listened. I heard a very faint pattering noise, which could have been dripping water, could have been rats, and could have been nothing.
I tried to think clearly and calmly to combat the irrational fear that threatened to overwhelm me. Dominic had known there was an evil spell on the king, I told myself, forcing my feet to proceed down the passage. He didn’t just think the king was sick, but thought magic must be implicated. Therefore, he knew more than he had told me about how that spell was cast.
I paused and listened again. There was no sound other than my own breathing. Even though Dominic knew something about the spell, I continued my reasoning, he still wanted it overcome. Therefore, he himself had not been responsible. I returned to a thought I had had long ago, that he was sheltering someone, most likely the queen. Could she have tried to put an evil spell on the king, which Dominic then wanted to overcome, even though he loved her too much to accuse her?
But Dominic might not know as much as he thought. He clearly believed, with the old wizard, that the north tower was still locked, and had had no inkling of the evil now settled in the cellars.
I forced my feet to start moving again, although at this point I was starting to feel what could only be a terminal illness, caused by black magic, sweeping through my body. This of course is the weakness of being a wizard; we are much more accessible to magic influences than ordinary people. Water splashed onto my socks with the next step; I had been following the passage slightly downhill, and the floor had gone from being damp to being flooded.
I murmured the spell that should have lifted me six inches above the water, to continue down the passage suspended in air. Nothing happened at all.
At this point, rationality lost. I turned and ran back toward daylight, the magic globe bouncing madly at the end of the string. At the door, I hesitated. I could not hear anything behind me, but I didn’t want whatever was in there coming out. I made myself gather up some of the debris from the first storeroom and stuffed it into the small opening in the iron door. I held it in place with the best magic lock I could manage.
With the sight of daylight before me, I was able to control my heartbeat enough to wait one more minute. I called, “Kitty, kitty, kitty,” not wanting to leave any cat trapped in the cellars. But when no cat appeared, I slammed the door, turned the iron key, and put an additional magic lock on the latch as well.
Back out in the narrow staircase, leaning against the stone wall, I slowly stopped feeling as though I were about to die. But in a minute even the staircase seemed oppressive, so I hurried back up the stairs. The smell of bread baking came to me from the kitchen like a benediction.
I didn’t want to return to my chambers right away but instead went to the great hall, telling myself I needed to return the key to Dominic but really in search of human company. The king and queen, along with several of the ladies, were seated around the fire, talking animately.
“Wizard!” called the king when he saw me. “We’ve just been making plans. How would you like to go visit the duchess?”
After a second in which I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about, I remembered the lady Maria once telling me that Yurt had, besides the king’s own castle, the castles of two counts and a duchess.
“I ought to visit my liege vassals more often,” said the king.
“The king and I met at the duchess’s castle,” the queen told me, smiling at him.
“I would be very interested in visiting the duchess,” I said. If Zahlfast was right (and I hoped he was, rather than believed he was), the king should now be safe from whatever black magic was lurking in the cellars. But no one else was safe. Until a supposedly fully-qualified wizard, me, could find a way to overcome that spell, it might be better if we all went visiting.
II
The duchess’s castle was closer than the city where we had gone to the harvest carnival, being only one long day’s ride away. Therefore we didn’t need the tents, and the pack horses were less burdened as we started out early on a frosty but sunny morning.
The king’s party was also much smaller, as most of the servants were not accompanying us.
I had talked to the queen about this. “Don’t you think it would be better if we brought everyone along?”
But she laughed. “The duchess won’t have nearly enough room for all of us. Her castle is smaller than the royal castle, and she has her own staff, of course. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were getting too attached to that saucy girl who brings you breakfast!”
It was bad enough being hopelessly in love with the queen without having her tease me about Gwen. I tried the constable instead.
“Don’t you think it might be better, while the king is gone, to send the servants away?”
He looked at me in amazement, as well he might, because the arrangement of the household staff was certainly not part of a royal wizard’s duties. For a minute I could see that he was about to resent my interference, but then he remembered that it was, after all, me.
“Usually when the royal household is away, I give most of the staff their vacation,” he said. “Some go to visit their families, although some of course stay here.”
“But I don’t want anyone to stay here.”
This was clearly going too far, even for a wizard who had already proved himself to have an odd sense of humor. “My principal responsibility,” the constable said with great dignity, “is the wellbeing of the royal castle of Yurt, including its people. My wife and I at any rate will not leave, certainly not on a wizard’s whim.”
It would have been hard to explain that I feared an evil influence was down in the cellars, especially as I had checked that morning and found my magic locks still in place. Since everyone in the castle, not just the king, seemed happy and well, I tried to tell myself that there was no danger. The night before we left, I spent hours with my books until I found what I hoped was a suitably strong protective spell. I put it on the castle and its inhabitants before we left.
The Lady Maria rode next to me. I had noticed that, in the last few weeks, she had stopped wearing as much lace and ribbon. This morning she was wearing a conservatively-cut, dark green riding habit, and her golden hair, rather than tumbling in ringlets around her shoulders, was tied up into a bun on the back of her head.
But her laugh and her conversation had not changed at all. “I think I explained to you once,” she said, “that the queen’s mother and the duchess’s mother are cousins-or is it second cousins? When the old duke died in that terrible accident-I was just the tiniest girl then, but even so I remember it well-he left only a daughter to inherit. She grew into quite a beauty, I can tell you!”
“Does she look like the queen?” I asked, that being my standard for beauty.
“She does, a little,” said Maria almost reluctantly, and I knew her well enough to realize that, while she loved to discuss charm and beauty in the abstract, she didn’t like the implication that midnight hair could be more beautiful than golden.
“I’ll bet she had a number of suitors!” I said, knowing that was what she wanted me to say.
“She certainly did!” she replied, her good humor restored. “But she wouldn’t have any of them! She was too proud for any but the best, and maybe she hasn’t met the best yet! She’ll soon be getting old, however, so she may shortly have to lower her standards! Of course, she isn’t as old as me.”
I was flabbergasted. I had never before heard Maria admit that she might be old. Together with the pulled- back hair, this made me start to wonder if she had been affected by some variation of the spell that had nearly killed the king.
But her manner was unchanged. She continued all morning to tell me stories that I had already heard and to point out all the places in the landscape with any romantic associations.
“See that spire?” she said at one point. A sharply-pointed spire rose from behind a snow-sprinkled hill, half a mile back from the road. The hill nearly obscured the low tiled roof of its church. “That’s the Nunnery of Yurt. It’s made up of widows who grieve for their dead husbands, and of young girls who have tragically renounced the world with broken hearts.” I decided to try to ride with someone else that afternoon.
After our lunch break, which we took standing up because the half-frozen ground was too cold for sitting, I managed to position my horse next to Joachim’s, at the end of the procession. This, I thought, might be the best
