But I still had to chuckle, thinking of him sitting here, imagining me embracing licentious freedom, at the exact same time as the duchess’s teasing was almost driving me in panic from her chamber.
The next morning was Sunday, and I was in the ducal chapel early, sitting down in the front row while the duchess’s chaplain and the royal chaplain conducted services together. Neither one of them seemed to notice my presence.
IV
We stayed at the duchess’s castle for a week. Both because I feared being teased again and because I didn’t want the chaplain worrying about my soul, I tried to avoid the duchess. Instead I devoted myself to the Lady Maria, always speaking to her at dinner, positioning my horse next to hers when we went out riding, standing as an attendant at her shoulder in the evening in the great hall. She was, I realized, the only person in Yurt to whom I spoke regularly with whom I did not always feel myself sparring.
But she could turn the conversation to her own purposes as deftly as anyone else if she wanted-something I had already known, and of which I was reminded when I tried to find out more about her previous experience with magic.
The king, the queen, and the duchess had all decided to go hunting-that is, the duchess asked the king if he would accompany her, and when he agreed the queen said that she wanted to hunt as well. They rode across the stubble of the duchess’s fields and along the margins of the woods, hawks on their fists, hoping for a goose. Some of the rest of us, including the Lady Maria and I, went out with them primarily for fresh air.
The air was cold and slightly damp, although the grey sky did not immediately threaten rain. The Lady Maria seemed to enjoy my attentions and always raised her chin a little when the duchess glanced at the two of us together. Now, as we rode, I was amusing her by telling her again about the dragon in the cellar of the wizards’ school.
“So, my predecessor agreed to teach you magic?” I asked suddenly, with no reference to what I had just been saying, hoping to catch her off-guard.
Her big blue eyes held mine for an instant, more intently than they ever had before. Then she looked away with a small laugh. “I already told you; he refused to teach me anything because I’m a woman.”
“Come now, you can reveal your little secrets to me!” I continued in a tone I hoped she would like. “You certainly learned to make magic requests somewhere!” When she did not answer, I added, “And have you requested the perpetual youth and beauty that adorn you, or was that given you at birth?”
She surprised me by seeming to take my fatuous comments entirely seriously. At any rate, her shoulders first stiffened, then sagged, and she looked straight ahead without any of the amusement I had expected.
“I asked for a while,” she said in a very low voice. I could barely hear her, but I did not dare tell her to speak more loudly for fear she would say nothing at all. “But now all that I asked for has gone.”
“My lady,” I said in almost as soft a voice, “who did you ask?”
She suddenly became very involved with her horse’s mane. We had reined in and were standing under a leafless tree, but a dead oak leaf had been carried on the wind and caught behind her horse’s ears. She glanced at me once, a glance I was apparently not supposed to notice.
“You said you’d teach me magic,” she said at last. “I don’t need all that grammar. All I need is a simple spell, a spell to make me young.”
“I’m afraid there isn’t a simple spell like that,” I said gravely, trying not to reveal how surprised I was at her admission that she needed a spell of youth-or apparently had once had one. “There’s a difficult spell, that the young wizards don’t even learn until we’ve been at the school for several years, that will slow down aging, but it won’t make one any younger than one already is.”
“Even if it’s difficult, I know I could learn it,” she said with the trace of a smile. “After all, I learned your telephone spell after hearing it once!”
“It’s a different kind of spell, and much more difficult,” I said, which was partly true, but in part I felt a sense of panic that I had introduced her to magic at all. Our duty as wizards is to help mankind, but every spell, however small, has consequences far beyond the spell itself. It was for this reason that all the teachers at the school agreed, and impressed on us strongly, that part of our responsibility as wizards was not to freely extend the lives of everyone we met.
“You’re teasing me because I’m a woman,” said the Lady Maria, facing me squarely. “I know I could learn your spell, and I know that magic can make time run backwards.”
“Time can’t run backwards. It’s the most powerful force in nature, and magic can never ultimately change anything natural.”
Tears of frustration appeared at the corners of her eyes. “But it can! I’ve seen it work! Why won’t you tell me the truth?”
I was swept with a terror so sharp and sudden that my lips were almost too paralyzed to speak. “My lady, have you been dealing in black magic?”
“No! There’s nothing evil in wanting to be young! And all you do is laugh at me!”
She really was crying now. She kicked her horse savagely and galloped away. My own mare turned her head to look at me in inquiry, then, when I continued to sit with the reins slack, started nosing again among the half-frozen grass.
After a minute, I managed to gather up both the reins and my mental strength enough to start back toward the castle. I could see neither the Lady Maria nor the rest of the hunting party, but I wanted to be inside near a fire.
I wondered how it could have taken me so long to realize that the Lady Maria had become involved with black magic. First her extreme youthfulness, then the abrupt loss of that youthfulness, should have made me realize that she had found a magic that mixed truly supernatural power with magic’s own natural power.
What I found difficult was to imagine her involved in evil herself. Could the supernatural which gave her magic the power to turn time backwards have been the supernatural power of the saints?
The difficulty here, I told myself, was that the saints seem to have little interest in magic. I wished I had paid more attention in my course on the supernatural to the part about the saints. There had been wizards in the past, as I dimly remembered hearing, who had tried to develop a “white magic” which would be as powerful as black magic, but those wizards must not have had sufficiently pure hearts and motives, for the saints had never listened to them.
Demons, on the other hand, love wicked hearts and perverted motives, and are, at least sometimes, even tractable if one knows precisely what to say. That was why black magic is not only possible but the single biggest danger, as they repeatedly warned us, for overly-ambitious young wizards.
The answer must be that Maria had become involved in someone else’s black magic, undoubtedly the same spell that had blighted the king and still suffused the cellars with a sense of evil. This put me back where I had been before, wondering who of the people of Yurt, all of whom I liked, could have been willing to give themselves to the devil.
“Let’s be calm and rational,” I told my horse, who had responded to a lack of commands from me to slow first to walk and then a complete stop. Maria came to Yurt four years ago with the queen. She and Dominic, who some people thought might make a match, amused themselves during their courting by asking the old wizard to show them some magic tricks. Had he introduced them to black magic?
I didn’t feel I knew my predecessor well, but I thought I had spent enough time with him to be able to say, fairly confidently, that he himself had not succumbed to evil. In some ways it was easier to tell with a wizard-I had spent eight years surrounded by nothing but wizards, and even someone trained in the old magic was not as strange to me as the duchess or the Lady Maria.
But who else could it be, if not the stray visitor to the castle that Dominic would have had me believe? I kept on coming back to the chaplain, who had come to the castle a year after the Lady Maria, just about the time that the black magic first
had its effect, if I assumed the king’s illness was indeed part of that effect.
“No,” I said out loud. “Zahlfast is wrong.” Maybe theoretically someone who healed could also sicken, but I refused to believe it here. I had paid very close attention in the part of the course that dealt with demons, and I knew that demons would not listen to a request to do good to someone else. A demon would happily do evil to others, but would only be helpful to the person whose soul he claimed.
Therefore, as I had thought all along, the supernatural power that had healed the king had been the power of the saints. Would the saints have listened to Joachim if his heart had been full of evil?
“Unless he’d since repented of that evil,” I answered myself, “and his heart was truly contrite.” I startled my mare by suddenly digging in my heels. I was not going to allow myself to take this reasoning any further. But then I was suddenly struck by the thought of the old chaplain, the one who had died unexpectedly. Could he have turned to evil, worshipping the devil in his heart while his lips addressed God?
This was a truly terrible thought, and I felt myself go cold and stiff again. If a castle’s chaplain had invited in the powers of darkness, had died with his immortal soul in the devil’s grasp, would a castle ever be able to recover?
I reassured myself with the thought that a chapel where a man could pray to the saints for a miracle was not a chapel where imps and demons frolicked unchecked. This left me Dominic as my final suspect. I wished I did not feel so much righteous pleasure in suspecting him.
In spite of the highly intermittent nature of my riding, I had at last arrived at the castle gates. I crossed the bridge into the courtyard, with more questions than I had had before but fewer answers. I needed to ask Dominic about his and Maria’s attempts to learn magic from the old wizard, and I had no idea how I was going to ask him.
I was nearly as startled as I would have been to meet a demon to find Dominic’s slightly red face looking at me as I entered the stables with my mare.
“Prince Dominic!” I stammered. “I thought you were out hunting!”
He frowned, clearly wondering what I could have been doing to make me react so guiltily to his presence. “I’m still worried about my horse’s leg,” he answered, “so I came in from the hunt.”
The thought passed wildly through my mind that the horse’s leg might recover more quickly with a lighter rider, but fortunately I was able to suppress any such comment. “I’m glad to see you here, as I’d wanted to ask you some questions,” I managed to say instead, wondering what I would ask him.
“But first I have some questions for you,” he said, standing up. He always seemed when I was close to him much larger than I remembered. “A royal wizard is supposed to use his powers to serve his king and kingdom, and I’d like to know what you think you’re doing with yours.”
“Serving the king and kingdom,” I said promptly, with as much of a smile as I could manage.
He seemed to find neither humor nor reassurance in this. “All you’ve done,” he said, scowling down at me and speaking slowly and distinctly as though I were slightly demented, “ever since you’ve come to Yurt, is to produce illusions that terrify the women-”
Fortunately I managed to keep a perfectly expressionless face.
“-and, I discover now, recklessly try to teach the king to fly.”
“Didn’t you know that?” I said inanely. “He asked me to months ago, back during the summer while the queen was visiting her parents. He wanted to surprise her when she came home.”
“I most certainly did not know it,” he said, his face growing darker red. This explained, then, the look of fury he had turned on me when we first arrived here and the king had used his rather limited flying powers to dismount. Thinking quickly, I realized that Dominic had never been there before on any of the very few occasions when the king had showed off his ability.
“But what’s the harm in it?”
“The harm,” he said, still in that careful voice in which rage seemed to boil barely suppressed, “is that any interference in magic processes, as you tried to tell me once yourself, can lead to terrible consequences, and the king’s too much of- too trusting to recognize the dangers. I shouldn’t have to remind you of this, Wizard.”
I was quite sure he had been going to say that the king was too much of a fool to realize magic’s dangers. I wondered if some of Dominic’s resentment of the king’s flying was that it freed the king from the dependency on his nephew he had had when the queen was away. But now that the king was well-and Dominic had seemed as delighted as anyone else-this dependency would not be at issue anyway. Maybe Dominic himself had already experienced some of the terrible experiences of misused magic.
“And I shouldn’t have to remind you,” I said, making myself as tall as I could, “that you yourself once interfered in magic processes, and have refused to tell me about what happened then. It’s my duty as royal wizard to know all the magic being done in the kingdom.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Dominic, taking half a step backwards.
I hesitated. My immediate reaction was to push my advantage, to call him a liar to his face, but if he openly denied having ever been involved in magic I knew he never would tell me about it. “Then I’ll bid you good day,” I said calmly and left the stables.
So far, I thought, crossing the wet cobblestones of the courtyard, I knew no more than I had known that summer. The only advance I seemed to have made was in somehow leading the duchess to believe that I was a well-qualified wizard.
The Lady Maria was at dinner that night, which almost surprised me, but she seemed very cheerful. Since we had been sitting next to each other all week, it would have looked very odd if either of us sat elsewhere, and I also felt it necessary to reestablish our light banter.
“You know everyone’s romantic secrets, my lady,” I said in a low voice to her during the soup. The soup was made of fish and herbs, actually one of the better productions of the duchess’s kitchens, but I could tell that it was ocean fish, not local river fish, and therefore must have been packed up from the City on ice at a remarkable cost.
“But I still don’t think I know all your secrets,” she replied with a smile, in the same tone, clearly eager to pretend that our afternoon’s conversation had never taken place.
“There’s one person’s secret I hope you might tell me,” I said coyly while the soup dishes were being cleared, taking advantage of the rattle of china to mask our conversation. “When the king and his party met you and the present queen’s party for the first time, here at the duchess’s castle, had there been a rumor that the king might be about to marry the duchess?’
“Oh, no,” she said with a little tinkling laugh. “It wasn’t like that at all.” A servant leaned between us at that point to place the silverware for the next course, and I had a sudden fear that the rumor had in fact been that the king would marry the Lady Maria, and that I had just deeply insulted her by never before having considered this possibility.
But she bent toward me as soon as the servant stepped back and whispered in my ear. “The rumor had been that Dominic was going to marry the duchess.”
I came within half a breath of saying, “Dominic?” out loud but stopped myself in time. He was sitting only four places down the table and would certainly have reacted to the sound of his own name.
“Yes,” she continued in my ear, clearly enjoying the fact that everyone else at the table noticed we were whispering. “The duchess’s servants told our servants that the king wanted to insure the inheritance of Yurt past his own death, so he felt his nephew and heir had to marry. They had come here expressly to arrange a marriage, when our party fortuitously happened to arrive at the same time, and the king met the queen! I don’t need to tell you what happened after that!”
“Wizard!” called the duchess from the end of the table. “Does a woman have to be blond for you to let her whisper sweet nothings in your ear?”
/> “As long as she’s as lovely as all the ladies here present,” I said gallantly, ignoring what I could tell was a warning stare from the chaplain, “I don’t care what color is her hair.”
This remark seemed to amuse most of the ladies, and the Lady Maria and I went back to eating. This meant, therefore, that the queen had not married the king to keep him from the duchess, my original and only half-serious thought, even though there was clearly no deep affection between the cousins.
From something that the Lady Maria had told me that summer, I could guess that Dominic had hoped, once he met her, that he and the queen would make a match, and that even the queen’s father, Maria’s brother, had made some plans in that direction. I didn’t know for certain why the original plan for a marriage between Dominic and the duchess didn’t go through, but I could guess: he had never been extremely enthusiastic about the plan in the first place, and then when he met the queen he had decided not to take the one cousin when he could not get the other. The king, hoping for a little son of his own, would have stopped worrying about finding a wife for his nephew.
So was that the answer to why the queen had married the king, that she wanted to get away from her father’s plans to marry her to someone suitable, when some of these suitable persons might have been even worse than Dominic? It seemed a plausible answer, but it did not answer the real one: who in Yurt had been practicing black magic?
PART FIVE — THE STRANGER
I
I was relieved to be heading home again. The queen seemed also to be glad to go, although the king, bidding the duchess an affectionate farewell, appeared to have enjoyed his visit thoroughly. I guessed that he had no idea the cousins were not highly fond of each other. But while the queen was merely happy to be leaving the duchess behind, I was eager to get back to the castle of Yurt and reassure myself nothing had happened in our absence. We had received no messages via the pigeons, and had not expected to, but if the castle had been swallowed by a giant hole in the earth they might not have had time to release the pigeons.
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