This door was not locked. It opened smoothly, letting me into a large and airy room. There were cupboards, desks, benches, and boxes, but all the cupboard doors were open, and there was nothing inside.
“So he took it all when he left,” I thought, and then wondered what
There was nothing else to see. One of the casement windows had had the glass broken out, but the rest were closed. I looked out the southern window toward the second highest tower in the castle, on the opposite end of the courtyard. It had a dovecot on the roof and was doubtless where the carrier pigeons came in. I opened the casement and climbed up on the sill, hesitated a moment, and stepped out into the air.
The rain had let up, but the damp cool air swirled around me. Although I would not have joined the king in characterizing flying as “extremely enjoyable,” there was a certain sense of power in holding oneself up against the tug of gravity, of letting oneself drift slowly down, so that the ground sometimes came too soon. This time, however, I was glad to be back on the ground. I rebolted the outer door to the tower from the outside, as I had unbolted it, and started back toward my chambers.
With my door in sight, I stopped abruptly. The handle should have been glowing softly from my magic lock, but it was not glowing at all. I was certain I had locked it. I stepped forward, tried the door, and it opened at once. Someone had taken off my lock.
I stepped inside cautiously, but all seemed undisturbed. My books were as I had left them, and my clothes seemed untouched. I probed for a trap, both with magic and by lying down and looking under the bed.
Finding nothing, I sat back on my heels. Although it was impossible to say where it was coming from, and although it disappeared if one tried to sense it directly, the dark touch I had been feeling all day was here in my room. It was like trying to see something that could only be glimpsed from the corner of the eye.
To remove my lock, someone would not only have to know magic, but a lot more magic than I did. It was probably possible to break a magic lock, but a lot of the young wizards, including me, had tried to find the spell and never done so. I tried to dispel the chill that came from more than the rain. “Maybe I should be glad he or she left it unlocked; they couldn’t have duplicated my palm print, which would mean that if they relocked my door it would only open to them.” But who in the castle besides me knew magic?
PART TWO — THE QUEEN
I
It took me a week to figure out how to do the lights. During that week, Gwen continued to bring me breakfast every morning, though not quite so early. I had told her that, in spite of my friendship for the chaplain (or maybe, I thought, in order to preserve that friendship), I would not be attending chapel every morning. Once or twice she brought me crullers, but usually it was cake donuts.
Although she was perfectly cordial, I got no more winks or saucy looks. I wondered if she had been warned against me, and if so by who. The constable, who oversaw the castle staff, seemed the most likely person, except that I couldn’t picture him doing it. I preferred to think that she had found out that wizards are not supposed to marry and was trying to rein in her affections before she developed a broken heart.
My initial problem with the lights for the stairs was finding something suitable to which to attach the magic. The headroom was so limited that I decided to use a flat surface rather than the more normal globes. My first thought was to do something with glass.
The constable introduced me to the young man who blew glass for the castle. I recognized him as one of the trumpeters who played at dinner. Once he had his livery off and his leather smock on, however, I would never have known him.
When he had his fire burning so hot that his glass was liquid and I had to stand back at the far side of the room, he dipped a long tube into the molten glass and began to blow. I was fascinated; I had never seen glass being made before.
He blew a large, thin bubble, brilliantly red, then laid it down and rolled it flat before it could cool. He stepped back, wiped his forehead with the back of his arm, and waited for comments from me.
It was exactly what I had asked for, an oval piece of glass a little thicker than a window pane. But I had had an awful thought. I had knocked my head on the ceiling going up the stairs to the chapel, and I was not the tallest person in the castle. I didn’t want my magic lights shattered into shards of glowing glass the first time Dominic raised his head too quickly.
“I’d like to try something a little different,” I said. “Maybe this time could you make something hollow, like a flat-bottomed bottle that tapers toward the top-” I waved my hands in the air, sketching the shape. I was describing the base of a telephone.
“These are going to be strange looking lights,” he said with a grin when he had blown it. “How many do you want?”
“Just one more, I think,” I said, looking at my telephone; it was still glowing hot. “And then I’ll want some more parts in different shapes.” For the next hour, he blew different shapes to my specification. The mouth piece was the trickiest part. At the end, I had a glass oval and two very lovely though very unusual glass telephone instruments.
“These actually aren’t all going to be lights,” I told the young man. “Have you ever seen a telephone?”
“Those are telephones?” he said with interest. “And I made them? Can I make a call and tell my mother?”
“Does she have a telephone?” I said quickly, hoping that she didn’t and wanting to forestall explaining that these were far from operational.
“No,” he said and frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that. You need two of them, don’t you, one for each person. I expect that’s why you made two. She lives in the next kingdom, about fifty miles from here; maybe I’ll send her a message by the pigeons.”
“You do wonderful glass blowing,” I said. “And I also very much like your playing at dinner.” I hurried back to my room with my prizes.
The telephones I set carefully on a high shelf, but I sat down with the oval of glass to try to make it glow. This piece, I thought, I could use for just inside the door from the great hall, where the ceiling was still high. Once I had been able to attach magic light permanently to it, I would talk to the armorer about getting some pieces of steel made in the same shape, for further up the stairs.
At first I was no more able to make my piece of glass shine permanently than I had been able to do with my belt buckle. I had been spending much of the day with my books of spells when, in the middle of the week, Joachim, the chaplain, invited me to his room after dinner.
I think I was the only person who called him Joachim. I had in fact known him for some time before even learning he had a name. Almost everyone else in Yurt called him Father, which I resisted doing, both because he wasn’t my father and because I was afraid that to do so would let down the dignity of wizardry. He didn’t seem to mind.
As I sipped the wine he poured me, I looked around his room. It was lit with candles, no magic globes here. He had only the one room, rather than the two I had, and his bed looked hard. The walls were unadorned, except for the crucifix over the bed, and all the books on his shelf seemed well-thumbed.
“Have you started feeling comfortable with your duties yet?” he asked, setting down the bottle and sitting on another hard chair opposite mine. The air from the window made the candle flames dance and his shadow move grotesquely behind him.
“I keep on hoping I’ll find out what my duties are,” I said. I was wondering if I could trust him with my climb up the north tower and the sense of evil I had first felt there. “They hired me as Royal Wizard, and they’ve given me some tasks, but these aren’t going to keep me busy forever-or I hope not. Do you know exactly what
