C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 05 Read online

  “We’ve only ever once had a dragon here in Yurt,” I said, “years and years ago, before the king was even born. It almost killed me.” For a number of reasons, I did not think the details appropriate for her.

  But instead of asking me more, she jumped up, listening with an eager expression. “I hear a swordfight!”

  My heart gave an abrupt thump, but the faint sound of swords during the day, carried into the castle from outside, was perfectly normal. “Someone’s practicing,” I said. “Do you want to go see?”

  Antonia ran ahead, chestnut-colored braids bouncing against the back of her blue dress. On the grass outside we found King Paul and Hildegarde, fencing with swords and light shields.

  In a leather tunic and men’s leggings, her long blond hair tied back and eyes flashing, Hildegarde had a magnificent figure. She was as tall as the king, well muscled but not the least bit unfeminine. I would have found the sight of her before me highly distracting, but Paul apparently did not. He concentrated on his fighting, moving lightly, landing all his blows on her shield while deftly parrying the strokes she rained less discriminately on him. For ten minutes they circled each other, fighting while more and more of the staff came out of the castle to watch.

  “Very good,” the king said as Hildegarde got an unexpected advantage for a moment and forced him to retreat a few steps. “But don’t drop your defense,” he continued, his sword moving constantly as he spoke. “Because if you do—” and with a sudden twist he jerked the blade from her hand.

  Antonia was watching open-mouthed. I doubted a seamstress’s house in town offered anything like this much excitement. Hildegarde dipped her head and lowered her shield. “That stung,” she said, flexing the fingers of her sword hand. “I think you got in a lucky blow.”

  “In part, of course, I did,” said Paul, pushing back sweaty hair and ignoring his audience. “I’ve had a lot more experience. But in part I’m just stronger than you are. Your footwork is fine, your stamina is fine, and your reach is longer than a lot of men, but you just don’t have the upper-body strength you’d need.”

  “Father keeps telling me the same thing,” she said glumly, retrieving her sword.

  Paul smiled and put an arm casually across her shoulders, as though she had been a youth in knighthood training rather than a stunningly well-constructed young woman. “I think it’s time we got cleaned up for dinner. I’ll try to think of some exercises for you to build your muscles.”

  At dinner my daughter demonstrated excellent manners, sitting beside me with a copy of Thaumaturgy A to Z bringing her up to table level. Afterwards I took her to the twins’ suite—Hildegarde had been transformed back into a modestly-attired aristocratic lady for dinner—and told them to make sure Antonia got to bed soon.

  King Paul was waiting at the door of my chambers when I returned. “I’d like to talk to you, Wizard,” he said, frowning.

  Good. This was my opportunity to impart some wisdom—if I could only think how to tell my liege lord diplomatically that he had been behaving like a fool. Acting in front of the staff as if he did not notice that Hildegarde was not a boy was perhaps insufficient cause for comment by itself, but I hadn’t forgotten him allowing the watchman to attack him in good earnest. I pressed my palm against the magic door lock and let him in, leaving the door open since it was such a pleasant June evening.

  Paul flopped down on my couch and stretched long legs out before him. “You know, Wizard,” he said, “sometimes it seems that you’re almost the only person in the castle not trying to get me married.”

  “Married?” This was certainly a different topic.

  “My Aunt Maria and half the ladies in court seem to bring the topic up every day. Mother’s the worst, of course.” Even his frown could not obscure the fact that Paul was extremely handsome, golden-haired, superbly muscled, with his mother’s emerald eyes and ready smile and his own grace and confidence in everything he did. “For the longest time she was trying to marry me to the daughter of King Lucas of Caelrhon. Not that Mother—unlike Aunt Maria!—ever said anything explicitly. But have you noticed how many times in the last year the little princess has been invited to the castle? And there were always hints, suggestions that now that I was king it was time to start giving some thought to the heir who would one day be king after me.”

  “And you don’t like the princess?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing to like! I’m sure she’ll be fine when she grows up, but it’s quite a stretch calling her a woman rather than a child. How could I possibly be interested in someone like that?”

  “It would certainly make sense to your mother,” I suggested, “forging anew a dynastic tie between the twin kingdoms of Yurt and Caelrhon. After all, her own husband is the younger brother of King Lucas.”

  Paul pulled a jeweled-handled knife from his belt and flipped it into the air, caught it, flipped it up and caught it again. I had never been quite sure how much he approved of his mother’s second marriage, but that was not what was bothering him now. “I thought a king was supposed to be able to do whatever he wanted,” he said gloomily. But then he abruptly smiled for the first time since entering my chambers. “But I can keep on with my horses. I’ve got a dozen foals sired by Bonfire now, and I’m going to backbreed some of the fillies to him. The stables of Yurt will one day be famous.”

  “And you’ve been able to do a lot for educating the children of Yurt.” I knew that Paul had, from his own resources, laid out a great deal in addition to the amount the royal treasury had always expended on books and teachers’ salaries in the schools scattered across the kingdom.

  He waved this away as barely worth mentioning. “I guess I just don’t want to feel that everyone considers me a stallion myself, interesting only if I’m fathering the heir to the throne.”

  The topic of fatherhood always made me feel as though my ears were burning. Traditionally wizards neither marry nor have children, being considered wedded to institutionalized magic. Although I had managed to carry on as Royal Wizard of Yurt in the five years since Antonia was born without either Paul or the wizards’ school learning she was my daughter, this was a charade I could not continue indefinitely. Part of my decision to bring Antonia to Yurt was a vague feeling that once she was here I might find a way to resolve the issue.

  The king did not seem to notice my confusion. “I think I finally made Mother understand that I’m not about to marry a thirteen-year-old girl, but rather than giving me a little peace she invited the duchess’s daughters to come visit! I’m sure she thought she was very subtle, being away with her husband at the royal court of Caelrhon while the twins were here, so as not to appear to be putting any pressure on me, but it’s still obvious why she invited them. I thought the three of us, the twins and I, had made it clear years ago that none of us wanted to marry each other, but apparently we’re going to have to do it all over again.”

  “Are you quite so sure they wouldn’t want to marry you?” I asked.

  Paul crossed his booted legs and smiled. “Of course not. We’ve known each other all our lives. Neither one of them wants to marry anyone. Celia just wants to study her Bible, and Hildegarde intends to become a knight.”

  This was news to me, though maybe it shouldn’t have been. “But women can’t be knights!” Or, for that matter, wizards, I added to myself. But Antonia had said she was going to be a wizard.

  Paul laughed. “Try telling that to Hildegarde. I’ve never had any luck changing her mind.”

  So far I hadn’t been able to work in any discussion of the fact that a king without an heir should not imperil himself for a joke. But fathers, I told myself, had to act responsibly even if no one else did. “Aren’t there any adult princesses who would consider marrying you, even if the twins won’t?” I asked. “After all—”

  He didn’t give me a chance to finish. “Of course there are, Wizard,” he said, looking at me levelly. “Last winter, when I spent several months in the great City by the sea with those re
latives of Mother’s, there were ladies enough who would have been more than willing to marry me or, for that matter, do anything else I wanted.” He shook his head in disapproval—or a good imitation. “Incomprehensible, of course,” which I thought showed a remarkable lack of insight. “Not a few of them even had royal blood! I expect wizards don’t get proposals like that, so you won’t know how startling it can be.”

  I prudently kept silent.

  “So of course there are women of appropriate rank who will have me—the problem is that I wouldn’t be willing to marry any of them. If I ever do decide to get married, it’s going to be to someone who excites me to the very core of my being, someone who feels as though she and I were two halves of the same whole, waiting from before our births to be reunited: not just someone who would be politically appropriate. So what do you think, Wizard?”

  His green eyes sought mine. I wondered briefly if he might be someone who would never find women romantically attractive, which would of course make the succession much more problematic. Without any good answer, I looked out toward the twilight courtyard and stammered, “Well, a king of course, that is— I mean, minds have been known to change—”

  But whatever Paul was hoping I would say, it was not what he had been hearing from the queen and the Lady Maria. “I really don’t know what you should do, sire,” I said, meeting his look. “You certainly shouldn’t force yourself to marry someone you find less appealing than your horses. And you can’t look at every woman you meet with both of you wondering if this is the one. Perhaps after a period of time—”

  Paul rose before I had to carry this inadequate advice any further. “Well, at least I know I have one more ally in the castle,” he said, settling his belt. “Maybe I’ll go see Gwennie.” He ducked his head to go out through my door.

  “Gwennie?” I said, startled. “But she—”

  “She should be done with her evening chores by now. She’s always been a good person to talk to—almost as good as you, Wizard,” he added generously. “She was the one who helped me decide how to break it to Mother the other year that I wasn’t going to marry either of the twins.”

  And he was gone, leaving me looking thoughtfully after him. That Gwennie was the daughter of the cook and the castle constable was only one of the reasons why I did not think her the best person with whom the king might discuss the question of whom he should marry.

  When I went to find Antonia in the morning, she was wearing a yellow scarf belonging to one of the twins and finishing a big bowl of porridge with gusto. “Guess what, Wizard!” she said with an excited smile. “Hildegarde and Celia are going to teach me to ride a horse!”

  “It’s very good of you, my ladies,” I began, “to help take care of my, uh, niece, but you really—”

  “We want to do it, Wizard,” said Hildegarde.

  “They were going to teach me to read,” said Antonia, “but I told them I already knew how.”

  “Then later today,” said Hildegarde cheerfully, “we’ll teach her how to deal cards off the bottom of the pack.”

  “What?!” I glared at the twins while Antonia grinned in anticipation.

  “It can be a very useful skill for a lady,” said Celia, effecting a serious tone, “learning how to spot cheating so she will not be tricked herself. So we’ll see you this afternoon, after our ride. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we need to put on our riding habits.”

  “Make sure the door is tight,” I heard Hildegarde say as it swung shut in my face. “He’s an old man. The shock of seeing us dressing couldn’t be good for him.” And all three of them—including, I was mortified to hear, my daughter—began to giggle.

  Since it looked like I wasn’t going to spend the morning trying to make Antonia feel as comfortable with me as she apparently already did with the twins, I instead went to look for Gwennie.

  I found her in the kitchen, slicing mushrooms for lunch. We grew mushrooms in the castle cellars, and the cook made excellent soup with them. If Paul had not yet persuaded his mother that he was unready to marry anyone, Gwennie had yet to persuade her own mother that she would never be a cook.

  I worked the pump for her. “Antonia seems happy that you put her in the suite with the twins, Gwennie—uh, Gwendolyn,” I said.

  But her frown had nothing to do with Antonia or with whatever I chose to call her. She shook the water from a handful of mushrooms and moved her knife so fast I could scarcely follow. “Paul told me he’d talked to you yesterday,” she said after a quick glance around showed her mother and the kitchen maids all at the far side of the room. That she called him simply by his name, without his title, and didn’t even seem to notice that she had, told me how distressed she had been by their conversation.

  “I can’t see him marrying a child princess any more than he can,” I said encouragingly.

  “But she might be the best person for him,” Gwennie said, pushing away a strand of hair from her face with a damp wrist. The knife flashed again. “If he told the queen he’d marry her when she was five years older, then he wouldn’t be bothered in the meantime by a parade of other candidates. And in five years, anything—” She stopped herself. “The girl would have to be better than the duchess’s daughters.” She allowed herself a smile. “I’m sorry, Wizard. I shouldn’t be talking to you like this.”

  “Better me than anyone else,” I said, working the pump again. Wizards in royal castles have always been in somewhat of an ambivalent position, with a power beyond that of kings if they cared to use it, yet on the paid staff like any servant. Most wizards manage to cultivate airs of authority and mystery that make everyone, from kings to stable boys, treat them with deference. In spite of twenty-five years of intermittent trying, I had never gotten anyone at Yurt to treat me with deference and had decided it was not worth the effort.

  “I didn’t tell Paul any of this, of course,” Gwennie said, scooping mushrooms from the board into a bowl.

  “How about telling him not to challenge an armed man for fun?” I said, but she wasn’t listening.

  “If I started telling him the same things everyone else is saying,” she said, “he’d stop coming to talk to me.” Although Gwennie and Paul were almost exactly the same age and had played together as children, I had imagined they had grown apart in the last fifteen years. Perhaps I was mistaken.

  “So don’t you agree, Wizard,” she said, looking at me with serious eyes that should have been bright and laughing, “that the best thing for him to do would be to marry the little princess? She’s certainly of a suitable station for him”—with only the slightest catch in her breath—“and I’m sure will be well trained to become a gracious queen of Yurt and mother of Paul’s children.”

  She turned away abruptly at that, making the gesture into rinsing off her knife with more than necessary energy.

  The thought flashed through my mind that if Paul was going to wait until someone grew up, then even Antonia might some day be old enough for him. But the illegitimate daughter of a witch and a wizard would never be of suitable station for a king—even less than the daughter of a cook and castle constable.

  III

  The twins and Antonia came back from their riding lesson in the early afternoon. When they left they had been on two rangy geldings and a shaggy little pony, but they returned with Antonia sitting in front of Hildegarde, half asleep, and the pony led behind. A wilted chain of daisies was around the girl’s neck.

  “I want to tell Mother I can ride now,” she roused herself to tell me. “Can we go see her?”

  “Not right now, but you can tell me,” I suggested, carrying her into the castle.

  “I can make the pony stop and go forward and even gallop,” she murmured into my neck. “Hildegarde didn’t want me to gallop but I did anyway. I only fell off once.”

  “She falls very well for a child,” said Celia, which I did not find nearly as reassuring as it was doubtless meant to be. I held Antonia close and stroked her fine hair.

  Having left
her asleep with the duchess’s daughters I returned to my chambers, feeling on edge and unable to concentrate on the spells I was trying to perfect for entertainment over dessert tonight. Instead I wrote Theodora a brief message to be sent on the carrier pigeons, telling her that Antonia’s first day in Yurt had gone well, leaving out all mention of cheating at cards or falls from ponies, and saying I sent love from both of us.

  As I came down from the pigeon loft in the tower, Gwennie met me. “You have a telephone call, Wizard.”

  For a second I imagined it was Theodora. But she had never wanted me to install a magical telephone in her house, saying she would have no use for it—and since it would have been hard to conceal my relationship with her if I was always talking to her on the phone, I had to agree she had a point.

  The call was instead from my old friend the bishop of Caelrhon. “Joachim!” I said with pleasure. It had been ages since we’d talked. Even when I visited Theodora in the cathedral city he was usually too busy with his duties for me to want to bother him. “How good to hear from you!”

  His face was a tiny image in the base of the glass telephone: black hair streaked with gray at the temples, enormous and compelling dark eyes, and an expression of great seriousness—except sometimes when he was talking to me. I had long ago decided that I should count it a personal virtue rather than a failing that the bishop of the twin kingdoms of Yurt and Caelrhon seemed to find me more amusing than he did anyone else.

  “I would like your advice, Daimbert,” he said, not smiling now. “There is something, well, strange going on here.”

  “How strange?”

  He hesitated. “It’s hard to say. A miracle-worker has come to town.”

  This didn’t sound like the sort of thing to concern a wizard. “But that’s good, isn’t it? Why do you need my advice?”

  The bishop hesitated again, just long enough for me to start to wonder if it might be serious after all. Joachim didn’t frighten easily. “I’m not sure he is really working miracles,” he said at last. “He might be working magic. But he has started to acquire a following. I need to know if he is a fraud or has truly been touched by God.”