I stayed with Joachim for four days. The cantor Norbert avoided me pointedly, the rest of the cathedral priests ignored me, and none of them showed any sign of trying to destroy me.
Every night I went out to check for magical influences on the new construction, and every night I found nothing. Although in the evenings the dean and I caught up on some of the conversations we had not had since he left Yurt, there was little for me to do during the day except fret about the queen. I did not even feel again the fleeting mental touch which I now concluded I had imagined.
“Telephone me if anything else happens,” I told Joachim as I prepared to leave. “But I really do think the magician or whoever was responsible must have been warned by the Romneys. Once he realized a wizard had arrived in town, he decided it was safest to stop his mischief.”
“I would certainly like to think so. Give my best wishes to everyone in Yurt.”
Though I left the quiet cobbled street behind the cathedral on foot, once I had made my way through the city streets and out the wide gates to where the Romneys had been camped I soared upward for the flight home. The whole way, I was trying to imagine what could have possessed the queen to want to marry again.
I came over a stretch of thick forest and saw before me the fields and castle of the kingdom of Yurt. It always looked from the air like a perfect child’s toy of a castle, with its whitewashed turreted walls and the pennants snapping from the towers. As I swooped down I noticed someone working in the old king’s rose garden, just outside the moat, so I landed there.
She saw me descending and came to greet me. I was flabbergasted. It was the queen, and for the first time in six years she was not wearing black.
“You’re home!” she said with delight. She had a smile that lit up her whole face and made whoever saw it want to smile too. “When your books arrived from the City, I knew you couldn’t be far behind!”
“I’ve been down in the cathedral city of Caelrhon, visiting the dean for a few days,” I said, wondering how I could possibly have stayed away as long as three months.
She gestured toward the garden. “As you can see, I was pruning the king’s roses. But I’ve just finished. Shall we go inside?”
The queen swung the gate shut and slipped one arm through mine, holding her gardening gloves and pruning shears in the other hand. She was wearing a very simple, but also undeniably very bright red dress. Red had always gone well with her complexion and her midnight hair. Although her hair now had an attractive white streak in it, red still suited her. She was, as she had always been, the most beautiful woman I had ever met.
I squeezed her arm with mine and said, “It’s good to be home.”
“If you’ve seen the dean, maybe he’s told you my news,” she said gaily as we crossed the drawbridge into the castle. “I’m thinking of marrying again!”
I realized from the thud of my heart that I had been hoping for four days that it was not true. But hearing her talk about it so blithely made it real in a way that seeing the words on paper had not. “Who are you marrying?” I asked and was surprised to hear my voice sound almost normal.
“His name is Vincent,” she said, again with that smile but this time not directed at me. “I’m sure you’ve met him, as he’s visited here several times over the years. He’s the younger son of a king-in fact the king of Caelrhon, where you’ve just been.”
I did indeed remember Vincent, well enough to detest him now. “But a king’s younger son!” I protested. “He is not worthy of you, my lady!” I stopped myself just in time from adding that he was much too young for her.
“You forget that I myself was only a castellan’s daughter before I became queen of Yurt,” she said with a laugh. Then she answered my unspoken comment as well by saying, “With him I feel almost like a girl again! Vincent is very different from King Haimeric, but I’m sure he would be delighted to see me happy again.”
She was at least right, I thought gloomily, about the old king of Yurt. He would have approved of the marriage even though I did not. “What do your parents think?”
“They’re pleased, of course. But you ask,” she added with another laugh, “as if I were still a girl too young to know my own mind!”
It was not hard to think of her as a girl in spite of the white streak in her hair. She gave a quick little whirl, almost a dance step, and said, “Vincent’s coming tomorrow so you can renew acquaintances. Your chambers should be ready. The constable put your books inside, but he didn’t unpack them-he was afraid his eye might fall on a spell accidentally and he would turn himself into a frog!” And she went off laughing at her own joke.
I was gloomily reshelving books when I heard a knock at the door. “Come in!” I called, hoping it was the queen come to say her plan to marry Vincent was just another joke, and in rather poor taste.
But it was Prince Paul, royal heir to Yurt. He seemed to have shot up several inches in three months and had to duck through the doorway. “Welcome home! I just heard you’d arrived. Did you have a pleasant stay in the City?” His good manners did not mask the intensity of whatever had brought him here. I had barely begun a congenial response when he added, “I need to talk to you privately. Can you come for a ride?”
Paul loved riding and was very good at it. I thought ruefully that I was going to be made stiff after months of not being on a horse, especially at the pace I was sure he would set. He led the way across the courtyard with rapid strides; his legs still had the slenderness of a boy’s, but they were appreciably longer than mine.
In a few minutes we were mounted and riding out across the bridge, me on an old white mare and Paul on a gelding. “I think Mother’s going to get me a horse for my eighteenth birthday,” he said in a low voice, smiling in anticipation. Temporarily, his other concerns seemed forgotten. “I heard her talking to the constable about horse breeders and about the horse fairs this summer. They didn’t know I was listening so I had to slip away, but I’m fairly sure she knows I want a roan stallion.”
“Your mother is a good judge of horses,” I said. “She used to ride a magnificent black stallion before you were born.”
“I know,” he said regretfully. “I still don’t understand why she sold him. But then,” with a grin, “I’ve never liked black horses that well anyway.” Paul kicked his horse to a faster pace. He was bareheaded, and the wind swirled his hair. When he was young his hair had been so blond it was almost white, and even now it formed a golden halo around his head.
We rode for a mile, more rapidly than I would have liked but not as rapidly as I had feared, down the hill from the castle and then along a deep tree-shaded lane by the meadows. Larks soared over the long grass, and in the distance I could see people starting to harvest the hay.
Paul tied his reins to a branch and threw himself down on the grassy verge. “No one will overhear us,” he said, intense once again.
I reminded myself as I eased out of the saddle that I couldn’t treat him like a boy. Legally he would be of age in another three months, and with his mother’s fire and his father’s sweetness of temperament he would be a formidable king. If I let his boyish enthusiasm for horses remind me too strongly that I had given him horsy-rides on my knee not long ago, I was never going to have his confidence. “What’s bothering you?” I asked, seating myself beside him. “Is it your mother’s remarriage?”
“Yes,” he said gloomily, lying down with his hands under his head. “It wasn’t hard to guess, was it?” He jerked back up to a sitting position. “How can she do it? Why would she want to marry anyone, after Father? If she has to marry somebody, why does it have to be Prince Vincent?”
Since I had been asking myself exactly these questions, I found it difficult to answer.
Paul was now examining one of his riding boots, rubbing his thumb on a scrape. “I even tried talking to Aunt Maria,” he said. “If Mother remarries it will affect the entire kingdom.” He shifted his attention to the other boot. “But she just said something foolish about how a woman like her deserves her happiness.”
As I had been about to say something similar, I was glad I had not spoken. Instead I asked, “What are you afraid will happen to the kingdom?”
“Vincent will move here,” said Paul from the depths of despair, “and nothing will ever be the same again.”
“You mean your mother isn’t planning to leave Yurt?” I asked, trying with only moderate success to keep the excitement out of my voice.
“Why should she?” said Paul, ignoring my tone if he even heard it. “She’s a queen, and back home in his kingdom he’s just the young prince. He’ll come here and change everything.”
“But there’s a limit to what he’ll be able to do. After all, you’re going to be king, not he.”
“I don’t mean he’s going to introduce bad laws or anything,” Paul said in irritation. “But we’ve been so happy and comfortable here, and now everything will be different.”
I observed with interest that nostalgia was perfectly possible even for someone thirty years younger than I. The afternoon breeze was a caress. The thought that the queen would not be leaving was so cheering that it was hard to be properly sympathetic.
“So what can we do?” He looked straight at me for the first time, waiting for an answer. He had the same brilliant green eyes as his mother.
Short of assassinating Prince Vincent I had no good suggestions. I was still unable to speak reassuringly of how the marriage was really best for the queen, especially since this was apparently what everybody else had been telling him. “I honestly don’t know, Paul. I was just as upset as you are when I found out.”
“So that’s all we can do, be upset together?”
“And learn to live with it. People can learn to live with a surprising number of problems. Yurt has gone on without your father, though when he died I never thought it would.”
Six winters ago, I reminded myself, was far more recent to me than it was to Paul. He did not find my comment reassuring. “Mother’s certainly recovered nicely from her loss,” he grumbled. “You would have thought at her age she’d be much too old for love.”
Since I knew no good way to contradict this foolish idea without also pointing out that I thought eighteen was much too young to know anything about love, I said nothing.
“And this Vincent is younger than she is by at least five years; she won’t tell me exactly. I think he’s deceiving her terribly. She goes around telling people she feels like a girl again, while it’s clear that his only interest in an old woman is to get hold of her kingdom.”
I had to smile at this, but since Paul had rolled over onto his stomach he fortunately didn’t see me. I would have been in love with the queen even if I had been eighteen and she was forty-three. “Do you know when they’re planning the wedding?” I asked with remarkable calmness.
“Not yet-I guess there’s still hope she’ll discover her mistake before it’s too late. She told me she didn’t even want to start plans for the wedding until after I come of age, and the dean of the cathedral sent her a note that if she wanted to get married there she would have to reserve the church six months ahead of time. And she said she didn’t want to get married during the winter.”
So they might not be getting married for close to a year. I agreed silently with Paul; the longer the wedding was put off, the more likely that she would have the sense not to go through with it.
He changed the subject abruptly, turning toward me with arms wrapped around one knee. “So what have you been doing the last few months in the wizards’ school?”
“I ended up teaching improvisational magic to technical wizardry students. In spite of all the formulas and books we have, you still have to be able to create your own spells-and to know when to try something unusual. Of course,” I added with a chuckle, “sometimes the unusual is not a good idea.” I went on to tell him about the three drunk newts.
Paul laughed, pulling up and twisting together blades of grass. “I think I’ll go study at the wizards’ school,” he said thoughtfully.
This made me sit up sharply. “Do you mean that?”
He looked at me with surprise. “Is there a reason why I shouldn’t?”
“No, but- Usually members of the aristocracy don’t become wizards. The training is too long and too hard and the rewards too negligible in comparison to aristocratic rule.”
“But aristocrats become priests sometimes.”
“Well, yes, but I’ve never heard of a king doing so. And there are a lot more priests than there are wizards. I assume a lot of men have a religious calling or something.”
“So would I be the only king at the wizards’ school?”
“That’s right,” I said, hoping desperately he was just casting around in his mind for an alternative to living with Vincent.
“What is it, an eight-year program?” he asked, positioning a blade of grass between his thumbs. He blew on it and seemed pleased to produce a high, blatting tone. “Maybe you could just teach me a little magic here.”
“I could certainly teach you a few simple spells,” I said, trying to hide my relief. I liked Paul tremendously, but I could not imagine him in the wizards’ school-nor imagine Yurt abandoned by its new king. “Real wizardry training,” I went on, “has almost all taken place at the school for the last century and a half. There are thousands of aristocratic courts in the western kingdoms and probably hundreds of seminaries, but only one wizards’ school. Since the old apprentice system died out, everyone’s been trained the same, and most of us know each other. But there are still a number of people, not wizards, who know the odd spell or two. Your father tried to learn to fly once though he never got very far. And your Great-aunt Maria wanted me to teach her wizardry; her problem was that she got bored with the first-grammar of the Hidden Language.”
“I never knew she was interested in magic,” said Paul in surprise. “The last couple of months, while you’ve been gone, she claims to have gotten very interested in theology.”
It was my turn to be surprised. The Lady Maria had a lively mind and had made early chapel service every morning for years, but she had always become quickly bored by anything intellectual. “Your father was interested enough in religion to go on pilgrimage,” I said.
“But Father was different. Besides, that was when the old chaplain was still here,” meaning Joachim. “He wasn’t too bad, and I also liked that priest whom the old chaplain had take over for him. But last winter, when he got a chance to go be a chaplain in the City, we ended up stuck with the chaplain we’ve got now.
“If you ask me,” he added in tones of disgust, “it isn’t religion she’s interested in at all, but that young chaplain. She acts moonstruck when he’s around. I decided I had to speak to her firmly. ‘Aunt Maria,’ I said, ‘I hope you remember that priests have to swear a vow of chastity.’ And you know what she said? She told me I had an ‘impure mind.’ All I can say, there are too many people in this castle who ought to know enough to act their age.”
Since I didn’t like the young chaplain either, I didn’t say anything. The problem with being mature was that I was always feeling that I ought to tell young people things for their own good when they were things I wouldn’t have wanted to hear myself.
“I’ll tell you who has an ‘impure mind’: it’s that chaplain.”
“Have there been any particular incidents of impurity?” I asked in some alarm.
“Of course not. Everybody but me thinks he’s fine.” I relaxed again. “But I can tell from his laugh and his handshake that he’s really a goat.”
Since these had never conveyed anything of the sort to me, I attributed this statement to Paul’s dislike of any change of personnel in Yurt. But an uneasy thought sent cold fingers walking down my spine. I had assumed that Zahlfast, in warning me against priests who would destroy me, was warning me against the cathedral. He might instead have been warning me against the young chaplain of Yurt.
Paul jumped to his feet, looking as satisfied and resolute as though we had decided something, which as far as I could tell we had not. “Race you back to the castle,” he said, reaching for his horse’s reins.