certainly have slowed down his own aging with powerful magic, I doubted he could be older than a hundred and twenty. “Where did he go?”
The wizard’s last apprentice, according to the ledgers, had left Yurt to become the wizard in a count’s castle in one of the larger of the western kingdoms, located a hundred and fifty miles away. Even that long ago, I thought, someone without a diploma from the school would have had to be satisfied with less than being a royal wizard.
I thanked the constable and his wife profusely and went back to my own chambers. My bones, I noticed, seemed less stiff. As soon as it was light enough for the pigeons to fly, I would send a message to that kingdom and begin to track down what had happened to the old wizard’s last apprentice.
IV
We prepared to leave early in the morning. The sky was grey and the wind damp and chill. I sent my message by the pigeons, asking that an answer be sent to the duchess’s castle. Since my message would have to be relayed through the City’s postal system, I could not expect an answer for several days.
When we had all ridden out, the drawbridge was raised, the first time I had seen it done since coming to Yurt. The gears turned with a rusty screech. The two men who had raised the bridge then came out of the tiny postern gate, and last of all the constable came after them. He locked the postern carefully and balanced on the stepping stones across the moat to join us. The castle looked dark and forbidding under the dark sky; I doubted very much that any thief would try to cross the moat and scale those high walls.
If the old wizard’s last apprentice was in the cellars, I thought, let him enjoy the empty castle. He’d certainly be able to break into the main storerooms if he needed food, but at least he wouldn’t be able to enjoy any of the cook’s fruitcake or Christmas candy, all of which was coming with us. I hadn’t wanted to tell anyone else that someone who had sold his soul to the devil might be rummaging through their rooms while they were gone. But I myself, as well as putting magic locks on my door and all my windows as carefully as I knew how, had brought along several of my most important books, including the Diplomatica Diabolica. The stable boy who helped me load a pack horse had not commented; let him think that wizards needed mysterious heavy objects wherever they went.
We rode as quickly as we could go with the horse litters; no one wanted to linger in the bitter wind. I rode next to Joachim, but we barely exchanged a word. He, I suspected, was wondering if I had had anything to do with the dragon’s appearance. I didn’t know how to reassure him that I hadn’t without also confessing that I had only a guess as to who had. At least, I thought, what the wizard had told me about the old chaplain’s death made it clear that the beginnings of evil in Yurt must have preceded, rather than coincided with, Joachim’s arrival.
Considering that I had been hired as the chief magic-worker in Yurt, I thought, there seemed to have been a very large number of people in the castle already who had become involved in magic. There was the stranger, who I was starting to assume was identical with the old wizard’s last apprentice; there was whoever had first put the spell on the king, who I kept fearing might turn out to be the queen, in spite of what she had told me on Christmas Eve; and there was the Lady Maria, who had certainly seen or been involved in black magic at some point.
The Lady Maria managed to position her horse next to mine after the brief lunch break. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you for two days,” she said. “But I’ve been wanting to tell you how exciting and romantic it was to see you defeat the dragon.”
Since there didn’t seem to be any good answer to this, I merely nodded gravely.
“If the dragon had killed you,” she said in great seriousness, “I would have always treated the shawl you gave me, such a short time earlier, as a sacred object.”
If the dragon had killed me, I thought, it probably would have gone on to kill everybody else, unless one of the knights had been able to get in a lucky spear thrust. In this case Maria, being dead, would not have been able to treat the silk shawl or anything else as a special object. But all I said was, “Don’t let the chaplain hear you referring to a simple shawl as sacred.”
She laughed as though this were a highly witty remark and went on to tell me how excited and how terrified she had been by the dragon. Since I had seen her then, I thought excitement rather than terror had been the dominant emotion on her part, but I was not at all unwilling to confess how terrified I had been myself.
By riding rapidly and taking the shortest rests possible, we were able to reach the duchess’s castle just before the early sunset of midwinter. Her constable and chaplain, the only members of her staff to stay at the castle over Christmas, had been warned we were coming and met us at the gate.
Our cook with her kitchen maids put together a quick supper, slowed down somewhat by her insistence that all the pans she found in the kitchen be packed up and the pans from Yurt unpacked and put in their places, before she could begin. Although every effort had been made to position the injured knights carefully in their litters, several were bleeding from wounds that had reopened during the ride, and Dominic was telling anyone who would listen that he was sure there were several fresh cracks in his ribs from the jostling.
But it was still a relief to be warm and snug in a castle without any damage done to it at all, and the next morning we all awoke more cheerful, in spite of a steady fall of sleet outside. Several of the younger ladies announced that they had been looking forward for months to a Christmas dance, and they intended to have one.
The morning was spent setting up the Christmas tree, rehanging it with all the ornaments, including my predecessor’s miniature magic lights, and putting up the rest of the decorations. The brass players had brought their instruments and could be heard practicing snatches of dance carols.
In the middle of the afternoon, the dancing began. The ladies had unpacked their brightest dresses, curled their hair, and perfumed their shoulders. The unwounded knights were dressed more uniformly, in the formal blue and white livery of Yurt, and all seemed to be enjoying themselves hugely. I sat in a little balcony above the great hall, watching and wondering when I might expect to receive an answer to my message.
In spite of the liveliness of the music, which had the other watchers tapping their toes and swaying their shoulders, I scarcely paid attention to the brightly-lit scene below. The best I could expect, I thought, was an answer from whoever was now count in the castle where the old wizard’s last apprentice had gone, and perhaps some indication of when that apprentice had left. But the records in another castle might not be as good as the records of the royal castle of Yurt, and, besides, the count might see no reason to pull out dusty ledgers to answer the letter of a wizard of whom he’d never heard.
Even if I received a detailed answer, I was not sure what it would tell me, other than that the apprentice had left there, which I thought I already knew. Two nights ago, finding him in the constable’s ledgers, I had thought I was well on the way to tracking down the mysterious stranger, but now I wasn’t sure what good it could do me to follow his movements before he became established in Yurt’s cellars.
In the first break in the dancing, while the dancers caught their breaths and the brass players shook the moisture from their instruments, the cook brought out punch and Christmas cookies. In the second break, however, they called for me.
“Come on down, Wizard!” called the young count, who had been leading the last set. “Show us some Christmas-time entertainments!”
Since this was asked almost politely, and he had suppressed any comments about entertainments being all wizards were suited for, I decided to oblige. For the most part, I made cascades of colored stars and a selection of red and green furry animals that scampered and played for a minute in the middle of the hall before disappearing with a pop. I also did a trick with two red balls, one real and one illusory, in which I mixed them up and made members of my audience guess which was which. Since they guessed wrong more than half the time, reaching out for what they thought was the real ball only to find that their hand passed right through it, this trick was considered a great success. To complete my entertainments, I made an illusory golden basket, piled high with colored fruit that shone like rubies and emeralds, and presented it to the Lady Maria.
She had been sitting by herself, not taking part in the dancing. Instead she smiled and nodded in an almost matronly manner, as though she were an old woman remembering the dances of her youth. Even when the old count tried to lead her out on the dance floor, she laughed and refused. When the dancing started again, I sat with her.
