speak normally.
“It will take a miracle to save him.”
“I thought you said, if you need a miracle, see a priest,” I retorted, and almost felt triumphant as he blinked and drew back.
When the king was settled in his tent, the queen sitting beside him, and when the cook, still grumbling but beneath her breath, had started a new batch of soup on a small fire started with coals from the kitchen, just outside the garden walls, I drew Gwen to one side.
“I have to go somewhere,” I told her. “Stay with the cook. Check the new batch of soup with the same spell. If it doesn’t change color, the king should have some.”
“But where are you going?”
“Not far. I’ll be back soon.”
Without giving her a chance to speak again, I rose from the ground and flew down the hill toward the forest, swifter than a horse could carry me.
I didn’t know why I was embarrassed to tell her I needed to ask the old wizard for help, except that I never had told anyone I had been visiting him.
I was thinking very bitter thoughts about my own abilities and responsibilities. Although Dominic had told me he thought there was an evil spell on the king, and although I nearly believed him, I had done nothing to discover the source of that spell. For two weeks, while the king grew weaker and weaker, I had been concerned only with my own education, as though it was going to be useful to know wizardry even though I never practiced it in the service of the king who had hired me as his Royal Wizard. I had originally visited the old wizard to find out if he knew anything about this spell, but instead I had allowed myself to become distracted into learning the magic of herbs. It wouldn’t be much good showing off my herbal magic to my friends in the City if I also had to tell them I had allowed my king to die of a magic spell when I hadn’t bothered to find out its source.
The concentration needed for rapid flying beneath low-hanging branches made it difficult to carry this line of thought much further. I burst into sunshine as I entered the old wizard’s valley. The lady and the unicorn were sitting by the little bridge, but today I saw no golden arrows.
I dropped to the ground outside the green door. The wizard was sitting in the doorway, the cat on his knee, enjoying the sunshine. He looked surprised to see me.
“Decided to skip the horse today, eh?” he said. “I just hope you weren’t trying to impress me. We wizards trained in the old way have always been able to fly better than you young whipper-snappers when we wanted to.”
I swallowed my irritation. “I’m not trying to impress you, Master,” I said. “I need your help.” Quickly I explained to him about the soup that turned green when subjected to the spell to detect a love potion.
His brows furrowed, and he tossed the cat roughly from his lap as he stood up. “That spell just detects herbal potions,” he said after a long pause, as though wondering what to tell me. “It turns food red if there’s an herbal potion in it. There’s no reason the spell should turn anything green. The girl probably got it wrong; maybe she said a spell of illusion by mistake.”
“I don’t think she got it wrong.”
“Then it’s detecting something else,” he said abruptly, as though he had made a decision. “It might also detect the presence of the supernatural.”
“You mean there’s been black magic worked on the king’s soup?”
“No, that’s not what I mean, as you’d know if you listened properly! I meant that there’s a supernatural presence in the castle. It might have nothing to do with the soup in particular, but in the right circumstances it might be detectable in food. No one need have put any potions in the soup for it to respond to that spell.”
“Dominic said that he thought an evil spell had been cast on the king,” I said. “Did he ever mention it to you, Master? Might this be the supernatural presence?”
“I don’t know what Dominic’s been telling you,” said the old wizard, sitting down again. “There certainly weren’t any supernatural presences in the castle when I was Royal Wizard.”
“Then I’d better see if I can find the source,” I said and flew back up the valley without even a proper farewell.
As soon as I left the wizard’s valley, the rain started again. I was furious with myself as I realized that, if he could create an island of good weather, I ought to have been able to do the same for the king. And the thought kept on nagging that the green of the chicken soup really was the same color as the queen’s eyes.
I had never flown so fast for so far before, and the concentration required left me no attention for a spell against the rain. I was wet through when I dropped to the ground outside the rose garden.
Gwen, standing under an umbrella, met me by the gate. “The cook finished the new soup, sir,” she said eagerly, “and the spell didn’t affect it at all. The queen’s giving him some now.”
“Good,” I said, though I feared it would take more at this point than the cook’s excellent chicken soup to heal the king. Hoping that drier weather might also help, I set to work at once on a weather spell.
But I realized immediately that I didn’t know the spell against slow and steady rain. The spells I had prepared during the harvest were all against sudden storm. I could go back to my chambers and try to work it out, but I felt a desperate sense of urgency and decided to improvise. If I could turn this rain into a thunderstorm, I could then dissipate it quickly.
“You’d better go inside, my dear,” I said to Gwen, as she stood, hesitating, beside me. “Don’t get any wetter.”
She went back into the castle, and it was just as well, because my first attempt to transform the rain into a real storm was so successful that a lightning bolt struck with a blazing flash and an acrid smell within ten feet of me, nearly taking off my eyelashes.
Peal after peal of thunder rolled around my head, and the air was blinding with repeated lightning flashes. I looked up and saw bolts of lightning dancing from turret to turret, hitting every tower in the castle and the spire on top of the chapel. I seemed to have created what must have been the worst thunderstorm in Yurt in a hundred years. My only hope was to make sure it was also the shortest. Setting my teeth grimly, I proceeded with the spells against thunderstorms, and abruptly the sky was clear. Both the thunder and the clouds rolled back, leaving a square mile of sunshine smiling down on the castle and the rose garden.
I checked my forehead to be sure I still had my eyebrows. Startled faces were looking at me over the garden gate, but I turned without saying anything and crossed the bridge into the castle. Since I had not in fact actually killed anyone with my lightning, it hardly seemed worth discussing the event at the moment.
As I crossed the courtyard, shivering in my wet clothes, I started toward my chambers to change, but decided instead to look for Joachim. I had been very rude to him and should probably show Christian tact by apologizing. He had been rude to me as well, but he had had more cause.
I hadn’t seen him in the rose garden, but I hadn’t actually gone into the garden. To save time, I probed with my mind to see where he might be in the castle. I couldn’t find him.
Feeling uneasy, I started searching. It should be fairly straightforward for a wizard to touch the mind of someone he knows, as long as that person is not too far away. I went up to the chaplain’s room, but it stood empty. I wandered around the castle aimlessly for a few minutes, not quite ready to go back out to the garden and face the inevitable questions about the thunderstorm, then realized I had not looked in the obvious place, the chapel.
I went up the stairs without the heart to turn on the lights, keeping my head low. So far I had been able to remove the king, at least temporarily, from whatever supernatural influence in the castle was harming him, and had been able to change the weather so he shouldn’t get very damp out in his rose garden, but in my bones I feared it was too late.
Candles were burning on the chapel altar. A figure in black and white linen was stretched on his face on the floor in front of the altar, arms outstretched. I started to step forward, started to cry out, terrified that now Joachim had been struck dead-perhaps by lightning.
I stopped myself in time. He was praying. No wonder, I thought, I hadn’t been able to touch his mind. Magic is, as I kept telling people, a natural force, and he was in company with the saints.
He was totally still, except for the slight rising and falling of his shoulders as he breathed. I tiptoed back out, though I doubted that even my thunderstorm had disturbed him.
I returned slowly to my rooms, physically and mentally exhausted, from flying, from working spells, and from
