"I've never plotted against anybody in my entire life," said Paul calmly. "And our wizard certainly wasn't in Caelrhon at our orders; we'd been wondering all summer when he'd come home."
One piece at a time. The wind whispered through the branches of a tree behind me. I found myself reluctantly admiring Lucas's courage. He had stayed in the city for weeks, convinced there was a wizard there seeking his own death but still determined to defend his kingdom and the church. Little wonder he had been so surly with me, both in Caelrhon and on this trip, if he thought I was that wizard! And his rapid looks around at the end of the bishop's funeral, which I had found so suspicious at the time, came from the threat of ‘something spectacular’—a threat Lucas could not tell to either Paul or me since he thought we were behind it.
"You're right, Prince," I said, "that there has been a renegade wizard in Caelrhon. The only flaw in your logic has been thinking it was me." That and persuading himself that if wizards were eliminated, aristocrats could become glorious heroes out of legend, but I wasn't about to tell Lucas that. "This wizard's real goal is the destruction of the Church," I continued. "The gorgos's attack on the cathedral was intended as a direct insult to the memory of the old bishop." Joachim, I thought, should hear me now—or, for that matter, Zahlfast.
But I kept on coming back to the unanswered question of who this renegade might be. Any wizard could have asked Vor about a gorgos, but it would have taken enormously powerful magic to call one from this northern land to Caelrhon and then to imprison it somewhere for weeks, much less elude all my efforts to find him.
I even wondered briefly if Elerius, who had graduated far ahead of good old Book-Leech with half the effort, might have been involved. Elerius's magic would certainly be stronger than mine, and Zahlfast would respect his judgment. My old teacher's sudden and irrational conviction that priests were working to destroy wizards made much more sense if he had been told this by someone he trusted, someone who, on the contrary, was seeking to destroy priests. But a wizard with a post at one of the most powerful western kingdoms would not become involved in the affairs of Yurt or Caelrhon. And, I reminded myself, a remarkable number of young wizards had graduated ahead of me.
"There are plots within plots here," said Vor to Lucas. Unlike me, he seemed full of theories. "Someone, probably even starting while your wizard was alive, arranged an elaborate masquerade to persuade you and your father to turn against wizardry." His eyes gleamed in the forest shadows. "Who would most like to see you helpless, with no wizard to come to your defense? Isn't it most likely to be Prince Vincent, your own younger brother?"
Lucas gave a start but did not answer immediately—he had considered this explanation. But this was terrible! Had Vincent contracted a nefarious plot to ensure that he, and not his brother, became king of Caelrhon? And only one man stood between Vincent and the crown of Yurt, once he was married to the queen the very day after Paul's coronation: Paul himself.
"What are you implying about my brother?" roared Lucas to Vor, finding his voice at last and, I thought, roaring even louder to cover up his hesitation. He might have plenty of suspicions of his own about Vincent, but he was not going to let anyone else voice them.
I ignored him, having for the moment an even more important concern. "Paul," I said, "I want you to promise me not to ride your stallion anymore."
"Not ride Bonfire?!"
"Vincent gave him to you. He's a trap. He's planning to use that horse somehow to kill you."
Paul regarded me stiffly. "I can decide for myself what horses to ride, Wizard."
I didn't have a chance to answer. Lucas pushed himself up onto his one good foot. His hand on his sword hilt, he hopped and shouldered his way between the two of us, making for Vor.
But before he could test whether the sword was faster than the spell, Paul leaped up. "Stop it! All of you, stop accusing each other for one minute!" A stray ray of sunshine had worked its way down through the leaves and glinted on his hair. "We've all been working against each other," he announced, "and we've all got to stop! No more accusations, no more lies, no more attempts to overpower each other. We need each other's help, not just to get away from the nixie but to save your kingdom, Lucas."
I watched him admiringly. I did hope we made it home to Yurt alive, because he would be a superb king.
"So you, Wizard," Paul continued, turning on me, "have got to stop acting as though only you were wise and knowledgeable." I opened my mouth and closed it again. "Vor, you've got to think less of your revenge and more of the welfare of the city where you now live and work. And Lucas, you have to admit that you've been deceived."
It took Lucas about ten seconds to make up his mind. But then he took a deep breath and said, "All right. I agree we're going to have to work together. But first I want some reassurance, real reassurance, that you are not plotting to reunite Yurt and Caelrhon with yourself as king."
There was a tinkling laugh behind us. All of us froze, then turned slowly. The nixie stood surrounded by her glittering stars. She was even more alluring than I remembered.
"Come now," she said with a smile. "You had tried to tell me that you had no energy, but for the last hour you have been quarreling with each other! That seems energetic to me!"
Paul threw himself on his bed, his back toward her. Lucas let himself down more gingerly. "You're offering us something delicate and enticing, Lady," said Vor. "We may need just a little more time to let the sour taste of the outer world pass away."
"If you keep on putting me off," she said with a coy smile, "I may have to take affairs into my own hands."
I sat down, not looking at her. Trapped here in the borderlands I was powerless to find the wizard who must be behind it all: the magical attacks on Joachim's cathedral, the vague warnings I had received against priests, Vincent's abrupt wooing of the queen.
I lifted my head. Vor and the nixie were still exchanging light banter. He seemed to be enjoying their conversation hugely, but he also seemed to have put her off again. "Then I'll see you tomorrow morning!" she said and slipped away. The dancing stars lingered for a few seconds behind her.
None of us felt like talking when she was gone. After a few minutes, Lucas reached for the apples.
When the silence threatened to last all day, I said, "I guess I'd better start on my spells to get us out of here. I'll try to work fast."
I went to the edge of the grove and sat down, my back against a tree, and started probing the magical structure of the invisible barrier. Paul followed me. He pressed his face against the barrier as against a window, looking for the horses. I had closed my eyes but opened them when I heard a sharp whistle. Paul was trying to attract the horses' attention.
The herd was closer than it had been yesterday. They cocked their ears at the sound of the whistle. They were all different colors, bay, black, grey, and sorrel, none of them red roan. But they had the same light step, the same delicate noses and wide-spaced eyes as Bonfire. When Paul whistled again they turned as one and ran, manes and tails floating behind them.
V
A week passed. The second day the nixie became petulant, and I told her brusquely, "I'm sorry, Lady, but we aren't interested."
"Then you'll have to stay here the rest of your lives," she said, not smiling at all. I turned my back on her, and in a minute she went away and did not come back.
In the following days, the air seemed less sensuous, still soft and perfumed but without the overwhelming sweetness it had had when we first arrived. Languor seemed to have overtaken Lucas completely. If pressed, he would admit that his ankle was healing, but mostly he slept and ate fruit. Vor too lapsed into inactivity.
Paul and I however remained occupied. Every morning, he determinedly trotted around the grove twenty times. He also continued trying to attract the horses; by the fourth day they approached rather than ran at the sound of his whistle, but they still remained well back, snorting and flicking their tails nervously. And I wrestled with the nixie's magic.
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I felt a desperate urgency to be back home, to stop the renegade wizard from doing what he was planning—or at least to be there when he did it. If he had been at all checked by my presence in the city, he certainly had nothing to fear now. His gorgos had gotten me out of the way almost as surely as if it had killed me.
If Vincent was working with him—maybe having turned against his own brother—I didn't want to imagine what he might be planning against the queen, though his plots against Paul seemed horribly clear. And I also did not want to imagine why and for what purpose he had captured Theodora, unless it was to silence the only person in the city who seemed able to detect his magic. The gorgos's attack on the cathedral at the time of the old bishop's funeral might only be a preparation for a much worse attack when the new bishop was elected. This wizard, apparently much more powerful than I could ever be, had in his control, directly or indirectly, the two women I loved, the dean, and the young man I hoped would become my king.
"Look at the stallion," said Paul, interrupting my thoughts. I looked out obediently. Only ten yards beyond the invisible barrier, the bay stallion stood watching us, pawing the ground with one foot, shaking the fetlock from his eyes with a proud toss of his head.
I closed my eyes again. I almost thought I understood the structure of the magic barrier now, after a week of studying it. Several times I might have had it, and several times on closer examination I had been wrong. I was having to improvise everything, and I kept having Theodora's feeling of being almost at the top and yet knowing that this time I would never make it. If I ever saw the school again I would have to relate my experiences to the technical division students as an example of improvised magic.
But this time— Quickly, delicately, I started putting a spell together, one designed specifically to overcome the spells that kept the air solid before us. I said the words of the Hidden Language and confidently reached out my hand.
It struck solidity so hard I bruised my knuckles. I probed again for the structure of the nixie's magic. The spells had all been changed.
"What's wrong?" Paul turned as I slumped down.
"She's changing the magic structure of the barrier. I'd wondered why I wasn't doing any better overcoming her magic, but now I know. As soon as I work out how to overcome one set of spells, she switches to another."
"And then can you overcome the new set?"
"Yes, in time—just a few seconds slower than it takes her to change the spells again."
There was a quick flutter of leaves, and the nixie burst into view. With a tinkling laugh, she planted kisses on Paul's lips and my own and scampered away again.
"I have an idea," said Paul with a half smile that made me hope he was not serious. "You and Lucas don't want anything to do with the nixie, and I can't say about Vor, but suppose just one of us were able to ‘fully satisfy’ her. Do you think she'd let us go?"
Out of several things I might have said, I chose, "When she was hoping for four men, I don't think she'd settle for one."
"Oh, I think I might be able to serve in the place of four men if I wanted to," said Paul with that same half smile.
"I have a better idea," I said. "Try to get some of your horses into the grove. They might be able to pass through the barrier the way the birds do, and maybe we could ride them out."
"Of course," said Paul in surprise. "What did you think I was doing?"
If the nixie was still nearby and listening to our conversation I had just given away what might have been our last chance. Even now she might be altering her barrier so that horses could not pass through it any more easily than could humans. Our only hope was that the nixie might never have needed spells to imprison horses.
"Quickly!" I said, low and urgently. "Try to lure the stallion in here. We have to go now! I'll get the others."
"I'm working as rapidly as I can," said Paul mildly.
But as I hurried away through the trees he started a different series of whistles, so enticing that even my feet slowed for a second.
Both Vor and Lucas were asleep. I woke them with a quick hand on their shoulders. "Come on," I said in a low voice. "We may be able to leave."
I lifted Lucas with magic before he could protest and hurried back through the trees, Vor close behind. Because Lucas was well off the ground, his head some two feet above mine, several times he got a faceful of leaves before he could duck, but I ignored his insults.
We stopped well back in the trees so as not to startle the horses. Paul was talking to them now, softly, alluringly. If the nixie was listening, I thought, she must wish Paul would talk that way to her. The stallion and a black mare were only a few feet beyond the invisible barrier.
A bird shot by suddenly, scolding, and the horses tossed their heads, wheeled, and ran. I tried to swallow bitter disappointment.
But Paul kept on whistling and calling, not at all dismayed. Most of the herd stayed a quarter mile away, but the stallion and the one mare approached again, less cautiously this time. "Come, my beauties, don't be afraid, we won't hurt you, come my lovely ones," Paul was saying.
He held out one of the nixie's apples. The stallion snorted and stretched his neck forward, still ten yards away. He took one stiff-legged step, then another. And then he was coming through the invisible barrier.
None of us breathed. Very solemnly and deliberately, the stallion took the apple from Paul's hand and crunched it between powerful teeth. With his other hand, Paul held another apple toward the mare. For a moment she held back, then with a nicker she too stepped into the grove.
My impulse was to leap forward, to seize the horses, but even I knew that would be fatal. Paul was stroking the stallion's neck, still talking softly and constantly, his voice like a running brook where the words mattered less than the sound. And then abruptly he took a handful of mane and swung up onto the stallion's back.
The horse jumped, all four feet together, and then whirled and began to run. The prince was almost lying on the horse's back, his head down and his legs pulled up so that no part of his body touched the nixie's barrier. It parted and let them through as though it were not there.
And then the two horses were off, racing across the plain, Paul clinging like a burr to the stallion's mane. "He's not abandoning us," said Vor, but his tone made the statement almost a question.
"No, he's not," said Lucas before I could answer. "He has to accustom the horse to being ridden before anyone else can even try."
The stallion reared, trying to shake Paul off. There was nothing I could do but watch; my magic could not penetrate the nixie's barrier. The stallion came down again, Paul still firmly on his back. The whole herd swept off, galloping across the plain, and disappeared from our view.
"The nixie's not going to wait passively for two hours or two days or whatever it takes Paul to calm down that stallion," said Lucas. I thought this one of his more intelligent recent observations.
Vor seemed to think so too. "There's only one thing to do," he said with his quick, fleeting smile. "I'll try to keep her occupied."
Lucas and I both turned to stare at him. "Oh, I'll readily admit I'm not in the right mood right now," he said playfully. "But nixies, happy nixies, can put one in the mood very easily. They do say that, if you live through the experience, satisfying a nixie is something you never forget."
Lucas cleared his throat as though about to speak but changed his mind.
"The two of you are bound by oaths of marriage and of wizardry," Vor continued, "but as long as I'm back home in the borderlands, I might as well take advantage of an opportunity I'm not likely to be offered down in the cathedral city among all the priests. With a little conversation, a little wine, and a few games, I should be able to stretch it out for several hours."
Lucas and I had nothing to say. "Oh, Lady!" Vor called, moving back toward the center of the grove. "Where are you? Could you bring your delightful form closer to mine?"
He was gone. Lucas and I looked at each other. I arranged him as well a
s I could, his leg propped up before him, and sat down to wait.
An hour passed, and the horses reappeared in the distance. I thought I spotted a dark shape still clinging to the stallion's neck. The stallion was not running now but walking.
"It looks like he may be taming that stallion," said Lucas with reluctant admiration. "Look at how easily he's sitting now."
Paul slipped down from the horse's back, a hand still in the mane, then leapt back up again. The stallion jumped, but this time only a small jump, and Paul guided an incipient gallop back into a trot.
Then he was off the stallion's back again and moving toward the black mare. I could see him stroking her, talking to her, and then suddenly he was on her back and she was running, and the entire process started over again.
The whole herd disappeared around the far side of the grove. I thought of following them but was afraid of doing anything that might startle the horses. Paul was going to need absolute concentration to try to tame two wild beasts that galloped like something out of legend.
I wondered again where Bonfire had really come from. Having seen the bay stallion and the black mare up close, I was now certain that Paul's red roan stallion had come from these borderlands. If the renegade wizard had been up here to find a gorgos, he might have taken back a horse for Prince Vincent at the same time. I was even more convinced that that horse was a trap.
Another hour passed. I was so tense that the very tension made me yawn with exhaustion.
And then Paul was back, appearing abruptly before us, riding the stallion and leading the mare with a hand on her mane. Both kept taking nervous little steps and jerking their heads up, but they kept coming. They passed without difficulty through the nixie's barrier. Extreme fatigue and delighted pride were both on Paul's face, but all he said was, "Where's Vor?"
I let my mind slip away through the trees until I found him. Standing in the flow of magic by the edge of his mind, I called softly. "Vor. Paul's back. We're going now."
C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 04 Page 21