“Have you invited him to my coming of age ceremony?” Paul asked his mother.
“He’d accepted when he was still dean,” she said, “but he may not now be able to get away from his new duties.”
“Were you surprised he was chosen?”
“He was an excellent chaplain,” said the queen with a smile. “You would not even have been born if he hadn’t saved your father’s life. I think he’ll be an excellent bishop.”
I hardly listened to their conversation. I scanned the skies for some new monster and the crowd for Theodora, seeing neither.
Several minutes passed, and nothing happened. Might the wizard be saving his next attack for Paul’s coronation? The duchess and her tall husband, Prince Ascelin, came over to talk to us. “I haven’t seen the royal family of Caelrhon in months,” Ascelin said with an almost shame-faced grin and a glance in their direction. “I wonder if Prince Lucas is still not talking to me.”
“But what’s the problem?” asked the queen, concerned.
“We were here in Caelrhon this spring at the same time as he was. Lucas was talking about his wife-justifiably, I’m sure! — about all her beauty, skills, and accomplishments. Not to be outdone, of course, I started talking about the duchess,” with an affectionate glance toward his wife. “I told him there was no one in the twin kingdoms, man or woman, who could compare to her in riding or hunting.”
I paused in scanning the sky to feel briefly sorry for Lucas. When he was already feeling royal power diminished, it must have been bitter to hear himself compared unfavorably to a duchess.
“He seems to have taken it as an insult to the crown princess,” Ascelin continued, a smile crinkling the tanned skin by his eyes. “He challenged me to a sword fight-a bad idea, since I would have disarmed him immediately. Fortunately his wizard stopped the fight before it even started: paralyzed him where he stood and took the sword from his hands. Lucas transferred all his fury from me to his Royal Wizard, and I was able to escape, calling apologies over my shoulder, while the prince was starting to tear into his wizard for lack of respect.”
I didn’t wait to hear any more. “Excuse me,” I said to the queen. “I’ll see you at the castle a little later.” To the young chaplain I added, “I hope Joachim outlives you.” And I hurried away.
Cutting around the cathedral’s hill, I headed for the artisans’ area to the east, the area where Theodora lived. I kept passing groups of townspeople, all in their Sunday finery, talking about the election. Normally I would have been interested in their reaction to their new bishop, but now I brushed past.
At the foot of Theodora’s street I paused. I could see her door and the upstairs window. It looked dark. A black and white shape darted in front of me: Theodora’s cat. I bent down, made clicking noises, and held out one hand. The cat hesitated, then recognized me and came to rub against my hand. It, at least, was happy to see me.
After a minute’s petting, the cat turned and trotted purposefully up the street. At its door, it sat down and began to meow. I came up quietly behind it. The door opened. “All right, kitty, come on in.”
The cat walked in, tail high. I took hold of the door to keep it from closing and found myself looking at Theodora.
Before I could think, I had clasped her in my arms and buried my face in her hair. Not until she pulled back a little, trying to wipe the tears from my cheek with one hand, did I realize I was crying.
“Daimbert?”
“Dear God, Theodora, for the last month I’ve thought you were dead.” I seized her again as though my embrace would make her immortal.
“But I’m not dead,” she managed to say, with the light, almost teasing note I knew so well. After envisioning so many horrible things, including that I had only imagined her existence, the feel of her in my arms was even better than I remembered.
“Or I thought you’d been captured by the wizard-or, or had even joined him.”
“What wizard?”
We were standing just inside her half-open door. I released her enough to be able to see her face in the light from the street. “I have two very important questions for you. First, will you marry me?”
“I told you before,” she said with a half smile, “a girl needs time to consider.”
And a month had apparently not been long enough. I knew the answer with the certainty of a blow to the stomach.
But I still managed to bring out my second question. “Last month there was a powerful wizard in the city, someone you could sense but I couldn’t. Is he here now?”
She turned her head away, slipping for a moment into her own magic. Then her amethyst eyes met mine. “No. If he’s here, he’s shielding his mind as effectively from mine as he is from yours.”
So perhaps I need not fear an immediate attack. Looking at Theodora it was almost impossible to imagine her working with an evil renegade. I dismissed him from my thoughts. “If you don’t want to marry me, would you consider living with me, even for a little while?”
She smiled. “I suspect this conversation may take a while. If we talk here, we may be interrupted. How about if we go to the grove outside of town?”
I was naturally intrigued by this suggestion, even though I realized she had not answered my question. I rubbed my eyes with my fists, and Theodora got her key to close the door behind us. As she stepped into the street, I noticed for the first time that she wore a black and gold dress with a bright red apron and shawl.
“You were at the new bishop’s enthronement,” I said with sudden comprehension, “sitting with the Romneys.”
She gave me a sideways smile. “I saw you with your royal court, but I was fairly sure you didn’t recognize me. I was wearing a head-scarf, too. I thought the pew with the Romneys an appropriate place for a witch. Was that extremely good-looking young man your Prince Paul?”
I nodded and reminded myself not to be jealous. Whatever reason she had for not wanting to marry me had nothing to do with Paul.
She tucked her arm through mine as we walked, one more couple out for a stroll on a fine afternoon after the episcopal election. Her earrings moved in and out from behind her hair in the charming way I remembered. “Isn’t the new bishop your friend the dean?”
“That’s right.”
“He looks very intense,” she said, “as though he doesn’t worry about the things that worry ordinary people, but always tries to look through to spiritual issues.” I nodded again; it seemed a good assessment. “But tell me-does he ever smile?”
“He’s been known to,” I said, smiling myself. “But not often. He’ll be an excellent bishop, but I’m afraid some of the young priests will find him hard on them.”
“You’ve been away for weeks,” she said. “Where have you been?”
It occurred to me only then that she might have been as worried about me as I was about her. “And where do you think I’d been?” I said teasingly, using her trick of answering a question with another question.
“I knew you defeated the monster that appeared right after the old bishop’s funeral,” she said. “Everybody in the city was talking about it.” Maybe I wasn’t being blamed for as much as I’d thought. “But the rumor was that something was still wrong, or the monster wasn’t fully defeated, and you had to go thousands of miles to find out where it had come from.”
“Close enough,” I said. “I’ve been up at the border of the northern land of wild magic.” The borderlands seemed much less interesting at the moment than the shape of her mouth, the way she held her head, and the color of her eyes. “The fanged gorgos, the monster, came from there, and I had to take it back to destroy it.”
Somehow she had me talking easily again, as I had always talked with her. While we walked through the city, out the gates, and past all the crowds and the tents and the Romney caravans toward the little grove a mile away, I gave her a quick overview of our adventures. The grass that had been long and green when we last walked here together had been browned by the summer’s sun and tra
mpled by many feet.
She was, as I had expected, fascinated by my account of the valley where everyone lived in houses built into the cliff. She was also very interested in the nixie’s barrier that specifically would not let humans pass. It was good to talk about magic with someone who understood it, and who I did not feel was in competition with me.
“So what would you have done,” she asked with a laugh, “if your prince hadn’t been able to attract those horses? Would you have given in to the nixie’s charms at last?”
I didn’t reply-in part because I did not know the answer. We had reached the edge of the woods, and I prepared to fly both of us up and over the blackberry tangles.
But she forestalled me. “I’ve been practicing while you’ve been gone. Watch!”
Slowly and deliberately, her lips moving silently, she rose into the air on her own magic, went over the tops of the brambles, and disappeared from view, a delighted grin on her face. From the thump and the sudden laugh on the far side I knew she’d come down faster than she intended.
I followed her, landing more gracefully, and we walked together to the center of the grove where the spring still played and the emerald grass grew long. The air was still permeated with unfocused magic, but not nearly as strongly as I had remembered.
“Let’s sit down,” she said in a different voice than she normally used. “I want to tell you something.” She sounded as sober as Joachim.
I had been about to take her in my arms but hesitated. We sat down next to each other, not touching. “What is it?”
“I am going to bear a child.”
There was a long pause. I put a hand over my eyes and called myself all the insulting names young wizards use for each other; the list was fairly long. A second-year wizardry student would have known better. But when I took my hand down I still had to ask, “And-it’s mine?”
“Yes,” said Theodora, less soberly, “yours- She’ll be yours and mine.”
“It will be a girl? You’re sure?”
A small smile had again reached the edges of her lips. “Of course I’m sure. After all, I’m a witch.”
This certainly ended the vague plans I realized I had been making about somehow having both her and my position in Yurt. Whatever institutionalized wizardry tolerated in its wizards, it was not being the fathers of families. “Theodora, you know I want to marry you. I’ll be happy to live wherever you like.”
The smile was gone again, and she took my hand. “But I never intended to marry you.”
IV
Christ, this was bad. I had thought my self-esteem had suffered so many blows over the years that I was fairly immune, but I had been mistaken. I had never loved the queen as much as I loved this woman.
“Theodora, I-” I tried to find some way to phrase it delicately so it would not be an insult, and ended up not finding any and saying it baldly. “So you made me fall in love with you deliberately, not interested in me at all, only-only using me the way the nixie wanted to use us!”
“Daimbert, it wasn’t like that,” she said mildly.
But now that I had started I couldn’t stop. “Once you had what you wanted, you didn’t need me and didn’t care to see me again.” I had jumped up and was pacing back and forth while she sat quietly, listening. “You managed to hide from me with your damned ring of invisibility, and when I left the city you were delighted, hoping I wouldn’t come back. If you hadn’t opened the door for your cat without taking the precaution of peeking out first, I never would have found you.”
“I’d always hoped to see you again.”
But I wasn’t going to be interrupted. “Of course you didn’t tell me, then, that you didn’t love me. You had to be sure you were pregnant first, because if you weren’t you needed to lure me back for one more try.”
I threw myself on the grass, my back to her. In a moment I felt a hand stroking my hair. As she’d stroke her cat, I thought bitterly.
“Daimbert, I do love you.”
“Odd that you never mentioned it before,” I said, but less bitterly.
There was a catch in her voice that, in a moment, made me sit up and turn around to look at her. Her cheeks streamed with tears. To my questioning look she said at last, “I feel so bad to have hurt you!”
I turned away again. This wasn’t helping. The women I loved could never love me. All I could do was to make them cry when they realized how deeply I was wounded.
There was another long pause, then she began tugging at my shoulders. I allowed her to pull my head into her lap, where she continued stroking my hair, but I kept my eyes shut against her.
“Let me tell you how it appeared from my side,” she said at last, her voice somewhat calmer. “I wanted to meet you from the first time I sensed your mind here in the city. And before you say anything, let me make clear that I was not planning from the beginning to seduce you. I just wanted to get to know a wizard.”
“You were already friends with the old magician, and if you’d wanted you could have met the royal wizard of Caelrhon any time before his death.”
“I told you, Daimbert, you aren’t like other wizards. Old Sengrim would have had nothing to offer me-if he’d even cared to get to know me. I knew at once that you were the only one I’d ever come across who might be at all interested in teaching a witch his magic.”
“Magic first, children second,” I mumbled.
“And once I met you,” she persisted, “I realized that I could gain from you far more than I’d hoped. And not what you’re about to say! What I gained from you was friendship.”
“Friendship,” I repeated. It seemed a weak enough word.
“You’re the only person I’ve been able to talk to about magic since my mother died. You were even interested in learning my magic, which I won’t teach anyone again until our daughter is old enough to understand. And you’re funny, and affectionate, and enthusiastic, and treated my ideas with interest and respect. Is it any wonder I fell in love with you?”
“Odd you never mentioned it before,” I said for the second time.
“That’s because I was hoping you weren’t in love with me,” she answered. “I knew you were Royal Wizard of Yurt, and I knew wizards don’t marry. If I made it clear how strongly I felt about you, you would feel compelled to resign your position, and I also knew the conflict would destroy you emotionally.”
“As opposed to feeling like this,” I said with intentional sarcasm. But I did open one eye for a quick glance at her face. She wasn’t crying any more but looked down at me affectionately. I closed the eye again.
“Your stay here, I knew,” she continued, “would not last long. You’d been Royal Wizard for years, but you’d only known me a short time. Before many more weeks had passed, I realized, you’d solve the cathedral’s problems and go home to Yurt. I’d always hoped to have a daughter, and I knew I couldn’t find anyone better to be the father.”
“Then having gotten what you wanted from me, why did you hide?”
“Because you asked me to marry you.”
“And you certainly didn’t want to do that!”
“No,” she said, very quietly, “because I did. If you had asked me again I probably would have agreed.”
“And would you agree now?” I asked, sitting up and compelling her eyes to meet mine.
But she shook her head. “I’ve had a month to strengthen my resolve. Please forgive me.”
I could manage no better answer than a snort.
“I’d hoped you’d forget me. Well, no, not hoped. I always wanted to see you again, and I certainly had to tell you about our daughter. But when you left the city so abruptly, I anticipated that by the time you came back and went home to Yurt you would be ready to put the whole interlude behind you. I did hope that you would at least think of me warmly sometimes.”
“But I already told you I resigned as Royal Wizard!”
“And had your resignation refused. I saw you sitting with your royal court this morning.”
She had me there. “Then I’ll just resign again.”
But she could be as stubborn as I. “No. Now listen to me. I’ve had plenty of time to think about this. You’ve been involved in wizardry your entire adult life. It’s as much a part of you as your bones and skin. You’re also a very good wizard, and you’re respected at the school. You couldn’t give up magic, and you also could not be satisfied doing odd tricks at fairs. I know you. I’ve heard you make disparaging remarks about magicians having to make their livings from pathetic scraps of magic, spells done for no better purpose than the entertainment of the ignorant. You’d do your best to hide it from me, because you are very affectionate, but there would always be a gap in your life.”
It would have been easier to argue with her if she hadn’t been right. “But there will always be a gap without you!”
She ignored the interruption and pushed on. “And I thought about myself. I’ve lived on my own for ten years and come to value my privacy. It’s been a good ten years. I have my embroidery and my magic and my climbing-though I won’t be doing any of that for the next year or so-and soon will have our daughter.”
I thought glumly that it was a sign of how much she valued her privacy that we were having this conversation here in the grove, not in her house.
“The cathedral probably won’t give me any more needlework once they decide I’m a loose woman, but I’ll still make a good living; I’ll be able to live for months on what the priests paid me these last few weeks.”
“So you don’t want anyone else disturbing your life.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying I wouldn’t make a very satisfactory wife to a wandering magic worker. No matter how much I loved you, I’d miss my independence, and I’m afraid I’d take it out on you. No, I think I’m the kind of person who is much better for short visits than for a permanent stay.”
There didn’t seem to be any way to answer this, even though I knew she was wrong. Theodora would be highly satisfactory for a permanent stay. But I considered for a moment what she’d just said. “Then you wouldn’t mind if I visited you sometimes?”
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