Daughter of Magic

I?”

Gwennie seemed happy to give up her seat on the elephant’s back. In a minute Margareta was seated next to the Lady Justinia, gaping anew at the automaton, and we all started homeward. I yawned and thought I might finally get some sleep once we were back at the castle.

Margareta squealed with real or assumed nervousness when the elephant began trotting, until Justinia told her rather sharply to stop scaring it. Gwennie, riding on the young princess’s horse, gave a calm and professional account of the castle’s doings in the few days the queen had been gone-except for the most crucial, the attack of the unliving warriors.

“In addition,” she finished, “there was one very sad event, and the night watchman is dead. Perhaps the king can tell you about it better than I. No, no, my lady, there is nothing to concern you now.”

Glancing surreptitiously at Gwennie, I wondered what, if any, of the Lady Justinia’s advice had gone home. That, I knew, would concern the queen if she ever learned about it even more than an attack which was now safely over.

When I awoke, aching and ravenous, in late afternoon, it was to find Antonia and her doll curled up beside me. I had been having strange, rather uneasy dreams, involving Theodora and some bones, and was glad to wake. I tried to sit up without disturbing the girl, but she rolled over and looked at me inquiringly through tousled hair. “I want to ask you something, Wizard,” she said. “Are you my father?”

I jerked upright, fully awake, and looked around quickly for Elerius. But if he was still reading old spells it was in my outer study. “What has your mother told you, Antonia?” I asked cautiously.

“She said that my father couldn’t live with us,” she said slowly, as though trying to remember all the details correctly, “but that he loved us very much, and that I would understand it all when I grew up. I want,” she added, fixing me with sapphire eyes, “to understand it all now.”

I ran a hand over my face and pushed back my hair. “So why do you think I’m your father?”

“I know you love me and Mother,” she said with great seriousness, explaining a complicated logical exercise, “and you told me you don’t love other ladies. And Mother seems to love you, and she hardly ever talks about any other men-except of course the bishop.”

If our daughter thought Theodora loved me, then she indeed must. Most of the time I knew this anyway-it was just her reserve and self-reliance, I told myself, that made me sometimes doubt it. “The bishop loves you, too,” I said. “He baptized you.”

“He’s my friend,” said Antonia, nodding. “But he just told me to talk to Mother when I asked him about you. Some of my other friends on the street said they all knew you were my father.”

In spite of Theodora’s quiet determination to keep her private life private, her neighbors must long have speculated about Antonia’s parentage, and I visited Theodora too often not to have attracted notice. Even the Romneys knew she had a wizard friend.

“So are you my father?” Antonia asked, looking at me expectantly.

There didn’t seem any way to get out of answering. Theodora may have preferred not telling our daughter for fear she would tell the other children, but it seemed too late to worry about that. “Yes, I am,” I said gravely, taking her hands in mine. They were bigger than when she had been born but still tiny in my grip. “And I am very glad you’re my daughter.”

She threw herself against my chest, and I gave her a close hug. “I’m glad too,” she said indistinctly against my shirt.

“Your mother wants this to be a secret,” I said after a minute, stroking her hair, “so let’s not tell anyone here, not even Celia and Hildegarde.”

“I guessed the secret all by myself,” Antonia said proudly, looking up at me. “But my friend Jen said she thought my father was the bishop.”

The bishop? I tried to make a sudden jerk seem like squeezing her tighter.

But Antonia observed my surprise. “I think,” she said in explanation, “that’s because he visits us sometimes, and everyone knows that Mother can go visit him in his palace whenever she wants.”

If such a rumor had started, I had to tell Theodora to be a little less secretive about me with her neighbors: far better to have them know for certain what most of them had guessed anyway than to have people start believing wild things about her and Joachim.

A sudden rap on the bedchamber door interrupted us, and Elerius put his head in. “Good, I see you’re awake, Daimbert. Your young woman constable just came by with a pigeon-message she said she thought was important.”

He handed me a little cylinder of paper, all the pigeons could carry, and ducked back out. “If you’re my father,” asked Antonia thoughtfully, “does that mean you’re Dolly’s grandfather?”

I didn’t answer. The message was from Celia in the cathedral city. I rubbed grit from the corner of an eye. I had again almost forgotten she was there. If people and events would just stay where I put them, and new ones would stop showing up in Yurt, and if I ever got enough sleep again, I might be able to keep track of what was happening in the twin kingdoms.

The message was, of necessity, brief. “Have met the Dog-Man. Religious vocation seems genuine. But strange. This afternoon down by the docks he killed a pigeon and brought it back to life.”

“But strange” was right. Presumably the pigeon in question was not the same one who had brought this message? I stared unseeing at the little piece of paper until I realized Antonia was trying to read it too, then wadded it up in my fist.

“We’d better get ready for dinner,” I said, but my best effort at cheerfulness sounded forced in my own ears. I felt cold from the nape of my neck all the way down my back. Somehow this man had persuaded Celia as well as the bishop that he genuinely wanted to be a priest. What could they be teaching in seminary these days? Even a wizard knew that a humble, holy man would not try to show off his miraculous powers. And someone who had already killed a frog and a pigeon, just to bring them back to life, might have something much worse in mind.

And someone who revived dead animals, I thought, trying without particular success to duplicate what Elerius had done to Antonia’s hair yesterday, seemed too close for comfort to someone who made warriors out of dead bones-someone who had killed the watchman and not brought him back to life.

II

Princess Margareta came down to dinner with her eyelids painted an iridescent blue like the Lady Justinia’s, which earned her a look of askance from the queen, and carrying a big porcelain doll. The doll wore a lace and silk dress more elaborate than the princess’s own and had golden curls arranged around its placid face in a style that even Elerius might have had trouble matching.

The king’s Great-aunt Maria threw up her hands with delight at the sight of the doll, but Antonia frowned. “The wizard told me not to bring Dolly to the table with me,” she said to the princess in a low voice, as though warning her against possible embarrassment.

But Margareta tossed her head imperiously and said in her slightly squeaky voice, “Queen Margarithia always sits wherever I do.” She ordered a servant to bring up a stool and set the doll in it, next to her own chair. One of the castle hounds, who were not supposed to be in the great hall at meal time, came up and started sniffing, but Margareta aimed a kick at it and the servant took the animal quickly away.

“Queen Margarithia is a good name for a doll,” said Antonia approvingly.

Margareta settled herself with a complacent flounce into the place of honor, at the king’s right hand. She had first been given that place by the queen two visits ago and seemed to feel it was rightfully hers.

As the rest of us seated ourselves and started passing the platters, I noticed that the young princess, however, paid less attention to King Paul than to the Lady Justinia, sitting directly across the table from her in the secondary place of honor. When Justinia took a single piece of chicken but several scoops of vegetables, Margareta pushed the three pieces of chicken she had already taken to the side of the plate and tried surreptitiously to fluff up her vegetables with a spoon. When Justinia set down her knife and switched her fork from left hand to right to eat after cutting each piece, Margareta tried to do the same, although on the second effort she dropped her knife on the