I went out onto the drawbridge, although I was cold without a coat. The morning sun glittered on the icy snow. I watched until the two riders disappeared into the edge of the forest and felt very glad that I was not a priest.
I hurried back inside and went in search of the constable. I found him in the kitchen talking to the cook. “Is something wrong?” she said, seeing me over his shoulder. “I know Gwen says that you always like crullers, but I’d only made a few this morning. She should be back from her vacation this afternoon.”
“It’s not about the crullers,” I said, although another time it would have been. I didn’t even mention how stale the donut I had gotten had tasted. “I wanted to talk to the constable.”
“All right,” he said, turning to smile at me. “Well, we can order whatever we don’t have,” he said over his shoulder to the cook. “Just start making a list of what you’ll need. We can talk more later.” Turning back to me, he said, “Shall we go to my chambers?”
I had never actually been in the constable’s chambers, and I immediately agreed, although if I had expected to see the paraphernalia of evil I was sadly disappointed. His chambers, in fact, looked a lot like mine, without the rows of books on magic. Instead he had big leather-bound manuscript books that I guessed were the castle accounts and inventories. There were rows of plants inside on the windowsills, and the furniture was all painted blue and white.
The constable’s wife was mopping the stone floor, the outer door open, as we came up. “Oh, excuse me, sir,” she said, putting the bucket outside. She ran to close the bedroom door, but not before I had caught a glimpse of a wide, turned-back bed, the white pillows and comforter fluffed out to air. “I’ll just go over to the kitchen for a moment, if you want to talk in private,” she said.
I realized the chief difficulty with my theory of the constable having sold his soul to the devil was the constable’s wife. It appeared on the face of it much more likely that he had given himself to her, heart and soul, many years ago, and had been happy enough with the arrangement that he wanted nothing else, or at least nothing else that a demon could promise.
“It makes such a happy difference having the king well again,” he said. “But part of that difference is that we on the staff are kept much busier! The king told me this morning that he wants to have a big party here for Christmas. The cook will have to start planning immediately, as it’s only three weeks away, and we’ll have to send in our order by the pigeons in a day or two if we need to order anything special from the City. He wants the duchess and both counts to come, which means we’ll have to clean out all the spare rooms to have them ready. I can’t remember when he last had so many people at Christmas!”
This was the difficulty with all my theories about anyone in the castle. Everyone always seemed so good-hearted and happy-except for Dominic-that it was impossible to suspect them of practicing black magic. I would have concluded I was imagining the whole thing, except that both Zahlfast and the chaplain, in their own way, had sensed it too.
“The king must be feeling very social,” I said, “to be planning to have a large party here when he’s barely gotten back from visiting the duchess.” Privately I wondered what the queen thought of this plan. “But I wanted to ask you something.” It was probably pointless to ask, but since I had interrupted him anyway I might as well. “Are you sure you don’t have a key to the cellars?”
He looked surprised, as well he might, and took the heavy bunch of keys from his belt. “I’m quite sure I don’t,” he said, flipping through them. “Dominic took the key some years ago, when we decided just to lock the cellars up rather than trying to use them any more. They always were very damp. I’m not sure we ever had a duplicate key, because before then the door had always stood open.” I certainly saw no key on his ring that matched the rusty iron one I had borrowed from Dominic. “Why do you ask?”
I had been afraid he would say that. “I’d been thinking it might be possible to dry the cellars out and use them for my own purposes,” I improvised. “We wizards need rooms that won’t be hurt if one of our experiments in fire and light goes a little astray. I understand the old wizard had the north tower, but that he didn’t want the tower room used again, so I thought the cellars might be a possibility. I’d looked at them a little the other week, but I hated to bother Dominic for his key again, so I …”
The constable smiled knowingly. “I understand. You and Prince Dominic don’t always see eye to eye, and you’re almost afraid of him now. Don’t be insulted!” seeing me about to interrupt. “It’s not your fault. He’s a hard man for anyone to get along with, as well I know.”
I nodded, not wanting to say anything for fear I’d start laughing. It made a much better excuse for talking to the constable rather than Dominic about the cellar key than anything I could have invented. But this made me think again that I ought to suspect Dominic. Suspecting him of evil intent, however, seemed so easy that I was worried that my personal feelings might cloud my judgment.
“But are you sure you really want to try the cellars anyway?” said the constable. “We’d hoped you’d find the chambers we gave you satisfactory” (The old nurse doubtless found them delightful! I commented to myself), “but if you need something more we should at least be able to find you a room that’s drier than the cellar. Could you wait, however, until after Christmas?”
The constable looked really troubled that he would be too busy to find me a good room for my experiments in light and fire during the next three weeks. Now I supposed I would have to find some such experiments to do. Remembering that I was keeping him from his work, I reassured him that January would be fine, and rose to my feet.
“Wait a minute, sir, if you don’t mine,” the constable said, and I sat down again. “There’s something I wanted to ask you.” He frowned and looked away. “When the king told me the people he wanted to invite for Christmas, he mentioned the duchess and the two counts, as I’d already said … But he also said he wanted to invite the old wizard.”
“Yes?” I prompted when he fell silent.
“I wanted to ask if that was all right,” the constable said, still not looking at me. “He lives very near here, down in the forest, and the king thought he would love coming up to the castle for Christmas, rather than spending it alone, that is, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course I won’t mind.”
The constable looked up then, smiling. “I’m sorry to bother you, then, but one hears rumors of how young and old royal wizards are always at odds, and even though I’d hinted to you when you first came that you might visit him, I knew you hadn’t, so though I’d hoped that in your case …”
I interrupted before he could make his statement any more involved. “Actually, I have visited him two or three times. We’ve probably become as good friends as old and young wizards ever do.”
The constable was positively beaming now. “Well! That’s very good news. I hadn’t wanted to pry into what you’d done, knowing that a wizard needs his privacy, but I’m delighted to hear that! Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He was whistling as he took down an account book while I went back out.
I paused in the center of the courtyard, trying to think whom I should suspect next of having a den of evil magic in the cellar, since it was so difficult to suspect the constable. The constable’s wife, the cook, the stable boy, and the kitchen maid, the only other people who had been in the castle when we arrived to find it dark, seemed even less viable alternatives. I briefly considered but rejected the possibility that Dominic had put everyone to sleep from far away. I didn’t know of any spell that would do such a thing from a distance, and could think of no reason why he would want to do so. Besides, I always kept coming back to the fact that Dominic was the one who had first warned me against the evil spell on the castle.
I shivered and was starting back toward my chambers when I was startled by seeing a tall, thin form standing motionless just inside the castle gates. “Joachim’s back already,�
� I thought in surprise. Then the man turned to look at me and I saw it was not the chaplain. It was someone I had never seen before.
He did not in fact look like Joachim at all, except that he too had enormous black eyes, in a face that was almost inhuman in its pallor and expressionlessness. He stared at me without blinking.
“Excuse me,” I said, “can I help you? Have you just arrived?” For a moment I thought it might be a new member of the castle staff, signed on by the constable while the royal party was away, and arriving to take up his duties this morning.
But the stranger turned away again without speaking and, with long strides, started toward the south tower.
I went after him, but he had a large lead, and he disappeared around the tower’s base. When I came up, there was no sign of him.
This, I thought, was very odd. There were several doors he could have gone into, so his disappearance was not very mysterious, but no stranger coming to a castle should flee before the royal wizard.
III
I went back to the constable’s chambers and knocked. He was working on the accounts as his wife finished her mopping. Both looked surprised to see me again so soon.
“Did you hire a new member of the staff while we were gone?” I asked. “There’s a stranger here, someone I’ve never seen before, and when I tried to talk to him he went across the courtyard and into a doorway.”
“I certainly haven’t hired anyone new,” said the constable. “It must be a visitor. But I don’t know why he wouldn’t talk to you.”
I had been concentrating so much on fears of black magic that I realized I had been overlooking something obvious: a thief sneaking into the castle. “Do you think it could be someone trying to steal something?”
“Let’s hope not,” said the constable, putting his account book back and jumping up. “We’d better find him.”
We checked the doors leading off the corner of the courtyard behind the south tower. These were rooms that were rarely used, and only one of the doors was unlocked. The constable opened the others with his bunch of keys, to make sure the thief had not gone in and looked the door behind him, but all the rooms were empty.
“I’ll get Dominic,” I said. “He should be able to help us.”
While the constable headed toward the main store rooms to see if they had been disturbed, I located Dominic in the great hall, talking to the king and queen. “Can you help the constable and me?” I asked. “I’ve just seen a stranger in the courtyard, and we’re worried it might be a thief. He ran away when I spoke to him.”
There were advantages of having someone large and burly beside you when looking for someone who might be dangerous. Dominic came at once, but I felt uneasy as I saw the queen putting on her shawl with a smile of excitement. I knew she loved hunting, but I didn’t think she should be hunting this person.
Nevertheless, she came with us. We met the constable in the middle of the courtyard. “I haven’t seen any sign of break-in or tampering with the locks,” said the constable. “Maybe the wizard frightened him off.”
“There he is!” I said. At the far end of the courtyard, near the kitchens, the tall thin form appeared for a moment and then disappeared again into a doorway. We all ran that direction, but when we arrived he again was gone.
“He can’t have gone far,” said Dominic. “We’ll have him in a minute.”
But he was wrong. All morning we pursued the stranger, and all morning he eluded us. Sometimes we thought he was gone and sat down to rest, only to see him again, striding across the far end of the courtyard, or standing on the parapet far above us, or looking out a window with his enormous black eyes. Dominic recruited the rest of the knights, and as the servants came back to the castle some of them as well joined in the pursuit.
I was glad the others saw him too, or I would have begun to worry that I was losing my mind.
“Are you sure you aren’t playing one of your tricks on us, Wizard?” a knight asked in one of the pauses in which we thought we had lost him. We were sitting in a row on a bench in the courtyard, panting in spite of the cold air. The queen was the only one who still looked eager for the chase.
“I’m certainly not responsible,” I said. “And I don’t think there are any other wizards near here who might try something like this.” But I did consider the possibility that this person might only be an illusion.
A few minutes later, the queen spotted a dark head peering down at us from the parapet. I probed quickly with my mind to see if this person was indeed real, furious at whoever might have pulled such a trick.
A wizard can normally only meet directly the mind and thoughts of another wizard, one who is willing for such contact, even though the Lady Maria had once been able to hear my thoughts. But one should still be able to find and recognize another mind, to tell at least if it is the mind of a man or a woman, reality or illusion.
I found the stranger’s mind and almost fell over backwards with the impact. This was no illusion. The man’s mind was looking for my own, ready to meet it, and his was totally evil. The distant, oblique touch of evil I had been feeling for months was no longer distant; it was here.
The rest ran after him, but I broke my mind away from that contact and sank back on the bench. Where had he come from? Why had he appeared in the castle now? What did he want with us?
I heard a step immediately next to me and whirled around. But it was not the stranger, only Gwen and Jon, coming toward me hand-in-hand.
“We wanted to tell you first, sir,” said Gwen. “We’ve gotten engaged!”
It took me several moments to recover my composure enough to be able to say, “Congratulations!” without fearing it would sound like the gaspings of a fish. I decided it would be tasteless to ask if Jon had resorted to the long-threatened love potion or if he had won her with his own unaided charms; I assumed the latter.
“I know you may be a little surprised, after a few things I’d said,” said Gwen with a smile up at Jon. “But when all of you left for the duchess’s castle, Jon asked if I wanted to spend my vacation with him, visiting his mother, and I said I would. We worked everything out pretty quickly, then! Now, we’ll have to tell the constable and get his permission to stay on once we’re married. We’ll want the chaplain to marry us in the castle chapel, of course.”
“Of course,” I said inanely.
“I just wanted to say something,” Jon interjected. “A couple of times, sir, I was jealous of your attentions toward Gwen. I know it sounds silly, and I’m really embarrassed about it now, so I just wanted to apologize.”
“That’s quite all right,” I said, feeling even more inane and watching the courtyard beyond them for a tall thin, form.
“Well, I’m glad you don’t hold it against me,” said Jon with a grin. “I told my mother all about our glass telephones. I told her I’d let her know as soon as we had them working!”
“Yes, indeed,” I said, standing up. I thought I saw a flicker of motion and wanted to investigate.
“We won’t keep you, sir,” said Gwen. “And I’ll still be bringing you your breakfast in the morning.”
“In that case,” I said in my gravest voice, “I want you to know that the girl who brought me breakfast this morning brought me a stale donut. And the tea was cold.”
This sent both Gwen and Jon into gales of laughter, and they went off, still holding hands, while I started walking as quietly as possible down the courtyard.
Here there were outside staircases leading up to some of the ladies’ chambers. The angle of the sun was such that I was dazzled, looking up toward the chamber windows, shading my eyes and blinking. But between two blinks, I thought I saw the door of the Lady Maria’s chamber opening and closing.
I ran up the stairs two at a time, rapped on the door, and opened it without waiting for an answer.
She was sitting by the window, sewing something lacy and pink. It appeared to be something a man shouldn’t see, so I carefully kept my eyes from it.
She was, quite naturally, very startled. “What is it? What’s happening?”
“Did someone just come in here?”
“No! Of course not,” she said, staring at me with wide blue eyes.
I did not believe her. But I saw no one there now, and I couldn’t call her a liar to her face. “Excuse me, then,” I said and backed out the door.
I scanned the courtyard from the landing but saw nothing. I refused to believe that the Lady Maria was acting from evil intent. I had touched her mind when we were experimenting with the telephones, even if very briefly, and I thought I should be able to tell if she had embraced the powers of darkness. But how did she know the stranger, and why was she lying?
I went slowly down the outside stairs, shivering again; I never had gotten my coat. Maria might perhaps be trying to shield somebody. She had told me she had “requested” certain magic favors, and I presumed she had requested them from someone in the castle. It would be that person, then, who had enlisted the stranger’s help in practicing black magic. I still had no idea who the stranger was, but I was suddenly convinced I knew who had wanted to cast the evil spell on the castle.
It had to be the queen. Ever since I had met her and had fallen in love with her, I had refused to harbor any suspicions against her, but there was no rational reason why I shouldn’t. The Lady Maria, even if she guessed that her beloved niece was mixing dark supernatural powers with her magic spells, would never allow anyone else to suspect her. There still seemed to be no easy explanation why the queen had married the king, unless she hoped in a few years to be a widowed queen, able to rule Yurt as she wished, never again having to fear being married off to someone she detested.
There was a cry of, “There he is!” from the far side of the castle, and the group of pursuers shot into view. The queen was in the lead, her skirts and shawl billowing. Her long black hair had come unpinned and was flying out behind her. Dominic, the constable, and a group of knights ran close beside her. In another context, I would have found it hilarious.
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