Daughter of Magic

irreverent spell allowed me to overhear. “I’m so sorry to interrupt, Your Holiness, but a pigeon-message just came in, and it said at the top that you must receive it at once. It’s something about your goddaughter.”

The blood turned to ice in my veins. Antonia!

“Excuse me just for a moment, Reverend Mother,” said Joachim quickly and hurried away. Without excusing myself at all, I was right behind him.

The housekeeper led us up flights of stairs and down echoing, vaulted corridors to a little enclosed courtyard off the kitchens. The pigeon loft was on the far side, and several maids stood there, looking uneasy. One smiled with relief when she saw me. “Oh, are you named Daimbert? A second pigeon just arrived, with a message to you from the royal castle. It says it’s urgent.”

Both messages, Joachim’s and mine, were ultimately from Theodora. She had, it appeared, bullied the cathedral priests into letting her use the telephone in the office there to call Yurt. When Gwennie told her I wasn’t home, she had instead sent a pigeon-message to Joachim, at the same time as Gwennie was writing a message conveying the gist of the phone call to me. “She was nearly hysterical,” Gwennie wrote at the end.

Hildegarde came panting up. “There you are!” she said cheerfully. “When you both left the chapel so abruptly I knew it had to be something pretty important! I’m afraid I don’t have my weapons with me, but it shouldn’t take long to stop back at the castle for them. What’s happening?”

I felt almost hysterical myself. “It’s Antonia,” I managed to gasp. “And all the other children of Caelrhon. Cyrus has piped them out of town and no one can find them.”

My heart was pounding so hard it was almost impossible to think clearly. The flying carpet, I told myself over the roaring in my ears. It could fly a lot faster than I could. Even with a detour back to the castle to get it, I would still reach Caelrhon faster than by my own unaided flying. And if we had to quarter and search all the rivers and forests and fields around the city, it would be good to have the fastest transportation possible.

“Tell Celia I’m sorry, but she’ll have to have a different spiritual sponsor,” I said to the bishop and shot off, not even caring if it was irreverent to fly within the precincts of the nunnery.

This was so horrible I couldn’t let myself believe it. It had to be some mistake. The children had gone for a picnic and someone had started a foolish rumor. They would all be home, laughing to hear how frightened everyone had been, by the time I reached Caelrhon.

The pit of my stomach didn’t buy any of this.

A summoning spell like the one Cyrus had used on the rats, I thought as I flew madly back toward the castle, but a spell with a subtle change to summon children instead. Feeling aggrieved at the bishop for making him give up the prayer sessions where people essentially came and worshipped him, at me for exposing his use of magic, and at the mayor and council for not coming to find him in the seminary with some even better reward than the key to the city, he — or the demon-had decided to take his revenge through the children. His piping would have drawn them all as surely as it had drawn the rats; Antonia, whose flair for magic made her particularly susceptible, wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Now I just had to try to find some clue to show where they had gone. Not taken downstream and dropped off like the rats, either to drown or wander away, I tried to persuade myself. According to Gwennie’s account, fuller than what Theodora had written the bishop, Cyrus had invited a number of his old friends, the children from the artisans’ quarter, for a country stroll. Antonia’s friend Jen had apparently been one of them, and Antonia had gone along. Adults had heard piping in the distance, but only Theodora had realized, when she felt a faint tug herself, what it meant, and by then other children were leaving their chores and their games to race through the city streets and out the gates. By the time the grownups went after them, every child under fourteen was gone.

But was there even more to this? Had Cyrus been especially interested in my daughter? He had seemed to know who I was when we first met, and if he was, as I intermittently suspected, part of Vlad’s planned revenge on me, then seizing Antonia would be doubly sweet, since he was already furious with me. Any of several people could have told him I was Antonia’s father-Theodora’s neighbors, even the Lady Maria, who had been so uncharacteristically closed-mouthed since coming home. Was summoning the rest of the children both generalized revenge and also a chance to conceal his nefarious plans for one particular child?

I flew over the walls of the royal castle and went straight to the Lady Justinia’s chambers. “I need your flying carpet, my lady,” I said with minimal effort toward politeness. “And I need it now.”

Her automaton leaned threateningly toward me. “This is passing abrupt, O Wizard,” Justinia said coolly. “The carpet is mine, given me by the mage Kaz-alrhun for my own transportation to safety, not for the convenience of western wizards and their daughters.”

I didn’t have time to explain properly or to respond to the sarcastic note in her voice. “Antonia’s been kidnapped by an evil wizard, and I have to go after her.”

Justinia immediately looked much more sympathetic. “She is always getting herself into one difficulty or another, of a certainty! I give thee leave, then, to use my carpet to help in the search for her, on this condition: that I myself accompany thee.”

I didn’t have time to argue. All I said was, “In that case, please leave your automaton behind-last time it tried to kill me.” It already seemed as though hours rather than minutes must have passed since the pigeon- messages arrived at the nunnery. We dragged the carpet, with the automaton’s help, out into the courtyard. Gwennie and Paul, hearing the commotion, came running.

The king must have gotten the details from Gwennie. “I will help you, of course,” he said, very sober and very concerned. “Move over. Are there handles or anything on this thing?”

“You just sit on it and hope it doesn’t tip,” said Gwennie from experience.

I didn’t want them along but I really didn’t have time to argue. The automaton glided nervously around the courtyard, and Justinia’s elephant trumpeted from the stables, angry at being left behind. The flying carpet shot off toward Caelrhon carrying, besides the foreign princess to whom it actually belonged, the king, the constable, and the wizard of Yurt.

V

“When I couldn’t reach you,” said Theodora, fighting to keep her voice steady, “I telephoned Elerius. He seemed to know who I was without my having to tell him. I know you don’t trust him, Daimbert, but you’ve always said he’s the best wizard of your generation, and-” Her mouth quivered, making it impossible for her to go on.

I put an arm tight around her. “We’ll find her. Everything will be just fine.” I wished I believed it myself.

“And the mayor’s just phoned the royal wizard of Caelrhon,” she continued, trying to compose herself. “It turns out that the Princess Margareta is among the missing.”

“Poor kid,” said Paul, showing unexpected sympathy for the girl he mostly referred to in the context of not wanting to marry her. “She must be terrified. And she’s started developing a woman’s form-what will an evil magic-worker want with her?”

“Come on. We’ll find them,” I said with a desperate effort to sound assured. “Cyrus won’t be able to hide from three wizards.”

The carpet shot off into the air again and out over the city walls. I had probed for and not found any lingering trace of Cyrus’s magic by which we might have followed him. He’d covered his tracks, which meant we had to assume the children could be anywhere. There might once have been footprints, but any physical traces of their passage had been obscured by the feet of desperate parents. The fields near the city were thick with the citizens of Caelrhon, shouting their children’s’ names, thrashing their way through clumps of bushes, dragging every body of water. A few looked up and pointed as we sailed past.

It was a good thing, I thought, that the Romneys had been gone for two weeks. Otherwise the people who had already been suspected, at least by some, of setting fire to the high street and of bringing the rats to town would probably find themselves killed by hysterical parents.

“I hope the Thieves’ Guild in Xantium does not learn of this stratagem,” commented Justinia. “They could win an exceeding number of concessions from my grandfather the governor in return for the city’s children.”