“We should have come here years ago,” said Dominic after a moment.
The king nodded. “But I always felt more responsible for the living than for the dead. If I had come when your father first died, your mother would have wanted to come too and brought you with her, even though you were a child. And then somehow the years passed, and I never made the voyage.”
“What’s this?” asked Hugo suddenly, bending closer. “It looks like the carving of a snake.”
It certainly did. In the corner of the stone slab was cut a tiny picture of a coiled snake, with what looked like a jewel resting on its coils. The image was strangely familiar.
“Take off your gloves, Dominic,” said the king. His nephew slowly pulled off his riding gloves. Gleaming on his second finger, his ruby ring had as its setting a gold snake that matched the carving. “I thought at the time,” said King Haimeric, “that those bandits were too hasty. They took our horses and our luggage, but they missed the single most valuable object we had with us.”
Excluding whatever Claudia might have given Joachim, I thought.
“This ring was among the jewels my father sent back to Yurt with a faithful servant when he died,” said Dominic. “Why would its image be carved on his tomb?”
“Let me see it,” I said.
Dominic gave me an odd look but started tugging at the ring. He had not had it off for years, during which time he had grown quite a bit heavier, and it took a minute.
As I took it in my hand, Hugo, who was still examining the stone behind which Dominic’s father was buried, spoke again. “I think this stone is loose.”
We all bent down again to look. As the sun moved, a stray beam found its way from the high windows down to near floor level. The stone was not completely flush with the wall around it but protruded ever so slightly on one side. Hugo wrapped his gloved fingers around it and began to tug.
“What are you doing?” demanded Dominic, pushing him away.
But the king put a hand on his arm. “If the stone is loose anyway, perhaps we are meant to open the tomb. I have felt badly all these years that it was impossible to bring my brother’s body back to Yurt to be buried with our parents and ancestors. Perhaps we should take his bones with us now.”
“Excuse me, sire,” said Hugo, “but are you really planning to cross the eastern kingdoms, go to the Holy Land, and then travel all the way home again with bones in your luggage?” But he was again tugging at the stone.
It came loose all at once, and he fell back. The tombstone hit the paving with a bang that echoed through the church. I anticipated a waft of foul air, but there was nothing of the sort. All of us gave each other quick, uneasy looks, then went down on our knees to look in. Since I was holding Dominic’s ring anyway, I lit it up with magic and held it out at arm’s length, reaching into the tomb.
I was not sure what I expected to see, but it was not an untidy pile of tumbled bones. “What have they done to him?” asked King Haimeric in distress. Dominic said nothing, but his color slowly darkened to brick red.
In the tiny glow of the ring, we could see bare bones lying among the scraps of what had once been clothing. A belt buckle and a brooch lay at one side. The skull was at the back, a thin gold circlet loose around it and turned to an incongruously jaunty angle. The empty eye sockets glared at us balefully.
“Someone’s opened the tomb, looking for something,” said Ascelin.
“This ring,” I said in sudden conviction. “And they didn’t find it.”
“By the way,” said Joachim, who had not spoken since Hugo started pulling at the stone, “I wonder where the priests of this church are.”
Ascelin leaped to his feet and reached for his sword. “A trap. I should have known it. We’ll have to fight our way out.”
Joachim put his hand on the prince’s hilt to push the sword back into its sheath. “Don’t forget that this is a house of God and no place for weapons of violence.”
“Stay back,” I said. “There’s only one way they can come in. I don’t want any more of you held hostage before I can disarm them.” I flew the length of the church, wishing for the calm courage to match my words and hoping Joachim would not call after me that God’s house was also no place for violent magic.
I stopped short of the door and probed with magic, expecting to find a mass of armed knights on the far side. But I found nothing. Just to be sure, I pushed the door open a crack and peeked out. The square in which the church sat was empty except for our horses, swishing their tails peacefully.
“There’s no one there, Ascelin,” I said and flew back. “Your hunter’s instincts have failed you this time, I’m afraid.”
“Let’s get out of here before I’m proven right.”
“Just a moment,” said King Haimeric. He crawled partially into the tomb; when he backed out a moment later his gray cloak was filthy, and he looked grim but satisfied. “You’re right, Hugo, that it doesn’t make sense to take his bones with us now. But at least I’ve straightened them out.”
“Come
I stopped the others short of the entrance, in case armed men had come up during the last minute, but my probing still found nothing. We hurried out, and I caught brief glimpses of faces in windows high up around the little square. The faces looked frightened rather than hostile and disappeared immediately.
In a moment we were onto our horses and riding recklessly fast through the city streets. But the worst danger we encountered was a cart of vegetables pushed out of a side street almost directly into our path, which Whirlwind vaulted and the rest of our horses scrambled around. Outside the city gates, we covered two miles as fast as Ascelin, who ran holding onto Dominic’s stirrup leather, could go.
“All right,” he said at last, throwing himself to the ground under a tree. “We got away safely this time. Now I’d like to know what’s actually happening.”
“So would I,” I said, dismounting and carefully removing my gloves. “And I think it starts with this ring.”
I had always coveted Dominic’s ring. The coiled gold snake and the ruby made it just the thing to suggest wizardly wisdom and mystery. I had inherited a ring shaped like an eagle in flight from my predecessor as Royal Wizard of Yurt, but it wasn’t the same.
Slowly I turned the ring in my hands, watching the ruby catch the light. “There might,” I said, “just might, be a spell attached to this, something like the message spell Sir Hugo’s wizard left for us in Warin’s castle. I’ll have to see if it’s still working after fifty years. Sire, did your brother take a wizard with him?”
“No,” said King Haimeric in surprise. “I only ever had the one Royal Wizard before you, and I don’t believe my brother’s household ever kept one.”
“Then the spell, if there is a spell,” I said, “was put together by a wizard of the eastern kingdoms, someone trained differently than I. This may take a while.”
I said that in the hopes that it would not take very long at all, and that I could impress the others with my abilities, but this ring was not nearly as ready to yield its secrets as Evrard’s black box.
“Then the carving of the snake on the tomb
Dominic ignored the second half of this comment. “Do you know if my father acquired all his jewels together,” he asked the king, “or a few at a time?”
“As I remember,” said King Haimeric thoughtfully, “it was a hoard he discovered or picked up somewhere-or perhaps captured in battle. His servant who brought the jewels back to Yurt told me at the time, but I’m afraid I didn’t pay very much attention to that part of his account.”
And that servant was long dead. Any secrets from beyond the grave would be revealed through wizardry or not at all.
I sat down under the tree, my back to the rest, and murmured likely-seeming spells under my breath. Behind me, Ascelin asked the chaplain, “Did your bishop visit the church of the Holy Twins?”
“He never got into this part of the eastern kingdoms,” said Joachim. “He took the main pilgrimage and trade route down along the rivers, west of the mountains.”
“Ha!” I said suddenly and out loud. The ruby on Dominic’s ring was held in place not just by the goldsmith’s
