A Bad Spell in Yurt woy-1 Read online

  “Of course not,” I said noncommittally. I really was going to have to meet the old wizard.

  The constable started to turn away. “Oh, just one thing,” I said, and he turned back at once. “Where do you get the Sunday paper around here?”

  He looked surprised. “We don’t get the Sunday paper. We don’t get papers at all in Yurt.”

  “But your ad for a wizard was in the Sunday paper.”

  “Yes, that. The queen had brought a copy back from her last trip to the City, so we had the address to which to write. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  He walked briskly away. “Well,” I said determinedly to myself, “if I’m not going to waste half the morning reading the color supplements, maybe I can see if there’s anything in any of my books about telephones.”

  With my casements wide open and red and white climbing roses peeking in, I settled myself in the most comfortable chair in my study and put my feet up. Thaumaturgy A to Z had nothing to offer, but the first volume of Ancient and Modern Necromancy, the volume I had never looked at it because most of it was just a history of wizards and wizardry, gave a brief description of the discovery of telephones. “The person’s voice actually enters the flow of magic. The spells attached to each telephone find the voice’s way through magic’s four dimensions, so that even a person without magic skills can operate it. All he has to do is to speak the name attached to the telephone instrument with which he wishes to communicate, and that instrument’s bell will ring, summoning someone to answer.”

  Well, I had vaguely known that already. The part this historical snippet seemed to pass over was how one created spells and attached them to the telephone, to localize the instrument in both space and time, and then set up the permanent channels through the flow of magic for the voice to travel. I closed the book and would have frowned if the summer breeze hadn’t been so soft on my cheek.

  Clearly I was going to have to try something different. The thought of going back to the City and stealing an instrument occurred to me briefly, but it would never work. The instrument would have to have all its spells redone or it wouldn’t function. The times I had seen a new telephone installed, it had always seemed to take several days and require several wizards-usually of the serious, pale-faced sort with whom I had not associated much at school. A kingdom didn’t hire a new Royal Wizard and then pay enormous sums to import other wizards who might know more than he did about telephones.

  I stood up and yawned. Maybe Yurt didn’t need a complete telephone system. Maybe it would be possible just to work out a way to communicate with the City and with wherever the queen’s parents lived. I stopped in mid-yawn and thought about this. It seemed to have possibilities.

  I found a piece of string that had been used to tie up my luggage and strung it between my bedroom and study. I already knew how to communicate, without speaking, to another wizard, at least if he was next to me and willing to listen to the thoughts I sent him. Therefore it should be possible to attach a communications spell to a string. An object with a spell attached became a magic object, and anyone could operate it.

  “It’s like invisibility,” I said to myself cheerfully. A ring of invisibility will always work, even though invisibility is one of the harder spells. For some reason, even though it is straightforward to make the empty air take on solidity in illusions, it is very hard to make solidity look empty. There is probably a good theoretical explanation, but I have never paid much attention to theory, preferring the practical.

  I paused to see how well I could make myself invisible. I had been working on the spells intermittently for almost a year now. Concentrating hard, breaking off pieces of the flow of magic and controlling them with the Hidden Language, I watched my feet disappear, first the left one, then the right one. At this point, however, things stopped. My knees remained obstinately visible. I snapped my fingers in disgust and my feet came back. Just last week I had made it almost all the way up my thighs.

  “But I’m not trying to make a ring of invisibility anyway,” I told myself firmly. “I’m making a communications string.” I put both hands on the string and concentrated on it, thinking of how one reaches out, slides just the corner of one’s mind into the stream of magic while leaving most of it firmly anchored to one’s body (one of the most dangerous moments for young wizards is discovering how to slip one’s mind out without losing oneself forever). I alternated the spells that seek another mind with attachment spells, and suddenly the string stiffened and glowed pink.

  I rushed out into the courtyard. Since it was Sunday, the servants were only doing necessary chores, and a number of them were now playing volleyball while the others watched and cheered. I found my own saucy servant girl, flushed and laughing after having just been replaced at the net.

  “Come on,” I said, “I need your help with a magic spell.”

  She looked over her shoulder at the others, said, “I’ll be back in just a minute!” and came with me, straightening her skirt. “What sort of magic spell? You’re not going to turn me into a frog or anything!”

  Ever since that practical exam, I had tried to avoid mention of things being turned into frogs, but she wouldn’t know that. “No,” I said, “I think I’ve invented a new kind of telephone, and I want to test it.”

  In my chambers, I stationed her in the study, at one end of the string, and went into the bedroom. “You listen,” I said, “and see if you can hear me.” Then, with my mouth close to the other end of the string, I said in my deepest voice, “All powers of earth and air must obey the spells of wizardry.”

  To my surprise, she burst into peals of laughter. “You’re the funniest person I’ve ever met!” she said when she had caught her breath. “Are you sure you’re really a wizard?”

  “Did it work?” I said with irritation. “Could you hear me?”

  “Of course I could hear you. You were only standing ten feet away! All powers of earth and air!” Still laughing, she went back out to rejoin the game.

  I looked at my piece of string in disgust. It was still glowing. I snapped my fingers and said the words to break the spell, but nothing happened. I seemed to have a piece of string permanently able to convey words over the same distance one could hear them anyway.

  “Except that it may not even do that,” I thought. “All I know for sure is that it’s pink now.” Besides, the more I thought about it the more strings seemed like an impractical idea. One couldn’t run a string two hundred miles to the City. It was with relief that I heard the gong for dinner.

  My good humor was restored by another excellent meal. At the end, King Haimeric said, “Come with me. I want to show you my rose garden.”

  He walked on his nephew’s arm out of the great hall, through the courtyard, and out through the great gates of the castle. Since I had arrived in the courtyard by air cart, I had not before been through the gates. The portcullis was up and looked as though it had not been lowered for years. Swans were swimming peacefully in the moat.

  A red brick road ran down the hill from the castle gates toward the forest below. Next to the road was a walled garden, with roses creeping over the tops of the walls. Dominic swung the barred gate open, and we went in.

  I had thought the roses in the castle courtyard were good, but these were spectacular. “You can leave us, Dominic,” said the king. “I’m sure this young man can see me back safely.”

  His burly nephew gave me a slightly sour look but left. The king seated himself on a bench while I wandered up and down the rows, admiring the different colors, the enormous blooms, the vibrant green of the foliage.

  “I’m too stiff to work on them much any more, but I planted every bush you see,” said the king. “Most of them are hybrids I developed myself, though I’ve also picked up a few cuttings over the years. The newest one is that white bush; I planted it the day I married the queen.”

  It was smaller than the other bushes but growing vigorously. The white blooms faded to pink in the shadows of the petals. W
hen I bent to smell it, the sweetness was almost overwhelming.

  “I’m looking forward to meeting the queen,” I said, realizing that she must be substantially younger than the king and wondering why I had ever thought otherwise.

  “I’ve been king of Yurt a long, long time. It’s been a good run of years, but in many ways the last four years have been the best, even though I can’t crawl around with a trowel any more.”

  So they’d only been married four years. I had to readjust several of my assumptions. It seemed most likely that the king had found a pliant young princess to marry, someone to adore him and do his bidding and fulfill the adolescent fantasies he had never been able to fulfill in his years in the rose garden. The only difficulty with this picture was that it was hard to see the king as the old goat. “You may think me silly,” I said, “but when I heard the queen was visiting her parents, I’d somehow thought of them as extremely old.”

  “Old?” he said and smiled. “No, they’re not old. The Lady Maria, who lives here with us, is the sister of the queen’s father. And you know from a remark at table last night how old she is.” He laughed. “Give me your arm; I want to look across my kingdom.”

  Though he needed my help to rise, he walked unaided back out of the walled garden. I swung the gate back into place, and we stood looking down the hill toward the plowed fields and the variegated green of the woods beyond.

  He stood without speaking for several minutes. Somewhere down there, I thought, was the old wizard. I was startled out of conjectures about him when the king said suddenly, “Can you transport me by magic?”

  “Transport you?” I said with some alarm. This was worse than telephones.

  “Lift me off the ground so I don’t have to walk. I’ve always wanted to try it.”

  “I think so,” I said, and “I hope so,” I thought. “Lifting spells become more difficult the larger the object one is lifting,” I explained. I didn’t tell him that he was a lot larger than a wine glass. Inwardly I was wondering how, if I hadn’t been sure I could magically pick up a heavy box or an awkwardly-placed platter of meat, I was going to manage my liege lord. “We’ll take it slowly. I’ll just lift you a little way, and I’ll walk right next to you so you can take my arm if you’re feeling unsteady.” “Or,” I added silently, “if I start to drop you.”

  The king, I decided as I started pulling the spells together in my mind, was actually not much heavier than a box of books. He stood looking at me with a faint smile as I concentrated, feeling my way into the magic, making sure each word of the Hidden Language was right. Slowly and gracefully, as though he were thistledown blown by the wind, he rose four inches, so that his toes just brushed the grass.

  We started toward the castle gates. I walked immediately next to him, just barely not touching him. Fortunately he was silent and let me concentrate. When we reached the drawbridge I had a sudden panic, picturing myself dropping him into the moat, and with my wavering in concentration he started to slip. I found the words just in time to set him down as gently as he had been lifted up.

  We walked together across the bridge and under the portcullis. Dominic was waiting for us just inside. “That was extremely enjoyable,” said the king. “Could you teach me to do that myself? Not today, but soon?”

  This earned him an odd look from Dominic, who had no idea what we were talking about. “I’ve never taught anyone,” I said honestly, “but I could try.”

  Back in my chambers, I spent the rest of the afternoon practicing lifting things.

  V

  After two days of loving my kingdom, I woke up the next morning hating it. Bells awakened me again. When I lifted my head I could hear hard rain on the cobblestones outside. The windows were streaked with water. My door handle rattled and didn’t open, since I had remembered to lock it last night, but there was immediately a loud and persistent knocking.

  When I opened the door, the servant maid stood there, trying without great success to shield both herself and a tray with an umbrella. I took the tray and half pulled her inside. “You’re going to get soaked!” I said.

  Her umbrella streamed water on my clean flagstone floor. My tea seemed to have been diluted with rain, and the napkin on the basket was damp. When I pulled back the napkin, I found not crullers but cake donuts, which I don’t like nearly as well. They weren’t even warm.

  “I just wanted to make sure you were up in time for chapel,” she said without a smile or any sign of friendliness. She put the umbrella back up and started out again.

  “Thank you very much!” I said quickly, wondering if everyone went to chapel every single day. “You know, I don’t even know your name.”

  “Gwen, sir,” she said and was gone. I wondered as I ate if she didn’t want to associate with someone as foolish as I must have seemed after the incident with the string. The donuts tasted as though they had been made several days before.

  My mood was not improved when I banged my head on the dark stair going up to the chapel and then found, when I reached the top, that the king and the chaplain were the only other two people there. I rubbed my head surreptitiously all during service. At the end, I offered the king my arm, but he shook his head.

  “A prerogative of being king is that I don’t have to use those stairs.” A small door which I should have noticed before opened half-way down the inner wall of the chapel, presumably into the royal chambers. He went through it and left me alone with the chaplain.

  The chaplain fixed me with his dark eyes. “Don’t think I don’t welcome you in the chapel,” he said. “But don’t come because you think you have to. I hold service every morning for anyone who needs spiritual refreshment, and the king usually comes, but the rest of the castle mostly come on Sunday.” He turned away without waiting for a response.

  “In that case,” I thought, “maybe I can start sleeping later.” I would have to tell Gwen, if she was still speaking to me. I wished I could talk to some of my friends at the wizards’ school. The chaplain still seemed like the only person at the castle I could hold a conversation with, and at the moment he was to me profoundly strange and distant.

  “There’s incentive for me,” I thought bitterly, groping back down the stairs. “All I need to do to talk to them is get the telephone working.”

  Back in my room, I was looking glumly at the backs of my books, wondering which ones I should try next, when there was a knock. I hoped it was Gwen, come to apologize for the dry donuts, but to my surprise it was Dominic, the royal heir.

  He lowered his umbrella and pulled off his coat. He looked around my study for a moment in silence, paused for a longer look at my diploma, and closed the door behind him. “May I sit down?”

  “Please do,” I said, wondering what he could want.

  He planted his solid body in a chair by the window, set his elbow firmly on the arm, and leaned his chin on a massive fist. “I’ve come to talk to you about your duties.”

  This was it. I knew my problem wasn’t the rain or the lack of crullers. I had spent two days on vacation, but now I was going to have to start work on projects I didn’t think I could do. I tried to look intelligent and alert.

  Surprisingly, he hesitated for a moment before beginning. “You’re an outsider,” he said at last-something I already knew! — ”and maybe I shouldn’t prejudice your mind with too many details. But you have to know one thing now. The king is under a spell.”

  This was not at all what I had expected. “Under a spell? What sort? I talked to him in the rose garden yesterday afternoon, and he never said anything about it.”

  “He wouldn’t have, of course. He doesn’t realize it himself. But the spell was one of the major reasons we decided to hire you.”

  He didn’t say who we were. He looked at me from under heavy lids, waiting for my answer. “But what sort of spell? Do you know the source?”

  “The king is growing old and feeble. This can only be the result of enchantment. We don’t know the source of the spell, but we want y
ou to overcome it.”

  “But that’s silly!” I protested. “Of course he’s getting weaker as he gets older. And besides,” thinking that the chaplain should hear me now, “wizardry can’t reverse natural aging.”

  “The king isn’t as old as you may think. When he married the queen, only four years ago, no one thought of them as an extremely ill-matched couple.”

  A sudden vision flashed into my mind of a girl married to a much older man, excited at first at the power of being queen, but soon made irritable when she discovered she was not supposed to have a mind of her own, but only be the king’s pliant companion. It shouldn’t be hard for her, on one of her trips to the City, to find an unscrupulous wizard willing to sell her a powder or spell to sicken her husband.

  “It must be the queen, then,” I said. “She has bewitched him somehow.”

  A low rumble began somewhere in his barrel chest and emerged in an angry, “No! It’s not the queen. It couldn’t be anyone at court. It must be a malignant influence from outside.”

  I modified my vision to have the queen and the royal heir secretly in love, plotting to have the king die so that they could rule together. But I stopped myself. This made no sense. If Dominic were partially responsible for putting an evil spell on the king, he certainly wouldn’t tell me about it.

  “Thank you for this warning,” I said in a deep voice. “The power of magic to conceal itself is often great, but the skill of the forewarned wizard is potent indeed.”