“But isn’t treating with a demon dangerous? Couldn’t you endanger yourself?”
She asked as though this wasn’t something I had already thought about, many, many times.
“If you negotiate, what will it demand?”
It crossed my mind that the duchess, with her rapid-fire questions, might be able to pin the demon down on a technicality and persuade it to leave empty-handed. But this was only an idle hope. “Their chief currency is human souls. When I thought that the old wizard’s last apprentice might have become a renegade, I’d even hoped I could persuade the demon to take the soul it had already been given and be content to leave with that. But now I don’t know what I will do.”
She leaned her chin on her fist, faced I assumed, for one of the few times in her life, with a problem which her rapid mind and forceful nature could not readily solve. “Should you get some help from that school in the City?”
“No, I really can’t. My old instructor visited me this fall to check on how I was doing and to remind me that, once we leave the school, we have to solve our own problems. My predecessor at Yurt told me it was my problem now, and he was right.”
“How about the chaplain, if the demon is afraid of him?”
“That’s part of the reason I couldn’t ask for his help. We might be able to chase the demon around the castle forever, but at some point someone has to talk to it, someone trained in wizardry.” I was amazed to hear the calm tone of my voice, as though I actually believed I was going to do it. “I don’t think the demon is afraid of the chaplain personally, anyway, but only of the aura of the saints. If the chaplain was able to put off that aura long enough that the demon was willing to approach him, he would be destroyed-he doesn’t know magic, and he wouldn’t know the words to say.”
“Are you sure, in that case, that another wizard couldn’t help you?”
“When the chaplain saved the king’s life, he didn’t ask for help from the bishop. When I go against the demon, I have to be able to do it alone.” I lowered my wineglass, which I had finally emptied, and stood up. “Thank you, my lady. I think, from talking to you, that my mind is clearer.” Not that it could have been any more confused than it already was!
She rose as well. I put my hands on her shoulders, bent down, and kissed her gravely on the cheek.
As I went down the broad staircase from her chambers to the great hall, I noticed that almost everyone else had gone to bed. But Dominic and the young count were sitting in front of the fire, talking intently. As they heard my step, they looked up hurriedly, even guiltily.
But I had too much on my mind to worry about them. All I had to do, before the twelve days of Christmas ended and everyone decided it was time to go home and start repairs on the castle, was to read the Diplomatica Diabolica properly at last, learn to deal with a demon as I had boasted to the chaplain when I first came to Yurt that I had been trained to do, find out somehow who had summoned the demon in the first place, and discover if that summons had involved asking the demon for the special advantages in this world which will destroy one’s soul in the next.
II
The sunrise brought a clear and cold day, perfect, several of the knights assured me, for a boar hunt. The morning also brought the departure of the old count and his wife.
“At our age, all this excitement and upheaval become a little wearying,” the countess explained to the duchess as they pulled on their gloves in the great hall.
“But we’re still willing to have everyone come after New Year’s, if you want!” the count assured the king. “Just send us a message so we’ll expect you.”
No one in fact believed this, and it was not meant to be believed. I was fairly confident that the duchess would be able to keep the party here for another week, through Epiphany, but at that point the king and queen would insist on returning home. Considering that I had been wondering since summer who had been practicing magic with evil intent, a week did not seem very long to discover who had summoned the demon and how to send it back again.
The old count’s departure caused some shuffling in rooms. The Lady Maria, as royal aunt, took the chamber the count and countess had shared for herself, while some of the ladies who had been squeezed in together took up the space that she vacated. The ladies insisted that they had to be along to see the boar captured, so the hunt did not actually leave until mid-morning.
“Don’t expect pork for supper even if you do catch it,” the cook said darkly. “Game’s got to be hung at least a few days, as I hope you know, or it will be too chewy to eat.”
“We’ll have it for New Year’s, then,” said the young count.
I rode out with the hunt because almost everyone healthy enough to ride was going, and I had some vague hope that someone might reveal his or her evil nature in the excitement of the chase. The duchess was wearing a disreputable man’s cloak, already stained with the blood of scores of hunts. The queen, as if in response, mounted her stallion wearing an extremely elegant scarlet riding habit that I knew she had ordered packed in from the City.
We were joined by several men from the village, both mounted and on foot. The duchess’s hounds were loosed and raced off across the stubble and into the woods, sniffing intently. I wondered absently if it would be possible to breed a hound who would have a nose to sniff out black magic.
For half an hour almost nothing happened. Then I discovered I was riding next to the young count, who was wearing a beautifully-tailored riding jacket and whose very horse seemed to be looking at mine with scorn.
But he spoke without scorn. “Look, Wizard, we’ve been talking, and it’s clear you need some help.”
My first thought was that the duchess had betrayed me. “What kind of help?” I said as casually as I could. I certainly did not want the young count trying to meddle with the demon.
“Prince Dominic told me your problem,” he continued. At least, I thought, I could retract my bitter thoughts about the duchess. “He said there’s a renegade wizard back in the royal castle.”
I had, I remembered, told the knights of Yurt that the stranger was some type of wizard, but I had hardly expected Dominic to start telling the young count about it.
“He told me you’d been having some trouble with it, and we guessed that it might even have summoned the dragon.”
I didn’t like the way his guesses were getting closer and closer to the mark, and I especially didn’t like the slightly patronizing air in which he said it, an air calculated to stop far short of the insult that might bring on another transformation but present nonetheless. I tried to adopt an air of mysterious wisdom and nodded in silence.
“Well, do you want my help, or don’t you?” he said. My silence was beginning to irritate him.
“Wizards can only be combatted by other wizards. Surely Prince Dominic understands the powers of magic even if you don’t.”
“Well, I hope you don’t mind my saying this,” in a tone that implied that he certainly hoped I did mind, “but Sir Dominic suggested that you were still a fairly inexperienced wizard, which was why you hadn’t been able to make any progress against this other wizard. So my plan was to go to Yurt and catch him.”
“Go to Yurt and catch him?” I repeated idiotically.
“Of course,” he said, clearly thinking Dominic was right about me. “It was my idea. Even a wizard won’t be able to stand up against an army of knights!”
“You’d be surprised at what a wizard can do. Did Dominic tell you that he and the other knights already spent most of one day chasing that ‘wizard’ without being able to catch him?”
He dismissed this with a wave of his elegant hand. “This time, I’ll be leading. There’s no need to thank me; as the king’s loyal vassal, I’m always eager to assist.” He kicked his horse and rode away, toward the baying of the hounds, before I could answer.
Last month, I thought, the demon had only showed itself to us because it wanted to taunt me. If a body of knights suddenly tried to roust it by f
orce from the cellars, it would be furious, furious enough that I would never be able to negotiate with it, even assuming I knew what to say. And a non-cooperative demon was going to be the least of my problems. If the count led a band of knights toward Yurt tomorrow morning, I was quite sure they would all be dead by night.
In desperation, I sought out the duchess. She was having an argument with her master of hounds, which argument she was apparently enjoying hugely, but when she saw my face she told him, “Then blow whenever you like,” and pulled her horse over next to mine. The master blew his horn to summon the hounds, put them on their leashes, and led them over the next hill while we sat our horses, talking.
The horses stamped and snorted clouds of white breath. “The count is planning to lead a body of knights to attack the demon,” I said.
“Does he know it’s a demon?”
“No, but I don’t think he’d care. He has no respect for magic and probably has none for the supernatural either. What am I going to do?”
“Stop him, I presume,” she said thoughtfully. “You know, you shouldn’t really be surprised. There have scarcely been any wars in the western kingdoms since there started to be school-trained wizards in all the chief political courts. If you wizards want to stop all fighting, you certainly have my support; too many people without any sense end up leading the battles. But you’ve got to realize that the knights are starting to seem almost superfluous, even to themselves. They’re trained as warriors, and the most war-like activity they normally have is escorting someone like me to the king’s castle for Christmas. No wonder they’re excited at finding someone to attack!”
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 s
ounds 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 heroism of the villagers- I’m sure it will all be terribly exciting.”
A Bad Spell in Yurt woy-1 Page 24