The Witch & the Cathedral

by C. Dale Brittain

  “That had nothing to do with my merits,” he said, staring straight ahead. “Besides, it was so long ago I doubt they remember, even if they heard about it in the first place.”

  When there was that note in his voice, I knew better than to argue with him. Instead I said, “I think you’d be a very good bishop.”

  The edge of his mouth twitched in what might have been a wry smile. “The good opinion of a wizard is not what I need.”

  I knew him too well to worry that this might be an insult. “At least if you were bishop you wouldn’t have to worry about someone else’s disapproval if you needed help with another magical problem.”

  He leaned forward, resting his forehead on his fists for a moment, then shot me one of his piercing looks. “I realize wizardry does not demand the same level of spiritual commitment as religion, but maybe I can explain it to you. I know my own weaknesses. My fears of being unworthy are not a meaningless or automatic response. Do you remember the very first day I met you, when you had just become Royal Wizard of Yurt? You were talking about the land of wild magic and said that you had never been there because you were ‘not yet worthy of the voyage.’ Do you remember?”

  “Yes, I might well have said that.”

  “Have you been there yet?”

  “Well, no. They used to have field trips from the wizards’ school, but I was never invited to go. I guess I could have gone myself any time in the last nineteen years, but somehow I haven’t.” Wild magic had been to meet me once too often; I had no desire to go meet it.

  “Then even you, with the audacity wizardry gives a man, know what it is like to feel unworthy.”

  Actually I had always had an excellent idea of what it feels like to be unworthy, or at least incompetent, but I had never let it bother me.

  He sat back as though he had just explained something important. I still thought he would be an excellent bishop. “If they do elect you,” I said, “I’ll go to the land of wild magic. Maybe I can find the Queen of the Fairies and make her stop sending her fairies to your cathedral.”

  Joachim said nothing but just looked at me.

  “Or,” I added, warming to the topic, “you and I could try to arrange better relations between wizardry and the Church, so that bishops aren’t always warning young priests and old wizards warning young wizards against each other.”

  I was pleased to see that this idea distracted him. He played with his empty wine glass, thinking about it.

  “There are three who rule the world,” I quoted, “the Church, the wizards, and the aristocracy.”

  “And the greatest of these is the Church,” he said absently.

  “Hey! They never added that when I learned the proverb!”

  This actually made him smile. “Did they tell you that the greatest were the wizards? It is a good saying. The Church is concerned with the souls of men and women in this world and their salvation in the next, and wizards with keeping the peace and keeping dragons away.”

  “And the aristocracy with law-giving and administering justice, with wars—when we let them—and with the extremely vital mission of providing the income for priests and wizards. We don’t actually say that wizards are the greatest, you know, even if we are; after all, we’ve always served the kings.”

  “That leaves the peasants and the artisans and the merchants.”

  “Of course they don’t have time for anything as foolish as ruling the world,” I said. “They’re too busy producing what everybody else needs.”

  Joachim smiled again and worked the cork out of another bottle. I was delighted to see him feeling less bitter. Maybe sometime he’d even want to go flying again. “But we are not discussing social theory,” he said. “You’re trying to cheer me up, and it may be the sin of despondency to resist such cheering, even from a wizard.” He filled our glasses; he had switched from white wine to red, and it glowed the color of rubies in the candlelight. “I still often feel like a callow priest fresh out of the seminary, but maybe even the most powerful men feel that way sometimes.”

  I remembered him having an air of mature gravity from the day I met him and very much doubted he had ever been callow and shallow—unlike the young priest who was now chaplain of Yurt. But I did not mention this, and also did not mention that he seemed to have done a very good job of overcoming the same fears of unworthiness when he was first invited to join the cathedral chapter.

  “Lately I’ve found myself wishing,” I told him instead, “that we could go back to Yurt the way it was when we first arrived there.”

  “Of course you have to remember,” he said thoughtfully, “that ‘Yurt as it first was’ is different for me than for you. I had already been royal chaplain for several years when you arrived. I remember the queen’s old nurse living in the chambers they later gave you.”

  I had never quite gotten over the feeling that I would have been much more awe-inspiring in a dungeon or a tower, but I very much liked my chambers in the royal castle, looking out into the courtyard through a tangle of climbing roses. It was by now far too late anyway to become frightening and mysterious.

  “Speaking of the queen,” added Joachim, “I meant to tell you. I received a letter from her yesterday.”

  I was jealous at once. I hadn’t had a letter from her since the first week I had been in the City.

  “I had not heard from her in months, maybe a year, but she wants to find out what she needs to do to reserve the cathedral.”

  “The cathedral?”

  “Yes. She is thinking of marrying again.”

  I stared at him, unable to answer. I was devastated. The old Romney woman, in prophesying that I would fall deeply in love, had been almost twenty years too late. I remembered my wine glass just in time not to drop it. “But she can’t get married!” I finally managed to gasp.

  “Why shouldn’t she? She has been a widow for some six years, so remarriage would show no disrespect to the king’s memory. Doesn’t Paul come of age this summer? Once he is eighteen her regency will be over, and she will be free to leave Yurt if she wishes.”

  This was even worse. “She can’t leave Yurt!”

  Joachim looked at me quizzically. “You seem very disturbed by this.”

  “I am disturbed,” I said desperately. “I’ve never told you this before, but I love the queen.”

  “Of course. Everyone who knows her must love her. That is why we should welcome anything that makes her happy.”

  I thought, not for the first time, that it was a good thing he was a priest.

  “You can see her letter if you like. She did not tell me the name of the man she is thinking of marrying.”

  He got it from his desk. It was a real letter, not one of the tiny rectangles that were all the carrier pigeons could handle. She must have found someone heading to the cathedral city to carry her letter by hand. I read it avidly, looking for hidden clues as to why she should suddenly have made such a bizarre decision, but there was nothing in it besides what the dean had already told me. I found myself remembering various men over the years who had looked admiringly at the queen, all of whom I now detested. Joachim was right that everyone loved the queen, and not everyone was a priest.

  “I’ll have to go back to Yurt at once.” When Joachim gave me another puzzled look, I added lamely, “They’ll need the Royal Wizard to help prepare for the wedding festivities.”

  “I had hoped you could stay at least a few days. If she is only just now inquiring about the availability of the cathedral, she cannot be planning to marry in less than six months.”

  He was right, of course. And if I had left the wizards’ school earlier than planned to help out an old friend, I couldn’t very well abandon him after only twelve hours in town.

  Joachim tipped up the bottle. “This is almost empty; we might as well finish it. There is a guest house down the street we use for visitors to the cathedral. Or you can stay here with me; I have an extra room.”

  “Thank you. I’d be very happy to stay
here.” I sipped the last of my wine, listening to the wind. The moon outside the window kept appearing and disappearing behind shreds of clouds. I hadn’t mentioned that mental touch up on the tower, and I was still not sure how real it had been, but if someone was practicing magic with evil intent—or if there really was priestly intrigue against organized wizardry here in Caelrhon—I felt much safer with Joachim than I would somewhere down the street.

  But how could I go on as Royal Wizard of Yurt if the queen moved away, married to somebody else?

  PART TWO - THE QUEEN

  I

  I stayed with Joachim for four days. The cantor Norbert avoided me pointedly, the rest of the cathedral priests ignored me, and none of them showed any sign of trying to destroy me.

  Every night I went out to check for magical influences on the new construction, and every night I found nothing. Although in the evenings the dean and I caught up on some of the conversations we had not had since he left Yurt, there was little for me to do during the day except fret about the queen. I did not even feel again the fleeting mental touch which I now concluded I had imagined.

  “Telephone me if anything else happens,” I told Joachim as I prepared to leave. “But I really do think the magician or whoever was responsible must have been warned by the Romneys. Once he realized a wizard had arrived in town, he decided it was safest to stop his mischief.”

  “I would certainly like to think so. Give my best wishes to everyone in Yurt.”

  Though I left the quiet cobbled street behind the cathedral on foot, once I had made my way through the city streets and out the wide gates to where the Romneys had been camped I soared upward for the flight home. The whole way, I was trying to imagine what could have possessed the queen to want to marry again.

  I came over a stretch of thick forest and saw before me the fields and castle of the kingdom of Yurt. It always looked from the air like a perfect child’s toy of a castle, with its whitewashed turreted walls and the pennants snapping from the towers. As I swooped down I noticed someone working in the old king’s rose garden, just outside the moat, so I landed there.

  She saw me descending and came to greet me. I was flabbergasted. It was the queen, and for the first time in six years she was not wearing black.

  “You’re home!” she said with delight. She had a smile that lit up her whole face and made whoever saw it want to smile too. “When your books arrived from the City, I knew you couldn’t be far behind!”

  “I’ve been down in the cathedral city of Caelrhon, visiting the dean for a few days,” I said, wondering how I could possibly have stayed away as long as three months.

  She gestured toward the garden. “As you can see, I was pruning the king’s roses. But I’ve just finished. Shall we go inside?”

  The queen swung the gate shut and slipped one arm through mine, holding her gardening gloves and pruning shears in the other hand. She was wearing a very simple, but also undeniably very bright red dress. Red had always gone well with her complexion and her midnight hair. Although her hair now had an attractive white streak in it, red still suited her. She was, as she had always been, the most beautiful woman I had ever met.

  I squeezed her arm with mine and said, “It’s good to be home.”

  “If you’ve seen the dean, maybe he’s told you my news,” she said gaily as we crossed the drawbridge into the castle. “I’m thinking of marrying again!”

  I realized from the thud of my heart that I had been hoping for four days that it was not true. But hearing her talk about it so blithely made it real in a way that seeing the words on paper had not. “Who are you marrying?” I asked and was surprised to hear my voice sound almost normal.

  “His name is Vincent,” she said, again with that smile but this time not directed at me. “I’m sure you’ve met him, as he’s visited here several times over the years. He’s the younger son of a king—in fact the king of Caelrhon, where you’ve just been.”

  I did indeed remember Vincent, well enough to detest him now. “But a king’s younger son!” I protested. “He is not worthy of you, my lady!” I stopped myself just in time from adding that he was much too young for her.

  “You forget that I myself was only a castellan’s daughter before I became queen of Yurt,” she said with a laugh. Then she answered my unspoken comment as well by saying, “With him I feel almost like a girl again! Vincent is very different from King Haimeric, but I’m sure he would be delighted to see me happy again.”

  She was at least right, I thought gloomily, about the old king of Yurt. He would have approved of the marriage even though I did not. “What do your parents think?”

  “They’re pleased, of course. But you ask,” she added with another laugh, “as if I were still a girl too young to know my own mind!”

  It was not hard to think of her as a girl in spite of the white streak in her hair. She gave a quick little whirl, almost a dance step, and said, “Vincent’s coming tomorrow so you can renew acquaintances. Your chambers should be ready. The constable put your books inside, but he didn’t unpack them—he was afraid his eye might fall on a spell accidentally and he would turn himself into a frog!” And she went off laughing at her own joke.

  I was gloomily reshelving books when I heard a knock at the door. “Come in!” I called, hoping it was the queen come to say her plan to marry Vincent was just another joke, and in rather poor taste.

  But it was Prince Paul, royal heir to Yurt. He seemed to have shot up several inches in three months and had to duck through the doorway. “Welcome home! I just heard you’d arrived. Did you have a pleasant stay in the City?” His good manners did not mask the intensity of whatever had brought him here. I had barely begun a congenial response when he added, “I need to talk to you privately. Can you come for a ride?”

  Paul loved riding and was very good at it. I thought ruefully that I was going to be made stiff after months of not being on a horse, especially at the pace I was sure he would set. He led the way across the courtyard with rapid strides; his legs still had the slenderness of a boy’s, but they were appreciably longer than mine.

  In a few minutes we were mounted and riding out across the bridge, me on an old white mare and Paul on a gelding. “I think Mother’s going to get me a horse for my eighteenth birthday,” he said in a low voice, smiling in anticipation. Temporarily, his other concerns seemed forgotten. “I heard her talking to the constable about horse breeders and about the horse fairs this summer. They didn’t know I was listening so I had to slip away, but I’m fairly sure she knows I want a roan stallion.”

  “Your mother is a good judge of horses,” I said. “She used to ride a magnificent black stallion before you were born.”

  “I know,” he said regretfully. “I still don’t understand why she sold him. But then,” with a grin, “I’ve never liked black horses that well anyway.” Paul kicked his horse to a faster pace. He was bareheaded, and the wind swirled his hair. When he was young his hair had been so blond it was almost white, and even now it formed a golden halo around his head.

  We rode for a mile, more rapidly than I would have liked but not as rapidly as I had feared, down the hill from the castle and then along a deep tree-shaded lane by the meadows. Larks soared over the long grass, and in the distance I could see people starting to harvest the hay.

  Paul tied his reins to a branch and threw himself down on the grassy verge. “No one will overhear us,” he said, intense once again.

  I reminded myself as I eased out of the saddle that I couldn’t treat him like a boy. Legally he would be of age in another three months, and with his mother’s fire and his father’s sweetness of temperament he would be a formidable king. If I let his boyish enthusiasm for horses remind me too strongly that I had given him horsy-rides on my knee not long ago, I was never going to have his confidence. “What’s bothering you?” I asked, seating myself beside him. “Is it your mother’s remarriage?”

  “Yes,” he said gloomily, lying down with his hands un
der his head. “It wasn’t hard to guess, was it?” He jerked back up to a sitting position. “How can she do it? Why would she want to marry anyone, after Father? If she has to marry somebody, why does it have to be Prince Vincent?”

  Since I had been asking myself exactly these questions, I found it difficult to answer.

  Paul was now examining one of his riding boots, rubbing his thumb on a scrape. “I even tried talking to Aunt Maria,” he said. “If Mother remarries it will affect the entire kingdom.” He shifted his attention to the other boot. “But she just said something foolish about how a woman like her deserves her happiness.”

  As I had been about to say something similar, I was glad I had not spoken. Instead I asked, “What are you afraid will happen to the kingdom?”

  “Vincent will move here,” said Paul from the depths of despair, “and nothing will ever be the same again.”

  “You mean your mother isn’t planning to leave Yurt?” I asked, trying with only moderate success to keep the excitement out of my voice.

  “Why should she?” said Paul, ignoring my tone if he even heard it. “She’s a queen, and back home in his kingdom he’s just the young prince. He’ll come here and change everything.”

  “But there’s a limit to what he’ll be able to do. After all, you’re going to be king, not he.”

  “I don’t mean he’s going to introduce bad laws or anything,” Paul said in irritation. “But we’ve been so happy and comfortable here, and now everything will be different.”

  I observed with interest that nostalgia was perfectly possible even for someone thirty years younger than I. The afternoon breeze was a caress. The thought that the queen would not be leaving was so cheering that it was hard to be properly sympathetic.

  “So what can we do?” He looked straight at me for the first time, waiting for an answer. He had the same brilliant green eyes as his mother.

  Short of assassinating Prince Vincent I had no good suggestions. I was still unable to speak reassuringly of how the marriage was really best for the queen, especially since this was apparently what everybody else had been telling him. “I honestly don’t know, Paul. I was just as upset as you are when I found out.”