Vincent is very different from King Haimeric, but I’m sure he would be delighted to see me happy again.”
She was at least right, I thought gloomily, about the old king of Yurt. He would have approved of the marriage even though I did not. “What do your parents think?”
“They’re pleased, of course. But you ask,” she added with another laugh, “as if I were still a girl too young to know my own mind!”
It was not hard to think of her as a girl in spite of the white streak in her hair. She gave a quick little whirl, almost a dance step, and said, “Vincent’s coming tomorrow so you can renew acquaintances. Your chambers should be ready. The constable put your books inside, but he didn’t unpack them-he was afraid his eye might fall on a spell accidentally and he would turn himself into a frog!” And she went off laughing at her own joke.
I was gloomily reshelving books when I heard a knock at the door. “Come in!” I called, hoping it was the queen come to say her plan to marry Vincent was just another joke, and in rather poor taste.
But it was Prince Paul, royal heir to Yurt. He seemed to have shot up several inches in three months and had to duck through the doorway. “Welcome home! I just heard you’d arrived. Did you have a pleasant stay in the City?” His good manners did not mask the intensity of whatever had brought him here. I had barely begun a congenial response when he added, “I need to talk to you privately. Can you come for a ride?”
Paul loved riding and was very good at it. I thought ruefully that I was going to be made stiff after months of not being on a horse, especially at the pace I was sure he would set. He led the way across the courtyard with rapid strides; his legs still had the slenderness of a boy’s, but they were appreciably longer than mine.
In a few minutes we were mounted and riding out across the bridge, me on an old white mare and Paul on a gelding. “I think Mother’s going to get me a horse for my eighteenth birthday,” he said in a low voice, smiling in anticipation. Temporarily, his other concerns seemed forgotten. “I heard her talking to the constable about horse breeders and about the horse fairs this summer. They didn’t know I was listening so I had to slip away, but I’m fairly sure she knows I want a roan stallion.”
“Your mother is a good judge of horses,” I said. “She used to ride a magnificent black stallion before you were born.”
“I know,” he said regretfully. “I still don’t understand why she sold him. But then,” with a grin, “I’ve never liked black horses that well anyway.” Paul kicked his horse to a faster pace. He was bareheaded, and the wind swirled his hair. When he was young his hair had been so blond it was almost white, and even now it formed a golden halo around his head.
We rode for a mile, more rapidly than I would have liked but not as rapidly as I had feared, down the hill from the castle and then along a deep tree-shaded lane by the meadows. Larks soared over the long grass, and in the distance I could see people starting to harvest the hay.
Paul tied his reins to a branch and threw himself down on the grassy verge. “No one will overhear us,” he said, intense once again.
I reminded myself as I eased out of the saddle that I couldn’t treat him like a boy. Legally he would be of age in another three months, and with his mother’s fire and his father’s sweetness of temperament he would be a formidable king. If I let his boyish enthusiasm for horses remind me too strongly that I had given him horsy-rides on my knee not long ago, I was never going to have his confidence. “What’s bothering you?” I asked, seating myself beside him. “Is it your mother’s remarriage?”
“Yes,” he said gloomily, lying down with his hands under his head. “It wasn’t hard to guess, was it?” He jerked back up to a sitting position. “How can she do it? Why would she want to marry
Since I had been asking myself exactly these questions, I found it difficult to answer.
Paul was now examining one of his riding boots, rubbing his thumb on a scrape. “I even tried talking to Aunt Maria,” he said. “If Mother remarries it will affect the entire kingdom.” He shifted his attention to the other boot. “But she just said something foolish about how a woman like her deserves her happiness.”
As I had been about to say something similar, I was glad I had not spoken. Instead I asked, “What are you afraid will happen to the kingdom?”
“Vincent will move here,” said Paul from the depths of despair, “and nothing will ever be the same again.”
“You mean your mother isn’t planning to leave Yurt?” I asked, trying with only moderate success to keep the excitement out of my voice.
“Why should she?” said Paul, ignoring my tone if he even heard it. “She’s a queen, and back home in his kingdom he’s just the young prince. He’ll come here and change everything.”
“But there’s a limit to what he’ll be able to do. After all, you’re going to be king, not he.”
“I don’t mean he’s going to introduce bad laws or anything,” Paul said in irritation. “But we’ve been so happy and comfortable here, and now everything will be different.”
I observed with interest that nostalgia was perfectly possible even for someone thirty years younger than I. The afternoon breeze was a caress. The thought that the queen would not be leaving was so cheering that it was hard to be properly sympathetic.
“So what can we do?” He looked straight at me for the first time, waiting for an answer. He had the same brilliant green eyes as his mother.
Short of assassinating Prince Vincent I had no good suggestions. I was still unable to speak reassuringly of how the marriage was really best for the queen, especially since this was apparently what everybody else had been telling him. “I honestly don’t know, Paul. I was just as upset as you are when I found out.”
“So that’s all we can do, be upset together?”
“And learn to live with it. People can learn to live with a surprising number of problems. Yurt has gone on without your father, though when he died I never thought it would.”
Six winters ago, I reminded myself, was far more recent to me than it was to Paul. He did not find my comment reassuring. “Mother’s certainly recovered nicely from her loss,” he grumbled. “You would have thought at her age she’d be much too old for love.”
Since I knew no good way to contradict this foolish idea without also pointing out that I thought eighteen was much too young to know anything about love, I said nothing.
“And this Vincent is younger than she is by at least five years; she won’t tell me exactly. I think he’s deceiving her terribly. She goes around telling people she feels like a girl again, while it’s clear that his only interest in an old woman is to get hold of her kingdom.”
I had to smile at this, but since Paul had rolled over onto his stomach he fortunately didn’t see me. I would have been in love with the queen even if I had been eighteen and she was forty-three. “Do you know when they’re planning the wedding?” I asked with remarkable calmness.
“Not yet-I guess there’s still hope she’ll discover her mistake before it’s too late. She told me she didn’t even want to start plans for the wedding until after I come of age, and the dean of the cathedral sent her a note that if she wanted to get married there she would have to reserve the church six months ahead of time. And she said she didn’t want to get married during the winter.”
So they might not be getting married for close to a year. I agreed silently with Paul; the longer the wedding was put off, the more likely that she would have the sense not to go through with it.
He changed the subject abruptly, turning toward me with arms wrapped around one knee. “So what have you been doing the last few months in the wizards’ school?”
“I ended up teaching improvisational magic to technical wizardry students. In spite of all the formulas and books we have, you still have to be able to create your own spells-and to know when to try something unusual. Of course,” I added with a chuckle, “sometimes the unusual is not a good idea.” I went on to tell him about the three drunk newts.
Paul laughed, pulling up and twisting together blades of grass. “I think I’ll go study at the wizards’ school,” he said thoughtfully.
This made me sit up sharply. “Do you mean that?”
He looked at me with surprise. “Is there a reason why I shouldn’t?”
“No, but- Usually members of the aristocracy don’t become wizards. The training is too long and too hard and the rewards too negligible in comparison to aristocratic rule.”
“But aristocrats become priests sometimes.”
