“I have no idea. It’s the only part of the castle I haven’t been able to get into. The constable told me the cellars are damp and haven’t been used for many years. I’d asked him for a key, but he said you had the only one.”
“That’s true,” said Dominic in a puzzled voice. Although I didn’t tell him, I had already tried to open the locked door using the same spell I had used on the bolt on the north tower, but a complicated lock had proved impervious to my magic, as a simple bolt had not.
Dominic took the heavy bunch of keys from his belt and flipped through them until he came to one stained with rust. “Here’s the key. You’d better take a can of oil, as I doubt it’s been opened in years.” He paused then and glared at me again. “I hope you weren’t planning to ask me for the key to the north tower, because I don’t have it. When your predecessor retired, he bolted the doors and put magic locks on that he said even another wizard couldn’t break.”
It was my turn to be surprised. “But I don’t need to go up in the north tower,” I said blandly, neglecting to mention that I had already been there twice.
Dominic said something under his breath. When I asked him to repeat it, he denied having said anything, but it had sounded to me like, “Maybe you should.”
With the key and a can of oil, I went down the narrow stairs behind the kitchen to the cellar door. It was iron and blotched with damp and rust. There was a small opening at eye level, too small for anything much larger than a cat to have climbed through, and a dank odor came out into the stairwell. Even with the oil and energetic turning, it took me almost five minutes to get the lock to open. Clearly no one had been in the cellars in years.
The door swung open with a protesting screech. I had tied a magic globe to my wrist with a piece of string. Its light bobbed eerily along the walls as I stepped inside.
It seemed to be nothing but abandoned storage cellars, damp because they had been dug too close to the castle well. The small rooms opening off the hall were littered with the unidentifiable remains of what might once have been stored there. Several of the rooms smelled as though used by cats or rats or both.
But permeating these innocuous dark stone rooms was an almost overwhelming sense of evil. I stopped and listened. I heard a very faint pattering noise, which could have been dripping water, could have been rats, and could have been nothing.
I tried to think clearly and calmly to combat the irrational fear that threatened to overwhelm me. Dominic had known there was an evil spell on the king, I told myself, forcing my feet to proceed down the passage. He didn’t just think the king was sick, but thought magic must be implicated. Therefore, he knew more than he had told me about how that spell was cast.
I paused and listened again. There was no sound other than my own breathing. Even though Dominic knew something about the spell, I continued my reasoning, he still wanted it overcome. Therefore, he himself had not been responsible. I returned to a thought I had had long ago, that he was sheltering someone, most likely the queen. Could she have tried to put an evil spell on the king, which Dominic then wanted to overcome, even though he loved her too much to accuse her?
But Dominic might not know as much as he thought. He clearly believed, with the old wizard, that the north tower was still locked, and had had no inkling of the evil now settled in the cellars.
I forced my feet to start moving again, although at this point I was starting to feel what could only be a terminal illness, caused by black magic, sweeping through my body. This of course is the weakness of being a wizard; we are much more accessible to magic influences than ordinary people. Water splashed onto my socks with the next step; I had been following the passage slightly downhill, and the floor had gone from being damp to being flooded.
I murmured the spell that should have lifted me six inches above the water, to continue down the passage suspended in air. Nothing happened at all.
At this point, rationality lost. I turned and ran back toward daylight, the magic globe bouncing madly at the end of the string. At the door, I hesitated. I could not hear anything behind me, but I didn’t want whatever was in there coming out. I made myself gather up some of the debris from the first storeroom and stuffed it into the small opening in the iron door. I held it in place with the best magic lock I could manage.
With the sight of daylight before me, I was able to control my heartbeat enough to wait one more minute. I called, “Kitty, kitty, kitty,” not wanting to leave any cat trapped in the cellars. But when no cat appeared, I slammed the door, turned the iron key, and put an additional magic lock on the latch as well.
Back out in the narrow staircase, leaning against the stone wall, I slowly stopped feeling as though I were about to die. But in a minute even the staircase seemed oppressive, so I hurried back up the stairs. The smell of bread baking came to me from the kitchen like a benediction.
I didn’t want to return to my chambers right away but instead went to the great hall, telling myself I needed to return the key to Dominic but really in search of human company. The king and queen, along with several of the ladies, were seated around the fire, talking animately.
“Wizard!” called the king when he saw me. “We’ve just been making plans. How would you like to go visit the duchess?”
After a second in which I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about, I remembered the lady Maria once telling me that Yurt had, besides the king’s own castle, the castles of two counts and a duchess.
“I ought to visit my liege vassals more often,” said the king.
“The king and I met at the duchess’s castle,” the queen told me, smiling at him.
“I would be very interested in visiting the duchess,” I said. If Zahlfast was right (and I hoped he was, rather than believed he was), the king should now be safe from whatever black magic was lurking in the cellars. But no one else was safe. Until a supposedly fully-qualified wizard, me, could find a way to overcome that spell, it might be better if we all went visiting.
II
The duchess’s castle was closer than the city where we had gone to the harvest carnival, being only one long day’s ride away. Therefore we didn’t need the tents, and the pack horses were less burdened as we started out early on a frosty but sunny morning.
The king’s party was also much smaller, as most of the servants were not accompanying us.
I had talked to the queen about this. “Don’t you think it would be better if we brought everyone along?”
But she laughed. “The duchess won’t have nearly enough room for all of us. Her castle is smaller than the royal castle, and she has her own staff, of course. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were getting too attached to that saucy girl who brings you breakfast!”
It was bad enough being hopelessly in love with the queen without having her tease me about Gwen. I tried the constable instead.
“Don’t you think it might be better, while the king is gone, to send the servants away?”
He looked at me in amazement, as well he might, because the arrangement of the household staff was certainly not part of a royal wizard’s duties. For a minute I could see that he was about to resent my interference, but then he remembered that it was, after all, me.
“Usually when the royal household is away, I give most of the staff their vacation,” he said. “Some go to visit their families, although some of course stay here.”
“But I don’t want anyone to stay here.”
This was clearly going too far, even for a wizard who had already proved himself to have an odd sense of humor. “My principal responsibility,” the constable said with great dignity, “is the wellbeing of the royal castle of Yurt, including its people. My wife and I at any rate will not leave, certainly not on a wizard’s whim.”
It would have been hard to explain that I feared an evil influence was down in the cellars, especially as I had checked that morning and found my magic locks still in place. Since everyone in the castle, not just the king, seemed happy and we
ll, I tried to tell myself that there was no danger. The night before we left, I spent hours with my books until I found what I hoped was a suitably strong protective spell. I put it on the castle and its inhabitants before we left.
The Lady Maria rode next to me. I had noticed that, in the last few weeks, she had stopped wearing as much lace and ribbon. This morning she was wearing a conservatively-cut, dark green riding habit, and her golden hair, rather than tumbling in ringlets around her shoulders, was tied up into a bun on the back of her head.
But her laugh and her conversation had not changed at all. “I think I explained to you once,” she said, “that the queen’s mother and the duchess’s mother are cousins-or is it second cousins? When the old duke died in that terrible accident-I was just the tiniest girl then, but even so I remember it well-he left only a daughter to inherit. She grew into quite a beauty, I can tell you!”
“Does she look like the queen?” I asked, that being my standard for beauty.
“She does, a little,” said Maria almost reluctantly, and I knew her well enough to realize that, while she loved to discuss charm and beauty in the abstract, she didn’t like the implication that midnight hair could be more beautiful than golden.
“I’ll bet she had a number of suitors!” I said, knowing that was what she wanted me to say.
“She certainly did!” she replied, her good humor restored. “But she wouldn’t have any of them! She was too proud for any but the best, and maybe she hasn’t met the best yet! She’ll soon be getting old, however, so she may shortly have to lower her standards! Of course, she isn’t as old as me.”
I was flabbergasted. I had never before heard Maria admit that she might be old. Together with the pulled-back hair, this made me start to wonder if she had been affected by some variation of the spell that had nearly killed the king.
But her manner was unchanged. She continued all morning to tell me stories that I had already heard and to point out all the places in the landscape with any romantic associations.
“See that spire?” she said at one point. A sharply-pointed spire rose from behind a snow-sprinkled hill, half a mile back from the road. The hill nearly obscured the low tiled roof of its church. “That’s the Nunnery of Yurt. It’s made up of widows who grieve for their dead husbands, and of young girls who have tragically renounced the world with broken hearts.” I decided to try to ride with someone else that afternoon.
After our lunch break, which we took standing up because the half-frozen ground was too cold for sitting, I managed to position my horse next to Joachim’s, at the end of the procession. This, I thought, might be the best chance I had had to talk to him in weeks.
“I owe you an apology,” I said, starting there because this way he couldn’t move away or change the subject before I’d had a chance to say it. “I was horribly rude to you when the king was ill.”
I also probably should apologize for terrifying him with my dragon, but I was afraid of insulting him more by reminding him that he had believed in an illusion-even if he and the queen were the only people prepared to do something about it.
Joachim pulled up his horse slightly, so that we were soon riding fifty yards behind the rest of the party. Although he did not answer at once, he was clearly thinking over his response. Then he gave me a sideways glance from his enormous dark eyes that would in anyone else have been a look of amusement.
“You weren’t rude,” he said. “I needed someone to remind me of my responsibilities.” We rode for several minutes in silence, then he spoke again as though there had been no pause. “I think I had still been feeling inadequate from my meeting with the bishop.”
Since such a confession on his part seemed to call for something similar on mine, if I wanted to rebuild our friendship, I said, “Do you remember seeing the wizard in my chambers?”
He clearly did not.
“You might have seen him, just for a second, the day you stopped to tell me you were going down to the village to see the little girl.”
There was the slightest flicker of emotion across his face. “Yes. I remember seeing him now.”
“That was Zahlfast, one of my old teachers. He’d come to give me what he said was my first checkup.”
This time the chaplain actually did smile. “I thought you told me you wizards were left on your own, once you’d finished at the school.”
“Well, that’s what I’d thought. I guess it shows how mistaken a wizard can be. I think he meant to be encouraging, but by the time he left all my inadequacies had been made clear to me.”
“And are you therefore feeling paralyzed, almost fearing to act because you don’t want to turn to evil?” As he spoke, Joachim turned to face me so abruptly that he brought his horse’s head around as well. We had to stop and disentangle the bells on my horse’s harness from the harness on his. When we started again, the rest of the procession was far in front of us, and we pushed our mounts to start catching up.
At first I thought Joachim was accusing me of being paralyzed in the face of a threat to Yurt, but then I realized he was only speaking from his own experience. Someone whose own inadequacies had been pointed out very recently might indeed feel unworthy to plead with the saints.
“I told Zahlfast you’d saved the king’s life,” I said as we drew closer to the rest of the party and slowed down again.
“I myself didn’t save him,” he answered quickly, looking straight ahead. “My merits had nothing to do with it.” I should have realized that he’d say this. Since the saints could not be manipulated, one’s only hope was to have a pure and contrite heart, and a contrite heart wasn’t proud of its merits.
But then he said something else that surprised me. “What did Zahlfast say when you told him that?”
I stammered, not sure how to answer, but almost immediately decided on the truth. “He reminded me that wizards don’t talk very much about miracles, and that those who heal also have the power to sicken.”
It sounded even worse than I had expected it to sound. While I was trying to frame a new apology, he kicked his horse forward, not even looking at me again, and pulled into line next to the Lady Maria. Since he, like me, had not been at Yurt yet when the king and queen happened to meet for the first time at the duchess’s castle, she started to give him all the details. I was sure he had heard it all before; he had, after all, gone to visit the duchess with the royal party the first year he was in Yurt, while the king was still traveling at least short distances. But he listened intently, even smiling at the right places, and did not once look back at me.
The short early winter day had ended, and the sun was gone when we saw the lights blazing out from the duchess’s castle in the valley before us. The knights had lit lanterns so that we could see the increasingly icy road, although I myself thought that the wildly flickering shadows from the swaying lamps made it even harder to guide one’s way. We all kicked our horses and hurried down the last hill, bells ringing loudly. The bridge was down, and we surged across and into the courtyard.
Servants hurried forward to help us dismount, and the duchess’s constable took the bridle of the king’s horse. But the king waved away the servant at his stirrup and instead, with a look of intense concentration, rose slowly straight into the air, until he could swing his foot easily over the horse’s back, then just as slowly descended to stand on the cobblestones.
Very few of the people from the royal castle of Yurt, and certainly no one from this castle, had seen the king flying before, so there was a stunned silence before the applause broke out. The queen laughed with delight as she dismounted in the more normal manner and took his arm. His back straight and a not-very-well concealed grin of pride on his face, the king walked toward the wide doorway leading into the great hall.
I was about to follow him, extremely proud of my pupil, when I caught a baleful glare. It was Dominic, and he was glaring at me with eyes that were nearly red with fury. I didn’t know why, but I certainly didn’t need a second person furi
ous at me today, so I turned my face from him and hurried after the king and queen.
They stopped just inside the hall, and I, following closer than anyone else, nearly ran into them. Over their shoulders, I saw a woman advancing to meet them, the duchess.
She did indeed look a lot like her cousin, the queen, although the duchess was at least ten years older. Her hair too was black and her features beautifully shaped, but she did not have the queen’s smile, which always seemed to be hovering near her lips even when she was sober or thoughtful.
The duchess did the full bow. “Welcome to my castle, which is your castle, my liege lord and king.” And it was the full bow, not the curtsy that women normally performed. The duchess, in spite of her feminine features and the long hair braided into a graceful coif, was dressed like a man, in a man’s tunic and boots.
“Rise, my faithful subject,” said the king. He drew her up, his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her on both cheeks. The queen kissed her as well, but, I noted, not nearly as enthusiastically.
“And who is this?” the duchess said, peeking at me past their shoulders.
The queen brought me forward with a hand on my elbow. I was glad I was wearing my new velvet jacket. “This is our new royal wizard! He joined us this summer from the wizards’ school in the City.”
The duchess gave me a look of frank and highly interested appraisal, which startled me more than I wanted to admit; no woman had looked at me like that since- well, at all that I could remember. Fortunately, she appeared to like what she saw.
“I haven’t had a wizard in my duchy in years,” she said. “My father, the old duke, used to keep a wizard, but he had retired even before I inherited, and the old royal wizard of Yurt never deigned to visit me.”
“That’s why I wanted to bring him along,” said the king. “Wait until you see his illusions!”
Although I was naturally crushed to discover that I had been brought along as an exhibit rather than as a necessary member of the king’s personal retinue, I was too intrigued by the duchess to give this much thought. Back before I had entered the wizards’ school, the women I had met in the City who dressed like men had for the most part, and ironically I always thought, not liked men. But the way this woman had looked at me suggested otherwise.
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