I awoke all at once and lay perfectly still, waiting for whatever sound had wakened me to come again.
Inside the tent it was pitch black and completely silent. I couldn’t even hear Joachim’s breathing. But then I heard the faintest creak from his side of the tent; he must have heard the sound as well and be leaning on his elbows, listening.
It came again, the sharp crack of a broken twig followed by muffled hushing sounds. Our tents were pitched in a little grove, and someone, or something, was creeping up on us.
I was out of the tent with a quick scramble and was hit by air so cold I immediately wished I had brought a blanket with me.
But there wasn’t time to go back. Where was Dominic? It should be his watch. Shivering in my pajamas, I crept toward the edge of the grove, straining to see.
The moon, three days past the full, hung red and deformed-looking above me. In its pale light I could at last see Dominic, a dim and bulky form. He moved his head as though he too had heard something.
Before I could speak or move closer, there was a dull thunk as of leather hitting bone, a grunt, and Dominic pitched forward. Behind him stood a smaller figure, arm upraised.
I yelled, a magically-amplified yell that shook the trees, and I filled the grove with a great flash of light. The light was gone in two seconds-even the best magic light needs to be attached to something solid. But before it faded I had seen four startled and frozen figures, and Dominic’s body face down on the ground.
If they remained still for five seconds, I had them. I threw out coils of magic, shaped with the Hidden Language to make thin air into bindings as strong as cord. My binding spell wrapped around the four, imprisoning them. It was not as thorough as a paralysis spell, but I didn’t have enough time for a paralysis spell.
I tried another flash of light and saw that I had all four. It must be, I realized, no more than a minute since I had scrambled out of the tent. In spite of the cold, I had to wipe my forehead with a pajama sleeve. Magic, especially rapid magic, is hard work.
But what had happened to Dominic? I groped toward him, then saw the rest of our party emerging. Hugo and Ascelin had swords in their hands, but the king, more usefully, had brought a lantern.
With the lantern’s light, I found the royal nephew and bent over him. He was breathing loudly, eyes shut. As I watched, his eyes flickered, and his fists clenched. Not dead then, I thought gratefully, as I took the jacket Joachim handed me.
“Look at this!” called Hugo, who had gone back for a lantern of his own. “It’s the same bandits!”
Indeed it was the same bandits, their faces distorted by the shadows cast by a lantern at their feet. Struggling unsuccessfully against the binding spell, they glared at us silently.
“What was your intention?” the king asked them sternly. “We let you go today out of courtesy to other aristocrats, but what sort of honorable and aristocratic behavior is this? Were you going to take vengeance on us for humiliating you by slitting our throats while we slept?”
Dominic abruptly sat up, rubbing the back of his head. He tried to lurch to his feet, but Ascelin kept him seated with a hand on his shoulder.
“We weren’t going to slit anybody’s throat,” protested the leader.
I wasn’t at all sure I believed him. I was coming close to Hugo’s point of view, that the best thing to do might be to kill them.
“It’s the middle of the night,” said Ascelin. “Let’s leave them to learn some sense by standing bound by the wizard’s spells for a few hours. Then we can question them in the morning.”
“It would have been my watch soon anyway,” I said, “so I’ll keep an eye on them while the rest of you get some sleep.”
Hugo clearly would have preferred to do something spectacular and warlike, but he contented himself with rounding up the bandits’ horses and tying them to a branch. In a moment our party returned to the tents, Dominic assisted by Ascelin.
Watching the two princes in the flickering light of the lantern the king held for them, I thought that it was good to see them managing to get along with each other on this trip. When they had first met, nearly eight years ago, they had detested each other. But then Dominic, always a snob, had not known at the time that Ascelin was a prince.
Our camp became quiet again, and I added a few details to the binding spells that held that bandits. It is possible to break out of an improperly-made binding spell, and I had pulled the magic together very rapidly. I didn’t want to paralyze them, however, even if that would have held them more securely, because I wanted them to remember this experience.
They soon stopped struggling and gave up cursing me a short time later, when I did not answer. What was I going to do with them? The school made us swear enormously solemn oaths to help mankind, but it only taught us magic, when at the moment what I felt I needed most to know was how to deal with people unlike any I knew in Yurt.
The moonlight made the stars pale in the center of the sky, but from where I was sitting I could see the Hunter, striding low over the horizon. Soon he would be gone from the sky for the summer.
We certainly couldn’t kill the bandits in cold blood, even if they had crept up on our tents planning to kill us. We were still in the orderly western kingdoms, not much more than three weeks away from Yurt, and there were legal methods for dealing with such things. But I didn’t like the idea of loading them onto the pack horses again, then trying to find a nearby castle that exercised high justice-other than the castle of the bandit leader himself.
The night dragged on. In a marginally successful attempt to stay warm, I rekindled the fire over which we had cooked supper. I kept yawning, but I was shivering too much to doze. It would have been Joachim’s watch next, but I let him sleep, not wanting to leave him with the responsibility for guarding bandits restrained by magic. After a while, the eastern stars gradually faded as the horizon grew gray.
I heard a rustle from the tents and looked up to see the king and his lantern approaching. He sat down next to me, pulling his cloak around him.
“Go back to your tent, sire,” I said. “I won’t be making the morning tea for another hour.”
“I couldn’t sleep anyway,” said King Haimeric with a shrug. “We have to decide what to do the bandits.”
I could see them faintly now, ten yards away, standing as stiffly as if they were tied to trees. The long cold night, I hoped, would have sobered them. “We can’t very well have them following us all the way to the Holy Land,” I said quietly. “But I don’t understand it. Why would a castellan turn to banditry?”
“I don’t know,” said the king in a worried voice. “I realize we’re not in Yurt anymore, but it’s still very strange.”
“Short of killing them, I don’t see what we can do that won’t make them feel even more humiliated, and even more bent on vengeance.”
“We can give them some tea,” said the king. “They’ve had a cold night of it. Since you’ve got the fire going anyway, put on the kettle.”
This made no sense at all. I stared at him a moment in the lantern light, then went to fill the kettle. He was, after all, my king.
In a few minutes, when the tea was brewed, we walked over to the bandits. “We weren’t going to slit any of your throats,” the leader growled. “I hope you realize we wouldn’t rob a caravan for a few baubles or a few bolts of frippery, and we aren’t murderers either. We just wanted to teach you a lesson.”
“That was my nephew you knocked on the head,” said the king gravely. “He may look at all this differently. But at the moment he’s asleep. Would you like some tea before he wakes up? It can’t have been comfortable standing here all night. Wizard, could you release the bindings enough so that they can drink?”
I adjusted my spell to allow them a very little arm motion. The king put tin cups of scalding tea into their hands. They drank slowly, looking at us thoughtfully over the rims. In the lantern light and the beginning of dawn, they would have seen two white-bearded men, one very slightly built.
“All right,” said the king sternly, taking back the empty cups. “I believe you. I won’t ask you what kind of ‘lesson’ you planned to teach us, because I’m quite sure I won’t like the answer. An aristocrat like you should know better. Your own fields and your rents should provide you plenty of income within the law-to say nothing of the proceeds of justice.”
The leader of the bandits looked at King Haimeric shrewdly. “So you didn’t find it either, eh?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, and I doubted the king did either, but that didn’t stop him. “Of course not. You seem to imagine that we ransacked the silk caravan after my wizard paralyzed you, but instead we sent it safely on its way. If you’re looking for caravan loot, you won’t find it in our camp. Do you employ a wizard?”
I was having trouble keeping up with the king’s line of reasoning, and from the looks on their faces, so were the bandits.
“No,” said the leader, eyeing me warily.
“If we let you leave with your lives,” I said, hoping this fit in with whatever King Haimeric was doing, “and I say if, hire a wizard at once.” The king gave me a quick look, and I realized it was probably not his intention after all to urge them to take on a new employee. But it was too late to stop now. “A real wizard,” I continued, “one from the school in the great City.”
A school-trained wizard would certainly be able to stop them from preying on any more merchant caravans-unless of course he ended up with his own throat slit. But he’d do much better than a magician, someone who had picked up a little of the Hidden Language here and there and might himself see nothing wrong with banditry.
“I asked if you had a wizard,” said King Haimeric, pulling his eyebrows into a frown, “because I wanted to be sure you understand the lesson that we will teach you if you follow us again. My own wizard will turn you all into frogs.”
It had been ten years since the disastrous transformations practical, and I had long since worked out where I had gone wrong with those frogs. I watched King Haimeric’s face, knowing he was going to expect some spectacular display of magic in a moment.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” said one of the bandits to the leader. “He’s just bluffing.”
That made it all very simple. I turned that one into a frog.
The king laughed, a quite genuine laugh. “Anyone else think the wizard is bluffing?” He picked up the bullfrog that had been a bandit a moment ago and held it out toward the rest with both hands.
The bullfrog looked up at them with wide, confused eyes, then gave a sudden booming croak. After a moment of stunned silence, the other three bandits began to look at each other with poorly suppressed smiles.
“Turn him back to himself, Wizard,” said the king.
In a moment, I had him a person again, and I quickly restored the binding spells around him. His throat continued to pump like a frog’s for a few seconds, which now set the other bandits laughing.
“Any tea left, Wizard?” asked the king. We gave them all another cup.
“Now,” said the king when they had finished-two even thanked us-”it’s almost day. My knights, the ones who overpowered you yesterday, will be up shortly, and they may not look at this incident as tolerantly as we do-especially my nephew. But we’re on a pilgrimage, and it’s important to return good for evil when one is on pilgrimage. Therefore I’m going to let you go.”
I stopped myself just in time from objecting.
“But I want you to remember,” said the king very seriously, “not to attack any more merchant caravans, and,” glancing toward me, “to hire yourself a competent wizard at the first opportunity. And certainly don’t try to follow us again. If you do, not only will my wizard turn you into frogs, he will have a dragon attack you first.”
This, I feared, really was a bluff. I certainly couldn’t summon a dragon from the land of wild magic.
The bandits seemed to be taking no chances. They agreed readily, and when I broke the spells that held them they went at once to their horses. As they mounted, I heard one call another “Froggie,” with an accompanying slap on the shoulder. The sound of galloping hooves brought the rest of our party out into the dawn.
I didn’t want to take any chances either. Leaving the king to explain to the rest what he had done, and for them to start breakfast, I tried to improvise an appropriate spell.
It would have to be an illusory dragon. The problem with most illusions is that they fade quickly, usually within a few minutes. I thought I might be able to manage something that lasted a little longer-my predecessor as Royal Wizard of Yurt used to make illusions that would last for hours. But the difficulty was to guess how long. It would need to be here when-or if-the bandits came back, but I didn’t want it to hover all day and terrify anyone else who used this road.
I decided at last to create an illusory dragon, all but the final twist of the spell that would bring it together, and to attach the nearly-finished spell to a pebble. When the pebble was moved, say, kicked by a bandit’s horse, that would complete the spell.
I had never done anything like this before, or even heard of it, so it took me a while to work out the spells, and then I tried making a small practice dragon. It worked even better than I expected. I put the pebble on the ground, kicked it, and a one-foot high blue dragon appeared and shot illusory smoke at me for a minute before fading.
In a few more minutes, I had put the spells together to create a thirty-foot scarlet dragon, one with three sets of bat-wings and extra-long talons, and attached the spells to a small stone. I placed it very carefully on the road in the direction back toward the bandits’ castle. Now, if they were the first ones along this road, it should work perfectly.
Before joining the others, I looked at my stone in assessment. The faintest outline of the dragon hovered around it, the almost-completed spell just on the edge of visibility, but I hoped the bandits, riding fast, wouldn’t notice it until it was too late.
“Wizard!” called Hugo. “There’s only a little tea left! Do you want some?” I hurried over to the fire, indeed wanting some.
Shortly afterwards, we packed up the tents and started south again. Dominic had a lump on the back of his head but insisted he was all right. I kept glancing over my shoulder, wondering when someone would follow us along the road.
We had climbed up the far side of the valley, perhaps a mile away, when the sound of distant voices was carried to us on the wind. I pulled up my horse and looked back.
There were several groves of trees in the valley, but I thought I could tell where we had camped last night. Just visible beyond was a splash of scarlet, though we were too far away to pick out any details. The distant voices, shouting and screaming, faded away. I laughed and hoped that it had indeed been the bandits.