Daughter of Magic

I dropped my eyes, deeply shamed. I was fairly sure bishops were not supposed to utter oaths like that. When I finally dared look up again, Joachim was examining his hands as though he had never seen them before.

But he suddenly looked up at me and did the last thing I expected: he smiled. He was certainly full of surprises today.

“No wonder you wanted to kill me,” he said. “Well, I am grateful you did not. You were right to call me complacent.” He shook his head ruefully. “Sin always awaits us, no matter how carefully we think we guard against it. I had not realized that wrath could overcome Christian charity so easily.”

He put a hand on my shoulder. “Forgive my anger if you can, and tell me why you think someone has taken Theodora’s love from you.” He smiled again. “We talk about you frequently, and I know she loves you dearly.”

Theodora and I sat on opposite sides of the gold-ceilinged room. I myself would have preferred to have her next to me, my arms around her, but she seemed to prefer it this way.

After several hours’ unconsciousness here in the bishop’s best guest chamber, the one where visiting church dignitaries stayed, I felt both rational again and deeply humiliated by my own actions. I had been guilty of some very strange behavior at times in the past, but this had gone beyond all bounds, even for me. In retrospect I could not imagine what madness could have impelled me to do something so eminently likely to lose me both my best friend-even if I hadn’t killed him-and the woman I loved. The wizards’ school would doubtless have agreed-not even raising a perfunctory request for mercy such as the cathedral would have forced itself to make-when the city authorities condemned me to hang. Theodora’s unwillingness to sit any closer seemed only appropriate.

“Theodora, you know I’d do anything for you. I’d die for you.”

She smiled and shook her head. “I realize you think you mean it, but that’s what the boys always tell the girls in all the songs.”

“I’d give up wizardry for you.”

“We’ve already been through that many times. You couldn’t give up magic, no matter how much you wanted to, no matter how hard you tried.”

I was rapidly running low on sacrifices I could make for her. “Then what can I do?”

She gave the worst possible answer. “I don’t want you to do anything.”

We sat in silence for a minute. “Can I still visit you and Antonia?” I asked then, trying not to sound abject and not succeeding.

“Of course,” she said in surprise. “It would take more than a nightmare to change that. You’re sure she’s all right alone in the castle?”

“I told you I telephoned Gwennie this morning,” I said wearily. I had talked to Elerius as well, making sure no more magical attacks had taken place while I was gone, but I did not want to bother Theodora now with undead warriors.

Silence stretched out again between us. “Well,” I said then, putting hands on my knees preparatory to rising, “if there’s nothing I can do to make you love me, then maybe I should get back to Yurt.” I waited to see if she would say anything but she didn’t. “At least Antonia seemed happy when I told her I was her father.”

Theodora abruptly smiled, with the lift of her brows and the dimple that I loved. “I’m so glad you told her! She had been asking about you the last few weeks, but I thought you would enjoy telling her yourself.”

It was as though the cool, reserved tone our conversation had taken had suddenly broken. I did not dare move but waited to see what Theodora would say next. She came across the room, took me by the ears and kissed me. “Maybe even in the bishop’s palace it won’t be too sinful to kiss the man I love.”

I wrapped my arms around her so she couldn’t get away again. “I don’t understand you, Theodora,” I said into her hair, feeling happiness breaking over me in spite of myself. “Why do you have to be so conventional sometimes? Why can’t you just tell me what you feel?”

She pushed herself back to look at me, though I kept a grip tight enough to forestall any attempts to escape. “Considering that you call me a witch,” she said, a smile twitching the corner of her lips, “I’m surprised to hear myself suddenly accused of conventionality.”

“You were just sitting there coldly, listening to me say I would do anything to make you love me, saying you didn’t want me to do anything!”

“Of course I don’t want you to do anything,” she said with a hint of a laugh. “I already love you! But it’s not respect for ‘convention’ that makes me feel that I should try to rise above concerns of the flesh here, as the bishop would surely want us to do. It’s respect for him, as the representative of God. He is so far above all of us-knowing him as well as you do, you must surely feel it too.”

It might be nothing like my nightmare, but in some areas she still felt more strongly about Joachim than me. I pulled her tighter to avoid meeting her eyes and maybe seeing something which-I managed to persuade myself-I would not see anyway.

“But I think he might understand now,” she said, kissing the side of my face. “When he sent for me he said you were very upset and had had a nightmare that I didn’t love you.” Her voice took on a teasing note. “Since you came to him yourself for comfort and guidance, why be surprised that I respect him as much as you do?”

It was more than I deserved that Joachim had not told her that I had threatened to kill him.

“But I don’t follow your reasoning, Daimbert,” she said more seriously. “Somehow I think you’re saying that because I have tried to be a mother on my own, acting strong for Antonia’s sake no matter how hard it is to be separated from you, rejecting the easy path of tying you down with marriage, I’m being conventional?”

“It’s because you want me to behave like an ordinary, unmarried wizard, while you try to act like a virtuous, self-supporting seamstress,” I said lamely.

“It is deliberate, Daimbert,” she said quietly. “If I want Antonia to have any sort of normal childhood, I have to be above suspicion of being just one more woman who threw away her virtue-I hope you are not equating convention with morality! And I really don’t care what ‘ordinary, unmarried’ wizards do. All I want is what will make you happiest, and that is not being driven out of Yurt by your king and snubbed by your school.”

It was clearly no use to argue with her or to point out that she was not giving me the chance to make decisions for myself. And if she worried more about morality than I did- Well, wizards had never had much use for religion anyway.

Something in her comment teased out a thought about Elerius. Would he hold over me threats of revealing all to the school in order to bind me to him for purposes of his own?

But I didn’t have the time or energy to worry about him. I looked into Theodora’s amethyst eyes and managed to smile. “I guess I’d better make it up to the bishop for breaking in on him this morning by trying again to find out more about the strange magic-worker here in the city.”

IV

Theodora had not seen the Dog-Man, but I hoped to learn more from Celia. Escaping from the bishop’s palace, I crossed town to the little castle belonging to the kings of Yurt, where the royal family stayed when visiting Caelrhon. As I hoped, the duchess’s daughters were there.

Hildegarde looked irritated and bored, but Celia appeared to be experiencing intense joy. “Thank you for sending me here, Wizard,” she said, taking both my hands. “This is the chance I have long waited for, that I feared might not exist, and I would not have it but for you.”

“The chance for what?” I said, too startled to appreciate her gratitude.

“To study for the priesthood, of course,” said Celia. “I’ve been so happy that I’ve been sending pigeon- messages to all the people who have encouraged me over the years in a religious vocation.”

And these, I felt fairly certain, did not include her parents.

“She met that Dog-Man all right,” said Hildegarde, leaning against the door-jamb and cleaning her nails with a knife. “And now that the bishop has accepted him into the seminary he’s promised to come teach her in the evenings everything he learns during the day.”