these days do use the knowledge that the world is God’s creation as an excuse to enjoy it too fully, without considering their ultimate responsibility to save human souls. It would certainly be possible to give the royal court of Yurt a different chaplain, but I would not do so without a better reason than personal antipathy from the Royal Wizard.”
But then, I thought, I wasn’t Royal Wizard of Yurt anymore. “Paul thinks he has an impure mind.”
Joachim looked alarmed. “What does that mean?”
“I think it means that Paul distrusts the discussions the Lady Maria has with him.”
“I believe the Lady Maria can defend herself from impure thoughts very well,” said Joachim. If he was making a joke he looked perfectly sober. “Perhaps you should discuss this wizardly ‘plot’ with Prince Lucas,” he continued, “while you are both here in Caelrhon.”
“He won’t want to talk to me. He almost attacked me today.”
“Maybe some way could be arranged for the two of you to spend time together,” said the dean thoughtfully.
I took a sip of wine and leaned back in my chair. “Did you ever think,” I said, changing the topic abruptly, “that it might be nice to give all this up?”
“Give what up?”
“These responsibilities. I know you feel the burden even more than I do. We’re supposed to be responsible for the young wizards and the young priests, for organizing and carrying out the important functions of our institutions, but after a while who wants the aggravation?”
“What are you suggesting we do instead?”
“I think the Romneys have the right idea,” I said, pushing my glass forward for more wine. “When they get tired of being in the same place too long, they leave. I know they’re rumored not to be Christians, so you might not want to travel with them, but we could have our own caravan, drawn by our own pony.”
“And what would we and our pony do?” asked Joachim. A faint smile hovered near his lips.
“We could go from town to town, see all of the different cities and castles-and even the pilgrimage churches- in the western kingdoms, and when we had finished with those we could start on the eastern kingdoms.”
“What would we live on?”
“I could do magic tricks, and you could work a few simple miracles, and people would pay us.”
Joachim poured out the last of the wine. “You realize of course,” he said, “that that’s your most inappropriate suggestion yet.” But the smile had reached his eyes.
PART FOUR — THEODORA
I
During the following weeks I saw Theodora every day. The first morning I strolled through the city for several hours, probing for wizards or magical creatures and seeing no one I knew except Prince Lucas, who turned deliberately away. Finally I spotted her coming out of a garment retailer’s. But after that I abandoned all pretense and we arranged our meetings.
I did not telephone the school again. Zahlfast thought I should be home in Yurt, and I was unsure how to tell him I had resigned. And, at least so far, my presence did seem to be keeping monsters away from Caelrhon. And it was easy to find excuses to stay in the city now that I had met Theodora.
We usually got together late in the afternoon, when the light was poorer for close hand-sewing. After a few hours every morning of searching in an increasingly desultory way for a powerful wizard I did not particularly want to find, or of going through my spells once again in a fruitless search for one that might work against monsters, I was gladder each day to see her. Strolling in the fresh air outside the city walls or sitting in the grass, thick with wildflowers, where the Romneys had camped, Theodora and I discussed magic. She explained fire magic to me, and I taught her some of the magic of light and air.
“You call it the Hidden Language?” she asked. “My mother simply called it the language of magic. She said it had no grammar, only words and phrases to be memorized, but I’ve long suspected it must have an internal logic of its own. Otherwise, you couldn’t create new spells.”
I felt vaguely uneasy teaching magic to a witch. The Master of the wizards’ school, I suspected, would disapprove. I rationalized that I was no longer Royal Wizard of Yurt, and that I would not want to return to the school either if they persisted in their belief that I would be good at teaching in the technical division, and thus I was not bound by the practices of institutionalized magic. Besides, this was not some witch in the abstract: this was Theodora.
The grass grew so tall around us that someone else would have spotted us and stepped on us at the same time. She sat with her legs tucked demurely under her while I sprawled back on my elbows, looking up at her. The breeze blew tendrils of hair across her face, half obscuring it. “And have you created any new spells of your own?” I asked.
“Just one that works reliably.” She snapped her fingers and said the two words to light a flame, but this one appeared not on the ground but in the air in front of her. It died out of course almost immediately, but another appeared just above it, then another, until a string of twenty tiny flames, each lasting only an instant, had climbed an arc up into the afternoon sky.
“So that’s what you were doing up on the cathedral scaffolding?” I asked casually.
Theodora’s dimple appeared. “I knew you were going to ask me about that sooner or later. The scaffolding presented a much better challenge than anything else in the city-and since my mother and I always embroidered for the cathedral, I felt secure there. I know the priests disapprove of magic, but as the tower wasn’t consecrated yet I thought they couldn’t object.”
“They did object.” Once again I sounded accusatory. At least so far she had not seemed offended.
She looked down at me and smiled. “That’s what the Romneys guessed. Isn’t that why the mayor sent for a wizard, even before the monster appeared, to find the source of the lights?”
“But the mayor didn’t send for me.” For reasons not entirely clear to me, I had not yet told either the dean nor Theodora about the other.
She plucked a long stalk of grass and tickled my nose with it. “The Romneys always worried about me,” she said. “They said I couldn’t be a wizard because I didn’t know how to fly. They never told me I couldn’t be a wizard because I was a woman. I still don’t understand why you don’t let women into your school.”
This topic had come up more than once. Since the more I knew her the less I agreed with the school’s policy, it was hard to be convincing in my answers. “I’ve already told you,” I attempted, “that some of the wizards have been contemplating for years whether and how the policy ought to be modified.”
“Then they ought to have been able to work it out by now.”
Theodora learned so quickly, and she had so much magic of her own to teach me, that I kept finding myself thinking of her as an equal. Even without what I would consider proper training, she learned faster than most of the wizardry students. I had only rarely in the last twenty years felt I was meeting someone else’s mind on an equal level in the area of magic. Joachim was my friend, but our areas of expertise were so different we were sometimes strangers to each other, and even the teachers at the wizards’ school had to work to remember I was no longer their pupil.
“Change can take a long time,” I said, shaking my head. “The old Master must be hundreds of years old by now, and he isn’t going to make innovations rapidly. But there’s something else, something I’ve felt uncomfortable telling you. The real objection raised to training women in wizardry is that women already have a creative power men don’t have. You can create life in your wombs.”
“You men are just jealous,” said Theodora.
“But it causes very serious problems,” I persisted. “A woman with the full knowledge of wizardry could create and give birth to a monster.”
“And school-trained wizards can transform ordinary creatures into monsters,” she replied. “I thought your training was supposed to make sure that wizards knew the responsibilities of magic as well as its uses. Why not train the witches too as long as you’re so worried?”
