“Thank you!” said Paul with a laugh. “Everybody else keeps trying to remind me that I still have three months to go!”
As the illusions faded away, people began to disperse. The young chaplain startled me by touching my elbow. “Would you care for a final glass of wine in my chambers?”
For a moment I was unable to answer. Even aside from my suspicions of him, coming back to Yurt had revived long-forgotten memories of the day I first arrived here. We had eaten in the same hall, its doors and windows open to the air; I had had the Lady Maria beside me; and after dinner I had asked Joachim to have a glass of wine in my chambers.
The young chaplain seemed to take my silence as a symptom of abstemiousness. “The Apostle tells us to take ‘a little wine for thy stomach’s sake,’” he said with a genial chuckle, patting the organ in question, “and we shouldn’t disobey the Apostle, now, should we?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was thinking of something else. I’d be very happy to join you.”
I turned toward the stairs that led up to the small room both Joachim and his immediate successor had had, but the young chaplain turned the other way. I hurried after him, recalling some problem which had made him ask for different chambers.
“So how are you settling into your new duties?” I asked as I caught up. “You’d been here a month with the previous chaplain, but you’d only been on your own for a few weeks when I left.” I wondered jealously if he now thought of Yurt as
“Very well, I hope. But maybe you shouldn’t be asking
He opened his door and motioned me to precede him. I observed at once that he had more space than I did. But I was also relieved to see that his chambers did not suggest an impure mind. The rooms were furnished sparsely, with nothing on the walls but his seminary diploma and the crucifix at the head of the narrow bed.
“You probably wondered why I asked you to join me,” the chaplain said, opening a bottle, “especially after the Lady Maria seemed to imply that you and I ought to be fierce competitors!” He gave a broad smile and handed me a glass. Even though it had always bothered me that Joachim had a rather limited sense of humor, I would at the moment have preferred his sober intensity.
“So she’s been taking her instruction in directions you hadn’t intended?” I asked, taking a sip. The first night I had met Joachim, we had put away several bottles of City vintage between us. I had been determined to show him that no priest could outdrink a wizard, and although I had never asked him about it, I had the impression he didn’t want to let a wizard think he could outdrink a priest.
“Well, her comments have put me in a delicate position,” said the chaplain with well-modulated cheerfulness. “You may not believe me”-I didn’t-”but it was not I who originally pointed out to her the growing role that wizards are taking in all noble courts. While naturally I have stressed the position of the Church in my little chats with her, it was someone else who planted the first seed of the idea that wizards are manipulating the secular rulers of society.”
“Then who was it?”
“Christian charity forbids me from speaking his name.”
Prince Vincent, I thought with sudden conviction. He must be behind the rumors the Master of the school had heard.
“But I will try to make amends,” continued the chaplain, “by asking you to join us in a conspiracy!”
I barely avoided choking on my wine. “What sort of conspiracy?”
“We want to make sure the queen does not make the error of marrying Prince Vincent.”
Immediately I liked the young chaplain much better. I could sort out all these strange rumors later. “And who is
He looked down for a moment as though embarrassed, then smiled again. “Well, I sounded pretty self- important there for a moment, didn’t I! So far, the conspiracy is mostly myself. The Lady Maria is of course in agreement with my purposes.”
“I would have thought she’d adore the romance of a love match.”
“In a way she does, but there is a core of wisdom in what you might think is just a silly head.”
I did not point out that I had probably known the Lady Maria since he was a child begging his mother for extra snacks. “How about other members of the court?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head regretfully. “When I tried to broach the topic to one of the knights, he said something-I know you’ll find this hard to credit-about the Church needing to stay out of the affairs of the aristocracy!” So if members of the court were being taught to distrust wizards, I noted with interest, they also distrusted the chaplain. “I would like to bring Prince Paul into our plans,” he added, “though at his age it is hard to trust his judgment.”
I thought uncharitably that the chaplain was not very much older. “I can understand why Paul doesn’t like the thought of his mother’s remarriage,” I said. “He’s had her all to himself, and he doesn’t want any disservice to his late father’s memory. But I don’t understand your own objections.”
He leaned forward and spoke gravely. The candlelight made flickering points of light in his eyes. “A woman, once widowed, does better to devote herself to God than to another temporal spouse.”
“So you think widows should never remarry?”
“The Apostle tells us it is best that they do not. I can see that she felt she had a moral obligation to raise her son to manhood before retiring, but a woman of true religious sensibilities would now to planning her retreat to a nunnery. The Nunnery of Yurt has an excellent reputation for holiness and was in the past, I understand, supported by generous and pious gifts from the royal family of Yurt.”
I was unable to answer at once. The queen had in fact, when very young, contemplated entering a nunnery rather than marry someone she detested, but she had instead married the king, whom she loved. I could not see her in a nunnery, then or now.
“Have you mentioned this to the queen?”
“I tried to suggest to her delicately that perhaps remarriage would distract her from the higher affairs of the soul, but she just laughed.”
I gave him my wizardly look. “Surely I do not need to tell you that to force a soul into suitable religious behavior will not help that soul’s salvation.” I rose to my feet without waiting for an answer. “Thank you for the wine. It is good if representatives of wizardry and the Church can agree on issues of mutual importance.”
As I strode with self-conscious gravity from his chambers and crossed the courtyard toward my own, I found myself wondering if a belief that the queen’s soul would be improved by a nunnery was his only consideration. Might he have some ulterior motive for wanting her out of the castle?
III
I awoke to the chapel bells the next morning with the happy realization that I was back home in Yurt, far from technical-division wizardry students. This cheerful thought was followed however almost immediately by the distressing knowledge that Prince Vincent was coming today.
He had telephoned that he planned to reach Yurt in the afternoon. The queen was busy bringing heaps of roses into the great hall, arranging them in vases and attaching bouquets to the dark stone walls. I myself wandered out across the drawbridge, gloomily convinced that he was the mysterious person inciting aristocrats to distrust their wizards. At least the queen and Paul seemed unaffected so far. I looked down the hillside sloping away from the castle, past the walled graveyard where the king was buried.
A distant group of tiny horsemen emerged from the woods, far earlier than anyone had expected. Faint on the wind came a trumpet call. Knights and ladies poured out across the bridge behind me. Even the queen, flushed, laughing, and pinning a white rose into her hair, came running out.
The trumpet sounded again, and the horsemen kicked their steeds for the last ascent. The man in the lead, whose golden surplice left no doubt he was a prince, was mounted on a red roan stallion. I looked surreptitiously for Paul, who I knew would be furiously jealous. He stood motionless among the members of the court.
With a jangling of bells and clatter of hoofs, the knights pulled up their horses. Vincent vaulted from the
