humiliating you by slitting our throats while we slept?”
Dominic abruptly sat up, rubbing the back of his head. He tried to lurch to his feet, but Ascelin kept him seated with a hand on his shoulder.
“We weren’t going to slit anybody’s throat,” protested the leader.
I wasn’t at all sure I believed him. I was coming close to Hugo’s point of view, that the best thing to do might be to kill them.
“It’s the middle of the night,” said Ascelin. “Let’s leave them to learn some sense by standing bound by the wizard’s spells for a few hours. Then we can question them in the morning.”
“It would have been my watch soon anyway,” I said, “so I’ll keep an eye on them while the rest of you get some sleep.”
Hugo clearly would have preferred to do something spectacular and warlike, but he contented himself with rounding up the bandits’ horses and tying them to a branch. In a moment our party returned to the tents, Dominic assisted by Ascelin.
Watching the two princes in the flickering light of the lantern the king held for them, I thought that it was good to see them managing to get along with each other on this trip. When they had first met, nearly eight years ago, they had detested each other. But then Dominic, always a snob, had not known at the time that Ascelin was a prince.
Our camp became quiet again, and I added a few details to the binding spells that held that bandits. It is possible to break out of an improperly-made binding spell, and I had pulled the magic together very rapidly. I didn’t want to paralyze them, however, even if that would have held them more securely, because I wanted them to remember this experience.
They soon stopped struggling and gave up cursing me a short time later, when I did not answer. What was I going to do with them? The school made us swear enormously solemn oaths to help mankind, but it only taught us magic, when at the moment what I felt I needed most to know was how to deal with people unlike any I knew in Yurt.
The moonlight made the stars pale in the center of the sky, but from where I was sitting I could see the Hunter, striding low over the horizon. Soon he would be gone from the sky for the summer.
We certainly couldn’t kill the bandits in cold blood, even if they had crept up on our tents planning to kill us. We were still in the orderly western kingdoms, not much more than three weeks away from Yurt, and there were legal methods for dealing with such things. But I didn’t like the idea of loading them onto the pack horses again, then trying to find a nearby castle that exercised high justice-other than the castle of the bandit leader himself.
The night dragged on. In a marginally successful attempt to stay warm, I rekindled the fire over which we had cooked supper. I kept yawning, but I was shivering too much to doze. It would have been Joachim’s watch next, but I let him sleep, not wanting to leave him with the responsibility for guarding bandits restrained by magic. After a while, the eastern stars gradually faded as the horizon grew gray.
I heard a rustle from the tents and looked up to see the king and his lantern approaching. He sat down next to me, pulling his cloak around him.
“Go back to your tent, sire,” I said. “I won’t be making the morning tea for another hour.”
“I couldn’t sleep anyway,” said King Haimeric with a shrug. “We have to decide what to do the bandits.”
I could see them faintly now, ten yards away, standing as stiffly as if they were tied to trees. The long cold night, I hoped, would have sobered them. “We can’t very well have them following us all the way to the Holy Land,” I said quietly. “But I don’t understand it. Why would a castellan turn to banditry?”
“I don’t know,” said the king in a worried voice. “I realize we’re not in Yurt anymore, but it’s still very strange.”
“Short of killing them, I don’t see what we can do that won’t make them feel even more humiliated, and even more bent on vengeance.”
“We can give them some tea,” said the king. “They’ve had a cold night of it. Since you’ve got the fire going anyway, put on the kettle.”
This made no sense at all. I stared at him a moment in the lantern light, then went to fill the kettle. He was, after all, my king.
In a few minutes, when the tea was brewed, we walked over to the bandits. “We weren’t going to slit any of your throats,” the leader growled. “I hope you realize we wouldn’t rob a caravan for a few baubles or a few bolts of frippery, and we aren’t murderers either. We just wanted to teach you a lesson.”
“That was my nephew you knocked on the head,” said the king gravely. “He may look at all this differently. But at the moment he’s asleep. Would you like some tea before he wakes up? It can’t have been comfortable standing here all night. Wizard, could you release the bindings enough so that they can drink?”
I adjusted my spell to allow them a very little arm motion. The king put tin cups of scalding tea into their hands. They drank slowly, looking at us thoughtfully over the rims. In the lantern light and the beginning of dawn, they would have seen two white-bearded men, one very slightly built.
“All right,” said the king sternly, taking back the empty cups. “I believe you. I won’t ask you what kind of ‘lesson’ you planned to teach us, because I’m quite sure I won’t like the answer. An aristocrat like you should know better. Your own fields and your rents should provide you plenty of income within the law-to say nothing of the proceeds of justice.”
The leader of the bandits looked at King Haimeric shrewdly. “So you didn’t find it either, eh?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, and I doubted the king did either, but that didn’t stop him. “Of course not. You seem to imagine that we ransacked the silk caravan after my wizard paralyzed you, but instead we sent it safely on its way. If you’re looking for caravan loot, you won’t find it in our camp. Do you employ a wizard?”
I was having trouble keeping up with the king’s line of reasoning, and from the looks on their faces, so were the bandits.
“No,” said the leader, eyeing me warily.
“If we let you leave with your lives,” I said, hoping this fit in with whatever King Haimeric was doing, “and I say
A school-trained wizard would certainly be able to stop them from preying on any more merchant caravans- unless of course he ended up with his own throat slit. But he’d do much better than a magician, someone who had picked up a little of the Hidden Language here and there and might himself see nothing wrong with banditry.
“I asked if you had a wizard,” said King Haimeric, pulling his eyebrows into a frown, “because I wanted to be sure you understand the lesson that we will teach
It had been ten years since the disastrous transformations practical, and I had long since worked out where I had gone wrong with those frogs. I watched King Haimeric’s face, knowing he was going to expect some spectacular display of magic in a moment.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” said one of the bandits to the leader. “He’s just bluffing.”
That made it all very simple. I turned that one into a frog.
The king laughed, a quite genuine laugh. “Anyone else think the wizard is bluffing?” He picked up the bullfrog that had been a bandit a moment ago and held it out toward the rest with both hands.
The bullfrog looked up at them with wide, confused eyes, then gave a sudden booming croak. After a moment of stunned silence, the other three bandits began to look at each other with poorly suppressed smiles.
“Turn him back to himself, Wizard,” said the king.
In a moment, I had him a person again, and I quickly restored the binding spells around him. His throat continued to pump like a frog’s for a few seconds, which now set the other bandits laughing.
“Any tea left, Wizard?” asked the king. We gave them all another cup.
“Now,” said the king when they had finished-two even thanked us-”it’s almost day. My knights, the ones who overpowered you yesterday, will be up shortly, and they may not look at this incident as tolerantly as we do- especially my nephew. But we’re on a pilgrimage, and it’s important to return good for evil when one is on pilgrimage. Therefore I’m going to let you go.”
