I came up the hill toward the castle on the white mare, exhausted and exhilarated. It was mid-morning, and I had again spent the night at the old wizard’s house without intending to do so when I arrived. But this time I had known the night was passing (and it was only one night, not two) and had stayed because I decided to, not because the old wizard had used his magic herbal smoke to put me to sleep.
The harvest was over, now, although the turnips still lay in the ground, waiting the first real frost. For two weeks I had stood out in the fields with the harvesters, wearing a wide-brimmed hat against the sun and doubtless looking much more like a farmer than a wizard. I had kept my eye open for thunderstorms or the hailstorms that could destroy the ripe grain, but for the most part the weather had stayed clear, and the weather spells I had assiduously reviewed were only needed once. With my harvest responsibilities over, I had gone back to the old wizard’s house under the giant oak.
Yesterday he had begun to teach me herbal magic. I smiled ruefully at myself, arriving yesterday morning, doubtless very like the Lady Maria expecting the first-grammar of the Hidden Language to be a tidy list of useful spells. I had expected a quick listing of different herbs and their properties. Instead he had begun teaching me to know the herbs, as well as I already knew the Language, to recognize the possible properties in each and to determine how to combine them and how to find the words that would reveal their potency.
It was only twenty-four hours ago that I had naively said, “You mean that you have to do something with magic herbs? Anyone can’t just pick them and use them?” The old wizard had snorted and looked at me as though he were going to send me back to the castle at once, but he hadn’t.
The exhilaration had come just before I left, while the old wizard was slicing me some coarse bread and vegetables for breakfast. I stood next to the table where he had different herbs laid out, trying to picture what each might do, while the calico cat rubbed against my ankles.
“You didn’t tell me you had a stick-fast weed,” I said.
“I don’t,” he said from the other table without turning around.
“This one,” I said, holding it out until he did look back over his shoulder.
“That isn’t anything,” he said, returning to the vegetables. “It got into my basket with a lot of other herbs.”
This, I decided, was a test. “But look!” I said. I squeezed the sap from the stem onto my palm, said two words, and reached down to pat the cat. When I stood up, it was firmly attached to my hand.
The cat didn’t like being suspended from my open palm. It yowled and extended its claws. I said two more words, and it was free. It dropped the short distance to the floor, gave a short hiss, and disappeared under the old wizard’s chair.
Then I realized it hadn’t been a test. The old wizard stared at me, the knife forgotten in his hand, without speaking. After a long minute, as though he had finally won the struggle to avoid praising me, he said, “Stick-fast weed,” and grunted.
He put the bread and vegetables on a plate and handed it to me without another word. But I knew. I had discovered an herbal property he had not known. While I ate, I kept tossing little crumbs toward the cat until it emerged. Then I scooped it up and settled it on my lap, where in a minute it settled down to purr to show we were friends again.
“Maybe I’ll be able to teach you some real magic after all,” said the old wizard as I saddled my mare. “Even if you did get some fancy notions at that City school.” The excitement lasted all the ride back through the woods, even though the exhaustion of staying up all night hit me as soon as I left the wizard’s valley. I had even learned a simple spell that even someone not trained in magic could say, to detect magic potions in food. I couldn’t wait to tell Gwen.
I wondered again, as the castle came in sight, what had happened during the day last month I had passed in a trance in the wizard’s house. Yesterday, as I ducked under the volley of magic arrows to reach him, I had been wondering if he had used the time as an opportunity to come back up to the castle without my knowledge. But if so, no one had seen him, and he had said nothing about it, either then or now. If he had come to the castle, I now thought, he would have seen at once that his magic locks were gone from the north tower and would most certainly have held me to blame. That his manner now sometimes verged on friendly showed he did not yet know what had happened there. But sometime I was going to have to tell him.
As I started across the draw bridge over the moat, I almost collided with the queen coming out.
“I’m so pleased you’re back!” she cried with the smile that made my heart turn over. “The king told me to meet him in five minutes in the rose garden. I’m sure he’d like you to be there as well. He said it was a magic surprise! The five minutes are almost up.”
I dismounted to walk with her. She was wearing a long white dress with a standing crimson collar that framed her face, and her eyes flashed with delight at me from under an errant wave of hair.
We stopped at the garden gate. “I’m here!” the queen called. “And I’ve brought the Royal Wizard with me!”
“Come on in!” came a faint call, and we entered.
Coming toward us between the rose bushes, his toes just brushing the grass, was King Haimeric. His face was so tight with concentration that he seemed not to see us. I could tell he wasn’t even breathing. When he was within three feet of the queen, he lifted his eyes, took a sudden breath, and dropped to the ground. She steadied him with her strong young arms.
“You were flying!” she cried. “When did you learn to fly? I know you said it would be a magic surprise, but I hadn’t imagined it could be anything so wonderful!”
The king winked at me over her head, a wink of triumph.
He leaned on her arm as they walked toward the bench, and I followed behind.
“I’ve been having the wizard teach me,” he said.
“And you’ve clearly been practicing on your own!” I added. “You’ve made much better progress than I would have expected. But you do have to remember to breathe.”
“I noticed that,” he said, sitting down and breathing hard now. “But it seems to interrupt my concentration.”
“All it needs is a little more practice.”
“I’d had no idea you were learning to fly,” said the queen in admiration, and for one bad moment I was afraid she was going to ask me to teach her too. “When did you start learning?”
“It was while you were at your parents’. Originally I was hoping to show you when you first got back, but I wasn’t as quick a pupil as I’d hoped. Not that our wizard isn’t a good teacher!” They both turned wide smiles on me. “One of the many, many things I like about having you here is that it makes me less dependent on Dominic. As you know, since my legs started to get weak I haven’t always been able to walk as well as I’d like, and he’d baby me unmercifully. I thought that if I learned to fly, I’d be able to move around as I liked without him always hovering. The boy means well, but …”
He didn’t finish the sentence. I was very pleased to see that I was not the only person in the castle referred to as a boy-especially since Dominic was nearly twice my age.
I was also pleased to see how much more cheerful the king had seemed since the queen came home. When I first arrived, he was looking back over his years as king as though they would shortly be coming to an end. Now he acted as though he were only in the middle of them. I began to wonder if the mysterious ailment that Dominic thought someone had given the king was nothing more than some stiffness in the knees combined with loneliness. If she had been my queen, I would certainly have been lonely when she was gone.
We looked at the roses while the king finished catching his breath. Some of the bushes had already finished blooming for the season, though late roses still bloomed defiantly on others.
“You know,” said the king, “it’s been several years since I’ve been to the harvest carnival. Would you like to go?”
“Oh, could we?” said the queen with that smile.
“I’d be delighted,” I said, since the question seemed to include me as well, and suddenly had to stifle a yawn.
“The carnival starts in two days,” said the king. “We’ll leave first thing in the morning.” With the tact I was pleased to see even a sometimes incompetent wizard deserved, he added, “You’ll have plenty of time before then to recover your strength after your magic activities.”
While I napped that afternoon with my curtains drawn, the rest of the castle must have buzzed with activity, for in the morning all was ready. The constable and his wife were staying behind with a few servants, but the rest of us rode out just after dawn: the knights first, led by Dominic, then the king and queen, surrounded by the ladies of the court, then the boys, the chaplain, and me, all followed by the servants, who led pack horses loaded with food, supplies, and the tents.
The queen rode her black stallion, but the rest of us were on the white or bay mares and geldings of the royal stables. Bells on our harnesses jingled as we waved goodbye to those staying behind and rode down the brick road toward the forest. The air was crisp, with a faint haze, and there were spots of orange leaves among the green before us.
“Have you been to this harvest carnival before?” I asked the chaplain. He was riding beside me, his horse the only one without bells.
“Not since I came to Yurt,” he said. “The carnival was already past the fall I arrived, and the king has not felt well enough since then to go. But of course I know the city well where it is held.”
Clearly I was missing something. Since I didn’t even know where we were going, I kept on with my questions. “Why do you know it well?”
Joachim looked at me in surprise, then nodded. “That’s right, you wouldn’t know. It’s my cathedral city, the city of the bishop. Yurt isn’t big enough for its own bishop, or for that matter its own harvest carnival, so for both the kingdom must rely on the nearest city of the next kingdom over. That’s where we’re going.”
“Then you’ll get to see your old friends at the bishop’s school,” I said, thinking I would like to see some of my friends from the wizards’ school. But this small city where we were going was still a long, long way from the City by the sea where the wizards trained, and I knew that most of my best friends were by now off in various parts of the western kingdoms in their own posts as wizards.
Joachim looked at me a moment in silence, then smiled. “I still don’t always recognize it when you’re making a joke,” he said. As I hadn’t been making a joke, this naturally surprised me. “I’d been about to say, you must not know very much about the way the Church is organized to think that a priest would take up his first post in the same diocese as his seminary.”
Since I had no idea what he was talking about, I decided to say nothing.
“But I am going to see the bishop. It would soon be time for my annual visit anyway, so it seemed easiest to come with the party from Yurt. I sent him a message by the pigeons yesterday so that he would expect me.”
“That will be nice to see him, if it’s been a year,” I said to keep the conversation going.
“‘Nice,’” said Joachim, as though testing the word. “You know, I don’t always understand you. Are you still joking? Or is it really ‘nice’ for you to explain to the old wizard of the wizards’ school your progress in the last year in combatting evil?”
“Oh,” I said, understanding at last. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I’d realized that you had to undergo an annual assessment.”
“How else would the bishops of the western kingdoms be able to be sure that the priests under them had kept the pure faith?”
We reached the edge of the forest and passed into the cool shade. The early morning light was dim, but I could see Joachim’s dark eyes glaring at me.
“Don’t you wizards from the wizards’ school have to do something similar?”
If so, no one had ever told me, or at least I hadn’t heard. I missed my friends and I missed the City, but I certainly hoped I would never have to explain to the Master of the wizards that I had spent the past year adeptly aiding mankind with benign wizardry. “Maybe it’s because wizards tend to fight all the time,” I said, “but they leave us alone once we’ve left the school.”
“Maybe it’s because the worst you can do is endanger your own souls,” said Joachim with a snort that would have done credit to my predecessor in Yurt.
We would soon be reaching the little pile of white stones that marked the turnoff for the old wizard’s hidden valley. I decided not to point it out.
We rode in silence for a few minutes. What he said seemed to dismiss the theory I had once had that a young, untried and unsupervised priest had somehow let evil loose in Yurt. I was happy to see the theory go. Although Joachim seemed short on tact, even for him, this morning, I could not be irritated. He was not only going to have to explain why everything he had done was good, but make it clear that he had done it with a pure heart. Whatever wizardry demanded, a pure heart didn’t seem absolutely necessary.
Reflecting on the lack of purity in my own heart made me think of Gwen. I hadn’t yet had a chance to tell her I had a spell against love potions. I excused myself, reined in my mare so that others could pass me, and dropped into line again as Gwen came even.
“Hello, sir,” she said in evident surprise.
“I’d like to talk to you a minute,” I said. “Privately, if we could.”
She had been riding next to Jon. Although the young trumpeter and glass blower had always been perfectly friendly to me, he now shot me a brief but unmistakable look of jealousy. “Don’t worry,” I said with a grin. “We can’t possibly get into trouble on horseback.”
This did not improve his expression, but Gwen laughed and reined in her own horse, so that the two of us fell to the back of the procession.
“You were asking me about love potions,” I said as soon as I thought no one else would hear us. Jon was riding a short distance ahead, but his back was turned toward us stiffly, as though to say that he would not deign to turn around. “I’ve learned a spell you can say to detect one.”
As I’d hoped, Gwen was delighted at this helpful advice from her elderly uncle. As we rode, I taught her the three simple words of the Hidden Language that would reveal such a potion and made her repeat them until I was sure she knew them. “Say them over any drink or dish you suspect,” I said, “and if there’s a love potion it will turn bright red.”
“That should make the danger clear, then,” she said with a smile.
“Very clear. And remember: I know the spell too, so don’t try slipping anything in my crullers!”
This attempt at flirtation was met with highly amused laughter. The elderly uncle was clearly cute and quaint. She kicked her horse and hurried forward to rejoin Jon.
We rode on all that day, stopping for lunch at the border where we left the kingdom of Yurt. In late afternoon, when the king was clearly exhausted, Dominic called a halt at a meadow next to a stream. The servants unloaded the horses and set up the tents with the knights’ assistance, then started fires to cook supper. The ride had made me ravenously hungry, and the smoked sausage they were grilling smelled delicious long before it was ready. The king and queen retired to their tent even before supper was ready, but the rest of us strolled around the meadow, glad to be on our own feet again after a day on horseback. Even the more reserved ladies of the court were talking and laughing about the events of the harvest carnival, which we would reach tomorrow, and the Lady Maria was positively giddy.