Mage Quest

supposedly competent wizard, me. I myself was angry that it had taken me so long to react; Hugo would have killed the leader if it hadn’t been for his armor, whereas I should have been able to disarm him easily with magic. The king looked excited and a little apprehensive, Joachim concerned, and the knights who were supposed to be protecting the caravan embarrassed.

A man in a rich purple cloak jumped off the first of the wagons. “Thank you!” he said heartily. “I don’t know what we would have done if you hadn’t come along,” with a sharp glance at his knights. “We hadn’t expected to meet bandits in this region-although I myself am only taking this road for the first time, since the lord in the next river valley over started charging tolls on his bridges. We have a lot of valuable silks here on the way to market. Can I reward you with a few bolts? The color of your choice, for yourselves or your ladies?”

The king smiled. “We appreciate your offer, but we don’t need a reward. I’m the king of Yurt.” So much, I thought, for traveling anonymously. “Even when not at home, I feel it part of royal responsibility to keep the roads safe for honest men-and you can tell that my knights feel the same way!”

“What shall we do with them?” asked Ascelin, stirring the three paralyzed bandits with one toe. They were breathing, but they were stiff and immobile, and I doubted they would remember much of this.

“We should kill them,” said Hugo enthusiastically.

“No,” said the king thoughtfully. “We may have caught them, but I have no rights of justice outside my kingdom.”

“And you can’t kill a defenseless man,” said Ascelin to Hugo reprovingly.

“Look at this, Hugo,” said Dominic pointedly. “The bandit leader has an earring just like yours.”

“We passed a castle about an hour ago,” said the merchant, pointing along the road in the direction that we were going. “You can just see the turrets beyond that hill. If the castellan there doesn’t have rights of justice, he’ll certainly have a dungeon where these malefactors can be kept until they’re turned over to the proper authorities.” He looked at their motionless forms quizzically, then at me. “What did you do with them?” he asked with what I hoped was awe.

“Just a little trick we wizards know,” I said airily, fairly satisfied myself with my ultimate role in this.

As we continued south, the bandits tied onto the pack horses, I positioned my horse next to Hugo’s so I could talk to him. Joachim seemed to have the same idea, for I discovered him on Hugo’s other side.

I spoke up quickly, feeling that the young lord needed to hear good sense before he heard Christian morality. “Hugo,” I said conversationally, “you could have gotten yourself killed back there.”

“But I didn’t,” he said with a grin.

“You might have had an arrow in the eye if the bandits had been on foot rather than on horseback.”

“That’s why I yelled, to startle the horses.” I was quite sure he had not thought this through, but I couldn’t very well contradict him. I had a sudden and very unpleasant vision, of Sir Hugo’s party starting happily home from the Holy Land and of bandits leaping out of ambush and putting an arrow through Evrard. But I couldn’t mention this to Hugo, because the next arrow would have been for his father.

I switched tactics. It was no use trying to make him realize the unnecessary danger he had put himself in if he was happy to have been in danger. “Why do you think the king brought his Royal Wizard along?”

Hugo shot me a quick look. “To deal with dragons or whatever magical creatures we run across.”

“And also,” I said, giving him a wizardly stare, “to deal with bandits. You saw me paralyze the three of them. If you’d given me fifteen seconds before you attacked, I could have had them all tied up neatly with magical spells.”

“You wizards take all the fun out of everything,” said Hugo grumpily. “I know perfectly well why there haven’t been any decent wars in the western kingdoms for close to two centuries, not since the Black Wars. You don’t want to let the aristocracy do what we’re trained to do.”

“We certainly don’t want you killing each other,” I said.

“Our own wizard would never scold me for saving us all from bandits.”

I realized he meant Evrard. But if he had seen much more of Evrard in the last few years than I had, I thought I still knew the red-headed wizard better. “Didn’t your wizard ever tell you that he’d decided to study wizardry in the first place because he was fascinated by the history of how wizards had stopped the Black Wars?”

Hugo didn’t answer, which I took as an affirmative.

“I don’t doubt your courage, Hugo,” I continued. I thought, but decided it would be tactful not to say, that he was still young enough that his own death would not seem a real possibility to him. “And there will be ample opportunity on this trip for you to show it. But if you don’t mind putting yourself in danger, you might at least think about the bandit leader. You would have killed him if he weren’t wearing armor.”

“It’s nice armor, too,” said Hugo thoughtfully, “much higher quality than you’d expect to see on a highwayman. It’s even better than mine. I wonder if it would fit me.”

I was not about to be distracted. “Doesn’t death seem like a rather stiff penalty for trying to rob a silk caravan?”

“Don’t go all moralistic!” Hugo cried. “The castellan to whom we’re taking these bandits may well hang them all if they’re multiple offenders. I know King Haimeric never hangs anybody, but justice is sharper a lot of places outside of Yurt.”

“You still can’t act as judge and executioner yourself,” I said sternly. I was rapidly starting to feel out of my depth. Since I, unlike Evrard, had not become a wizard out of fascination with the end of the Black Wars, and because Yurt really was very peaceful, I tended not to think about the morality of judicial execution, or for that matter much about deep moral issues at all.

“Even the Church recognizes killing in self-defense and the possibility of a just war,” said Hugo.

“This was not self-defense,” said Joachim.

I had been wondering when the chaplain was going to join this conversation. Priests were supposed to worry about morality. Wizards just try to keep as many people as possible alive and well.

“And killing someone,” Joachim continued soberly, “even in self-defense or to save another innocent life, still leaves a stain on the soul.”

Hugo, who had turned toward the chaplain, seemed abashed. I myself sometimes still found Joachim’s burning dark eyes intimidating. “Well, I didn’t kill him, and I didn’t mean to kill him.”

I expected he was telling the perfect truth-at all the tournaments in which he had taken part, everyone would have been wearing armor, and he would not have even thought about the effects of a razor-sharp sword on a man who did not have mail under his cloak.

But I was tired of worrying about morality myself. So when Hugo suddenly looked up and said, “What a castle!” in an entirely different voice, I was happy to change the subject.

And it was quite a castle. Among the tumbled hills before us rose a high ridge of red sandstone, at least a hundred feet tall. Cut into the sandstone were narrow windows, and perched on top, staring sternly down at the fields surrounding it, was the castle itself. Pennants whipping in the wind from the tops of the towers looked tiny, making us realize how high the castle really was.

We all pulled up for a better look. The castle was so well situated for war that we were momentarily stunned. “It would be impregnable,” said Ascelin. “There’s no way to scale the sandstone cliffs, especially with men inside shooting out. And I expect the stairs inside, going up to the castle, are very narrow and could easily be blocked against an enemy.”

“I’m sure the castellan there does indeed have rights of high justice,” commented the king with a chuckle.

The castle rose higher and higher above us as we approached. Encircling the base of the sandstone ridge was a tall curtain wall, also built of red stone, but the gate stood open. Two soldiers stepped forward menacingly as we approached.

“Greetings,” said the king. “We would like to see the lord of this castle. We have captured some bandits.”

The soldiers took a good look at us and our pack horses and then abruptly fled with startled cries. Giving each other surprised glances, we dismounted and came through the gate on foot.

“It’s a good thing we caught these bandits,” said the king, “if even the sight of them bound terrifies the people here.”

“It’s a good thing the castellan has such a fine castle if his soldiers are all cowards,” replied Dominic.