully.

  "Was that just before I arrived?"

  "It was, actually," she said, surprised. "The old wizard had left two days earlier, and the constable told us you were coming at the end of the week. It was a very strange experience. I hope you won't think I imagined it."