also did not mention that he seemed to have done a very good job of overcoming the same fears of unworthiness when he was first invited to join the cathedral chapter.
“Lately I’ve found myself wishing,” I told him instead, “that we could go back to Yurt the way it was when we first arrived there.”
“Of course you have to remember,” he said thoughtfully, “that ‘Yurt as it first was’ is different for me than for you. I had already been royal chaplain for several years when you arrived. I remember the queen’s old nurse living in the chambers they later gave you.”
I had never quite gotten over the feeling that I would have been much more awe-inspiring in a dungeon or a tower, but I very much liked my chambers in the royal castle, looking out into the courtyard through a tangle of climbing roses. It was by now far too late anyway to become frightening and mysterious.
“Speaking of the queen,” added Joachim, “I meant to tell you. I received a letter from her yesterday.”
I was jealous at once. I hadn’t had a letter from her since the first week I had been in the City.
“I had not heard from her in months, maybe a year, but she wants to find out what she needs to do to reserve the cathedral.”
“The cathedral?”
“Yes. She is thinking of marrying again.”
I stared at him, unable to answer. I was devastated. The old Romney woman, in prophesying that I would fall deeply in love, had been almost twenty years too late. I remembered my wine glass just in time not to drop it. “But she can’t get married!” I finally managed to gasp.
“Why shouldn’t she? She has been a widow for some six years, so remarriage would show no disrespect to the king’s memory. Doesn’t Paul come of age this summer? Once he is eighteen her regency will be over, and she will be free to leave Yurt if she wishes.”
This was even worse. “She can’t leave Yurt!”
Joachim looked at me quizzically. “You seem very disturbed by this.”
“I
“Of course. Everyone who knows her must love her. That is why we should welcome anything that makes her happy.”
I thought, not for the first time, that it was a good thing he was a priest.
“You can see her letter if you like. She did not tell me the name of the man she is thinking of marrying.”
He got it from his desk. It was a real letter, not one of the tiny rectangles that were all the carrier pigeons could handle. She must have found someone heading to the cathedral city to carry her letter by hand. I read it avidly, looking for hidden clues as to why she should suddenly have made such a bizarre decision, but there was nothing in it besides what the dean had already told me. I found myself remembering various men over the years who had looked admiringly at the queen, all of whom I now detested. Joachim was right that everyone loved the queen, and not everyone was a priest.
“I’ll have to go back to Yurt at once.” When Joachim gave me another puzzled look, I added lamely, “They’ll need the Royal Wizard to help prepare for the wedding festivities.”
“I had hoped you could stay at least a few days. If she is only just now inquiring about the availability of the cathedral, she cannot be planning to marry in less than six months.”
He was right, of course. And if I had left the wizards’ school earlier than planned to help out an old friend, I couldn’t very well abandon him after only twelve hours in town.
Joachim tipped up the bottle. “This is almost empty; we might as well finish it. There is a guest house down the street we use for visitors to the cathedral. Or you can stay here with me; I have an extra room.”
“Thank you. I’d be very happy to stay here.” I sipped the last of my wine, listening to the wind. The moon outside the window kept appearing and disappearing behind shreds of clouds. I hadn’t mentioned that mental touch up on the tower, and I was still not sure how real it had been, but if someone was practicing magic with evil intent-or if there really was priestly intrigue against organized wizardry here in Caelrhon-I felt much safer with Joachim than I would somewhere down the street.
But how could I go on as Royal Wizard of Yurt if the queen moved away, married to somebody else?
PART TWO — THE QUEEN
I
I stayed with Joachim for four days. The cantor Norbert avoided me pointedly, the rest of the cathedral priests ignored me, and none of them showed any sign of trying to destroy me.
Every night I went out to check for magical influences on the new construction, and every night I found nothing. Although in the evenings the dean and I caught up on some of the conversations we had not had since he left Yurt, there was little for me to do during the day except fret about the queen. I did not even feel again the fleeting mental touch which I now concluded I had imagined.
“Telephone me if anything else happens,” I told Joachim as I prepared to leave. “But I really do think the magician or whoever was responsible must have been warned by the Romneys. Once he realized a wizard had arrived in town, he decided it was safest to stop his mischief.”
“I would certainly like to think so. Give my best wishes to everyone in Yurt.”
Though I left the quiet cobbled street behind the cathedral on foot, once I had made my way through the city streets and out the wide gates to where the Romneys had been camped I soared upward for the flight home. The whole way, I was trying to imagine what could have possessed the queen to want to marry again.
I came over a stretch of thick forest and saw before me the fields and castle of the kingdom of Yurt. It always looked from the air like a perfect child’s toy of a castle, with its whitewashed turreted walls and the pennants snapping from the towers. As I swooped down I noticed someone working in the old king’s rose garden, just outside the moat, so I landed there.
She saw me descending and came to greet me. I was flabbergasted. It was the queen, and for the first time in six years she was not wearing black.
“You’re home!” she said with delight. She had a smile that lit up her whole face and made whoever saw it want to smile too. “When your books arrived from the City, I knew you couldn’t be far behind!”
“I’ve been down in the cathedral city of Caelrhon, visiting the dean for a few days,” I said, wondering how I could possibly have stayed away as long as three months.
She gestured toward the garden. “As you can see, I was pruning the king’s roses. But I’ve just finished. Shall we go inside?”
The queen swung the gate shut and slipped one arm through mine, holding her gardening gloves and pruning shears in the other hand. She was wearing a very simple, but also undeniably very bright red dress. Red had always gone well with her complexion and her midnight hair. Although her hair now had an attractive white streak in it, red still suited her. She was, as she had always been, the most beautiful woman I had ever met.
I squeezed her arm with mine and said, “It’s good to be home.”
“If you’ve seen the dean, maybe he’s told you my news,” she said gaily as we crossed the drawbridge into the castle. “I’m thinking of marrying again!”
I realized from the thud of my heart that I had been hoping for four days that it was not true. But hearing her talk about it so blithely made it real in a way that seeing the words on paper had not. “Who are you marrying?” I asked and was surprised to hear my voice sound almost normal.
“His name is Vincent,” she said, again with that smile but this time not directed at me. “I’m sure you’ve met him, as he’s visited here several times over the years. He’s the younger son of a king-in fact the king of Caelrhon, where you’ve just been.”
I did indeed remember Vincent, well enough to detest him now. “But a king’s younger son!” I protested. “He is not worthy of you, my lady!” I stopped myself just in time from adding that he was much too young for her.
“You forget that I myself was only a castellan’s daughter before I became queen of Yurt,” she said with a laugh. Then she answered my unspoken comment as well by saying, “With him I feel almost like a girl again!
