our trip and listening attentively to our answers, and at the same time somehow keeping her children quiet and orderly and their meat cut up in bite-size pieces.
But twice, as her husband sat beaming genially at the other end of the table, I thought I saw her shoot a worried look toward him.
III
“I understand your family is also in commercial imports?” said the Lady Claudia to me.
“Was. My parents died when I was little, and my grandmother kept the warehouse going, but she herself died while I was still in the wizards’ school. We imported wool from the Far Islands and wholesaled it to the cloth manufacturers.”
“How interesting,” said Claudia with a bright smile. In fact it wasn’t interesting at all, which was part of the reason I had become a wizard instead of a merchant. I would probably have done an even worse job of running a wool wholesale business than my grand mother had, and there hadn’t been much left over when she died and I had to sell the warehouse to pay the firm’s debts.
“And now you’re a wizard,” said Arnulf genially. “I gather the wizards’ school keeps a fairly close eye on all of you-even tries to establish your routes when you travel.”
“Not really,” I said in surprise. “Of course the school tries to coordinate the practice of wizardry throughout the western kingdoms, but wizards argue with each other too much to allow close oversight.” Arnulf nodded but said nothing more.
The chaplain seemed much more sober during lunch than I would have expected of someone home to see his family after a long absence. “You know, Joachim,” said Claudia when dessert was served, “I still can’t get used to seeing you in priest’s vestments.”
Dessert was lemon pie, and one of the dishes served earlier had been rice with almonds. We didn’t have rice in the royal castle of Yurt very often, and lemons even less frequently. Although I had always assumed that coming to Yurt had been the move into luxury for Joachim that it had been for me, perhaps I was wrong.
“Did he use to wear an earring when you first knew him?” Hugo asked Claudia with a wink for Dominic.
The chaplain did smile at that and brought both ear lobes forward with his forefingers to show they had never been pierced.
“No,” said Claudia, also with a smile. “He always dressed very soberly, even when he was still expected to take over the family business.”
“It’s just as well I didn’t,” said Joachim. “My ideas of fair business practice would have lost our firm everything we had in two years. You and Arnulf would be lucky to have a cottage of your own, much less this house.”
He spoke lightly-or at least lightly for him-but Arnulf gave him a look that just managed not to be a scowl. There had been an argument here, I thought, perhaps accusations of immorality on one side and accusations of being hopelessly unworldly on the other, that still festered after more than fifteen years.
“He’s been such an excellent royal chaplain,” put in King Haimeric, “that we in Yurt at any rate are very glad he
“You wouldn’t want to try your hand at the family trade one more time, Joachim,” asked Arnulf breezily, “perhaps arrange a trade for me while all of you are in Xantium?”
He spoke as though it were a joke, but Joachim took it seriously. “No.” He shot his brother an intense look. “I gave up all worldly commerce when I entered the seminary.”
The topic was dropped there, and Claudia asked Ascelin about his principality as she poured us all tea. The prince shook off the air of watchfulness that had hung about him for the last hour and answered graciously. She seemed very well-informed about everyone in our party. The chaplain must have written his brother about all the people in Yurt, I thought, and I felt at a disadvantage that he had never told us nearly as much about the people here.
After lunch, Claudia went off with the children and Arnulf took us on a tour of his grounds. As we came through the flowering orchard, I thought that we would be many miles away when the cherries were ripe.
Arnulf’s foreman came up to him with a question as we were being shown a pasture where fine horses grazed beyond a white fence, and the lord of the manor excused himself and went, taking Joachim with them.
“Listen carefully,” said Ascelin as soon as they were out of earshot. “We have to get out of here as soon as we can.”
This was the same surprise to the others that it had been to me.
“Don’t you think everyone here is just a little nervous, having the chaplain home again after so long?” asked the king when Ascelin tried to explain his instinctive feeling that something was about to happen. “You heard them at lunch; he must have left after some sort of quarrel that they’re all trying hard to forget.”
“And if something here
“I think Ascelin’s right,” said Hugo with a frown. “It could be any number of dreadful things. Arnulf, after all, trades with the East, where the women grow fur on their bodies down to their knees and have two-foot tails, and where enormous horned snakes guard the pepper groves.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Ascelin.
But Dominic nodded soberly. “The boy has a point. It’s one thing to flee a human enemy, another a monster.”
I too was about to protest, to tell Hugo that he knew perfectly well that the women of the East were not furry, that he himself had suggested to me that his father was surrounded by dancing girls. But then he gave me a broad wink, and I stopped in time.
“We couldn’t leave anyway,” said King Haimeric. “The servants have our bags, and down in the stables they’re reshoeing our horses. Why don’t we just ask Arnulf if he has any problems on which he’d like our help?”
“All right,” said Ascelin, “but I still want to leave as soon as our horses are ready, and we should all stay close together. That means you too, Hugo. I wish the chaplain hadn’t gone off with him.”
We moved in a group in the direction that Arnulf and his foreman had gone. I thought irrelevantly that anyone seeing us would assume we had become so accustomed to each other’s company while traveling together that we could not now bear to be separated.
But we did not find the lord of the manor. “Sire,” I said to the king, “tell the others about the bandits, about how they were apparently expecting to find something in that silk caravan. I can search more quickly by using magic.”
I left them sitting on a pasture fence and hurried back toward the house. Enormous horned snakes or not, I too wished the chaplain had not gone off with Arnulf.
I found him, unexpectedly, not with the lord of the manor but with the lady. Claudia sat on a bench under a tree in the garden, singing and playing a lute, while Joachim sat at her feet, his dark eyes fixed on her face.
Surrounded by the colors and scents of a spring garden, dappled with the sunlight that made its way through the young leaves overhead, they seemed themselves caught in a song, a song of heart-wrenching beauty, where the afternoons were endless and the dailiness of ordinary life was so far away to be non-existent.
And then I listened to the words. “So kiss me as you say good-bye,” sang Claudia. “Kiss me, and ask not the reason why. But my heart shall take an eagle’s wing, away to fly.”
I froze, caught between feeling I should slip away without disturbing them and feeling that I must stop this at once.
But Joachim smiled and motioned me to join them. Claudia looked up from her lute, saw me, and stopped in the middle of a word.
“Please go on,” said Joachim. “I’d forgotten how well you sing.”
Flustered, Claudia started again, but a completely different song. This was a sea-faring tune about courage and shipwreck.
I let the melody wash over me while I probed with magic for Arnulf. I found him in the stables-either
