Daughter of Magic

Celia shot a sharp glance at her sister but said only, “I told you not to call him Dog-Man anymore. The children call him that, of course, as a sign of affection, but his real name is Cyrus.”

Cyrus. So at least now I had a name to go with the fragmentary and contradictory things about him I had learned from Theodora and the bishop.

“His religious vocation is so strong,” Celia went on eagerly, “that he spends most nights in prayer, lying before the high altar in the cathedral.”

This, I thought grudgingly, might explain why I had not been able to find him when I was here before. He wouldn’t have had to be hiding from me deliberately. In prayer, he would enter the supernatural realm of the saints and be beyond the reach of my magic. “Any particular sins he’s trying to atone for with all this penitent prayer?” I asked, half as a joke.

But Celia did not take it as a joke. “He feels terrible urges within himself,” she said in a low voice. “That-that is why he has killed innocent creatures. That is what he hopes he will overcome through penitence and through immersion in the sanctity of the seminary.”

“Does the bishop know this?” I asked in amazement.

“He-” She hesitated, then pushed on. “Cyrus may not have told His Holiness everything.”

And she already had my own authorization to act behind the bishop’s back, I thought grimly.

“But his prayers have always restored the creatures,” she said in what was probably meant to be a hopeful tone.

I didn’t like at all the idea of the duchess’s daughter spending time alone with someone with “terrible urges.” I started to forbid her, with a sharp rebuke for her lack of sense, ever to see him again.

But too many people had been telling her what she could and could not do. On the other hand, to be killed by someone I persisted in thinking of as demonic would probably be a mild, even pleasant experience compared to what the duchess would do to me if she thought I had allowed one of her daughters to be hurt. Why, if a young woman decided to find her own vocation and her own way in life, must it be by putting that life in peril?

I looked toward Hildegarde, the one sure defense Celia might have. She nodded her blond head slowly and wordlessly, meeting my eyes. She understood the situation even better than I did.

“Oh,” I said, remembering what had been happening in Yurt while the twins were gone, “you missed some excitement, Hildegarde.” I told her briefly about the warriors’ attack.

She cheered up at once. “It sounds like we’d better get back to Yurt right away,” she said to Celia. “Paul will want me there in case anything further happens. And don’t you think, Wizard, that this might be an attack on the Lady Justinia? After all, she’d just arrived when this happened. So the king may want to post a guard in her bedchamber, and it had better be another woman!”

“Do what you like,” said Celia quietly. “I shall remain here.”

“But you can’t stay here by yourself!” Hildegarde protested.

“Why not? We need not always do everything together. And if I went back to Yurt, Cyrus would not be able to teach me what he learns in seminary.”

Hildegarde fidgeted, eager to show what a woman’s strong arm could do against creatures of darkness, yet unwilling to leave her sister to the Dog-Man. “And we still haven’t showed the wizard’s niece how to deal off the bottom of the deck,” she said to her sister as an added inducement to return to Yurt. “You know you’re much better at it than I am.”

“Uh, Hildegarde, maybe the two of you can stay here just a little longer,” I said. “I’m going to find this Cyrus and talk to him myself.”

“But he won’t want to talk to a wizard,” said Celia, rising abruptly from her chair. “He has had evil experiences with wizardry. In becoming a priest, he intends to break all ties with magic.”

So had this man been at the wizards’ school along with everything else? I really did need to talk to him soon, no matter what Celia might think.

I left the little castle a few minutes later to head out of the city. Although the Romneys had denied categorically any knowledge of someone called Dog-Man, they might have information about someone named Cyrus. Both Yurt and Caelrhon were tiny kingdoms, probably unknown to most of the people in the west, much less anywhere else. If this would-be priest had come here intentionally, rather than just wandering into town by accident, he would have needed directions from someone who traveled here fairly frequently, which would mean either the merchants who brought up goods from the great City or else the Romneys.

Although we in the Western Kingdoms tended to consider the kingdoms east of the mountains as “eastern,” in fact there was a very long distance past them still to go into the East. The multitude of small kingdoms and principalities where the Romneys were believed to have originated formed a barrier between our Western Kingdoms and the true East. Far beyond that region, in the old imperial city of Xantium, they must consider our Western and Eastern Kingdoms an undifferentiated western mass.

The streets of Caelrhon were packed, as they always were these days, and I had to thread my way carefully toward the city gates. The square in front of the cathedral, once the main market square of Caelrhon, had for several years been full of construction equipment, and now rising from the center was what would someday be the great doors and flanking towers of the new cathedral. So far the doors opened not into a cathedral nave but only onto more piled timbers, stones, and vats of mortar, but every time I was in town I could see that the crew had brought the new church one small step closer.

Beyond the city gates the dense crowds thinned out rapidly, though a number of people besides me seemed to be heading toward the Romney encampment. Today the brightly-painted caravans were surrounded by horses. Afternoon sun shown on glistening coats, black, bay, and dapple, and summer breezes ruffled manes and tales. The Romneys themselves in their black and red ducked and dodged their way between the animals, talking confidently to the other people there.

The Romneys, it seemed, were holding a horse-fair. Knights and merchants and a few farmers milled around the encampment, both buying and selling. Horses stamped, kicked, and bared their teeth at each other. Some of these were riding horses, some plow horses, and a few unbroken colts. On every side I heard extravagant claims by would-be sellers of the virtues of horses that looked no different to me than those that were being harshly criticized by would-be buyers.

But it did look as though all the adult Romneys were involved. The children were half a mile away, playing by themselves. I wandered toward them, trying not to draw attention to myself from the adults. High white clouds sat on the horizon, but the sky above was clear.

“There’s the wizard!” one of the boys called, breaking away from the rest to run toward me. “Make me another snake!”

It was the same boy, peering at me with shiny black eyes from under shaggy hair, to whom I had first spoken a few days ago. The other children raced to gather around us. Again I made an illusory ruby-eyed snake that curled up his arm and quivered its tongue at him. “Now make it real!” he said.

I shook my head, smiling. “That’s beyond the reach of natural magic,” I said.

“How about the Dog-Man?” a girl suggested. “I’m sure he could do it!” One of the other children elbowed her hard, and there was suddenly a bashful silence.

My illusory snake was fading fast. “When I was here before,” I said, looking at the children with a wizardly scowl, “you told me none of you had ever met the Dog-Man. But I think now you really had, even though you might not have realized it at the time.” The children shuffled their feet, and I knew I was right. “He’s the same man who traveled to Caelrhon with you a few weeks ago, isn’t he. He’s calling himself Cyrus now; what name did he give you?”

The children, laughed, embarrassed. “When did you find out that the man the children in the city were talking about was one you already knew well?” I pressed them.

“You can’t blame us for not knowing who he was,” the oldest boy piped up. “He never did things like bring dogs back to life when traveling with us! Maybe,” he added thoughtfully and unconvincingly, “he knew we’d see straight through his illusions.”

I myself had long since given up any hope that what this man was doing was mere illusion. “Tell me more about him,” I suggested, jingling coins ostentatiously in my pockets.

“Well, I decided to go into town and see him,” announced one of the girls, tossing her hair. “We’d heard such strange things about him-and you had asked us about him, Wizard-that I went down by the river to find him. And it was Cyrus!”