A Bad Spell in Yurt Read online

  I dismounted to walk with her. She was wearing a long white dress with a standing crimson collar mat framed her face, and her eyes flashed with delight at me from under an errant wave of hair.

  We stopped at the garden gate. “I’m here!” the queen called. “And I’ve brought the Royal Wizard with me!”

  “Come on in!” came a faint call, and we entered.

  Coming toward us between the rosebushes, his toes just brushing the grass, was King Haimeric. His face was so tight with concentration that he seemed not to see us. I could tell he wasn’t even breathing. When he was within three feet of the queen, he lifted his eyes, took a sudden breath, and dropped to the ground. She steadied him with her strong young arms.

  “You were flying!” she cried. “When did you learn to fly? I know you said it would be a magic surprise, but I hadn’t imagined it could be anything so wonderful!”

  The king winked at me over her head, a wink of triumph.

  He leaned on her arm as they walked toward the bench, and I followed behind.

  “I’ve been having the wizard teach me,” he said.

  “And you’ve clearly been practicing on your own!” I added. “You’ve made much better progress than I would have expected. But you do have to remember to breathe.”

  “I noticed that,” he said, sitting down and breathing “But it seems to interrupt my concentration.”

  “All it needs is a little more practice.”

  “I’d had no idea you were learning to fly,” said the queen in admiration, and for one bad moment I was afraid she was going to ask me to teach her too. “When did you start learning?”

  “It was while you were at your parents‘. Originally I was hoping to show you when you first got back, but I wasn’t as quick a pupil as I’d hoped. Not that our wizard isn’t a good teacher!” They both turned wide smiles on me. “One of the many, many things I like about having you here is that it makes me less dependent on Dominic. As you know, since my legs started to get weak I haven’t always been able to walk as well as I’d like, and he’d baby me unmercifully. I thought that if I learned to fly, I’d be able to move around as I liked without him always hovering. The boy means well, but…”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. I was very pleased to see that I was not the only person in the castle referred to as a boy—especially since Dominic was half again my age.

  I was also pleased to see how much more cheerful the king had seemed since the queen came home. When I first arrived, he was looking back over his years as king as though they would shortly be coming to an end. Now he acted as though he were only in the middle of them. I began to wonder if the mysterious ailment that Dominic thought someone had given the king was nothing more than some stiffness in the knees combined with loneliness. If she had been my queen, I would certainly have been lonely when she was gone.

  We looked at the roses while the king finished catching his breath. Some of the bushes had already finished blooming for the season, though late roses still bloomed defiantly on others.

  “You know,” said the king, “it’s been several years since I’ve been to the harvest carnival. Would you like to go?”

  “Oh, could we?” said the queen with that smile.

  “I’d be delighted,” I said, since the question seemed to include me as well, and suddenly had to stifle a yawn.

  “The carnival starts in two days,” said the king. “We’ll leave first thing in the morning.” With the tact I was pleased to see even a sometimes incompetent wizard deserved, he added, “You’ll have plenty of time before then to recover your strength after your magic activities.”

  While I napped that afternoon with my curtains drawn, the rest of the castle must have buzzed with activity, for in the morning all was ready. The constable and his wife were staying behind with a few servants, but the rest of us rode out just after dawn: the knights first, led by Dominic, then the king and queen, surrounded by the ladies of the court, then the boys, the chaplain, and me, all followed by the servants, who led pack horses loaded with food, supplies, and the tents.

  The queen rode her black stallion, but the rest of us were on the white or bay mares and geldings of the royal stables. Bells on our harnesses jingled as we waved good-bye to those staying behind and rode down the brick road toward the forest. The air was crisp, with a faint haze, and there were spots of orange leaves among the green before us.

  “Have you been to this harvest carnival before?” I asked the chaplain. He was riding beside me, his horse the only one without bells.

  “Not since I came to Yurt,” he said. “The carnival was already past the fall I arrived, and the king has not felt well enough since then to go. But of course I know the city well where it is held.”

  Clearly I was missing something. Since I didn’t even know where we were going, I kept on with my questions. “Why do you know it well?”

  Joachim looked at me in surprise, then nodded. “That’s right, you wouldn’t know. It’s my cathedral city, the city of the bishop. Yurt isn’t big enough for its own bishop, or for that matter its own harvest carnival, so for both the kingdom must rely on the nearest city of the next kingdom over. That’s where we’re going.”

  “Then you’ll get to see your old friends at the bishop’s school,” I said, thinking I would like to see some of my friends from the wizards’ school. But this small city where we were going was still a long, long way from the City by the sea, where the wizards trained, and I knew that most of my best friends were by now off in various parts of the western kingdoms in their own posts as wizards.

  Joachim looked at me a moment in silence, then smiled. “I still don’t always recognize it when you’re making a joke,” he said. As I hadn’t been making a joke, this naturally surprised me. “I’d been about to say, you must not know very much about the way the Church is organized to think that a priest would take up his first post in the same diocese as his seminary.”

  Since I had no idea what he was talking about, I decided to say nothing.

  “But I am going to see the bishop. It would soon be time for my annual visit anyway, so it seemed easiest to come with the party from Yurt. I sent him a message by the pigeons yesterday so that he would expect me.”

  ‘That will be nice to see him, if it’s been a year,“ I said to keep the conversation going.

  “ ‘Nice,’ ” said Joachim, as though testing the word. “You know, I don’t always understand you. Are you still joking? Or is it really ‘nice’ for you to explain to the old wizard of the wizards’ school your progress in the last year in combating evil?”

  “Oh,” I said, understanding at last. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I’d realized that you had to undergo an annual assessment.”

  “How else would the bishops of the western kingdoms be able to be sure that the priests under them had kept the pure faith?”

  We reached the edge of the forest and passed into the cool shade. The early morning light was dim, but I could see Joachim’s dark eyes glaring at me.

  “Don’t you wizards from the wizards’ school have to do something similar?”

  If so, no one had ever told me, or at least I hadn’t heard. I missed my friends and I missed the City, but I certainly hoped I would never have to explain to the Master of the wizards that I had spent the past year adeptly aiding mankind with benign wizardry. “Maybe it’s because wizards tend to fight all the time,” I said, “but they leave us alone once we’ve left the school.”

  “Maybe it’s because the worst you can do is endanger your own souls,” said Joachim with a snort that would have done credit to my predecessor in Yurt.

  We would soon be reaching the little pile of white stones that marked the turnoff for the old wizard’s hidden valley. I decided not to point it out.

  We rode in silence for a few minutes. What he said seemed to dismiss the theory I had once had that a young, untried and unsupervised priest had somehow let evil loose in Yurt. I was happy to see the theory go. Although Joachim s
eemed short on tact, even for him, this morning, I could not be irritated. He was not only going to have to explain why everything he had done was good, but make it clear that he had done it with a pure heart. Whatever wizardry demanded, a pure heart didn’t seem absolutely necessary.

  Reflecting on the lack of purity in my own heart made me think of Gwen. I hadn’t yet had a chance to tell her I had a spell against love potions. I excused myself, reined in my mare so that others could pass me, and dropped into line again as Gwen came even.

  “Hello, sir,” she said in evident surprise.

  “I’d like to talk to you a minute,” I said. “Privately, if we could.”

  She had been riding next to Jon. Although the young trumpeter and glassblower had always been perfectly friendly to me, he now shot me a brief but unmistakable look of jealousy. “Don’t worry,” I said with a grin. “We can’t possibly get into trouble on horseback.”

  This did not improve his expression, but Gwen laughed and reined in her own horse, so that the two of us fell to the back of the procession.

  “You were asking me about love potions,” I said as soon as I thought no one else would hear us. Jon was riding a short distance ahead, but his back was turned toward us stiffly, as though to say that he would not deign to turn around. “I’ve learned a spell you can say to detect one.”

  As I’d hoped, Gwen was delighted at this helpful advice from her elderly uncle. As we rode, I taught her the three simple words of the Hidden Language that would reveal such a potion and made her repeat them until I was sure she Knew them. “Say them over any drink or dish you suspect,” I said, “and if there’s a love potion it will turn bright red.”

  “That should make the danger clear, then,” she said with a smile.

  “Very clear. And remember: I know the spell too, so don t try slipping anything in my crullers!”

  This attempt at flirtation was met with highly amused laughter. The elderly uncle was clearly cute and quaint. She kicked her horse and hurried forward to rejoin Ton.

  We rode on all that day, stopping for lunch at the border where we left the kingdom of Yurt. In late afternoon, when the king was clearly exhausted, Dominic called a halt at a meadow next to a stream. The servants unloaded the horses and set up the tents with the knights’ assistance, then started fires to cook supper. The ride had made me ravenously hungry, and the smoked sausage they were grilling smelled delicious long before it was ready. The king and queen retired to their tent even before supper was ready, but the rest of us strolled around the meadow, glad to be on our own feet again after a day on horseback. Even the more reserved ladies of the court were talking and laughing about the events of the harvest carnival, which we would reach tomorrow, and the Lady Maria was positively giddy.

  II

  The first sight we had of the city was the spire of the cathedral, seeming to rise out of the golden stubble of the wheat fields. The forests of Yurt were far behind, and all afternoon we had been riding past wide fields. As we came closer, we could see that the cathedral spire was surrounded in turn by a small walled city, and that the city was surrounded with the colorful striped tents of other people who had come to the carnival. As we approached, I could see crenellated towers rising on the opposite side of the city from the cathedral, directly against the walls. The city gates stood wide open, and a crowd hurried in and out. Distant sounds of shouting, of laughter, and of song reached us on the wind.

  We rode through the encampments, through the city gates, and were plunged into narrow streets bustling with humanity. We had to ride carefully to be sure our horses did not bump into anyone or knock over tables set out with everything from fresh vegetables to tooled harnesses to bales of fabric. I had expected that we would be camping again, but instead we proceeded through the streets toward the small castle whose towers I had seen from outside the walls.

  “This castle belongs to Yurt,” explained the Lady Maria, riding beside me. “Our king’s grandfather, I think it was, bought the land outside the old city walls, built the castle, and rebuilt the walls to go around it. He wanted to have a place to stay when he came for one of the carnivals or to visit the cathedral. Now even the king of this kingdom has to ask our king’s permission if he wants to stay here!”

  Before reaching the castle, we had to pass the wide open square in front of the cathedral. Here, in the long shadow of the spire, the market tables were thickest, and the music was the loudest. Ahead of us, I saw the chaplain speak for a moment to the king, then pull his horse out of line.

  “I’m leaving you now,” he said as I came even. “But I’ll be with you when you go.” He dismounted before I could say anything and led his horse through the tangle of tables to the cathedral steps, where I saw him talking to a boy and handing him both the reins and a coin. I looked over my shoulder before we left the square to see him going, straight-backed, up the cathedral stairs and in the tall door.

  “The king and queen were married in the cathedral,” said the Lady Maria. “It was the sweetest ceremony, with roses brought from the king’s own garden, and the queen just radiant. I always like to visit the cathedral when we come here.”

  In a few more twists of the street, we had reached the gateway which led into the courtyard of the king’s little castle. The constable of this castle and his wife were at the gate waiting for us, wearing the same blue and white livery as the constable back home in Yurt. There were only a few chambers besides the royal chambers, so my little bundle of clean clothes ended up in the same room with Dominic and the knights. But none of us wanted to stay in the castle’s narrow rooms when the sounds of carnival were right outside the windows. Within a few minutes, everyone but the king and queen was out in the city streets.

  Most of them went in groups of three or four, but I went alone. At a booth just down the street from the castle I discovered something I had not expected to see but which I had to buy at once: a newspaper. I had not seen a newspaper since arriving in Yurt.

  “This is dated five days ago,” I said, leafing through it excitedly. In fact it didn’t matter when it was dated, because I hadn’t heard any news for two months anyway.

  “That’s when it left the City,” said the man at the booth. “It came up here on a pack train, and they hurried, too, to get it here so quickly. You don’t expect the pigeons to be able to carry a newspaper!”

  “Of course not,” I said absently, moving away, avidly turning the pages. But in a moment I paused, thinking something was wrong. When I had been at the wizards’ school, I had always read at least the Sunday paper, and often the paper during the week as well. It had always been full of interesting news, ads, and information, whereas this paper was all full of the doings of some rather uninteresting people far away. Then I realized what the problem was. There was nothing in the paper about Yurt.

  I laughed and folded it up. At this rate, soon I wouldn’t be able to think of myself as a city boy any longer.

  I had only a rather vague idea of how newspapers were produced, except that the presses that covered piles of newsprint with black ink were powered by wizardry. But I hadn’t thought before how localized newspapers were, all produced in the City, by wizards trained in the school, carrying ads for the City emporia or sometimes ads sent in from distant kingdoms, like Yurt, that were aimed at people in the City, like young wizards. I opened the paper again, and saw that on the inner pages there was some news of political events in some of the western kingdoms, but for the most part the paper was devoted exclusively to topics that would interest people of the City. When I stopped at a stall to buy a bun topped with spices and melting cheese, I held the newspaper under my chin to catch the drips before they reached my clothes.

  If I belonged anywhere, I thought, I now belonged to Yurt, not the City. Both my parents had died when I was very young, and the grandmother who had brought me up and operated their wholesale warehouse for a few more years had died my fifth year in the wizards’ school. I had made some good friends at the school, but n
ow that we were scattered over the western kingdoms we would not see each other very frequently, and probably not in the City at all.

  Even if I wasn’t a city boy anymore, I was exhilarated to be back in busy streets, where people on foot and horseback jostled with carts and booths. Competing music rose from every corner. I tossed coins to the best musicians, or at least the ones I enjoyed the most. As the afternoon dimmed toward evening, lamps were hung above the shop doors, and the shadows danced over faces that in many cases now were painted and decorated. Men, and a few women, with glasses in their hands spilled out of tavern doors. Although this was a small city, we were certainly not the only ones to have come to the carnival from far away. This, I thought, compared favorably to the harvest carnival in the City itself.

  The relief after a long summer’s worry and the work of harvest, of knowing food was stored away for the next year, made people giddy. Or at least I could imagine myself saying that to Joachim, to show him I often thought deeply about human nature, not just magic. On consideration, it didn’t appear as deep or unusual a conclusion as I hoped. For that matter, the chaplain wasn’t spending the carnival being giddy; he was doubtless at this moment describing the purity of his heart to the bishop.

  But I was enjoying myself. I tried all the different kinds of food being served, from sausages to sweet hot pastries. I stopped briefly at a tavern, though the air inside was so thick and hot that I moved back out to the street after a single glass of wine. I admired and tossed coins to a girl doing a fairly provocative dance. I was startled and had to leap back against a wall as six people collectively wearing a dragon costume came running around the comer. For one horrible moment, I was afraid it actually was a dragon.

  They certainly made a spectacular beast. Seeing they had startled me, they paused in their progress and did a dance for my benefit and that of several people near me. The dragon’s fringed ears whirled around its head, its twelve legs stamped and weaved, and its eyes glowed red, not, as I realized in a moment, from fire but from magic.