The queen and Vincent were married by the bishop in a quiet ceremony the following morning, and our guests began to leave in the afternoon. No one really had the heart to continue the festivities. The cook said darkly that she hoped that those of us who stayed had good appetites, or a lot of good food was going to go to waste.
Paul stood at the gates, thanking each person individually for coming and apologizing for their burns and bruises. Lucas slapped him on the shoulder in good fellowship. “Now watch yourself, young king,” he said with just the faintest hint of jealousy. “You have to realize it can’t all be like this. You’re not going to turn eighteen, be crowned king, and have a chance to save your kingdom from peril all on the same day again!”
I thought Paul recognized the irony of having the departing guests treat as a glorious deed out of legend something that he himself considered the worst experience of his life. But he said nothing about this. Some people, however, may have wondered why he did not seem to smile.
The Romneys were already gone. They had guessed all along, I thought, that Sengrim and the ragged old magician were the same person, and they didn’t care to answer questions on this topic. They also did not want to discuss the telephone call one of the Romney girls had placed to the royal court of Caelrhon of behalf of the “magician,” and they did not want any further discussion on the topic of the red roan stallion. Sengrim had given it to the Romneys as a bribe or a reward for their silence, I realized, knowing that they would love the opportunity to tame such a superb horse and that they would be able to get a substantial sum from the right buyer. Vincent, I thought, must have paid them a good half of the spending money his father allowed him in a year.
We buried Sengrim in the castle cemetery, where kings of Yurt and servants of Yurt had been buried for generations. The young royal chaplain read the service with what I thought exaggerated seriousness. Paul listened while staring expressionless into the distance, then tossed the first shovelful of dirt onto the coffin and went back to the castle without waiting for the rest of us.
By the end of the afternoon, the bishop’s party were the only guests left. I went up to the chaplain’s old room to talk to Joachim.
“Do you think Paul will be all right?” I asked. “I hope you haven’t told him that he’s irretrievably damned for eternity for killing the wizard.” When Joachim didn’t answer, I continued, “Come on, I know that in the past you’ve felt the bishop wouldn’t approve if you revealed the secrets of the confessional, but you are bishop now.”
He took a deep breath, and his mouth moved slightly in what might have been a smile. Joachim had always taken the oddest things for jokes. “I still wouldn’t reveal the ‘secrets of the confessional,’ as you put it,” he answered, “but I can tell you that I most certainly did not tell your king that he was damned for eternity. To kill is always a sin, but this world has been imperfect since the Fall, and one cannot always make a choice between good and evil. Sometimes the only choice is between one sin and a worse one. The worst possible sin for a king, sworn to defend his people, is to let them be killed. He has a stain on his soul, but he should be able to recover from it.”
“I hope you explained all that to Paul.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Of course I did. Don’t you have any confidence in me as a priest?” I couldn’t tell if he was serious or if this was one of his jokes.
We sat in silence for a moment. “How long can you stay?” I asked then.
“I’ll wait until Theodora feels well enough to travel; that will give my new dean a chance to get some experience on his own. I am very happy to see her recovering so well.”
“As am I, thanks to your prayers.”
“And to your herbal magic,” he replied, “and her own youth and health, and maybe even the doctor’s draughts.”
I hadn’t asked Theodora again to marry me, feeling that it would be unfair to press her in her weakened state, but I feared I already knew what she would say. Even without my assent, we seemed inexorably to be moving toward an arrangement where she and our daughter would live in the cathedral city while I stayed in Yurt. “But I want to ask you something, Joachim. You seem remarkably unconcerned for a bishop about an expectant mother refusing to marry.”
“I thought you knew that marriage was a sacrament, created by God. The essence of a valid marriage is free consent. It would be a great sin to force someone to marry against her will. I cannot approve, of course, of unmarried women having children, but it would be even worse to force such women into marriage.”
Clearly I wasn’t going to get any help from him.
“Your child was conceived in sin, but then so were we all, ever since the children of Adam. You do realize, Daimbert, that Theodora’s unwillingness to marry you gives you no license. You have repented sorely of what you have done, but it would not be true penitence if you intended to do it again. I spoke with her while we were riding here, and she agrees. Your relations from now on must be of the purest.”
This was worse and worse. “But I love her!”
“In this fallen world,” Joachim continued, holding me with his eyes, “love is often an opportunity for sin, but remember that love remains one of the first gifts of God to His creation.”
“How would you know?” I asked bitterly. “You’ve never tried love yourself.”
“Of course not,” he said in surprise. “I’m a priest.”
Considering how much trouble we had understanding each other, it was a wonder that Joachim and I were friends at all. “Now that you’re bishop,” I said, “you’re responsible for the whole of the twin kingdoms. You can’t be responsible for my soul anymore.”
“Of course,” he said, immediately and contritely. “Forgive me. I was speaking as though I were still your chaplain.”
This didn’t help. I certainly wasn’t going to discuss Theodora with Yurt’s new chaplain. “Don’t you think you could look into getting us a different one?”
He looked amused but shook his head. “I’ve talked to your chaplain, and there’s really nothing wrong with him, Daimbert. He doesn’t have an impure mind, or whatever you once tried to tell me. He might never make a great theologian, but he’s a perfectly competent priest.”
I bit my lip. “I was afraid you’d say that.” By talking about the young chaplain, he had made it almost too late for me to say that I had no intention of keeping my relations with Theodora of the purest. If she agreed with him, I would at any rate have no choice. Besides, I didn’t want to argue with Joachim. “I hope you don’t think that I have sunk irretrievably into sin.”
He looked at me a long moment without answering. “No,” he said at last. “Not irretrievably. Not that I know about. Not yet.”
Theodora and I walked slowly around the castle’s hill in the early morning two days later. She and the bishop’s party would shortly be leaving to ride back to the cathedral city.
“Before you ask me,” she said, “let me tell you the answers. Yes, I love you very much and will never love anyone else. No, I can’t marry you. No, I can’t come live with you here, getting in your way as Royal Wizard, defying the bishop, and probably getting you into serious trouble with your school. And no, I don’t want to wander around from fair to fair doing magic tricks.”
This did indeed seem to answer all possible questions in advance. I put my arms around her and gently kissed the purple bruise on her forehead. “You realize,” I said, “that I am going to come visit you very often.”
“Of course. I thought we already agreed on that.” We continued walking for a few minutes, then she said, “I do feel embarrassed as a witch that I never realized the Royal Wizard of Caelrhon was the same person as the old magician I’d known for years. What is your school going to do?”
“I haven’t had a chance to tell the school much more than that he’s dead. All the teachers have been up north, and I just spoke very briefly to Zahlfast last night when he returned. I need to call them again. But I’ve been trying to work some of it out myself. An enormous amount of Sengrim’s madness was directed personally toward me.”
She nodded without speaking.
“Sengrim had hated me for years. He was a good wizard, really good, or he would never have been able to master a gorgos. And he knew it, and it ate into him that no one else knew it. I’ve always just considered it a sign that even intelligent wizards can have errors in judgment that they asked me to teach at the school, but for him it must have been the final blow to his self-esteem.”
“It can only be a small proportion of the graduates who are ever invited back to teach, even just a short series of lectures.”
“That’s just it. But Sengrim didn’t realize how inadequate I felt. All he knew is that I’ve had my name in every copy of Ancient and Modern Necromancy for years, because of accidentally inventing a telephone attachment, and that I’d been invited back to the City and he hadn’t. To plot against me without suspicion, he decided to fake his own death.
“It started with me, but it didn’t end with me,” I continued. “At this point I’m guessing, but I think he turned his jealousy of me into hatred for all the wizards at the school. And the Church was a tempting target, since no wizard, other than me, would be very concerned about strange apparitions on the cathedral.”
“What it comes down to, then,” said Theodora, “is that you and Paul have not only saved the people here but the church and your school.”
“Not at all,” I said in surprise. “Well, maybe Paul has. But I can’t take any credit. All I did all summer, while Joachim thought I was trying to find a way to protect the cathedral from peril, was to fall in love with you.”
She made a noise that was almost a snort.
“All right,” I conceded, “I did get the gorgos back up north. And I found out that Lucas had gotten himself into a state where he wanted to discard both priests and wizards, and I talked him out of it. But I’m going to have to phrase it all rather delicately when I explain it to the Master of the school.”
We kept on walking. “The bishop likes you,” I said after a minute.
“I still find him a little intimidating,” she said, “but at the same time, strangely, I find him a good person to talk to. Though one thing is odd, Daimbert. Because I’d known he was your friend I’d expected him to be a lot like you, but he isn’t at all.”
“The priesthood doesn’t allow people like me.”
She smiled and squeezed my arm. “Probably just as well. But I wanted to ask you,” more seriously now, “how many people in Yurt know about our daughter. First you told the bishop, and now you told the queen! How about the teachers at the school?”
“So far,” I said, smiling down at her, “we’re up to two people.”
“And the school?”
“I have no intention of telling them. They don’t want married wizards, but if you won’t marry me then the rest is none of their business. Even if I am at some level answerable to organized wizardry, I still, as a theoretically competent wizard, have to be able to make my own decisions. I’m not even going to tell them that I taught-or tried to teach-a witch to fly!”