art but by magic, and by a spell I recognized. With a few quick words of the Hidden Language, I loosened the spell. In three twists, the stone came loose, and something tiny, scarcely bigger than a pin head, dropped into my hand.
I had an audience now. With no time to search carefully for the best spell, I improvised, trying a variation of a trans formations spell to transform whatever tiny object I held into something bigger, without, I hoped, changing any of its other properties.
And that turned out, almost to my surprise, to be the right spell. I was suddenly holding a piece of parchment in my hand with a message written out clearly. I looked first at the formal signature, “Dominicus princeps Yurtiae,” and then at the heading, “To my dearest wife and son.”
I handed it to Dominic. “I think this is for you.”
III
He read it out loud. “By the time you read this I will be dead.” Dominic stopped, looked at the king, cleared his throat, and continued reading. “The servant by whom you will have received this ring will also have given you a more open letter of farewell. I hope the Royal Wizard will quickly discover this ring’s secret, but if not, the snake I asked to have carved on my tombstone will be a clue for you.”
“I was right,” said Hugo. Dominic ignored him.
“The wizard I have taken into my employ, who will hide this message magically in the ring for me, is one I trust thoroughly, totally, and explicitly.”
“That means he didn’t trust him at all,” interrupted the king.
“What?” said Dominic and I together.
“Didn’t I ever teach you that code, Dominic?” asked King Haimeric. “Your father and I worked it out when we were boys. Because normally you say that you trust someone implicitly, trust them completely without having to say anything, to say that you trust them explicitly is to say just the opposite, that you express your trust only with your lips.”
I tried to remember any occasions when the king might have said he trusted me explicitly. Fortunately I couldn’t think of any.
“Is it possible,” asked Ascelin, “if Prince Dominic employed a wizard after all, that he might have been the ‘magnificent warrior’ of the border guards’ story?”
King Haimeric shook his head. “I don’t think so. He was certainly a magnificent knight, but there was nothing about him that should inspire frightening stories.”
Dominic read another sentence. “My wizard and I are both gravely wounded and ill from the same fever.” He stopped again and looked up. “I thought my father was killed in battle.”
“Wounded in battle,” said the king soberly, “so badly he might not have recovered anyway, but his servant said it was the fever that finished him.”
I glanced at Joachim out of the corner of my eye and said nothing.
“But we have learned of something wonderful,” Dominic continued, “something marvelous, so special that I dare not mention it even in this secret letter.”
“So we’re still not getting any answers,” said Ascelin, half under his breath.
“It is hidden far to the south of the Holy Land, in the Wadi Harhammi. I can’t even tell you how we found out, but you will know it when you find it.”
Dominic lifted his eyes. “That’s the entire message.” He handed me the parchment. “Does it make any sense?”
“What’s a wadi?” asked the king.
“It’s a dry watercourse,” answered Ascelin.
“The Wadi Harhammi,” said Hugo, “south of the Holy Land. This message is fifty years old. Other people must have learned about it by now. I’m sure it’s what my father was looking for when he disappeared.”
“We have to go there,” said Dominic. He spoke slowly, with dignity and determination. “Wherever this Wadi Harhammi may be, whether or not the marvelous object is still there, we must go in search of it. I cannot ask the rest of you to accompany me against your wills, but I myself have no choice. My father wished me to go.”
We all looked toward King Haimeric. This was still his quest, no matter what messages from the dead we might receive. The king nodded thoughtfully. “After fifty years, whatever he’d found or heard of is unlikely still to be there. But you’re quite right: we have to look. Besides, the stories of the blue rose say it’s being cultivated south of the Holy Land.”
Dominic handed me the parchment. “Since this is a magical message, Wizard, you should carry it.”
Ascelin stood up. “Whatever your brother had heard of, Haimeric, someone thought it important enough to break into the tomb to try to find the secret. If they’re looking for the snake ring, and they know we have it, we could be in constant danger.”
King Haimeric smiled. “I appreciate your concern, Ascelin, but this enemy of which you speak must already know the secret’s not in the tomb, and will think we don’t have it either or we wouldn’t have come here to look for it.”
“Could I have my ring back?” Dominic asked me.
I had almost forgotten I was holding it. Even if all of us still seemed more willing to follow the king in search of his brother than Dominic in search of his father, the burly prince certainly had a right to his own ring. I reattached the ruby and reapplied the binding spell to keep it in place, and handed him the ring, but the piece of parchment I slipped inside my jacket.
We traveled southeast through the eastern kingdoms while summer advanced rapidly around us. The king had been right, back in the mountains, that we soon wouldn’t need our heavy clothes. Ascelin kept us to back roads and away from the cities. If we were being followed, neither his hunter’s instincts nor my magic could find anyone behind us. But we became lost ourselves on the narrow roads at least once a day, so someone else might have had even more trouble.
Although the border guards of the first kingdom beneath the mountains had said their kingdom was not at war, the other countries apparently all were. We became lost most commonly when trying to dodge the lines of soldiers we saw approaching in the distance, or to get away from the main road when a long line of carts, carrying heavily-guarded supplies, appeared before us.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the eastern kingdoms for anything,” said Hugo in my ear, as he and I lay in the underbrush near the main road, watching horses pass by, waiting until the road was clear so we could get the others and follow it ourselves. Harnesses jingled, and dust rose from hundreds of shod feet. Spear points glinted in the sun, but the faces of the riders were hidden by their helmets. “It’s like the hiding games I used to play when I was little, but it’s deadly earnest,” he added cheerfully.
Hugo might think it an exciting game, and Joachim might think there would be great merit in dying on this pilgrimage. But if we ended up as six fresh heads on poles, like the ones we had seen last night, I doubted we would appreciate it.
I felt a new respect for the wizards of the eastern kingdoms, who I kept hoping to meet at some point, although about the only people we had met so far were frightened farmers from whom we bought food. Ending war in the western kingdoms, it appeared, had not made the western aristocracy any less interested in fighting, only more likely to go help the wars continue east of the mountains.
“That’s the end of the troops,” I said, rising cautiously to my feet. “Let’s get the others.”
We followed the main road a short distance, back in the direction from which the troops had come, and were just looking for a good place to leave the road again when Hugo, in the lead, reined in abruptly. “Look at this! They aren’t- They’re not real, are they?”
“I’m afraid they are,” said Ascelin grimly.
Before us rose a pyramid made entirely of human skulls. An inscription carved in stone at the base told us proudly that these were the enemies that the local king had had killed within a single year. Amazed, I tried to calculate how many skulls might be in the pyramid and gave up. It towered at least twenty feet above the road. The
