Afterwards we lay on the soft grass and watched the sun turn red beyond the trees. I felt happier than I ever had in my life. “Will you marry me?”
Theodora had been lying with her head on my chest. Now she sat up and scrambled around to face me. For a second she seemed almost alarmed, then she smiled, although somewhat tentatively. “This seems an odd time to ask!”
“I mean it. I’m just sorry I didn’t ask you before.”
She lay down beside me again, one arm across me and her lips grazing mine as we talked. “But everyone knows wizards don’t marry.”
I was getting tired of hearing this. “Don’t you know I love you, Theodora? This isn’t just a pleasant interlude during an extended visit to town. I don’t want to go on unless you’re beside me.”
Her amethyst eyes again looked troubled, but then she smiled. “Aren’t you going to have trouble explaining this in Yurt? No king wants to have a Royal Witch alongside his Royal Wizard.”
“It won’t be a problem. I should have told you this long ago. When I left Yurt, I resigned as Royal Wizard.”
“But what will you do?” she asked in what sounded like genuine distress.
“I thought we could have a caravan like the Romneys. If an old magician can make a living doing magic tricks at fairs, we should certainly be able to as well-after all, our magic is a lot better!”
She was silent for a moment, and I could sense a tension in her that I had not expected at what seemed to me a delightful proposal. But in a few seconds she relaxed and smiled.
“Let me give you my eagle ring, then,” I said, encouraged, and started tugging at it.
She forestalled me with a hand on mine. “I can’t wear a wizard’s ring that’s too big for me!” she said with her usual amused look. “Besides, I already have a magic ring of my own. What I have from you is much more valuable than any ring. Come on! We’d better get back to the city soon, and it won’t be fun scrambling through the briars once it gets dark.”
With clothes neatly arranged and hair smoothed, we walked through the silent trees like a decorous couple coming home from an innocent ramble. Once again I flew us over the briars. Outside the woods the breeze found us, cool now that the sun was setting. A mile away, the last of the sunlight glittered on the cathedral towers. I put my arms around Theodora and kissed her thoroughly. Her firm, slim body in my arms seemed like a gift: not mine by right, but given to me.
“You still haven’t said you’d marry me,” I said, smiling down at her.
“Isn’t a woman supposed to have a little time to consider a proposal?” she said with a teasing look. “After all, it seems that if I accept you I’ll be accepting a caravan and a pony.”
“We can work something out,” I said comfortably as we strolled back toward the city. “We could have a donkey or a horse instead of a pony.”
It was nearly dark by the time we reached Theodora’s house. She paused with her key in the lock. “Well, good-night.”
“What do you mean, good-night? I can’t leave you now!”
She stretched up to kiss me. “Your friend the dean will be horrified if you spend the night with a witch.”
I hated to leave her, but she had a point. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” I said and turned away quickly before the desire to go inside with her became overwhelming.
Whistling, hands in my pockets, I walked back toward the cathedral. It was only as I reached Joachim’s door that I realized that, for the first time in weeks, we had not arranged where and when to meet the next day.
A loud knocking woke me in the middle of the night. I had been happily dreaming of Theodora, and it took me a few seconds to realize where I was. The knocking was at the outside door, and in a moment I heard it open, letting in the sound of rain. There was rapid conversation, too low for me to understand, although I could recognize one of the voices as Joachim’s.
There was a confused sound of further voices, the banging of box lids, rapid steps, and then the slamming of the door. The house was now totally silent. I lay tense for a moment, wondering if the monster had returned to the cathedral tower. But Joachim was highly unlikely to go face a magical apparition without the wizard he had brought in especially to deal with it. I rolled over and went back to sleep.
When I awoke several hours later the house was still silent, although I could hear or rather feel the heavy booming of the organ from the cathedral. Thinking it was a little late for early service and that I had never heard the bells, I dressed quickly and uneasily. When I went into the kitchen, the fire was cold. I found the tinder to boil some water and looked around for the bread. While I was rummaging through the cupboards, Joachim’s silent servant came in.
“What’s happening?” I asked, wondering if he would even answer me. “Where’s the dean gone?”
The servant turned his eyes toward me, not with Joachim’s piercing look but with something close, as though he had been trying to emulate it. On the surface he looked very sober, but there was a look of relief underneath; maybe, I thought, he had finally confessed his youthful indiscretions to the dean. He spoke for the first time since I met him. “The bishop is dead.”
“Oh,” I said, and then, “I’m very sorry to hear that.” This then explained the sudden summons to the dean in the middle of the night. The water I had put on the hearth was close to boiling, and I realized I was standing with a loaf in my hand. “Is it all right if I make myself some breakfast?”
The servant did not speak again. He nodded gravely and left the room. I consumed tea and toast rapidly and stepped out into the normally quiet street.
It was now thick with priests, most of them sheltering under umbrellas against the continuing rain. They went in and out of the houses, in and out of the side door of the cathedral, and gathered in little knots to talk. I could usually keep myself dry against the rain with magic, but out of respect for the dead bishop I let the rain fall on my head as I hurried down the street and into the cathedral.
The inside of the church had been transformed. The altar cloths were gone from all the altars, and the crucifixes had been draped in black. The bouquets of flowers which normally clustered in front of the statues of the saints were also gone, and no candles burned. The organ, which I had heard increasingly clearly as I came down the street, played deeply and solemnly.
As I hesitated in the doorway, I heard a confusion of voices and footsteps in the street. I stepped quickly into a side aisle as a small procession came in. They paused briefly to remove the cover from the burden they were carrying, then proceeded toward the high altar. It was the bishop.
I did my best to make myself invisible without actually employing magic. Shielded by a pillar, I watched the priests arrange the bishop’s body in front of the altar. He looked in death both older and smaller than I remembered. He was dressed in his full formal vestments; the brilliant scarlet made the only spot of color in the dark church. A tall white and gold hat covered his bald head. His eyes were closed peacefully, and his hands were folded across his pastoral staff. As banks of candles sprang to light around him, I could see the flash of reflected light from the bishop’s ruby ring.
The organ kept playing its dirge. When the priests began to kneel, I slipped from behind my pillar and darted back out into daylight.
As soon as I was away from the cathedral I set up the spell to keep off the rain. I walked toward Theodora’s house with my head down, thinking that now Joachim really might become bishop.
The news of the bishop’s death had already spread through the city. I heard it discussed at open windows and where people sheltered under broad eaves. I wondered what Theodora would think of the event; the bishop had held office here since long before she was born.
But when I knocked on her door there was no answer. I peered through the window into the dark interior, seeing nothing, and rattled the door handle to find it locked. I told myself that she had probably gone around to some of the garment retailers to pick up or drop off embroidery, but I felt strangely uneasy.
When I discovered that virtually all of the shops in the city were closed, I became even more concerned. Shades were pulled, and black ribbon hung on the doors. In a cathedral city, I thought, the death of the bishop must be one of the major events of the generation. The inns were still open, but I did not spot Theodora there either. Thinking that she must have gone out and then returned home when she found the shops shut, and that I had simply missed her in the streets, I hurried back again to her house. But it was still dark and silent; my knocking did not even gain a response from the cat.
“This is silly,” I told myself, trying to stem an irrational panic. “We just didn’t happen to plan where to meet, and now with the bishop’s death she’s probably out looking for me.” Leaning against her doorway, I closed my eyes and stepped into the flow of magic.
My mind raced across the hundreds of minds in the streets around me, not quite touching them, moving so lightly they would never know I was there. Most of the minds were unfamiliar, and I slid across them without pausing. Some were people I had come to know more or less well: Prince Lucas, one of the innkeepers, a few of the cathedral priests.
I was startled in brushing the edge of Joachim’s servant’s mind to find it a dense turmoil of thoughts. Somehow I had assumed his thoughts would be as silent as his voice. For a second I even wondered if he might be the evil wizard, but I dismissed this at once; if I could actually touch a wizard’s mind, there was no way he could conceal his magic from me. I did not find Joachim or most of the other priests, but this was not surprising. Deep in prayer, their minds would have entered the supernatural realm of the saints and thus be beyond the reach of my magic.
But I also did not find Theodora. My mind slid back to my body, and I opened my eyes. There was no emotion in the deep silent tunnels of magic, but once back to myself I felt a sharp fear. Where could she be? Within the square mile or so of the city, she should not have been able to hide from me unless she were cloaking her mind thoroughly. This meant that she had either left the city and was already a good distance away or else was deliberately hiding from me.
I hurried back to the cathedral through the wet and slippery streets. All activity on the construction site had ceased. The tall front doors of the church stood open. A few townspeople were going up the stairs to them, almost shyly. None of them was Theodora. I joined them, and we entered the dim church and walked the length of the nave to where the bishop lay before the altar, surrounded by candles. After a brief pause and a brief dip of the head, the townspeople quietly walked out the front doors again, but I slipped around to the side entrance.
The street behind the cathedral was quiet once more. I hurried down to the dean’s house and went inside. He was there, but I did not think he even heard me come in. He sat at the table, all in black, his face buried in his hands.
I tiptoed past him and went into the room where I had been staying. The only thing I could do was leave at once. I gathered up my clothes and books and packed everything neatly in my box.
But where could I go, and, even more importantly, where was Theodora? Maybe she had had a fit and died in the night. Maybe the old bishop, in dying, had reached out a demonic hand to take her soul with his.
This last was too unlikely, even in my worried state. But I did not like my other ideas any better. Had she been kidnapped and dragged from the city? Had an evil wizard ambushed her and taken her to wherever he and his nefarious magic were hiding?
Or, most devastating of all, did she not want to see me?
“No,” I said aloud. I could not think of this as the most devastating, no matter what it did to my self-esteem. I would rather have her alive and furious with me, for reasons I could not begin to fathom, than to have her in dire captivity or even dead.
Had Theodora felt violated by my attentions? I found it hard to accept this; it was she who had led the way to the grove. Since I was a wizard, not a priest, I had, as I had told her, not sinned against institutionalized magic by being with her. But if I had somehow, unintentionally but horribly, frightened her or hurt her, I had sinned against Theodora herself. As I thought again of our walk back to the city last night, it became more and more clear that she did not want to marry me.
Had she all along been the sort of witch I had feared when I first met her, only interested in men to satisfy her mad lusts? Maybe the woman I thought I had come to know and love this summer had all been a facade.
“Theodora!” I shouted inside my mind. “Where are you?” Any wizard or witch within five miles should have been able to hear me.
There was no response, but I had expected none. After sitting glumly on the bed for a few more minutes, I stood up abruptly to go out. Joachim had not moved. I closed the door quietly behind me as I stepped into the street.
The rain had let up. As I came around to the front of the cathedral, I saw that the numbers of townspeople coming to pay their final respects to the bishop had grown.
I headed out through the city gates and wandered through the long, wet grass, finding no clues and not even sure what I was seeking. I stared out along the road leading from the city, and, in the distance, could see a galloping horse coming toward me.
It was a red roan stallion, and in a moment I could see that the rider was Paul. No one was with him, and he rode as though pursued by demons. My heart felt as though a hand had clutched it.
With Theodora either held captive by an evil wizard or furious with me, and with Joachim lost to me forever, I had been thinking that nothing worse could possibly happen. But now I knew it could.