"I hope you explained all that to Paul."
He lifted an eyebrow. "Of course I did. Don't you have any confidence in me as a priest?" I couldn't tell if he was serious or if this was one of his jokes.
We sat in silence for a moment. "How long can you stay?" I asked then.
"I'll wait until Theodora feels well enough to travel; that will give my new dean a chance to get some experience on his own. I am very happy to see her recovering so well."
"As am I, thanks to your prayers."
"And to your herbal magic," he replied, "and her own youth and health, and maybe even the doctor's draughts."
I hadn't asked Theodora again to marry me, feeling that it would be unfair to press her in her weakened state, but I feared I already knew what she would say. Even without my assent, we seemed inexorably to be moving toward an arrangement where she and our daughter would live in the cathedral city while I stayed in Yurt. "But I want to ask you something, Joachim. You seem remarkably unconcerned for a bishop about an expectant mother refusing to marry."
"I thought you knew that marriage was a sacrament, created by God. The essence of a valid marriage is free consent. It would be a great sin to force someone to marry against her will. I cannot approve, of course, of unmarried women having children, but it would be even worse to force such women into marriage."
Clearly I wasn't going to get any help from him.
"Your child was conceived in sin, but then so were we all, ever since the children of Adam. You do realize, Daimbert, that Theodora's unwillingness to marry you gives you no license. You have repented sorely of what you have done, but it would not be true penitence if you intended to do it again. I spoke with her while we were riding here, and she agrees. Your relations from now on must be of the purest."
This was worse and worse. "But I love her!"
"In this fallen world," Joachim continued, holding me with his eyes, "love is often an opportunity for sin, but remember that love remains one of the first gifts of God to His creation."
"How would you know?" I asked bitterly. "You've never tried love yourself."
"Of course not," he said in surprise. "I'm a priest."
Considering how much trouble we had understanding each other, it was a wonder that Joachim and I were friends at all. "Now that you're bishop," I said, "you're responsible for the whole of the twin kingdoms. You can't be responsible for my soul anymore."
"Of course," he said, immediately and contritely. "Forgive me. I was speaking as though I were still your chaplain."
This didn't help. I certainly wasn't going to discuss Theodora with Yurt's new chaplain. "Don't you think you could look into getting us a different one?"
He looked amused but shook his head. "I've talked to your chaplain, and there's really nothing wrong with him, Daimbert. He doesn't have an impure mind, or whatever you once tried to tell me. He might never make a great theologian, but he's a perfectly competent priest."
I bit my lip. "I was afraid you'd say that." By talking about the young chaplain, he had made it almost too late for me to say that I had no intention of keeping my relations with Theodora of the purest. If she agreed with him, I would at any rate have no choice. Besides, I didn't want to argue with Joachim. "I hope you don't think that I have sunk irretrievably into sin."
He looked at me a long moment without answering. "No," he said at last. "Not irretrievably. Not that I know about. Not yet."
Theodora and I walked slowly around the castle's hill in the early morning two days later. She and the bishop's party would shortly be leaving to ride back to the cathedral city.
"Before you ask me," she said, "let me tell you the answers. Yes, I love you very much and will never love anyone else. No, I can't marry you. No, I can't come live with you here, getting in your way as Royal Wizard, defying the bishop, and probably getting you into serious trouble with your school. And no, I don't want to wander around from fair to fair doing magic tricks."
This did indeed seem to answer all possible questions in advance. I put my arms around her and gently kissed the purple bruise on her forehead. "You realize," I said, "that I am going to come visit you very often."
"Of course. I thought we already agreed on that." We continued walking for a few minutes, then she said, "I do feel embarrassed as a witch that I never realized the Royal Wizard of Caelrhon was the same person as the old magician I'd known for years. What is your school going to do?"
"I haven't had a chance to tell the school much more than that he's dead. All the teachers have been up north, and I just spoke very briefly to Zahlfast last night when he returned. I need to call them again. But I've been trying to work some of it out myself. An enormous amount of Sengrim's madness was directed personally toward me."
She nodded without speaking.
"Sengrim had hated me for years. He was a good wizard, really good, or he would never have been able to master a gorgos. And he knew it, and it ate into him that no one else knew it. I've always just considered it a sign that even intelligent wizards can have errors in judgment that they asked me to teach at the school, but for him it must have been the final blow to his self-esteem."
"It can only be a small proportion of the graduates who are ever invited back to teach, even just a short series of lectures."
"That's just it. But Sengrim didn't realize how inadequate I felt. All he knew is that I've had my name in every copy of Ancient and Modern Necromancy for years, because of accidentally inventing a telephone attachment, and that I'd been invited back to the City and he hadn't. To plot against me without suspicion, he decided to fake his own death.
"It started with me, but it didn't end with me," I continued. "At this point I'm guessing, but I think he turned his jealousy of me into hatred for all the wizards at the school. And the Church was a tempting target, since no wizard, other than me, would be very concerned about strange apparitions on the cathedral."
"What it comes down to, then," said Theodora, "is that you and Paul have not only saved the people here but the church and your school."
"Not at all," I said in surprise. "Well, maybe Paul has. But I can't take any credit. All I did all summer, while Joachim thought I was trying to find a way to protect the cathedral from peril, was to fall in love with you."
She made a noise that was almost a snort.
"All right," I conceded, "I did get the gorgos back up north. And I found out that Lucas had gotten himself into a state where he wanted to discard both priests and wizards, and I talked him out of it. But I'm going to have to phrase it all rather delicately when I explain it to the Master of the school."
We kept on walking. "The bishop likes you," I said after a minute.
"I still find him a little intimidating," she said, "but at the same time, strangely, I find him a good person to talk to. Though one thing is odd, Daimbert. Because I'd known he was your friend I'd expected him to be a lot like you, but he isn't at all."
"The priesthood doesn't allow people like me."
She smiled and squeezed my arm. "Probably just as well. But I wanted to ask you," more seriously now, "how many people in Yurt know about our daughter. First you told the bishop, and now you told the queen! How about the teachers at the school?"
"So far," I said, smiling down at her, "we're up to two people."
"And the school?"
"I have no intention of telling them. They don't want married wizards, but if you won't marry me then the rest is none of their business. Even if I am at some level answerable to organized wizardry, I still, as a theoretically competent wizard, have to be able to make my own decisions. I'm not even going to tell them that I taught—or tried to teach—a witch to fly!"
IV
After watching the bishop's party ride away, I did not go back inside the castle. Instead I went into the old king's rose garden and sat on a bench for a while, then wandered up and down the rows of rosebushes, trying to distract myself by remembering what he had long ago told me about where he had obtained or how
he had bred each one. The blue rose that he had brought back from the East was blooming: an enormous, brilliant sapphire flower. I could never forget how he obtained that one.
After an hour I came out again and looked out across the fields of home. Whatever else had come out of this summer, I seemed cured of being homesick for the Yurt of years ago. If everything had stayed exactly the same, Paul would not now be my king, and I would never have met Theodora.
Years of warding off thunderstorms during harvest time had made me aware of what crops looked like when they were ready to be gathered in. I smiled and estimated that the barley would be ripe in about a week. It was time to review my weather spells.
Off in the western sky I saw a speck approaching. My heart gave a hard thump, but that was out of habit. I knew what was coming. Zahlfast had said he would send the air cart for the red lizards. I walked around the hill to where they still stood. I was actually rather pleased with my paralysis spell, which I had not expected to last this long. But it might be hard to fit them all into the cart
I looked again toward the speck, which was close enough now that I could tell it was purple. But something was odd about it. I rubbed my eyes and looked again, and this time there was no doubt. It was not one air cart coming but two. So much, I thought, for getting my own air cart. Sengrim must have had one which, it now appeared, the Master had appropriated it for the school's use.
The two carts dipped, banked, and landed beside me. I loaded the lizards carefully, packing the heads, wings, and legs in as well as I could. There was just enough room left in the second cart for a man.
I ducked back across the drawbridge and found Gwennie. "I was looking for the constable," I told her, "but you'll do fine. I have to go down to the City but I'll be back tonight or tomorrow." I did not trust Sengrim's lizards not to come back to life if left to themselves. I had, perhaps unjustifiably, come out of this business quite credibly, and I didn't want to ruin it now.
Gwennie waved as the lizards and I took off. It took until early afternoon to reach the white spires of the City and the school perched on the highest central point. The lizards remained paralyzed the whole way. As the carts landed in the school courtyard, I thought that these creatures might prove useful after all for the students to practice their "anti-monster" spells.
As I unloaded the stiff bodies, with the help of a teaching assistant and several students, the cheerful conversation and questions around me suddenly stopped and I looked up to see two senior wizards: Zahlfast and the white-bearded Master of the school.
Zahlfast walked around the lizards slowly. "Nice paralysis spell, Daimbert," he said in his school-teacher voice.
"I know you gave Zahlfast a quick overview on the telephone of what happened," said the Master, "but I'd like to hear more. How about if you come to my study?"
Leaving the assistants to finish dealing with the lizards, I followed the Master with a cold feeling in my chest. It seemed ominously significant that the two wizards had appeared together. Although there had never been any formal announcement, it had become clear over the last few years that Zahlfast had gone from being the head of the transformations faculty to being the de facto second in authority at the school.
Inwardly I was in turmoil. While my own role in killing Sengrim, I was now ashamed to admit, had not bothered me in the slightest, it suddenly seemed highly likely to be a heavy black mark against me in the eyes of the school. No one expected wizards to get along well with each other, but killing each other was something else.
In the Master's study, I told them everything that had happened as honestly as I could, neither trying to justify or to boast, starting with the lizards on the new cathedral tower, and including the gorgos, the strangely out-of-order telephone at the watch-station, and my final spell against Sengrim. All I left out was Theodora. I ended with my guesses why he had been so jealous of me. "One thing you can tell me," I concluded. "Was he just very good at magic, or was he working with a demon?"
Zahlfast and the Master looked at each other. "There is nothing that makes us think," said Zahlfast, "that he'd taken the step into black magic."
"Good," I said. "We gave him a Christian burial."
"You may be correct," said the Master, ignoring this comment, "that he was eaten up with jealousy. I must say I'd never known a student of mine to summon a hundred dragons to attack the school. If your king hadn't killed him, I wonder what his next effort might have been—but thanks to you, we will never have to know!"
Zahlfast said thoughtfully, "I wonder if we ought to keep somewhat closer track of the wizards after they leave the school, to make sure something like this doesn't happen again. We'd seen him this spring, only a short time before he faked his death, but we believed him when he said everything in Caelrhon was fine."
"Was that his air cart?" I asked abruptly.
"Why, yes. He told us that he'd been able to obtain a purple flying beast up in the land of wild magic. I presume he got it at the same time as he was capturing the gorgos and disabling the telephone system. The cart will be very useful at the school now that he won't be needing it." Just as I had thought.
The Master leaned toward me, his hands on his knees. "So. What it all comes down to, young wizard, is that you defended your kingdom successfully from someone who knew a lot more magic than you do."
"And in the process," added Zahlfast, "you and your local bishop worked out an agreement that priests and wizards ought to stop working against each other."
I looked at him sharply. I hadn't said anything about this, as not being directly relevant.
"Yes, we've heard about it," said Zahlfast with a smile. "You weren't the only wizard in Caelrhon, you know."
"Since Sengrim was so good at magic," I asked, changing the subject because I didn't want to have to justify my friendship with Joachim, "why was he still wizard of Caelrhon? If Yurt's the smallest of the western kingdoms, Caelrhon has to be the second smallest."
Zahlfast looked as though he was going to say something about how the school did not discuss one wizard's career with another, but the Master answered me without hesitation.
"There's a lot more to being a good wizard than being good at spells. Some wizards stay at their first posts for their entire lives, some move to richer courts in just a few years, some stay at the school as assistants, some come back to work at the school after years away. It all depends on a number of factors, including the wishes of the wizard himself, how well he's doing where he is, and what other opportunities may be available. In his case, he'd applied for other positions over the years, but none of them were quite right for him."
"Including Yurt," I said. "I still don't understand why you made sure that I became wizard there."
"We told you that years ago," said Zahlfast. "You were the best qualified person for the position."
"Caelrhon will need a new royal wizard now, of course," said the Master. "The king telephoned the school after the royal family realized that Sengrim really wasn't a good representative of a school-trained wizard.. There is someone we had in mind for the position, and we would like your opinion. His name is Evrard, and I believe he was briefly ducal wizard of Yurt fifteen or twenty years ago."
I was surprised but pleased. "That's a fine idea. He'll be a good Royal Wizard of Caelrhon."
"And that brings us," said the Master, "to the real issue."
This was it, I thought, the reprimand for which I had been waiting the last hour. My only hope was that even if they wanted to install someone else as wizard of Yurt, they couldn't do so over the objections of Paul and the queen.
"We want you to stay here and teach at the school."
This was both unexpected and anticlimactic. "But I was just here this spring," I said. "I would have thought I did a poor enough job inspiring your technical division students that you wouldn't want me to try again already."
"It seemed like a good idea at the time," said Zahlfast, "and in fact I think those students will get more long-term adva
ntage out of your lectures than you realize. But you may well be right that the technical division isn't the best place for you. You could teach in one of the other faculties this fall."
I shook my head. "I appreciate the offer, but I really can't. I've been away from Yurt much too much this year anyway. Paul's just become king, and he needs his Royal Wizard with him as he adjusts to his new responsibilities."
"Maybe you don't understand what we're saying," said Zahlfast. "We're not asking you to stay at the school for a series of lectures. We're asking you to join the permanent faculty."
This was certainly not what I expected. I looked from one to the other, my mouth doubtless gaping. "But—" Out of several things I might have said I chose, "But I thought the two of you were going to punish me for being implicated in the death of another wizard."
Zahlfast started to chuckle. "So you told us the whole story, expecting at any moment that we would accuse you of being a traitor to organized wizardry?"
"And you're not going to?" I said cautiously.
"Haven't you been listening?" asked the Master, the twinkle in his frost-blue eyes pronounced. "The school certainly doesn't want its graduates killing each other, but the first oath you all take is to serve humanity. Very few wizards are ever asked to join the permanent faculty. We very much want you."
I had again the feeling that I had irretrievably lost my way, but now it was worse. Not only had I become lost wandering in a wood, but the forest floor itself had been whipped out from under me. "But I had just been talking to the queen about my position," I said. This point at least was firm. "She and King Paul very much want me to continue as Royal Wizard of Yurt."
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