A Bad Spell in Yurt Read online

  “All our food, or almost all, is produced right on the castle estates. At this time of year they’re winnowing the cockerels out of the young fowl, so we’ll have chicken very regularly. I hope you don’t miss the greater choice of the City.”

  “Well, this is delicious,” I answered, wiping my lips and wondering if I could reach the platter or if I would have to interrupt Dominic in his conversation with the lady on his far side to get him to pass it.

  “I spent three seasons in the City myself when I was younger, much younger.”

  “Then you must have been an infant,” I said gallantly. I slid my hand nonchalantly to the left along the table, calculating the distance. I guessed her as perhaps half again my age, in spite of the big pink ribbons with which her braids were looped and the myriad flowers and flourishes of lace on her gown.

  “On, no,” she said with a tinkling laugh. “I’m so much older and wiser than you might think. I may have kept my youthful looks, but they conceal a wealth of experience. You may not realize it, but it can be a serious disadvantage to still have golden curls when one has passed twenty summers. It’s so hard to be taken seriously!”

  Although my curls were not golden, I actually realized it quite well, having the same problem—except that I didn’t have the wealth of experience either. Dominic’s wine glass was unfortunately placed; I was afraid I’d catch it with my elbow. I wondered if I dared use a lifting spell on the platter.

  “Go ahead, see if you can guess my age,” she continued. I was tired of this topic, but she was just wanning to it. “Come on, everybody, guess!”

  “Twenty-five?” I said judiciously.

  “My goodness, you’re getting close, but you’re still too low.” She laughed again. “Anyone else?” looking around the table.

  Dominic looked toward us. “Pass the chicken, please,” I said quickly.

  The chaplain, sitting across the table from me, had been following our conversation in silence. “Forty-eight,” he said, just as everyone else had stopped talking.

  My companion blushed up to the roots of her hair (if she dyed her hair, she was careful; the roots were as golden as the rest). The chaplain resumed eating, and, after a brief embarrassed pause, so did everyone else. I reloaded my plate with more clattering of spoons than was strictly necessary.

  “While you were in the City,” I said, “did you ever go on the tour of the wizards’ school? Did they show you the dragon in the basement?”

  Conversation resumed around us. I glanced over again at the chaplain. I was afraid he didn’t have a sense of humor, which could be a problem for him if he was going to be friends with me, but on the other hand he didn’t seem to have any tact either, which could have advantages.

  I don’t know why I kept expecting Dominic to be my enemy, but the burly royal heir was trying to be friendly. “There’s a story we ve heard even out here,” he said, “that if you go far enough north, thousands and thousands of miles, you come to a land that’s nothing but dragons and other magic creatures. Is this true? A wizard came through once, to visit our old wizard, and he said he’d been there.”

  “Oh, it’s real enough,” I said. “The magic is wild up there.” Other people were turning toward us, and I was enjoying the audience. “It’s the same magic we use, because it too grows out of the power that shaped the earth.” I caught the chaplain’s eye across the table and winked. He made no response.

  “But the magic there is more primitive,” I continued, “not formed into the deep channels that generations of wizards have made for it down here. It’s a land of dragons, of giants, of unspeakable monsters. The air cart you saw me arrive in today”—I knew some of them must have been peeping at me from the windows—“is the skin of a beast from the land of dragons. Anything could happen there; it can be a highly dangerous place, even for those most experienced in wizardry.”

  “Have you been there yourself?”

  I had been hoping Dominic wouldn’t ask that. Of course I hadn’t been there. There had been a field trip from the wizards’ school, but only the best students were invited to go.

  “I am not yet worthy of the voyage,” I said in what I hoped would be a mysterious voice. Surprisingly, the chaplain sat up straighter and fixed me with his enormous eyes at that. Several ladies further down the table smiled as though they saw right through me. “Has your old wizard ever been?” I said disingenuously, knowing the answer from what Dominic had said but wanting to make it clear that I at any rate had company.

  “Not that he ever told us,” said the lady on my right, but much more uncertainly than I had expected. Several things several people had said about the old wizard made him seem like a more distant and more shadowy figure than someone should be who had lived in the court for years, and even now, apparently, lived just outside the castle. I was both going to have to work on my own aura of shadowy mystery and visit him.

  There was a clearing of a throat at the upper end of the table. Everyone fell silent at once. “Wizard!” said the king. “How are you finding Yurt? Do we have company to make up for the pleasures of the City?”

  The chaplain might have said “No.” I instead answered only the first but not the second question. “I like it very much!” I said with perfect honesty.

  “But already you’re worrying that the evenings will be quiet,” said the King with a smile. How had he known that? “This will be an incentive for you to work on our telephone system, so you can talk to your friends again.”

  The disadvantage to studying wizardry, instead of religion, is that you don’t learn good curses. Everything you learn is in the powerful language of magic and will have an effect if you say it, even if the effect is not the intended one. I really didn’t want to propel King Haimeric and his talk of telephones across the hall and into the fire, so I couldn’t even think it. “The constable’s already mentioned that to me!” I said with cheerful noncommittal. If I already had a telephone, maybe I could call up some of my teachers, the ones who still liked me even at the end, and ask them how to put one in. But this line of thinking clearly was not going to get me anywhere. “Do the neighboring kingdoms already have their systems?”

  “Ours will be the first in the region,” said the king proudly.

  III

  Dessert came at that point, providing a welcome distraction. A few minutes later, the king rose, and everyone rose with him. He left the hall, again on Dominic’s arm, presumably bound for bed. Some people stood talking, and others started to disperse. I touched the chaplain on the shoulder. “Would you like to go to my chambers for a last glass of wine?”

  He looked slightly surprised but nodded, and we walked together back out into the cobbled courtyard. The long summer evening was still lingering, and the air was like a caress on the skin. My magic lock was glowing softly. I pressed with my palm to open the door, men threw the casements open to let in the air.

  The chaplain took a seat by the window, eyeing my diploma and books. I opened one of the bottles of wine I had brought with me. Tomorrow I would have to ask the constable about getting some of the local wine for my chambers; it was better than what I had been able to afford in the City on a student stipend.

  “You seemed surprised that I asked you in,” I said as I handed him a glass. “Why was that? Were you and the old wizard enemies?” I knew at least that he would give me a direct answer.

  “No, not enemies,” and he held the glass up to the light. “I trust this isn’t magic wine,” he said and smiled for the first time since I’d met him. He took a sip without waiting for the answer to what was obviously meant to be a joke. “But your predecessor resented religion. I don’t know whether he thought there shouldn’t be a court chaplain at all, or whether he thought that the fact that religion demands a higher standard of human behavior than does magic put him at a disadvantage. I have only been here three years myself, and clearly something happened between the old wizard and my own predecessor. I have never heard what it was; I had too much Christian ta
ct to ask.”

  “You didn’t have too much Christian tact to guess the lady’s age tonight!” I said with a laugh. If he could make a joke, so could I.

  “The Lady Maria?” He considered for a moment. “Maybe it wasn’t tactful at that.” I began to wonder if he would be as good a person to talk to as I had hoped.

  “Did the old wizard have these same chambers?” I said to change the subject.

  “These chambers? No. In fact, I was rather surprised when I heard the constable was putting you here. The queen’s old nurse lived here until she died last year; the rooms were then shut up until last week. The old wizard had his chambers in the north tower.”

  I knew it. They weren’t taking me seriously. I could be ten times more powerful and mysterious in north tower than in the old nurse’s chambers!

  As though reading my thoughts and wanting to contradict them, the chaplain said, “Everyone was enormously impressed when a wizard trained in the great school answered the constable’s ad. The queen started talking at once about a telephone system.”

  “Why a telephone, in the name of the saints?” I cried, using an exclamation I trusted he would understand.

  He lifted his eyebrows at me. “The queen has found telephones extremely convenient the times she has been in the City. She thought that if we had a system here, she could phone here and talk to the king wherever she is, in the City or visiting her parents, rather than having to rely on carrier pigeons.”

  The queen was clearly an important presence here in Yurt. I wondered if she could possibly be as old and bent as the king, and, since she seemed to take frequent trips, when she would be returning.

  The chaplain hesitated for a moment before speaking again, taking unnecessarily long over a sip of wine. It was probably Christian tact failing again to control his words. “I don’t like this talk of telephones,” he said brusquely.

  “Neither do I,” I said cheerfully, but he didn’t hear me.

  “The queen herself tried to persuade me that it’s only white magic, that it involves no dealings with the devil, but I can’t be sure. There must be black magic in being able to hear someone else’s voice over hundreds of miles.”

  Since it could have been pink or purple magic for all I knew about telephones, I responded to a different aspect of his comment. “If you had been more friendly with my predecessor, surely he would have persuaded you there s no such thing as either white magic or black magic. That’s only a popular perception. Didn’t they teach you that at seminary? Magic is neither good or evil in itself, only natural, part of the same forces as the world and mankind. The only good or evil is in the people who practice it.”

  “And you don’t practice magic with evil intent?”

  “Of course not,” I said self-righteously. A few student pranks hardly counted.

  “Then why do you have a well-thumbed copy of the Diplomatica Diabolica if you don’t converse with demons?”

  He was looking at my shelf. The volume’s spine was cracked; it did look well-thumbed. But that was from the time I had been reading it late at night, the night before the demonstration, and had become so terrified I had slammed it shut and it had fallen on the floor. That book gave me the willies.

  “One prefers not to talk with demons,” I said. It didn’t seem appropriate somehow to tell him about that demonstration, about how two other wizards were there to help our instructor if they had to, and how when a very tiny demon, maybe a foot tall, had appeared in the pentagram, the room had gone totally dark and some of the students (not me!) had fainted in fear. “But one meets them occasionally,” I continued airily, “and if one does one had better know exactly what to say and how to say it. Otherwise, as you know yourself, one’s immortal soul is in danger.”

  “But why practice magic at all?” he cried, his black eyes burning. “You put your souls in danger, and for what? Your predecessor used to entertain us with illusions during dessert, but that’s the only magic I ever saw him do.”

  Illusions! Clearly I was falling down already. It hadn’t even occurred to me to produce special entertainment at dinner; I had enjoyed the brass quartet and the food too much to think anything else was needed.

  “There’s lots of magic besides illusions,” I said. “You saw the magic lock I have on my door.”

  “My door locks with a key. It works just as well.”

  He had emptied his wine glass and was spinning it in his fingers. I said two quick words in the Hidden Language and the glass spun away from him, rose majestically, and slid across the air to my own hand. I refilled it and sent it sliding back without spilling a drop.

  He had to smile at that. “Very deft,” he said. “But you could also have gotten up.”

  “But wizards have known about magic since the beginning of human history,” I protested, feeling that I was not the person who should be having this discussion. I was also rapidly running low on the spells that I knew always worked. “You can’t turn away from knowledge.” He opened his mouth to speak, and I knew he was going to say something about Eden and the Tree of Knowledge. One thing they taught these priests in seminary was how to have quick answers to everything. “And magic works!”

  “Every single time? You’ve never had a spell that didn’t work perfectly?”

  Maybe they taught them to read minds too at seminary. “Well, maybe just once, or twice, or a few times…” But I realized that, if I was going to have him for a friend, I was going to have to be honest. “Don’t tell anyone else, but a lot of the time things don’t work out exactly as I expected. But that’s not a problem with magic. That’s a problem with me. If you do it right, magic always works.”

  “You’re implying religion doesn’t?”

  “You know it doesn’t!” I protested. “Lots of people pray to the saints all the time and never get anywhere, whereas if they consulted a competent wizard they’d always get results.”

  “The saints don’t listen to formulae. The saints listen to pure and contrite hearts. You spoke at dinner of a voyage you thought you were not yet worthy to take. Doesn’t even magic make absolute demands on your mind and your soul?”

  I felt I was being backed into a corner instead of sitting comfortably in my own study in my own kingdom, with the stars coming out through the window. “So what would you do if you met a demon and you didn’t know how to speak to him? Have you ever had to do an exorcism?” I paused briefly before continuing, taking his silence as a negative answer. “You can’t very well practice and study ahead of time to make sure you have a pure and contrite heart when the time comes. Suppose you meet a demon and you’ve had an impure thought a few minutes ago and, never having studied the Diplomatica, don’t know the words to say to keep the demon from being annoyed?”

  “We have the liturgy and the ritual of exorcism.”

  “See?” I said triumphantly. “You have to learn magic words too, even if you don’t call them that.”

  He changed the topic abruptly away from demons. I was just as glad. I didn’t like talking about demons with it now full dark, even though one of my predecessor’s excellent magic globes was shedding a soft light in the room—I hoped the chaplain didn’t consider that an illusion.

  “You say that magic always works,” he said. “But they must have taught you at the very beginning of your studies that there are only limited areas in which magic works at all.” For someone who claimed to have no Knowledge of or interest in magic, he seemed to be able to guess remarkably well. “Since magic is part of the earth’s natural forces, it can modify them but never alter them irrevocably.”

  I nodded ruefully. “The cycle of birth and death, sickness and health. We can lengthen life, but not indefinitely. We can’t cause someone to be born, and we can’t bring them back when they’re dead.”

  He smiled for the third time that evening. “For twinkling lights and fairy gold, see a wizard. For a miracle, see a priest.” That must be something else they had taught them at seminary, a handy phrase to confound wi
zards.

  “Would you like more wine?” I stood up this time to get his glass.

  IV

  Bells were ringing out in the courtyard. Snuggled down in my pillows, I opened one eye. Early morning light was coming in the window, too early, I decided, to make it worth thinking about yet. I closed the eye again.

  My door handle rattled, then the door swung open. I wished again for a good curse to use, this time against myself. I remembered now forgetting to lock the door when I let the chaplain out, well past midnight. I sat up straight, both eyes wide open.

  I was, however, somewhat mollified when I saw it was the pretty servant girl who had given me a saucy look at dinner the night before, and that she was carrying a steaming tray. “Good morning, sir. Are you ready for your tea and crullers?”

  I pulled on my robe and tried to push my hair into line with one hand.

  She set the tray on my table. “The crullers are still warm; I just finished making them.”

  I took a drink of scalding tea and a bite of cruller. They were just the way I liked them, with lots of cinnamon. “These are wonderful.”

  “Thank you, sir. As well as bringing you your breakfast, the constable’s wife said I should explain to you how to get to the chapel for service. You go back through the great hall—”

  “Church service!” I cried. “That’s why they’re ringing the bells. I’m going to be late.”

  “You have plenty of time. They always ring the bells half an hour early, to give slack-a-beds time to get up and dressed.”

  “I forgot it was Sunday,” I said somewhat sheepishly.

  “We nave service in the chapel every morning,” she said primly. “Anyway, you go through the great hall, and at the far right-hand corner there’s a door into a stairway. Go up to the third landing, and there’s the chapel. You shouldn’t get lost; just about everyone else should be going there too.” But though she spoke formally and correctly, as a servant should address even someone who was fully dressed and combed, she gave me a wink as she left me to finish my breakfast and get dressed.