After two days of loving my kingdom, I woke up the next morning hating it. Bells awakened me again. When I lifted my head I could hear hard rain on the cobblestones outside. The windows were streaked with water. My door handle rattled and didn’t open, since I had remembered to lock it last night, but there was immediately a loud and persistent knocking.
When I opened the door, the servant maid stood there, trying without great success to shield both herself and a tray with an umbrella. I took the tray and half pulled her inside. “You’re going to get soaked!” I said.
Her umbrella streamed water on my clean flagstone floor. My tea seemed to have been diluted with rain, and the napkin on the basket was damp. When I pulled back the napkin, I found not crullers but cake donuts, which I don’t like nearly as well. They weren’t even warm.
“I just wanted to make sure you were up in time for chapel,” she said without a smile or any sign of friendliness. She put the umbrella back up and started out again.
“Thank you very much!” I said quickly, wondering if everyone went to chapel every single day. “You know, I don’t even know your name.”
“Gwen, sir,” she said and was gone. I wondered as I ate if she didn’t want to associate with someone as foolish as I must have seemed after the incident with the string. The donuts tasted as though they had been made several days before.
My mood was not improved when I banged my head on the dark stair going up to the chapel and then found, when I reached the top, that the king and the chaplain were the only other two people there. I rubbed my head surreptitiously all during service. At the end, I offered the king my arm, but he shook his head.
“A prerogative of being king is that I don’t have to use those stairs.” A small door which I should have noticed before opened half-way down the inner wall of the chapel, presumably into the royal chambers. He went through it and left me alone with the chaplain.
The chaplain fixed me with his dark eyes. “Don’t think I don’t welcome you in the chapel,” he said. “But don’t come because you think you have to. I hold service every morning for anyone who needs spiritual refreshment, and the king usually comes, but the rest of the castle mostly come on Sunday.” He turned away without waiting for a response.
“In that case,” I thought, “maybe I can start sleeping later.” I would have to tell Gwen, if she was still speaking to me. I wished I could talk to some of my friends at the wizards’ school. The chaplain still seemed like the only person at the castle I could hold a conversation with, and at the moment he was to me profoundly strange and distant.
“There’s incentive for me,” I thought bitterly, groping back down the stairs. “All I need to do to talk to them is get the telephone working.”
Back in my room, I was looking glumly at the backs of my books, wondering which ones I should try next, when there was a knock. I hoped it was Gwen, come to apologize for the dry donuts, but to my surprise it was Dominic, the royal heir.
He lowered his umbrella and pulled off his coat. He looked around my study for a moment in silence, paused for a longer look at my diploma, and closed the door behind him. “May I sit down?”
“Please do,” I said, wondering what he could want.
He planted his solid body in a chair by the window, set his elbow firmly on the arm, and leaned his chin on a massive fist. “I’ve come to talk to you about your duties.”
This was it. I knew my problem wasn’t the rain or the lack of crullers. I had spent two days on vacation, but now I was going to have to start work on projects I didn’t think I could do. I tried to look intelligent and alert.
Surprisingly, he hesitated for a moment before beginning. “You’re an outsider,” he said at last-something I already knew! — ”and maybe I shouldn’t prejudice your mind with too many details. But you have to know one thing now. The king is under a spell.”
This was not at all what I had expected. “Under a spell? What sort? I talked to him in the rose garden yesterday afternoon, and he never said anything about it.”
“He wouldn’t have, of course. He doesn’t realize it himself. But the spell was one of the major reasons we decided to hire you.”
He didn’t say who we were. He looked at me from under heavy lids, waiting for my answer. “But what sort of spell? Do you know the source?”
“The king is growing old and feeble. This can only be the result of enchantment. We don’t know the source of the spell, but we want you to overcome it.”
“But that’s silly!” I protested. “Of course he’s getting weaker as he gets older. And besides,” thinking that the chaplain should hear me now, “wizardry can’t reverse natural aging.”
“The king isn’t as old as you may think. When he married the queen, only four years ago, no one thought of them as an extremely ill-matched couple.”
A sudden vision flashed into my mind of a girl married to a much older man, excited at first at the power of being queen, but soon made irritable when she discovered she was not supposed to have a mind of her own, but only be the king’s pliant companion. It shouldn’t be hard for her, on one of her trips to the City, to find an unscrupulous wizard willing to sell her a powder or spell to sicken her husband.
“It must be the queen, then,” I said. “She has bewitched him somehow.”
A low rumble began somewhere in his barrel chest and emerged in an angry, “No! It’s not the queen. It couldn’t be anyone at court. It must be a malignant influence from outside.”
I modified my vision to have the queen and the royal heir secretly in love, plotting to have the king die so that they could rule together. But I stopped myself. This made no sense. If Dominic were partially responsible for putting an evil spell on the king, he certainly wouldn’t tell me about it.
“Thank you for this warning,” I said in a deep voice. “The power of magic to conceal itself is often great, but the skill of the forewarned wizard is potent indeed.”
To my surprise, he treated this statement perfectly seriously. “Good. I knew we had done well to hire you.” He started to rise.
“But how about my other duties? The king’s talked to me about a telephone system, the constable’s said you need more magic lights-”
He waved these away with his broad hand. I was fascinated by the ruby ring on his second finger. Its setting was a gold snake supporting the jewel on its coils. It looked like a perfect ring for a wizard, and I coveted it for myself. “Those are a facade for your real work.” He pulled his coat back on, picked up his umbrella, and left without saying Goodbye.
I stood by the open door, looking across the rain-drenched courtyard. The paint and the flowers were bright in spite of the dark sky. Could there actually be dark powers at work here in such a perfect little castle?
I closed my eyes, probing past the closed doors and shuttered windows. There were plenty of minds there, most of which I did not know well enough to recognize, though I could tell the king and Gwen. Oddly, I didn’t find the chaplain. I stayed well outside their minds, slipping by so lightly they wouldn’t even feel me there. I found no powerful evil presence.
But when I opened my eyes a sense of foreboding lingered. Dominic might be right. If not the queen, who wanted the king dead, and how were they doing it? Was the constable, with his talk of lights and telephones, deliberately trying to mislead me? Had Gwen been warned against me?
I shook my head. This would get me nowhere. Maybe while everyone else was sheltering from the rain I should take the opportunity to explore the castle; so far I had seen very little of it. I remembered a spell I had seen once and reached for my shelves. I found it in only the second book I consulted, the spell to keep dry in the rain. “Why didn’t I learn this one before?” I asked myself. It was only a variation of the lifting spell, creating a diversion for all the raindrops before they hit one’s head.
I set the spell in place and stepped outside. It worked perfectly, although I immediately stepped in a puddle and got water in my socks. But this was not the fault of the magic. My good humor restored, I turned back to lock the door to my chambers, then started across the courtyard.
I stopped in the stables, where the horses whickered at me and the cats came to rub against my legs. It was warm and dusty with the smell of hay. The sound of rain seemed faint and far away in the comfort and dim light. I stroked the horses on their noses and laughed when they tried to nuzzle my pockets. “No carrots,” I told them. Also no malignant influences. I readjusted my spell and stepped back into the courtyard.
This time I walked to the north end of the courtyard, where a massive tower rose. The stones of the tower, unlike the stones of the rest of the castle, were not whitewashed, but were so dark they were almost black. There were no windows for the first thirty feet. It was in this tower, according to the chaplain, that my predecessor had had his study.
A heavy oak door was the only way in. I tested the handle, but it wouldn’t open. With my eye to the crack along the doorjamb, I thought I saw a bolt on the inside. Delicately I tried a lifting spell on the bolt, or rather a sliding spell, to push it back in its track. Although I had to abandon the spell against the rain to give all my concentration to the bolt, my sliding spell actually worked. With only the slightest squeak, the bolt slid back, and I was able to pull the door open. Damp but delighted, I went in and closed the door behind me.
Inside it was completely black, except for tiny streaks of light around the door frame. I needed a light; I wondered if maybe I should start carrying a wizard’s staff. I could make a light, at least temporarily, but I needed something to attach it to. I found a piece of hay sticking to my trousers and tried that, but it made only a faint firefly glow. So I took off my belt and used the buckle. It was still not very bright, but it was serviceable, and since the design of the buckle was the moon and stars, it was rather dramatic. I wondered why I had not thought of making the buckle glow earlier and wondered if it would be possible to attach the light permanently.
Pleased with myself, I started up steep, uneven steps. It wasn’t until I had spiraled up at least halfway, I estimated, to the first window, that a sudden thought brought me to a halt. If the tower was empty, why had the door been bolted on the inside?
I listened for a moment, hearing nothing but my own heartbeat, and probed with my mind, without finding another intelligence in the tower. I shrugged, telling myself that there was perhaps a connection to the rest of the castle from an upper level, but I had again the goose-bump feeling of evil.
Shortly I reached the first window and looked out across the wet courtyard. Except for the smoke from the chimneys and a distant sound of voices and laughter, the castle looked deserted. From here on up there seemed to be windows enough that the stairs were never black. I had been walking with my belt held out ahead of me to watch for uneven places in the stairs, but now I put it back around my waist. To my disappointment, the moon and stars of the buckle slowly faded once I turned my attention from keeping them bright.
My legs were just starting to ache when I reached another oak door. I admired my predecessor if he had walked up and down from here for every meal. “But he probably flew,” I thought. “And that’s why the door was bolted on the inside; the last time he was here, he closed it down below and then left through a window.”
For some reason I had never liked flying. I could do it if I had to, at least for short distances, but I preferred my own feet on the ground. The king with his aching joints might prefer to skim above the grass, but I liked to feel my shoes among the blades. I was quite sure my dislike for flying had nothing to do with my experiences that first day our instructor had tried to teach us.
This door was not locked. It opened smoothly, letting me into a large and airy room. There were cupboards, desks, benches, and boxes, but all the cupboard doors were open, and there was nothing inside.
“So he took it all when he left,” I thought, and then wondered what it might be. The room was almost disappointing. After the dark climb and the length of the stairs, it seemed as though there ought to be something significant here, rather than a room from which someone had removed his possessions and which he had swept thoroughly before leaving for the final time. I realized I did not know how long the old wizard had been gone; I had been acting and thinking as though it were a very long time, but in fact it might only have been a few days.
There was nothing else to see. One of the casement windows had had the glass broken out, but the rest were closed. I looked out the southern window toward the second highest tower in the castle, on the opposite end of the courtyard. It had a dovecot on the roof and was doubtless where the carrier pigeons came in. I opened the casement and climbed up on the sill, hesitated a moment, and stepped out into the air.
The rain had let up, but the damp cool air swirled around me. Although I would not have joined the king in characterizing flying as “extremely enjoyable,” there was a certain sense of power in holding oneself up against the tug of gravity, of letting oneself drift slowly down, so that the ground sometimes came too soon. This time, however, I was glad to be back on the ground. I rebolted the outer door to the tower from the outside, as I had unbolted it, and started back toward my chambers.
With my door in sight, I stopped abruptly. The handle should have been glowing softly from my magic lock, but it was not glowing at all. I was certain I had locked it. I stepped forward, tried the door, and it opened at once. Someone had taken off my lock.
I stepped inside cautiously, but all seemed undisturbed. My books were as I had left them, and my clothes seemed untouched. I probed for a trap, both with magic and by lying down and looking under the bed.
Finding nothing, I sat back on my heels. Although it was impossible to say where it was coming from, and although it disappeared if one tried to sense it directly, the dark touch I had been feeling all day was here in my room. It was like trying to see something that could only be glimpsed from the corner of the eye.
To remove my lock, someone would not only have to know magic, but a lot more magic than I did. It was probably possible to break a magic lock, but a lot of the young wizards, including me, had tried to find the spell and never done so. I tried to dispel the chill that came from more than the rain. “Maybe I should be glad he or she left it unlocked; they couldn’t have duplicated my palm print, which would mean that if they relocked my door it would only open to them.” But who in the castle besides me knew magic?