A Bad Spell in Yurt Read online

  She ignored the compliment if she even noticed it. “No, I don’t need a love potion myself. But I’m afraid Jon is going to use one on me.”

  “Jon?”

  “You know him. He’s one of the trumpeters, and he also does the glassblowing. He made you your glass telephones.”

  “He does very good work, too,” I said, wondering why she would need a love potion used on her. “He seems a very nice young man.” Now I was sounding like an uncle again, trying to persuade the coy niece to accept her gallant suitor.

  “I like him, sir, I really like him a lot. But he wants to get married, and I’m not sure I’m ready. Maybe not ready to marry anybody, and certainly not to marry him. He gets so jealous! Can you imagine, when you first came he even was jealous of your He made me promise not to speak more to you than absolutely necessary.”

  This, of course, was devastating. At first I had thought someone had warned her against me, and had speculated whether this might have something to do with the strangely distant yet evil touch I felt in the castle. Then I had decided she had had to restrain her affections before her heart broke. And now it seemed it was all due to a jealous glassblower, who she thought should have known better than possibly to be jealous of me!

  “I guess I’m breaking my promise talking to you now, but I really do feel I have to.”

  “If you’re worried he’ll use a love potion to make you mary him,” I said with as much dignity as I could, “where do you think he’ll get it?”

  “At first, of course, I was worried he’d get it from you, that he might even have asked you for it the day he blew that glass for you. But a month has gone by, and I know he hasn’t tried to slip me a potion yet, and I haven’t seen him talking to you again, except a few words in front of a lot of other people.”

  “I don’t make love potions,” I said honestly. “That’s not something they teach us in the wizards’ school. That’s more something for magic-workers at carnivals than real wizards.”

  “I think the old wizard, your predecessor, might have made love potions.”

  This was entirely possible, but I didn’t say so. “I don’t, at any rate, so you need fear nothing from me.”

  “But he might get it somewhere else, then, at a carnival, or even from the old wizard. How can I tell if he’s put it in my food?”

  A good question, and the same question I was wondering about the king. A wizard can recognize another wizard at once, but since magic is a natural force, someone simply carrying a magic potion is not particularly obvious. If someone could poison the king, then Jon could try to make Gwen love him.

  “Don’t ever eat or drink alone with him,” I said, which was not a particularly useful answer, but was all I could think of. “He wouldn’t mind taking the love potion himself, since he’s already in love with you, but I don’t think he’d dare have anyone else fall in love with him.” Gwen looked at me skeptically, as though disappointed that such obvious advice was all I could give. “And smell your food,” I said. “Love potions are made of herbs and roots and usually smell rather nasty.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, rising and taking my now-empty tray.

  “Thank you for the crullers!” I called after her. “They were delicious.”

  A little later that morning, I sat with the Lady Maria in my outer chamber, the curtains drawn, and the telephone instruments before us. I didn’t really need her for what I was trying, but after what I had said at dinner I felt I ought to include her. Besides, she had been talking to Dominic in the great hall when I went to find her, and he had given me an almost furious look when I interrupted and asked her to join me. If Dominic had turned against me, I wanted him as uncomfortable as possible.

  “Now keep perfectly silent while I work this spell,” I said. “I’m trying something different this time. It’s a far-seeing spell, and extremely difficult. They never even taught it to us at the wizards’ school.” They might have taught some of the other students, but they most certainly had never taught me. “I’m going to try to attach it to the telephone.”

  The Lady Maria did as she was bid, even breathing virtually without a sound, as I checked the spell one last time in the book, put it away, and closed my eyes to begin. The heavy syllables of the Hidden Language rolled from my tongue. It was a long spell.

  I opened my eyes and looked at my glass telephone in the dim light of the room. It looked exactly the same. I was about to try speaking a name to it, to see if it might respond, when I was almost knocked from my chair by the surprise of another voice speaking the Hidden Language.

  It was the Lady Maria. Her eyes closed, she was resting her hands on the telephone instrument in front of her and repeating the long spell I had just given, word for word.

  In ten minutes, at the last syllable, she opened her eyes and gave me a saucy look that Gwen could not have equaled. “There! You probably didn’t think I could work magic.”

  “But can you?” I cried, flabbergasted. I hadn’t thought anyone could say a spell, except one of the very simple ones, without actually learning the Hidden Language, knowing what the words meant as well as how they were pronounced. And I was quite sure there was no way to learn the Language other than a lengthy apprenticeship or years in the wizards’ school.

  “ If your spell works, mine should too,” she said complacently. “I just said everything you said, the same way you said it.”

  “Let’s try yours, then,” I said and pulled the curtain open. I picked up the receiver and spoke the name attached to the telephone at the wizards’ school in the City.

  Very faintly, from the receiver, I could hear a distant ringing. “Triumph at last!” I thought, but dared say nothing. I held the receiver so Maria could hear as well. She leaned close to me, her hair brushing my cheek.

  “Look!” she said with indrawn breath. The glass base of the telephone had lit up. Inside was a miniature but very real scene, a room at the wizards’ school, a telephone sitting on a table, and one of the young wizards, one I knew but not well, picking up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello!” I cried. “Can you hear me?”

  “Hello?” somewhat more dubiously. “Is anyone there?”

  The tiny figure inside the telephone base turned his head, as though talking to someone else. “No, I can’t hear anyone. It’s just silent.”

  “We’re here! We’re here! Hello?” I shouted.

  “Maybe someone’s idea of a joke.” We watched his hand move to replace the receiver, and then our telephone went blank.

  “We did it!” said Maria, giving me a hard hug that startled me so much that I couldn’t answer at once. “We made the telephones work!”

  “In fact, we didn’t,” I said, trying to catch my breath.

  “Let me try this time.” Before I could say anything she had picked up the receiver and spoken another name. Again I could hear the faint sound of ringing. Then, once again, the telephone base lit up with a miniature scene within it. This time, it was a liveried servant picking up the receiver.

  “Thats a servant in my brother’s castle,” she said. “We can tell them the queen got home safely. Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?”

  As I expected, the servant could not hear us and replaced the receiver in a moment. “We don’t need to tell them,” I said. “The queen sent a message by the pigeons when she got home yesterday.”

  “But why can’t they hear us?”

  “I was trying to tell you,” I said, drawing my chair away from hers. “A telephone, if it’s working, is a communications instrument. Our telephones don’t communicate at all. I’ve taken the far-seeing spell and attached it to the instruments, but it’s not working right. Now it only means that someone using our telephones can see a distant telephone, not that he or she can talk to anyone far away.”

  “But couldn’t you still use our phones for communication? You could send a message by the pigeons that you were going to telephone, and then when the phone rang and they couldn’t
hear anyone, they could just say whatever they wanted to say, knowing you could hear them.”

  This was too elaborate for me. “No; all it means is that I’m not closer to the telephone system they wanted. On the other hand,” feeling more cheerful, “I don’t think anyone’s ever attached the far-seeing spell to an object before. This means someone, even if not trained in magic, could see far away, as long as he only wanted to see a distant telephone room.”

  But this brought me back to an earlier concern. “Lady Maria, how do you happen to know magic? Usually women don’t know any. Have you been trained?”

  “Of course not; all you male wizards refuse to teach women magic. Are there really no women wizards?”

  “Not really.”

  “But why not? I’ve heard of witches; aren’t they women wizards?”

  This was going to be difficult to explain. “Of course there are witches in the world. They’re women who’ve learned magic on their own, for the most part, or from other witches. But there have never been women in the wizards’ school.”

  “Is there a real reason, or just a silly tradition?”

  “Tradition’s not silly,” I told her. “Anything that has functioned well for centuries must have some validity. But you’re right, it is a tradition, rather than a written law, such as that barring women from the priesthood.”

  I didn’t want to be distracted from my original question of where she had learned magic, but she kept on pushing me about women wizards. “But what validity can a tradition have that keeps women from learning magic?”

  “ You’re not the first to ask this. It’s actually a question that’s being raised by some of the wizards of the City. The real reason, the original reason, is that women already have a creative power that men don’t have, the power to create life within their wombs.” If I hoped to embarrass her by my frankness, I should have known better; this was the same woman who had been whispering to me at dinner about the queen’s attempts to have a baby. “It would be too dangerous to link wizardry with that kind of creation. Witches are always teetering, about to go over into black magic, unless they know so little magic at all that their spells are useless. If you’ve heard of witches, you must have heard that some of them are said to create magic monsters in the womb.”

  Maria paused for a moment; she clearly had heard something of the sort. “But that wouldn’t apply—” She broke off. That wouldn’t apply, she had been starring to say, to someone already forty-eight, but she wasn’t going to say it. Instead she said, “In that case, wouldn’t it be better to train the women properly, so they would know how magic should be used? Isn’t that training why the wizards’ school was started originally? That’s what we were told when we started looking for a new wizard.”

  This argument too I had heard in the City. But instead of answering I changed the subject back to my question. “So how did you learn the Hidden Language?”

  “Is that what it’s called? When I first came to Yurt, I was terribly excited at the opportunity to learn magic, when I found there was a Royal Wizard here; there was no wizard in my brother’s castle. And then, at most, he let me be there while he worked some spells! But I found out I had the ability to say spells myself, if I’d heard them even once, and then I started making requests of my own!”

  “Requests?” This sounded dubious. “What were you requesting?”

  “Don’t ask a girl all her secrets!” she said with a smile which was indeed positively girlish.

  She seemed, I thought, to be one of the rare persons born with a flair for magic. This was why, weeks earlier, she had been able to hear my voice speaking within her mind.

  “The old wizard wouldn’t teach me anything. Could you, might you, teach me wizardry?”

  There was actually no reason why I shouldn’t. But I hesitated. Magic was a powerful tool, and the old wizard had been right in calling her flighty. But no one would have called me sober and stable either when I first came to the wizards’ school.

  “You’d have to learn the Hidden Language first,” I said at last. “You can do a few spells by saying the words, but to create your own spells you need to understand them thoroughly.” I reached for the first-grammar from my shelf. It was heavy, and the cloth binding was starting to fray badly. “Take this if you want, but I will need it back again. Start studying, and if you’re still interested I can help you further.”

  She took the volume eagerly, but her face fell as she leafed through it. “But it doesn’t tell how to do spells.”

  “As I said, you can’t create your own spells unless you understand the Language first. But tell me,” as a thought struck me, “how you’ve been able to make magic ‘requests’ without knowing magic.”

  There was no doubt now that she didn’t want to answer me. She stood up rapidly, clutching the first-grammar. “I’ll try to work through this,” she said. “I’d better go now. But wasn’t it fun that it was my telephone that worked?” She rushed across my room and was gone before I could answer.

  I sat down again and leaned my face on my fists. I had imagined being a Royal Wizard was exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring. So far, I had actually promised to teach wizardry to a woman, one who was positively flirting with me; another woman, who came to ask my wizardly advice, left thinking of me as a rather dim-witted uncle; and I was in love with a third woman, this one married already.

  Part Three

  Carnival

  I

  I came up the hill toward the castle on the white mare, exhausted and exhilarated. It was midmorning, and I had again spent the night at the old wizards house without intending to do so when I arrived. But this time I had known the night was passing (and it was only one night, not two) and had stayed because I decided to, not because the old wizard had used his magic herbal smoke to put me to sleep.

  The harvest was over, now, although the turnips still lay in the ground, awaiting the first real frost. For two weeks I had stood out in the fields with the harvesters, wearing a wide-brimmed hat against the sun and doubtless looking much more like a farmer than a wizard. I had kept my eye open for thunderstorms, or the hailstorms that could destroy the ripe grain, but for the most part the weather had stayed clear, and the weather spells I had assiduously reviewed were only needed once. With my harvest responsibilities over, I had gone back to the old wizard’s house under the giant oak.

  Yesterday he had begun to teach me herbal magic. I smiled ruefully at myself, arriving yesterday morning, doubtless very like the Lady Maria expecting the first-grammar of the Hidden Language to be a tidy list of useful spells. I had expected a quick listing of different herbs and their properties. Instead he had begun teaching me to know the herbs, as well as I already knew the Language, to recognize the possible properties in each and to determine how to combine them and how to find the words that would reveal their potency.

  It was only twenty-four hours ago that I had naively said, “You mean that you have to do something with magic herbs? Anyone can’t just pick them and use them?” The old wizard had snorted and looked at me as though he were going to send me back to the castle at once, but he hadn’t.

  The exhilaration had come just before I left, while the old wizard was slicing me some coarse bread and vegetables for breakfast. I stood next to the table where he had different herbs laid out, trying to picture what each might do, while the calico cat rubbed against my ankles.

  “You didn’t tell me you had a stickfast weed,” I said.

  “I don’t,” he said from the other table without turning around.

  ‘This one,“ I said, holding it out until he did look back over his shoulder.

  “That isn’t anything,” he said, returning to the vegetables. “It got into my basket with a lot of other herbs.”

  This, I decided, was a test. “But look!” I said. I squeezed the sap from the stem onto my palm, said two words, and reached down to pat the cat. When I stood up, it was firmly attached to my hand.

  The cat didn’t like bei
ng suspended from my open palm. It yowled and extended its claws. I said two more words and it was free. It dropped the short distance to the floor, gave a short hiss, and disappeared under the old wizard’s chair.

  Then I realized it hadn’t been a test. The old wizard stared at me, the knife forgotten in his hand, without speaking. After a long minute, as though he had finally won the struggle to avoid praising me, he said, “Stickfast weed,” and grunted.

  He put the bread and vegetables on a plate and handed it to me without another word. But I knew. I had discovered an herbal property he had not known. While I ate, I kept tossing little crumbs toward the cat until it emerged. Then I scooped it up and settled it on my lap, where in a minute it settled down to purr to show we were friends again.

  “Maybe I’ll be able to teach you some real magic after all,” said the old wizard as I saddled my mare. “Even if you did get some fancy notions at that City school.” The excitement lasted all the ride back through the woods, even though the exhaustion of staying up all night hit me as soon as I left the wizard’s valley. I had even learned a simple spell that someone not trained in magic could say, to detect magic potions in food. I couldn t wait to tell Gwen.

  I wondered again, as the castle came in sight, what had happened during the day I had passed in a trance in the wizard’s house last month. Yesterday, as I ducked under the volley of magic arrows to reach him, I had been wondering if he had used the time as an opportunity to come back up to the castle without my knowledge. But if so, no one had seen him, and he had said nothing about it, either then or now. If he had come to the castle, I now thought, he would have seen at once that his magic locks were gone from the north tower and would most certainly have held me to blame. That his manner now sometimes verged on friendly showed he did not yet know what had happened there. But sometime I was going to have to tell him.

  As I started across the drawbridge over the moat, I almost collided with the queen coming out.

  “I’m so pleased you’re back!” she cried with the smile that made my heart turn over. “The king told me to meet him in five minutes in the rose garden. I’m sure he’d like you to be there as well. He said it was a magic surprise! The five minutes are almost up.”