* * * *
As I rose slowly to my feet all sorts of other reasons why it would never have worked anyway occurred to me. Arriving in the City with a horde of dragons at my back would have been much more likely to begin a devastating battle between the wizards of the school and the dragons—and me—than to make Elerius abruptly reconsider his agenda. Especially since there was an excellent chance that Elerius, with his much better abilities, would snatch the Scepter from my hand as easily as I had snatched it from Gir.
And might the dragons, no longer intimidated by the Scepter, start erupting into the land of men after I brought them back here, even if I succeeded? The wizards' school has always had the announced mission, dating back, I realized, to programs of Naurag's, of keeping dragons well up in the north; and yet keeping them there had never been a particularly onerous task. Gir and his people—and the Scepter—I now suspected, had for centuries been unacknowledged allies in the wizards' efforts to keep humans safe from wild magic. There might be an excellent reason that there were a lot more dragons in the old stories than were ever now seen in the Western Kingdoms.
"No need to worry about moving, Gir," I said with a rather unconvincing effort at nonchalance. "The Scepter would be dangerous for us to use anyway." An understatement. "It was just an idea one of the old wizards at the school had had, but I realize now it would be impractical. There's somebody who's got a plan to take over the world. His name is Elerius. But I realize now that bludgeoning him into submission by trying to wield a Scepter I don't even know how to use just wouldn't work. Keep it here, and keep the dragons—and the other creatures of wild magic—in control."
Gir sprang up with as much youthful vigor as Paul. Looking at the relief and gratitude all over his face, I realized that he had just been having as big a moral struggle as I had. I was relieved that I would not be responsible for his death after all.
"If you have completed your visit to the dragons' valley, then," he said cheerfully, "we should have breakfast. I do not believe you had any blackberries yesterday."
* * * *
I stayed two more days with the elves. That evening, rather than entertaining me with their music, they had me tell them stories, how old Naurag's original dream of a wizards' school had finally been put into effect centuries later, once the devastations of the Black Wars had made the wizards, fractious and touchy as they were, realize they had to start working together for the good of all humanity. My own grasp of the history of wizardry was always a bit shaky; I hoped the parts I had to make up weren't too far from accurate.
During the day I flew on my purple flying beast over the giants' farms and, carefully avoiding the lair of the fanged gorgos, on to explore other areas of this wild northern land. It might, I thought, be my only chance to see the creatures that I had assumed ever since I grew up were just imaginary: and to find out they all existed here. Some were beautiful, many strange, many dangerous. I thought rationally that I should be bitterly disappointed to have made this trip for nothing, but in fact I knew it was not for nothing. And it was hard to be downcast when the magic flowing through me felt so glorious.
But if there was nothing for me here, then I needed to return to the City. I had to find out how Elerius was doing in his plans to take over all of western society. "Or how would you like to visit the East?" I asked my flying beast. "I'm sure you've never been there, and they do have good melons, though not as good as the elves'." The power of an Ifrit, if I could find and master one in the wild eastern deserts, would certainly be enough to outmatch even Elerius.
Naurag flew south reluctantly on the third day, making sure that I noticed him casting lingering glances toward the elves' gardens and orchards. I hoped he realized I was planning to take him much farther from those orchards than the borders of the land of magic where I had found him. It would, I tried to explain to him, be an exciting new experience for him to see humans.
The trip south, back toward the City, took much less time than the trip north, with Naurag's rapid wing beats carrying us across woods and hills. Finding enough gourds and melons for him occupied much of my attention—attention which I knew I should instead be turning to the question of what to do about Elerius now that it turned out I didn't have the Scepter. But the feeling of loss to be leaving behind all that magic drained me of any initiative. After three days of following the coast line, we started approaching lands I knew.
And I realized that I had headed us toward Caelrhon. It was inland from the City, out of my way though not very far. I had started humming during the afternoon, no longer as depressed as I had been to be leaving the land where my spells worked so well. The vague image floating through my thoughts resolved itself into setting the flying beast down in the cobbled street by Theodora's house, while the evening darkened and the lamplighters came up the street. She would be delighted to recognize my step, and she would draw me in, toss the cloth scraps off the couch—
But Theodora thought I was dead. No visits with his wife for a man who still seemed to imagine that he could force the best wizard since the original Naurag to give up his plans for world domination.
We flew high over Caelrhon's royal castle as evening came on. A large number of tents were set up outside the moat, and I could make out men in armor around them. Perhaps the king had decided to summon all his knights for exercises. The spires of the city of Caelrhon rose before us in the last light of day; my flying beast seemed to be responding to commands I wished I could give. I made both him and me invisible and flew low over the rooftops, just trying a delicate probing spell to reassure myself that Theodora was there and well.
Neither Theodora nor Antonia was there. Not quite allowing myself to worry, I set the flying beast down in the meadow a mile outside the city walls, where the Romneys sometimes camped.
I hadn't picked up Joachim's mind either, but that was less surprising. At prayer in the cathedral, his mind would enter the realm of the supernatural and be inaccessible to my magic. But as I lit a small fire and, visible once again, started preparing supper, I wondered uneasily what had been happening while I was gone. Might Elerius, now elected new Master of the school, have invited Antonia to start her studies in the City at once, and urged Theodora to come along to act as chaperone for my daughter and Prince Walther?
I had bought an earthenware pot of stew from a friendly woman on a farm the day before. She had given me far too much to finish in one day, so I had managed to keep the rest inside the pot today with a careful binding spell. It smelled rich and savory as it began to heat. I sat with my back against Naurag's flank and my face toward the fire.
It cast very little heat or light against the dankness. The evening was chill, and the last of the summer insects called raucously to each other. But suddenly their calls went still. Someone was moving stealthily through the meadow toward my fire.
III
A quick spell lit up the darkness. I did not know what to expect, thief or another batch of student wizards coming to kidnap me, but the light in its brief flare showed instead what appeared to be a boy crouching, startled, a few yards away.
"Come closer so I can see you better," I called as my spell faded. "I won't hurt you, but I don't want to have to use magic to capture you if you try to run off."
The boy hesitated while I waited. The smell of the stew, I thought, had brought him. If this boy was a runaway, he must be hungry. Hunger was stronger than caution, for in a moment he rose to his feet and moved slowly closer, still poised for flight at any moment.
"If you'd like to share my supper, I have plenty," I said. In spite of my friendly invitation, I kept a shadow over my face until I was sure this was no one I knew. He took one cautious step forward, into the flickering light of my fine, and now I saw that it wasn't a boy after all. It was a young woman dressed as a boy, her hair all cut off under her cap.
"You're a wizard," she said accusingly, dragging her voice own a few octaves. "I don't trust wizards."
I laughed and let the shadow
slide from my face. My identity should be safe with her; I couldn't remember ever seeing her before in my life. "You don't need to pretend to be a boy with me. I'm not about to assault you. And you might as well trust me, because if I'd meant you harm I could already have turned you into a frog—but I don't. What's your name?"
For a second I thought she would flee, but then she peered toward me, shrugged, and came a step closer. "I'm Hadwidis," she said, no longer trying to pitch her voice lower. She said her name firmly, as though there might have been some doubt in my mind about it. I knew no one named Hadwidis. "Can I really have some of that, Wizard? I saw your fire and was going to avoid you, but it smelled so good!"
The stew was hot by now. We shared the spoon, and I let her have the larger portion. From close up she appeared even younger than I had originally thought, maybe only five or six years older than Antonia. Her caution all seemed forgotten in her hunger. She couldn't have been running for long, I thought, and wherever she had left, it had been someplace she trusted the people around her. From the way she gobbled the stew down, I doubted she had had anything to eat since leaving that place.
When Hadwidis finally sat back from the well-scraped pot, she took a deep breath and said, "Well! Thank you. I should have thought to bring some food along."
"That's a common oversight with people running away," I said in a tone meant to encourage confidences, but she didn't hear me.
She had finally realized that the large shape at my back was not a boulder. "What's that?"
"A flying beast. He's purple, though you can't tell in the darkness. He's very friendly. His name is Naurag."
She peered at him cautiously, and Naurag snaked his long neck around my shoulder to peer back. "He looks like a dragon, only smaller," Hadwidis said at last. "But I thought dragons weren't real."
"They're real enough," I said, more gruffly than I intended. "But he isn't a dragon; he's just a flying beast. Pat him on the neck, he likes that."
She patted him carefully, exclaimed at how warm he felt, then rubbed his scales more enthusiastically. I was watching her in the meantime, wondering where she had run from and where she thought she was going. I had enough to worry about already.
"You know, Wizard," she said unexpectedly, "I don't think you owned a flying beast the last time I saw you."
"Do I know you?" I asked, appalled. Here I had carefully staged my death and avoided telling this young woman my name, and she was about to turn out to be a cousin or something of one of the servants in the castle of Yurt, who would shortly be announcing to everyone that I was still very much alive.
"You probably don't remember me, but do you recall coming to the Nunnery of Yurt once, six or eight years ago? You were spiritual sponsor for a woman who then decided she didn't want to be a nun after all."
I nodded; I remembered that fiasco extremely well. It was the first and only time I had been inside the nunnery. "You were there too? I'm afraid I still don't recognize you."
"I was just a girl then, one of the novices. We probably all looked alike to you in our white robes. But I remember you. After all, that was the most exciting series of events at the nunnery in years! But I'd have remembered you anyway. We'd hardly see a man from one year to the next except for some really old priests, and you looked very interesting. At first we all thought you were old too, because of the white beard, but your face didn't look old. We had quite a few discussions in the novices' dormitory afterwards about whether you were a wizard or not. I said you were, and it turns out I was right! But," more soberly, "I guess now I'll never be able to tell the other girls."
If she had been a novice nun for years, I thought, isolated from the world inside the cloister, she would have no idea that the Royal Wizard of Yurt was supposed to be dead—and in fact, she might not even know I came from Yurt. "So you've decided not to make your final profession as a nun?" I asked.
She hesitated a moment, staring into the fire. Naurag nuzzled her shoulder encouragingly, which knocked off her cap, showing a shaved scalp. But then she hooked an arm around the flying beast's neck, as if for comfort, and slowly shook her naked head. "I did make my profession," she said in a low voice, "two years ago when I turned sixteen. But I've changed my mind. I just don't have the vocation to be a nun."
"So you ran away," I said flatly. For a nun to leave the cloister, I was sure, must be to commit a horrible sin. But I didn't worry about that now. Suppose, I thought instead, Antonia decided to run away from the wizards' school? She would be even worse at planning ahead than this girl.
Now that she'd admitted it Hadwidis was more than willing to fill me in on the details of her flight from the cloister. "You know, Wizard, it's quite a relief to have somebody to talk to about this! I thought it was all going to be easy. Three days ago the plan appeared in my mind, fully formed. The nunnery's having all the windows redone—a chance to see a real man within the walls! The glazier and his son are staying at the guest house. They'd washed out their clothes and hung them up to dry, so I just stole a shirt and cap and a pair of trousers that looked like they'd fit me. Then two nights ago I waited until everyone else was asleep, put on the clothes, unlocked the gates—I know where they keep the key—and slipped out."
This then explained the shaved head. Three days ago it would have been covered by a nun's wimple.
"It turned out to be a lot harder than I thought, running away. For one thing, I realized I couldn't go anywhere in daylight, or everybody would realize that I must have left the nunnery and probably send me back. And I won't go back. Also I hadn't remembered that I'd need money outside the nunnery. We nuns don't have money of course—we have nothing of our own. At night I may be able to pass as a boy, but I'll have to find something to eat —and somewhere to stay—until my hair grows out. After that I'm planning to go into the city of Caelrhon and work as a waitress at one of the taverns. What do you think, Wizard?"
"Well, Hadwidis," I said slowly. From nun to tavern wench! She certainly had decided to leave the cloister thoroughly behind her.
She interrupted before I had a chance to come up with some well-meaning and fatuous advice about not restricting her choices. "My name, for example! That's part of the reason I had to leave. I'm Hadwidis and always will be, but when I made my profession I had to take a saint's name. Well, if you can imagine it, they had run out of women saints! All the women's names the abbess thought suitable for us had already been taken by the older nuns. So my group all ended up with men's names. I tried telling the abbess that I was sure there had been just as many holy women as holy men over the years, if not more—after all, women can become nuns and men don't do anything of the kind!—but that as long as only men decided who was really a saint, women's holiness wouldn't be recognized. Do you remember the abbess, Wizard? She wasn't impressed with my argument."
I remembered the abbess vividly. I wouldn't have tried to argue with her about anything. "So what name did you end up with?"
"Sister Eusebius!" she said as though spitting out the words. "Can you imagine? They call Eusebius the Cranky Saint. It turns out there's always a nun with his name at the house because he's the patron saint of Yurt. They've got his Holy Toe in a reliquary somewhere in the kingdom."
"Umm," I said in vague affirmation, remembering just in time that I didn't want to advertise how well I knew Yurt. I had had only one direct contact with the saint myself, years ago in the narrow valley that housed the hermitage of the Holy Toe, but it had certainly not faded from memory. A saint who responded to a lovely woman's prayer, to cure her of her vanity, by giving her a giant nose-wart certainly deserved the appellation of Cranky. All saints were holy, Joachim had once told me, but that didn't mean they were nice.
"And not only did I not want his name, it turns out the saint didn't want me to have it either!" Hadwidis was excited now, gesturing as she spoke. "I had to make my profession on his holy day, of course, and no sooner had they given me the ring that marked me as a bride of Christ and called me Sister Eusebius for the
first time, when all the candles went out by themselves."
"Well, ah, there could be a perfectly normal explanation—"
But she was not listening. "And the candles wouldn't relight! At first the abbess said it was the wind, except the air was perfectly still. It smelled of roses, too—which I thought pretty suspicious, because it was the wrong season for roses. Then the abbess said those candles must be defective, so she sent for some more, and they burned perfectly well until they got within ten feet of me, when they all went out. So I knew that the Cranky Saint was angry, and I think the abbess was starting to realize it too."
"Had you done anything to make him angry?" I asked, fascinated.
"Well," she said, partly embarrassed and partly proud, "I did play him at the Feast of Fools. Did you have the Feast of Fools when you were little? It's the day that everything is turned upside down. It was a lot of fun when I still lived at home, and my little brother would play Father, and I'd be Mother, and all the servants had to do whatever we said. It certainly made things different to have a three-year-old boy sitting on the throne! But I think they only have the Feast at the nunnery because it's such an old tradition. The girl who's chosen to be Abbess for the day always has to be better than good. Anyway, I'd decided to liven things up and play Saint Eusebius. I even made up a song for him to sing: 'Oh, no, I lost my toe, I'm filled with woe, here in the snow, my tears do flow—' But you get the idea."
That would certainly have gotten a cranky saint's attention. "Were there any other signs of his displeasure besides the candles?"
"None that anybody else saw, so the abbess started thinking I was making things up. And I was really trying to be a good nun! Or at least I started trying harder after that. But sometimes during the night services I'd get so sleepy that I'd just sit down on a bench, or sometimes when we were fasting I'd get so hungry I'd just take an apple or something from the kitchen, or sometimes when we were supposed to be reading I'd start making up a funny song in my head and get to giggling, and you know what? Every time, I'd feel a pinch on my arm, or there would be a sudden cold breeze right down my back, or a tap like somebody tapping his foot right behind me. Let me tell you, it was creepy!"
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