Daughter of Magic

At the moment we still had some hope of saving Antonia. But at this rate, I thought grimly, the best negotiators from the school wouldn’t be able to save her-if they even cared to try.

“Vlad first,” I said to Evrard and Elerius, managing to get back on my feet after only a brief struggle. “Come on.”

“Where has Cyrus gone?” asked Elerius, looking around. The bishop was by himself now, standing by the window with his back to the room, his head bowed. “He must have been listening to our entire conversation with the demon.”

“He’s probably off in a corner somewhere vainly praying for forgiveness,” I said with supreme indifference. “Evrard, once we have the torches you’ll have to lead us, as well as you can, to where the magic of light failed you.”

But we had gone only a short distance when Hildegarde came toward us at a dead run. She didn’t even slow down as she passed, blond hair flying out behind her. In one hand she held a naked sword, streaked black with blood.

I turned back at once. The children screamed to see her, some in fear, some in simple excitement. Hildegarde stood for a moment looking wildly around, as though not seeing whom she was looking for or not even knowing who it was.

Then she spotted her sister. Letting the sword fall from her hand she threw herself onto her knees. “Celia,” she gasped, “you’ve got to help me. I’ve sinned horribly. I’ve just killed somebody.”

Celia dropped to her own knees and wrapped her arms around her sister. “Tell me,” she murmured.

They immediately drew an intensely interested audience of a prince, a duchess, a bishop, and three wizards. But Hildegarde paid no attention to any of us. “It must have been the ensorcelled frog,” she got out, her breath coming in great gulps. “I’d made a torch from a dead pine branch and was well down in the dark part of the castle. Several times I spotted what looked like damp frog tracks, and at one point I heard somebody cursing.”

“I think that was me,” muttered Evrard, “when I fell into the cess pit.”

“But I still didn’t spot anybody. Then I climbed over some fallen stones and saw-it was horrible! It was partly like a man, but it had legs like a frog.”

“Yes?” prompted Celia.

“He was mumbling to himself, and I don’t think he’d heard me coming. But then he saw me, and he jumped at me with his frog legs, and his face was all white but he had these pointed teeth-”

“And so you killed him,” said Celia quietly.

“Not yet. I threw the torch at him. That’s when he started to come apart. But he was still coming. He was disintegrating, but the teeth especially, as though they themselves were alive- That’s when I put the sword into his heart.”

Hildegarde started to sob then. “God still loves you,” murmured Celia, rocking her like a child. “He loves us all, even terrible sinners.”

Vlad had been preparing his spells again as fast as he could transform himself back into a man, I thought. He was ready for a wizard but not for a young woman carrying a torch. And it never would have occurred to him that she had a sword.

“As soon as he was dead,” Hildegarde continued in a minute, lifting a tear-streaked face from her sister’s shoulder, “he stopped being a frog at all, but he fell apart. That might have been the worst part of all. His arm fell off, and half his face … There’s nothing left of him now but scraps. And those started to stink, as though he’d already been dead for months.” She looked up toward Prince Ascelin. “Father, have you ever had to kill someone? When they’re teaching you to fight, why don’t they tell you how horrible it is? He might have been awful and half a frog, but at least he was alive until I got through with him!”

Vlad was dead. I turned away, not wanting Hildegarde to see the intense relief on my face. Now that we’d gotten rid of one nearly hopeless problem, the dark wizard, all we had left was the impossible one, the escaped demon.

Antonia put her head out from behind the bishop; I hadn’t even realized she had been listening. With an expression of deep distress, she went over and put a hand gently on Hildegarde’s shoulder. “Maybe you shouldn’t try to be a knight after all,” she said. “It sounds too scary.”

Ascelin swung her up and passed her, protesting, back to Theodora, who had been desperately trying to keep the rest of the children calm. But then he said soberly to his own daughter, “I think it’s too late to make that choice. You are a knight now. There’s a lot more to it than knowing how to fight. It looks like once we’re home again I’d better start you on real training.”

Hildegarde, still clinging to her sister, appeared not to hear, but Celia gave their father a quick smile over her head.

“Do you think,” suggested Evrard in my ear, just as though I might need something else to worry about, “that the demon will try to reanimate Vlad?”

Before I could shape a reply, the castle shuddered to the clang of what might have been an unimaginably huge bell. For a second a wind reeking of evil fumes whirled through the room, then it whooshed down the passage toward the ruined chapel. I heard Cyrus’s voice, but this time it was raised in a frenzied cry of pure triumph.

“I have my powers again!”

V

The air at the entrance of the ruined chapel, when I slammed into it, had turned to glass. Of course. With the powers of black magic restored to him, Cyrus would have no trouble recreating Vlad’s spell which had created an invisible barrier around the chapel.

I clawed at it frantically, then tried to calm myself enough to start on spells. The chapel was dark again, lit only by a deep, orange glow. If Cyrus had been able to locate the demon and persuade it to work with him, then it must now be there. If I could reach it I could bargain for Antonia’s soul before anything else happened to stop me. I gestured for everyone else to go back and then turned away from them. This was between Cyrus and me now.

The spell that made the air solid remained impervious to my magic. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I could see the pentagram glowing and the demon in the middle of it.

But the demon looked strangely different. He had been deep red with an enormous, quivering belly. Now he was cadaverously thin and colored a pale orange, although the fiery eyes and razor-sharp teeth remained unchanged. “Thank you, Master,” he was saying, and even the voice sounded different. Its tone could have been mistaken for pleasant. “It is much more interesting on earth than in hell.”

I stared until my eyes stung. When I had spoken to the demon, he had been in the right-hand of the two pentagrams Antonia had drawn. He was now in the left. It wasn’t the same demon.

Dear God. Now we had two demons in the castle: Antonia’s, merrily running around loose somewhere, and Cyrus’s, trapped for the moment-but I feared only the moment-back in the pentagram in which Antonia had imprisoned him before returning him to hell, from where Cyrus had once again summoned him.

At the moment I would almost have been willing to sacrifice all of us, me, Antonia, Theodora, Joachim, the duchess’s family and all the children, if the saints would just appear and open an enormous hole and send the entire castle, with both demons, down to hell. But this seemed very unlikely. If I was ever in a position to give advice on the metaphysics of creation, which had seemed less and less likely for some time, I would say that this business of free will had gone entirely too far.

“I want you to do something for me,” said Cyrus urgently to the demon.

“Of course, Master,” he replied suavely. “Do not doubt for a moment I am yours to command. As long”-and he showed all his teeth-“as I have the opportunity for evil!”

“There’s another demon in this castle,” said Cyrus, talking fast. “Yes, the demon who captured you. I’m going to free you from the pentagram but only for a minute. You have to bring him back and put him in this other pentagram, and return here yourself.”

And send Antonia’s demon back to hell, her soul with it. I pounded desperately on the invisible barrier with my fists, without success. They couldn’t hear me. Cyrus had doubtless taken tips from what Antonia had done and