C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 01

by A Bad Spell in Yurt

  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.

  Packed in my saddlebags were the books I had found in the room of the old ducal wizard. I had quite brazenly stolen them, reassuring myself that it was not theft to take something no one wanted. They had clearly been undisturbed for thirty years, and if the duchess did indeed hire someone from the wizards' school, as she had threatened to do, he would probably throw them out immediately.

  At dusk we came out of the woods and up the hill toward the castle. A chill wind mixed with a little sleet whipped about our ears, and our horses were eager for the stables. I looked up, expecting to see welcoming lights shining out, and instead saw only the castle's dark shape against the dark sky.

  "The constable knew we were coming home today," said the queen in surprise.

  "Everyone may just be sitting warm in the kitchen," said the king.

  A chill had gone through me far colder than the sleet. I looked toward Joachim and saw that a similar fear had gripped him, for he had reached into his saddle bag and taken out his crucifix. He too, I thought, must have been feeling that elusive sense of evil in the castle, and he must have been worried about it in ways that he never told me.

  "At least the drawbridge is down," said one of the knights. The king's optimism was not shared by the rest of our party.

  For a brief moment we hesitated by the bridge, looking in through the gates toward the dark and silent courtyard. Then the king said cheerfully, "They'll light the lights as soon as they hear us. Just don't let your horses slip going in!" He led the way, the rest of us following single-file behind.

  No one spoke as we crossed the bridge and then the courtyard toward the lightless stables, but our horses' hooves on the cobblestones and the bells on their bridles made a sound that should have awakened any sleeper. There was an abrupt clattering sound from the direction of the great hall, then to my intense relief I heard the constable's voice. "On!" he shouted, and all the magic lamps in the hall blazed into light.

  More lights came on then around the castle, and the constable ran out to meet us, disheveled and embarrassed. "Forgive me, sire," he said, holding the king's stirrup while he dismounted. "I don't know what happened to me. I must have fallen asleep. I didn't mean for you to come home to a dark castle."

  Everyone else was now talking and dismounting, and a stable boy started taking the horses. The others seemed to have dismissed whatever fears they had felt looking up at the lightless bulk of the castle against the twilight sky. But the chill I had felt then was still with me. I caught Joachim's eye and knew that he too was not completely satisfied.

  The cook came rushing into the hall from the kitchens, highly flustered, at the same time as we came in from the courtyard. She spoke quickly to the constable and rushed out again. "We'll have a hot dish for you very quickly, my lords and ladies," said the constable apologetically. "The cook somehow had let the fire go out, but she'll have it going again in just a minute."

  The hall fire too was quickly built up again. We all stood around it, warming ourselves after the ride, waiting for supper. While we waited, I wondered what could have happened to cast everyone in the castle into slumber, and what had wakened them again. Only a small part of the staff was there, as the rest—including Gwen and Jon—would not be back from their vacations before tomorrow, but it was certainly not natural for all of the staff present to have been overcome with sleep at the same time.

  And had it merely been the sound of our horses that wakened them? I put my coat back on and slipped away, taking one of the magic lamps with me. As I went by the kitchens, I could hear loud clattering and the cook giving rapid orders, and could smell supper cooking, a smell so delightful after a long day's cold ride that I had to stop myself from going in for a sample bite.

  Instead I went down the dank staircase behind the kitchens, forcing my unwilling feet forward and doing my best to ignore the plausible reasons that kept popping into my mind why it would be much better to wait until morning.

  It was as I feared. The rusty iron door was st
ill shut, but my magic locks were gone, and the debris with which I had blocked the small window in the door had all fallen to the ground.

  I went back up the stairs much faster than I intended and crossed the courtyard to my own chambers. To my intense relief, the magic lock on my door was glowing softly, undisturbed. I went inside to be out of the wind while I found my composure again. If this lock too had been gone, I would have had to believe there was a demon loose in the castle.

  But a new thought also struck me. Someone who knew very powerful magic had apparently been at work while we were gone. This person had his or her headquarters in the cellars, a place where spells were cast and books and herbs kept. When I locked the cellars with magic, he or she had had to break my locks to get back in.

  And this person, I reasoned, would have to be someone on the castle staff, the constable and his wife, the cook, the stable boy, or the kitchen maid, the only people who had been here when we arrived. But why would one of those five have put the others to sleep and pretended sleep himself or herself? I shook my head, realizing it could have been any other member of the staff, who would have perhaps come back "early" from vacation, entered the castle without any challenge, put the rest into a sleep that would make them forget he or she had been there, and left again. In this case, the sleep could have been intended to insure there were no witnesses to whatever the person was going to do—or people to hear the screeching of the iron door being opened.

  I left the lights on in my chambers and hurried back to the hall, arriving just in time for a light supper of soup and omelet, served with some of the cook's excellent bread. Hungry and tired, we all ate without more than the briefest snatches of conversation. As the food was being served, I had briefly considered trying the spell that had turned the king's soup green before his recovery, but I did not have the heart to do so, fearing what it might show. Besides, I was almost too hungry to care.