Daughter of Magic

by C. Dale Brittain

  “It’s because you want me to behave like an ordinary, unmarried wizard, while you try to act like a virtuous, self-supporting seamstress,” I said lamely.

  “It is deliberate, Daimbert,” she said quietly. “If I want Antonia to have any sort of normal childhood, I have to be above suspicion of being just one more woman who threw away her virtue—I hope you are not equating convention with morality! And I really don’t care what ‘ordinary, unmarried’ wizards do. All I want is what will make you happiest, and that is not being driven out of Yurt by your king and snubbed by your school.”

  It was clearly no use to argue with her or to point out that she was not giving me the chance to make decisions for myself. And if she worried more about morality than I did— Well, wizards had never had much use for religion anyway.

  Something in her comment teased out a thought about Elerius. Would he hold over me threats of revealing all to the school in order to bind me to him for purposes of his own?

  But I didn’t have the time or energy to worry about him. I looked into Theodora’s amethyst eyes and managed to smile. “I guess I’d better make it up to the bishop for breaking in on him this morning by trying again to find out more about the strange magic-worker here in the city.”

  IV

  Theodora had not seen the Dog-Man, but I hoped to learn more from Celia. Escaping from the bishop’s palace, I crossed town to the little castle belonging to the kings of Yurt, where the royal family stayed when visiting Caelrhon. As I hoped, the duchess’s daughters were there.

  Hildegarde looked irritated and bored, but Celia appeared to be experiencing intense joy. “Thank you for sending me here, Wizard,” she said, taking both my hands. “This is the chance I have long waited for, that I feared might not exist, and I would not have it but for you.”

  “The chance for what?” I said, too startled to appreciate her gratitude.

  “To study for the priesthood, of course,” said Celia. “I’ve been so happy that I’ve been sending pigeon-messages to all the people who have encouraged me over the years in a religious vocation.”

  And these, I felt fairly certain, did not include her parents.

  “She met that Dog-Man all right,” said Hildegarde, leaning against the door-jamb and cleaning her nails with a knife. “And now that the bishop has accepted him into the seminary he’s promised to come teach her in the evenings everything he learns during the day.”

  Celia shot a sharp glance at her sister but said only, “I told you not to call him Dog-Man anymore. The children call him that, of course, as a sign of affection, but his real name is Cyrus.”

  Cyrus. So at least now I had a name to go with the fragmentary and contradictory things about him I had learned from Theodora and the bishop.

  “His religious vocation is so strong,” Celia went on eagerly, “that he spends most nights in prayer, lying before the high altar in the cathedral.”

  This, I thought grudgingly, might explain why I had not been able to find him when I was here before. He wouldn’t have had to be hiding from me deliberately. In prayer, he would enter the supernatural realm of the saints and be beyond the reach of my magic. “Any particular sins he’s trying to atone for with all this penitent prayer?” I asked, half as a joke.

  But Celia did not take it as a joke. “He feels terrible urges within himself,” she said in a low voice. “That—that is why he has killed innocent creatures. That is what he hopes he will overcome through penitence and through immersion in the sanctity of the seminary.”

  “Does the bishop know this?” I asked in amazement.

  “He—” She hesitated, then pushed on. “Cyrus may not have told His Holiness everything.”

  And she already had my own authorization to act behind the bishop’s back, I thought grimly.

  “But his prayers have always restored the creatures,” she said in what was probably meant to be a hopeful tone.

  I didn’t like at all the idea of the duchess’s daughter spending time alone with someone with “terrible urges.” I started to forbid her, with a sharp rebuke for her lack of sense, ever to see him again.

  But too many people had been telling her what she could and could not do. On the other hand, to be killed by someone I persisted in thinking of as demonic would probably be a mild, even pleasant experience compared to what the duchess would do to me if she thought I had allowed one of her daughters to be hurt. Why, if a young woman decided to find her own vocation and her own way in life, must it be by putting that life in peril?

  I looked toward Hildegarde, the one sure defense Celia might have. She nodded her blond head slowly and wordlessly, meeting my eyes. She understood the situation even better than I did.

  “Oh,” I said, remembering what had been happening in Yurt while the twins were gone, “you missed some excitement, Hildegarde.” I told her briefly about the warriors’ attack.

  She cheered up at once. “It sounds like we’d better get back to Yurt right away,” she said to Celia. “Paul will want me there in case anything further happens. And don’t you think, Wizard, that this might be an attack on the Lady Justinia? After all, she’d just arrived when this happened. So the king may want to post a guard in her bedchamber, and it had better be another woman!”

  “Do what you like,” said Celia quietly. “I shall remain here.”

  “But you can’t stay here by yourself!” Hildegarde protested.

  “Why not? We need not always do everything together. And if I went back to Yurt, Cyrus would not be able to teach me what he learns in seminary.”

  Hildegarde fidgeted, eager to show what a woman’s strong arm could do against creatures of darkness, yet unwilling to leave her sister to the Dog-Man. “And we still haven’t showed the wizard’s niece how to deal off the bottom of the deck,” she said to her sister as an added inducement to return to Yurt. “You know you’re much better at it than I am.”

  “Uh, Hildegarde, maybe the two of you can stay here just a little longer,” I said. “I’m going to find this Cyrus and talk to him myself.”

  “But he won’t want to talk to a wizard,” said Celia, rising abruptly from her chair. “He has had evil experiences with wizardry. In becoming a priest, he intends to break all ties with magic.”

  So had this man been at the wizards’ school along with everything else? I really did need to talk to him soon, no matter what Celia might think.

  I left the little castle a few minutes later to head out of the city. Although the Romneys had denied categorically any knowledge of someone called Dog-Man, they might have information about someone named Cyrus. Both Yurt and Caelrhon were tiny kingdoms, probably unknown to most of the people in the west, much less anywhere else. If this would-be priest had come here intentionally, rather than just wandering into town by accident, he would have needed directions from someone who traveled here fairly frequently, which would mean either the merchants who brought up goods from the great City or else the Romneys.

  Although we in the Western Kingdoms tended to consider the kingdoms east of the mountains as “eastern,” in fact there was a very long distance past them still to go into the East. The multitude of small kingdoms and principalities where the Romneys were believed to have originated formed a barrier between our Western Kingdoms and the true East. Far beyond that region, in the old imperial city of Xantium, they must consider our Western and Eastern Kingdoms an undifferentiated western mass.

  The streets of Caelrhon were packed, as they always were these days, and I had to thread my way carefully toward the city gates. The square in front of the cathedral, once the main market square of Caelrhon, had for several years been full of construction equipment, and now rising from the center was what would someday be the great doors and flanking towers of the new cathedral. So far the doors opened not into a cathedral nave but only onto more piled timbers, stones, and vats of mortar, but every time I was in town I could see that the crew had brought the new church one small step closer.

  Beyond the c
ity gates the dense crowds thinned out rapidly, though a number of people besides me seemed to be heading toward the Romney encampment. Today the brightly-painted caravans were surrounded by horses. Afternoon sun shown on glistening coats, black, bay, and dapple, and summer breezes ruffled manes and tales. The Romneys themselves in their black and red ducked and dodged their way between the animals, talking confidently to the other people there.

  The Romneys, it seemed, were holding a horse-fair. Knights and merchants and a few farmers milled around the encampment, both buying and selling. Horses stamped, kicked, and bared their teeth at each other. Some of these were riding horses, some plow horses, and a few unbroken colts. On every side I heard extravagant claims by would-be sellers of the virtues of horses that looked no different to me than those that were being harshly criticized by would-be buyers.

  But it did look as though all the adult Romneys were involved. The children were half a mile away, playing by themselves. I wandered toward them, trying not to draw attention to myself from the adults. High white clouds sat on the horizon, but the sky above was clear.

  “There’s the wizard!” one of the boys called, breaking away from the rest to run toward me. “Make me another snake!”

  It was the same boy, peering at me with shiny black eyes from under shaggy hair, to whom I had first spoken a few days ago. The other children raced to gather around us. Again I made an illusory ruby-eyed snake that curled up his arm and quivered its tongue at him. “Now make it real!” he said.

  I shook my head, smiling. “That’s beyond the reach of natural magic,” I said.

  “How about the Dog-Man?” a girl suggested. “I’m sure he could do it!” One of the other children elbowed her hard, and there was suddenly a bashful silence.

  My illusory snake was fading fast. “When I was here before,” I said, looking at the children with a wizardly scowl, “you told me none of you had ever met the Dog-Man. But I think now you really had, even though you might not have realized it at the time.” The children shuffled their feet, and I knew I was right. “He’s the same man who traveled to Caelrhon with you a few weeks ago, isn’t he. He’s calling himself Cyrus now; what name did he give you?”

  The children, laughed, embarrassed. “When did you find out that the man the children in the city were talking about was one you already knew well?” I pressed them.

  “You can’t blame us for not knowing who he was,” the oldest boy piped up. “He never did things like bring dogs back to life when traveling with us! Maybe,” he added thoughtfully and unconvincingly, “he knew we’d see straight through his illusions.”

  I myself had long since given up any hope that what this man was doing was mere illusion. “Tell me more about him,” I suggested, jingling coins ostentatiously in my pockets.

  “Well, I decided to go into town and see him,” announced one of the girls, tossing her hair. “We’d heard such strange things about him—and you had asked us about him, Wizard—that I went down by the river to find him. And it was Cyrus!”

  The oldest boy apparently decided that as long as the story was out anyway he might as well tell me what he knew and at least get the credit for it. “He always told us his name was Cyrus,” he broke in. “But he never told us he was a wizard.”

  “Where did he join you?” I asked casually, not wanting to show how urgently I wanted to know.

  “East of the mountains. We were heading this way for the summer, and he came up to our camp, asking if we’d ever heard of Yurt …”

  I went cold. Vlad had lived in the Eastern Kingdoms, far beyond the mountains. Could he himself be Cyrus, here bent on vengeance against me?

  “We told him we were going to Caelrhon, which was very close to Yurt,” said the boy, taking my attentive silence as an invitation to continue.

  But nothing that I remembered of Vlad suggested he would decide to become a priest. Mentally I shook my head. I was letting my imagination get carried away. There could be plenty of explanations both for the attack on the castle and for this very strange miracle-worker without having to imagine it had something to do with long-ago events or even with me. Elerius had thought it might, but even Elerius, I told myself firmly, could be wrong.

  “Did he say anything about wanting to enter the seminary?” I asked. The children were growing restless, finding the topic of Cyrus rather dull and clearly wondering if I was going to do anything with my coins besides jingle them.

  “He asked us if we were Christian,” said the girl who had spoken before. “I told him we weren’t. By the way, are you wizards Christian? Some priest came out from the city last week and was trying to make us go to his church, and I told him to start on wizards before bothering us!”

  “Wizards are Christian,” I said hastily, not wanting to go into detail on the millennia-old conflict between magic and religion, and pulled out a handful of coppers. I divided them between the girl and the oldest boy, and when I headed back toward town they were busily counting and assessing how they should be distributed.

  So Cyrus had come west with the Romneys, I thought, strolling through the sun-warmed meadows. And he had been looking deliberately for Yurt. This need not have anything to do with Vlad to be distinctly ominous. The dark chill on the summer day had nothing to do with the weather.

  But what could have possessed this strange half-wizard to enter Joachim’s seminary?

  I sat down in the shade of a tree, thinking that I ought to demand that the bishop forbid this man to talk to Celia, or for that matter to anyone, and that he be expelled from seminary. But it was going to be hard to do so without any information more solid than what I had bought from a group of children not generally credited with high standards of honesty. It would be especially hard since I was still mortified enough by behavior I was now trying to pretend had never happened that I was unsure how I could ever face Joachim again.

  V

  I must have fallen asleep sitting under the tree, because the next thing I knew I found myself half-slumped at a very awkward angle, and the tree’s shadow stretched long across the meadow.

  Rubbing a stiff neck, I sat up and looked toward the Romney encampment. The breeze that made silver tracks in the long grass was cooler now. The horse fair seemed over; the last steeds were being led away. Well, I thought, it seemed only appropriate that a day that had begun with nightmare-inspired madness should end without my accomplishing anything at all.

  I rose and stretched. I had behaved idiotically with Theodora as well as with Joachim, but it was always so good to be with her that the attractions of spending the evening at her house far outweighed the embarrassment of facing her.

  And then I saw a lone figure striding across the meadow. He was dressed in black, so that his person and his long shadow seemed to merge into one. He walked with his head down and hands behind his back, paying no attention to the Romneys’ camp or anything else.

  Cyrus! I thought, heading rapidly toward him. Now was my chance to confront him.

  But it was not the mysterious miracle-worker from the Eastern Kingdoms. It was the bishop.

  Joachim glanced up as I approached. He gave a start as though surprised to see me still in Caelrhon, or perhaps to see anyone. But then he nodded gravely in my direction and kept walking.

  At least he did not seem frightened of me—but then he hadn’t this morning either. I fell into step beside him. Something must be very wrong for the bishop to be out here alone, without any accompanying priests, without guards or servants.

  We walked in silence for several minutes. “I had not expected to meet you, Daimbert,” he said at last, “but perhaps it is only appropriate that I do. For it is because of our conversation earlier that I have spent much of today searching my soul and have now come to a very difficult and terrible decision. For I know that God first summoned me to the office of bishop, and it is because of my own sins that I must now resign.”

  I stared at him, stunned. What could my wild accusations have done to him? Or could he— B
ut I dismissed this idea before it could even form.

  “The devil is even more subtle than I had imagined,” Joachim continued, soberly and quietly. “I told you this morning that I knew well my own sins, but I was wrong. I have sinned, and sinned willingly, in ways that I kept hidden even from myself. It is only fitting that I tell you first, Daimbert, before announcing my decision to the cathedral chapter.”

  “Uh, I thought bishops had chaplains of their own to whom they were supposed to confess their sins,” I mumbled. At this point, tired, humiliated, and deeply worried about Yurt, I didn’t think I was in much of a position to help a bishop through a spiritual crisis.

  Joachim paid no attention to my mumblings if he even heard them. “For you were right. It is especially against you that I have sinned.” He had been avoiding my gaze, but he suddenly turned toward me, his enormous deep-set eyes darkly shadowed as the sun sank toward the horizon. “I began wondering why I should have become so wrathful at your accusations, when it should have been clear that these were only the product of the fears that lurk in midnight dreams. But in turning my thoughts over I realized that it was the wrath of a sin that fears exposure.”

  We had stopped walking and stood facing each other. Joachim was taller than I, and I had to look up at him. The breeze fluttered his vestments around his ankles and stirred his hair.

  “You distrusted Cyrus when I first told you about him,” he said. “And then today you said that it was my sins that had allowed a demon to enter the cathedral. Although I am still certain that Cyrus is no demon, you were right that a bishop’s sins can put his entire church in mortal peril. If I can no longer sift out evil from good, then I cannot in conscience lead my flock.

  “As I told you, Daimbert,” he continued quietly, “I have never touched Theodora. And in eschewing sins of the flesh, I had managed to persuade myself of my own purity. Of course I spoke with her often about her duties as seamstress for the cathedral, and even, in quiet moments that each of us might take amidst our responsibilities, we would share a cup of tea and talk about you. I was happy, I told myself, that my oldest friend had won the love of such a woman, and that the two of you could prosper together in chaste friendship, the parents of a fine little girl. But today I have had to ask myself: did I counsel Theodora in physical purity only so that I did not have to think of her loving another man as she could never love me?”