had a horse saddled and ready. A man in a brown tunic was mounted and waiting by the gate.
“Is that your friend the chaplain?” said Zahlfast behind me.
I nodded, watching the two ride through the gate and away. I knew, without the chaplain telling me, that the news of the king’s miraculous recovery must have spread at once throughout the kingdom, and that anyone now who needed a miracle would not be satisfied with their local priest but would want the castle chaplain.
“So tell me more about herbal magic,” said Zahlfast.
Although I had had some success teaching a little magic to the king and the Lady Maria, it was extremely odd to be suddenly explaining something to my former teacher. It was also difficult to do with no herbs at hand; the sense that the old wizard had taught me, of how to determine a plant’s properties just by handling it, was difficult to put into words.
But I had been able to explain at least some of the basic principles when I heard voices, the sound of hoofs, and the queen’s laugh in the courtyard and realized the hunting party had returned. “You’ll have to stay for dinner,” I said, “and I’d be delighted to have you stay with me if you were willing to spend the night. Even for you, a two- hundred mile flight can’t be easy.”
To my surprise, he agreed. At dinner, he took the chaplain’s chair across the table from me, which kept on startling me, as I would look up from my plate to see a face I had stopped being accustomed to see in the context in which I had recently become accustomed to seeing another’s. He kept our table highly entertained, with gossip from the City and stories about the northern land of dragons, which he had visited. I saw even the servants at the next table leaning to catch his words.
“I’ll have to tell you something I tell all the young wizards after the first checkup,” he said as he prepared to leave the next morning. We were standing outside the castle gate, looking down at the red and golden foliage of the forest. “I doubt this would be a problem for you anyway, but some of the young wizards, when they find that the school is still interested in what they’re doing, feel they can ask for help for every little problem. We certainly want to make sure that magic is being practiced well throughout the western kingdoms, but we just don’t have the time to keep helping out fully-qualified wizards who should know how to do magic on their own.”
But then his smile came out. “In your case, write me whenever you want. There were some of the teachers who’d had doubts you’d even learn enough magic to become a magician, but I knew from the beginning you’d someday be capable of becoming a good wizard.”
This would have been more of a compliment if it hadn’t been for the implication that “someday” had not yet arrived.
“Well, it was delightful to see you,” I said, inane once more. Zahlfast rose from the ground and sped away, west over the treetops toward the City. It really had been very nice to see him, even though I continued to feel extremely irritated that he and the Master had apparently engineered my position at Yurt for me, for reasons he had perhaps still not told me completely,
As I watched his flying figure disappear in the distance, I wondered again if he had in fact even told me the real reason for his visit. I realized there were a number of questions I had not asked him, or if I had asked he had not answered. He had never said where he thought the evil spell on the castle might come from, and I had not had a chance to ask his opinion of the old wizard’s empty tower room. Well, if I was supposed to be fully qualified to practice magic on my own, I would have to do so.
As I turned to start back into the castle, I saw a another distant figure, this one on horseback, coming up the road toward the castle. In a moment, I recognized Joachim and waited for him to reach me.
I became alarmed at his appearance when he came closer. His usually smooth hair was rumpled, his vestments wrinkled and stained, and his hand slack on the reins. The accentuated gauntness of his cheeks and his unseeing stare made me realize he was exhausted from more than riding five miles home after staying up all night.
I took the horse’s bridle to lead it across the bridge and helped him dismount. He seemed to notice me for the first time.
“Do you think it’s too late for me to hold chapel services this morning?” he asked, clearly concerned about this lapse.
“The king and queen have already left to go hunting again,” I told him. “Tomorrow’s Sunday; service can wait until then.”
“All right,” he said meekly and started moving slowly toward his room. He stopped then, looked back, and told me what I had already guessed. “The little girl died.”
PART FOUR — THE DUCHESS
I
The first snow had reached Yurt. It wasn’t very much snow, a light dusting in the courtyard, but as evening came on it rose and whirled in the wind, and made all of us in the great hall linger around the fireplace after supper. Through the tall windows, I could see the moon, slightly orange and half obscured by whipping clouds, what Gwen told me they called in Yurt a witch’s moon.
The Lady Maria had been talking about dragons at supper. The combination of Zahlfast’s visit and the first volume of Ancient and Modern Necromancy, which I had given her to read when the first-grammar continued to prove frustrating, had given her enough information about the northern land of wild magic that she was talking as though she wanted to go there herself.
“But Maria, it’s terribly cold even here!” said one of the other ladies with a laugh. “Think how much colder it would be so much further north.”
“Then maybe I’ll try to go there in the summer,” she said, undeterred. “Or maybe a dragon would come here.”
The other ladies, who clearly did not believe in dragons, or if they did certainly believed they had nothing to do with Yurt, all laughed thoroughly at this.
I at least knew dragons were real, and maybe it was to support the Lady Maria that I decided to make an illusory dragon. I had never tried to match my predecessor by producing illusions over dessert, but while most of the castle was lingering by the fire it seemed a good time to start.
Illusions are among the first things they teach at the wizards’ school, and they are so much fun that wizardry students tend to stay up late challenging each other with different effects, which is why even carnival magicians are proficient at them. At any rate, even though I knew I could never equal my predecessor’s skill at life-like creations, I started on a dragon.
It stayed rather flat-looking, and at certain angles one could see right through it, but that didn’t deter me, as I set out to make a dragon that would fill our entire end of the hall. It certainly didn’t hurt my efforts that the queen came over at once, eyes dancing, to watch the dragon being constructed.
First I did the tail, long and reptilian with a double row of spines down the center. When I had the tail lashing nicely, I started on the body, massive and scaled, with six legs and long, scaled wings. It was only coincidence, I told myself, that I made the iridescent scales emerald green. By now most of the castle was watching; even the servants who had taken the dishes down to the kitchen came back.
The head was the hardest part. I gave my dragon a gaping mouth with several hundred teeth, long fringed ears, and eyes of fire. It actually looked more like the dragon costume at the harvest carnival than like the rather small blue dragon in the basement of the wizards’ school, the only real dragon I had actually seen. But since no else there had ever seen a dragon at all, this did not matter. They stood well back from its slowly lashing tail and watched with growing excitement.
And I decided to make it especially exciting. As soon as I had finished the last detail, the long forked yellow tongue, I gave the whole dragon the order to move and stood back to catch my breath. It was a dozen times larger than any illusion I had ever made before.
It moved spectacularly. Eyes burning and mouth opening and closing in frenzied snaps, it whirled away from me and started toward my audience.
It moved totally silently, but that was all right, because the screaming of ladies, servants, and even knights
