after a moment.
“Yes,” I said because there didn’t seem to be anything else to say. We sat quietly for several minutes.
“You and the chaplain have been good friends,” said Hugo at last. There was a curious intimacy of sitting near him in the dark, hearing his breath but not able to see him. “I didn’t think wizards and priests were friends very often.”
“They’re not,” I said. When the silence began to stretch out again, I forced myself to say more. Hugo, without his normal bravado and bantering manner, seemed very young and vulnerable, and I did not want to dismiss him with monosyllabic answers. “Wizards and priests follow different sets of laws and gain power from very different sources. But Joachim and I have been friends since a short time after I became Royal Wizard of Yurt-even though I started our acquaintance by suspecting him of evil.”
“I think Father Joachim was always different from most priests.” I didn’t like the way Hugo put it in the past tense but made a sound of assent. “He was already royal chaplain of Yurt back when I was being trained in knighthood,” he went on, “but at the time I didn’t pay much attention. I think I’ve always assumed someone would become a priest only if he didn’t have the courage or the manhood to become anything else. My own father’s chaplain is well-meaning and fussy. But the royal chaplain is different. He always thinks he’s right, like all priests, and wants everyone else to have the same opinion he does, but it’s still not the same.”
I said nothing but let him continue.
“He doesn’t just preach about morality but acts as though he takes it very seriously himself. And he’s stayed brave even while dying. Do you know why he decided to become a priest in the first place?”
I made myself answer. “I don’t think he felt he could do anything else. You met the Lady Claudia. She may be too old for you, but she’s a stunningly beautiful woman, and Joachim rejected her love because he felt God had called him.”
Hugo thought this over. “Ascelin said he thinks she gave him King Solomon’s Pearl. What do you think? Do you think she still loves him? Do you think the bandits tried to kill him on purpose because he had it?”
“I have no idea,” I said, not caring this time if I sounded dismissive.
But after a few more minutes Hugo spoke again. Our sleeves brushed as we shifted, but most of the time we could have been disembodied minds, close together in the night with death very near.
“I realize,” said Hugo, “that in spite of all my knighthood training I’ve never before actually seen anyone dying from wounds suffered in battle or in ambush. Have you?”
“I’ve watched someone die before,” I said slowly, not liking the way he’d phrased the question.
“What do you think?” he persisted. “Is it really true, what the priests tell us, that we go to heaven when we die?”
“That is what they tell us. Joachim, at any rate, seems fairly sure of it.”
This time Hugo did not answer. We sat in silence for hours. At any rate, I assumed it was hours; I quickly lost all track of time, and it began to feel that this night had already lasted as long as most weeks. From the sound of his breathing Hugo had dozed off, and I myself had to fight increasingly powerful waves of drowsiness. Bodies needed sleep, too, no matter who might live or die.
My mind had wandered far away, halfway between waking and dream, when a soft sound brought me abruptly back to full consciousness. That sound was my own name.
“Hugo?” I said, but Hugo was asleep. It was Joachim who had spoken.
“Daimbert, I must apologize,” he said quietly. “I’m afraid I have given you a great deal of trouble and worry.”
I put my face down next to his. “I don’t care. It would be worth any amount of trouble and worry if I could save you from death.”
“But I’m afraid it’s all for nothing,” he continued. I was weak enough that, against my will, tears began leaking down my cheeks. I was so unhappy that it took me five seconds to understand what he said next. “Because it looks like I’m not going to die after all.”
I shook Hugo awake, crying hard now for no reason at all. “Light the lantern,” I told him, and “Keep your eyes shut,” to Joachim. Hugo and I carefully lifted my herbs away from the wound. The cut was clean, pink, and no longer infected.
Hugo scrambled out of the tent to tell the others. I broke the wad of herbs open, because while it was still damp in the center the outside had dried, and reapplied it. “Thank God,” I managed to say, although my voice no longer seemed to be working correctly.
“I’m afraid my mind may have wandered again for a while,” said Joachim, “but I have a vague recollection that, somewhere through the evil dreams, I heard talk of chicken soup. Do you think there might still be some?”
PART FOUR — THE EASTERN KINGDOMS
I
We stayed at our mountain campsite among the rocks and evergreens a week, by which time the cut on Joachim’s throat was little more than a scab, and the horses were getting restive. I used the time to read
The fact that no one came by in all that time, not the bandits, not the king’s chancellor to check on stories of travelers ambushed less than a day’s ride from the royal castle, not any other traveler, made me even more convinced than I had been that King Warin was behind the attack on us. King Haimeric still refused to distrust his old friend, but he had discovered during the week that he was outnumbered, four to one, with the chaplain abstaining.
I thought grimly that if they were the same bandits who had tried to attack Arnulf last fall, then this was why Arnulf had sent whatever was in the package with Joachim rather than going anywhere himself, but I did not mention this to the chaplain.
Ascelin and King Haimeric looked again at the maps. “With spring another week along, we should have even less trouble with the passes,” said Ascelin.
“Dominic’s not the only one who wants to go to the eastern kingdoms to visit his father’s grave,” the king said. “I’ve never been there either.”
When we started eastward again, Ascelin went first, his bow strung and ready, looking around with hunter’s eyes at anything that could be an ambush. I rode at the rear, probing with magic. No one would be able to attack us by surprise this time.
In spite of the tension, all of us found our spirits rising just to be on the road again. We passed a number of narrow tracks branching off from the main road, which could have gone to the royal mines and could have gone to the bandits’ hideout. The road quickly grew so steep that in several places we had to dismount and lead the horses.
As we climbed upward, I kept glancing surreptitiously at the chaplain out of the corner of my eye, fearing that he would find the ride too exhausting. If he did, he gave no sign, and in fact several times he appeared to be singing, half under his breath. This was the man, I reminded myself, who had thought that peril gave additional merit to the journey.
When the road finally leveled out, it clung halfway up the side of a gorge, with peaks high above us blocking out the sky and a rushing river far below. The stonework looked ancient, as though dating from the Empire, but the road appeared sound. A cold wind blew steadily through the gorge. In several places, waterfalls shot from the cliffs above us toward the river below, and the road went under them. As we passed beneath a solid, roaring mass of water, damp dripped onto our hair and gave life to vividly green ferns clinging to the rock wall, though on either side the cliffs were barren.
“Aren’t we up to the pass
“We won’t be up to the pass for two more days,” said Ascelin. “And it certainly won’t be a smooth road from
