A Bad Spell in Yurt

refused to believe it here. I had paid very close attention in the part of the course that dealt with demons, and I knew that demons would not listen to a request to do good to someone else. A demon would happily do evil to others, but would only be helpful to the person whose soul he claimed.

Therefore, as I had thought all along, the supernatural power that had healed the king had been the power of the saints. Would the saints have listened to Joachim if his heart had been full of evil?

“Unless he’d since repented of that evil,” I answered myself, “and his heart was truly contrite.” I startled my mare by suddenly digging in my heels. I was not going to allow myself to take this reasoning any further. But then I was suddenly struck by the thought of the old chaplain, the one who had died unexpectedly. Could he have turned to evil, worshipping the devil in his heart while his lips addressed God?

This was a truly terrible thought, and I felt myself go cold and stiff again. If a castle’s chaplain had invited in the powers of darkness, had died with his immortal soul in the devil’s grasp, would a castle ever be able to recover?

I reassured myself with the thought that a chapel where a man could pray to the saints for a miracle was not a chapel where imps and demons frolicked unchecked. This left me Dominic as my final suspect. I wished I did not feel so much righteous pleasure in suspecting him.

In spite of the highly intermittent nature of my riding, I had at last arrived at the castle gates. I crossed the bridge into the courtyard, with more questions than I had had before but fewer answers. I needed to ask Dominic about his and Maria’s attempts to learn magic from the old wizard, and I had no idea how I was going to ask him.

I was nearly as startled as I would have been to meet a demon to find Dominic’s slightly red face looking at me as I entered the stables with my mare.

“Prince Dominic!” I stammered. “I thought you were out hunting!”

He frowned, clearly wondering what I could have been doing to make me react so guiltily to his presence. “I’m still worried about my horse’s leg,” he answered, “so I came in from the hunt.”

The thought passed wildly through my mind that the horse’s leg might recover more quickly with a lighter rider, but fortunately I was able to suppress any such comment. “I’m glad to see you here, as I’d wanted to ask you some questions,” I managed to say instead, wondering what I would ask him.

“But first I have some questions for you,” he said, standing up. He always seemed when I was close to him much larger than I remembered. “A royal wizard is supposed to use his powers to serve his king and kingdom, and I’d like to know what you think you’re doing with yours.”

“Serving the king and kingdom,” I said promptly, with as much of a smile as I could manage.

He seemed to find neither humor nor reassurance in this. “All you’ve done,” he said, scowling down at me and speaking slowly and distinctly as though I were slightly demented, “ever since you’ve come to Yurt, is to produce illusions that terrify the women-”

Fortunately I managed to keep a perfectly expressionless face.

“-and, I discover now, recklessly try to teach the king to fly.”

“Didn’t you know that?” I said inanely. “He asked me to months ago, back during the summer while the queen was visiting her parents. He wanted to surprise her when she came home.”

“I most certainly did not know it,” he said, his face growing darker red. This explained, then, the look of fury he had turned on me when we first arrived here and the king had used his rather limited flying powers to dismount. Thinking quickly, I realized that Dominic had never been there before on any of the very few occasions when the king had showed off his ability.

“But what’s the harm in it?”

“The harm,” he said, still in that careful voice in which rage seemed to boil barely suppressed, “is that any interference in magic processes, as you tried to tell me once yourself, can lead to terrible consequences, and the king’s too much of- too trusting to recognize the dangers. I shouldn’t have to remind you of this, Wizard.”

I was quite sure he had been going to say that the king was too much of a fool to realize magic’s dangers. I wondered if some of Dominic’s resentment of the king’s flying was that it freed the king from the dependency on his nephew he had had when the queen was away. But now that the king was well-and Dominic had seemed as delighted as anyone else-this dependency would not be at issue anyway. Maybe Dominic himself had already experienced some of the terrible experiences of misused magic.

“And I shouldn’t have to remind you,” I said, making myself as tall as I could, “that you yourself once interfered in magic processes, and have refused to tell me about what happened then. It’s my duty as royal wizard to know all the magic being done in the kingdom.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Dominic, taking half a step backwards.

I hesitated. My immediate reaction was to push my advantage, to call him a liar to his face, but if he openly denied having ever been involved in magic I knew he never would tell me about it. “Then I’ll bid you good day,” I said calmly and left the stables.

So far, I thought, crossing the wet cobblestones of the courtyard, I knew no more than I had known that summer. The only advance I seemed to have made was in somehow leading the duchess to believe that I was a well-qualified wizard.

The Lady Maria was at dinner that night, which almost surprised me, but she seemed very cheerful. Since we had been sitting next to each other all week, it would have looked very odd if either of us sat elsewhere, and I also felt it necessary to reestablish our light banter.

“You know everyone’s romantic secrets, my lady,” I said in a low voice to her during the soup. The soup was made of fish and herbs, actually one of the better productions of the duchess’s kitchens, but I could tell that it was ocean fish, not local river fish, and therefore must have been packed up from the City on ice at a remarkable cost.

“But I still don’t think I know all your secrets,” she replied with a smile, in the same tone, clearly eager to pretend that our afternoon’s conversation had never taken place.

“There’s one person’s secret I hope you might tell me,” I said coyly while the soup dishes were being cleared, taking advantage of the rattle of china to mask our conversation. “When the king and his party met you and the present queen’s party for the first time, here at the duchess’s castle, had there been a rumor that the king might be about to marry the duchess?’

“Oh, no,” she said with a little tinkling laugh. “It wasn’t like that at all.” A servant leaned between us at that point to place the silverware for the next course, and I had a sudden fear that the rumor had in fact been that the king would marry the Lady Maria, and that I had just deeply insulted her by never before having considered this possibility.

But she bent toward me as soon as the servant stepped back and whispered in my ear. “The rumor had been that Dominic was going to marry the duchess.”

I came within half a breath of saying, “Dominic?” out loud but stopped myself in time. He was sitting only four places down the table and would certainly have reacted to the sound of his own name.

“Yes,” she continued in my ear, clearly enjoying the fact that everyone else at the table noticed we were whispering. “The duchess’s servants told our servants that the king wanted to insure the inheritance of Yurt past his own death, so he felt his nephew and heir had to marry. They had come here expressly to arrange a marriage, when our party fortuitously happened to arrive at the same time, and the king met the queen! I don’t need to tell you what happened after that!”

“Wizard!” called the duchess from the end of the table. “Does a woman have to be blond for you to let her whisper sweet nothings in your ear?”

“As long as she’s as lovely as all the ladies here present,” I said gallantly, ignoring what I could tell was a warning stare from the chaplain, “I don’t care what color is her hair.”

This remark seemed to amuse most of the ladies, and the Lady Maria and I went back to eating. This meant, therefore, that the queen had not married the king to keep him from the duchess, my original and only half-serious thought, even though there was clearly no deep affection between the cousins.

From something that the Lady Maria had told me that summer, I could guess that Dominic had hoped, once he met her, that he and the queen would make a match, and that even the queen’s father, Maria’s brother, had made some plans in that direction. I didn’t know for certain why the original plan for a marriage between Dominic and the duchess didn’t go through, but I could guess: he had never been extremely enthusiastic about the plan in