Mage Quest

I stopped myself just in time from objecting.

“But I want you to remember,” said the king very seriously, “not to attack any more merchant caravans, and,” glancing toward me, “to hire yourself a competent wizard at the first opportunity. And certainly don’t try to follow us again. If you do, not only will my wizard turn you into frogs, he will have a dragon attack you first.”

This, I feared, really was a bluff. I certainly couldn’t summon a dragon from the land of wild magic.

The bandits seemed to be taking no chances. They agreed readily, and when I broke the spells that held them they went at once to their horses. As they mounted, I heard one call another “Froggie,” with an accompanying slap on the shoulder. The sound of galloping hooves brought the rest of our party out into the dawn.

I didn’t want to take any chances either. Leaving the king to explain to the rest what he had done, and for them to start breakfast, I tried to improvise an appropriate spell.

It would have to be an illusory dragon. The problem with most illusions is that they fade quickly, usually within a few minutes. I thought I might be able to manage something that lasted a little longer-my predecessor as Royal Wizard of Yurt used to make illusions that would last for hours. But the difficulty was to guess how long. It would need to be here when-or if-the bandits came back, but I didn’t want it to hover all day and terrify anyone else who used this road.

I decided at last to create an illusory dragon, all but the final twist of the spell that would bring it together, and to attach the nearly-finished spell to a pebble. When the pebble was moved, say, kicked by a bandit’s horse, that would complete the spell.

I had never done anything like this before, or even heard of it, so it took me a while to work out the spells, and then I tried making a small practice dragon. It worked even better than I expected. I put the pebble on the ground, kicked it, and a one-foot high blue dragon appeared and shot illusory smoke at me for a minute before fading.

In a few more minutes, I had put the spells together to create a thirty-foot scarlet dragon, one with three sets of bat-wings and extra-long talons, and attached the spells to a small stone. I placed it very carefully on the road in the direction back toward the bandits’ castle. Now, if they were the first ones along this road, it should work perfectly.

Before joining the others, I looked at my stone in assessment. The faintest outline of the dragon hovered around it, the almost-completed spell just on the edge of visibility, but I hoped the bandits, riding fast, wouldn’t notice it until it was too late.

“Wizard!” called Hugo. “There’s only a little tea left! Do you want some?” I hurried over to the fire, indeed wanting some.

Shortly afterwards, we packed up the tents and started south again. Dominic had a lump on the back of his head but insisted he was all right. I kept glancing over my shoulder, wondering when someone would follow us along the road.

We had climbed up the far side of the valley, perhaps a mile away, when the sound of distant voices was carried to us on the wind. I pulled up my horse and looked back.

There were several groves of trees in the valley, but I thought I could tell where we had camped last night. Just visible beyond was a splash of scarlet, though we were too far away to pick out any details. The distant voices, shouting and screaming, faded away. I laughed and hoped that it had indeed been the bandits.

II

Spring advanced rapidly as we moved south. The woodland flowers disappeared as we moved into kingdoms where the trees had already leafed out. Here too the hills were a different shape than the hills of home, the roof- lines of the houses different, the very style of clothes worn by the people working in the fields different from those worn by the villagers of Yurt. To all of us and especially to Dominic, the newness and variety was a heady experience in itself.

After a month of traveling south on less-frequented roads, we finally picked up the main pilgrimage and commercial route that ran from the great City down toward the Central Sea. We stopped at our first pilgrimage church, a small dark structure that seemed little visited even though it stood close to a busy road. But it had vivid and complicated stone sculptures, about which Joachim read to us from the bishop’s guidebook.

“The saint here miraculously cured thousands of a disease whose name is no longer remembered. It has been forgotten because the saint cured it out of existence.”

Hugo lifted his eyebrows ironically at me. From the sculptures, it looked as though the disease was thought to have rotated men’s heads around backwards.

After two days of jostling with other travelers on the road and another night in an inn-we got two beds this time-we again left the route for the detour to visit Joachim’s family. We headed through fields and meadows swathed in fresh yellow-green toward the manor where his brother lived.

We looked at each other critically that morning. After a month of travel, we were all grubby, as well as leaner and browner than when we left home. That is, all except the chaplain himself: he had somehow managed to keep himself tidily shaved and his clothes relatively unwrinkled.

“Looking forward to someone else’s cooking?” I asked Ascelin as we lowered ourselves delicately into a stream which, even under a sunny spring sky, felt cold enough to have ice in it. I tried without much success to work up some lather to wash the smell of woodsmoke out of my hair.

He plunged his head under water and came up snorting and laughing. His dark blue eyes contrasted sharply with his tanned face. I passed him the soap. “I should ask all of you that question.” We had decided, the third day out, that Ascelin was by far the best camp cook and had made him prepare the suppers ever since. He could even make passable biscuits over the fire. “Any time you want to take a turn-”

“I wanted to ask you something,” I said as we dried ourselves off and tried to shake the wrinkles out of the only clean clothes we had left. “I’ve been wondering about this for a while. Why did you and the duchess show up at the royal castle just as the king was about to announce his quest?”

Ascelin pulled a shirt over his head. “Didn’t Diana tell you? Sir Hugo’s wife had called her that morning.”

“Sir Hugo’s wife-”

“He’s Diana’s relative as well as the queen’s uncle-just a more distant relation. His wife was, of course, very worried about him. She was hoping, I think, that he might have been in contact with us, although I don’t know why he would write us and not his own wife. But she did mention that she’d already talked to your queen. Diana guessed that at least some of you from the royal court would be planning to go look for Sir Hugo, and she had no intention of being left behind.” He chuckled. “In spite of racing up to the royal castle through a snowstorm-and me on foot! — she still couldn’t go along.”

Ascelin leaned his back against a tree to pull his boots on. “Looks as though I need new soles,” he said to himself, then gave a quick smile. “I must be in the best condition of my life, keeping up on foot with five mounted men.

“My lady Diana was very disappointed, as I’m sure you can guess,” he went on. “But Haimeric was right: we couldn’t have both gone and left the twins behind. You might have done better with her than with me, however- even if I am a better camp cook.”

He fell silent for a moment, looking out across the stream. “She is a remarkable woman, Wizard. I wouldn’t tell this to anybody but you, but after all you did help bring us together. I miss her terribly — before this we’d never been separated for more than a day or two since we were first married.”

I pulled a few words of the Hidden Language together to create an illusion, just a tiny illusion, a dark-haired woman about a foot high wearing a leather tunic and wide gold bracelets. I liked to do at least a little magic every day. Wizardry is hard enough that I was always afraid of going rusty. It wasn’t very difficult to create illusory images of people I knew, though I didn’t do it often.

Ascelin saw what I was doing and caught his breath. “That’s Diana!”

“Don’t try to touch it,” I said. “Your hand would go straight through her.”

I had expected him to be pleased, but he turned his back sharply on me. I looked at his wide shoulders thoughtfully. I didn’t even miss the queen that much. I shrugged, said the two words to end the illusion, and stood