Daughter of Magic - Wizard of Yurt - 5 (12 page)

And someone who revived dead animals, I thought, trying without particular success to duplicate what Elerius had done to Antonia’s hair yesterday, seemed too close for comfort to someone who made warriors out of dead bones—someone who had kiled the watchman and not brought him back to life.

II

Princess Margareta came down to dinner with her eyelids painted an iridescent blue like the Lady Justinia’s, which earned her an askance look from the queen, and carrying a big porcelain dol. The dol wore a lace and silk dress more elaborate than the princess’s own and had golden curls arranged around its placid face in a style that even Elerius might have had trouble matching.

The king’s Great-aunt Maria threw up her hands with delight at the sight of the dol, but Antonia frowned. “The wizard told me not to bring Doly to the table with me,” she said to the princess in a low voice, as though warning her against possible embarrassment.

But Margareta tossed her head imperiously and said in her slightly squeaky voice, “Queen Margarithia always sits wherever I do.” She ordered a servant to bring up a stool and set the dol in it, next to her own chair. One of the castle hounds, who were not supposed to be in the great hal at mealtime, came up and started sniffing, but Margareta aimed a kick at it and the servant took the animal quickly away.

“Queen Margarithia is a good name for a dol,” said Antonia approvingly.

Margareta settled herself with a complacent flounce into the place of honor, at the king’s right hand. She had first been given that place by the queen two visits ago and seemed to feel it was rightfuly hers.

As the rest of us seated ourselves and started passing the platters, I noticed that the young princess, however, paid less attention to King Paul than to the Lady Justinia, sitting directly across the table from her in the secondary place of honor. When Justinia took a single piece of chicken but several scoops of vegetables, Margareta pushed the three pieces of chicken she had already taken to the side of the plate and tried surreptitiously to fluff up her vegetables with a spoon. When Justinia set down her knife and switched her fork from left hand to right to eat after cutting each piece, Margareta tried to do the same, although on the second effort she dropped her knife on the floor and blushed when a servant slipped over from the other table to give her a clean one.

Paul too gave most of his attention to the Lady Justinia. Elerius was entertaining the knights and ladies with tales of his travels, including a trip right up into the far northern land of dragons, where I had never gone. He seemed so comfortable at an aristocratic table that I wondered vaguely, as I had several times before, if the family background he had always kept secret might include birth in a noble household, or if he, like me, had learned to imitate refined social graces upon taking up a post as a royal wizard. Antonia folowed his stories with such rapt attention that she almost forgot to eat, but the king scarcely appeared to hear him.

When dessert came, Elerius graciously refused requests to entertain the court with ilusions, referring the company instead to me. My dragons doing the tango got a much more appreciative response here than they had received last night from the renegade magic-worker who might— or might not—have been watching me covertly.

As the servants began clearing away the plates and everyone else started back toward their chambers or else talked in smal groups by the hearth, the Lady Justinia put her hand on the king’s arm. “I have a question for thee, perhaps even a suggestion,” she said with a slow smile, under the sounds of general conversation.

Princess Margareta, picking up her dol, glanced toward them. Justinia, her back toward the table, did not notice either the girl or me. “I have been at thy court long enough, O King, to learn that thou art truly a man and not a boy,” Justinia continued quietly, her lips curved into a half smile and her dark eyes holding his. “A man and a king can make his own choices in love: he is not one to let the old women decide for him. Thou and I both know, do we not, that thy own choice would never be a little girl, scarce more than a child, who stil plays with dols?” The tips of Paul’s ears went pink as he started to smile in response. But the effect on Margareta was immediate. She blanched white and stood stark stil for a moment, clutching her dol to her. Queen Margarithia’s wide blue eyes stared unseeing at the room, and her painted china lips continued to sketch their cupid’s-bow smile.

Then Margareta whirled around, the dol swinging from one hand, and stormed from the room. Queen Margarithia’s porcelain head struck the table leg and shattered explosively. A number of people turned at the sound, but Margareta, almost running, did not seem to notice.

Neither did Paul, although Justinia glanced briefly over her shoulder. “Who do you think then my choice should be, my lady?” he asked. My liege lord’s expression was so intense and so vulnerable that I felt almost ashamed to be eavesdropping.

“The choice is thine to make, O King,” she said, looking at him from under long lashes. “But I believe there is a heart in the castle that loves truly, has loved thee a very long time, with a care thou hast ignored for far too long.”

I turned away. The queen, frowning, was looking toward Paul and Justinia, but this was something the king would have to take care of by himself. The Lady Justinia might think she was pleading Gwennie s cause, but to me it looked only as though she were advancing her own.

Gwennie had reasserted her authority as arranger of accommodations in the castle and had told me that a little girl could not possibly stay in my chambers with two wizards, and instead would sleep with her in her own room until the twins returned. That was fine with me—it kept her away from Elerius. Antonia had been quite smug earlier about this opportunity to sleep in three different rooms in a castle and said she could hardly wait to tel her friend Jen.

This evening, however, she kept referring to the smashing of Queen Margarithia. Antonia thought Margareta must be especialy upset because she had destroyed her beloved dol herself, and when I explained that my magic would not put broken porcelain back together, she suggested earnestly that we send at once for the Dog-Man. I took her to Gwennie’s room and sat holding her hand until she fel asleep.

The room was reached from the courtyard by an outside staircase. Gwennie was waiting when I came out. “Could I talk to you for a moment, Wizard?” We sat side by side on the stone steps, stil warm from the day’s sun although it was now twilight. The castle around us was growing quiet, but from the stables came faint sounds of restless horses who had yet to reconcile themselves to the company of an elephant. The last swalows darted high overhead.

I looked at Gwennie from the corner of my eye while waiting for her to begin. She had a finely shaped nose and brow-line, if a rather firm chin marked by a slight cleft, and straight dark blond hair that was always escaping its pins. I myself thought she was as lovely as the Lady Justinia.

“Al the years my father was constable,” she said with strained cheer after a few minutes, “I never realized how difficult his duties must be! Keeping the castle accounts, hiring new servants, assigning them their duties and ascertaining that they carry them out, making decisions ranging from when to whitewash the wals to when to buy new table linens to whether we should plant barley or rye this spring—”

“I’m sure everyone appreciates how smoothly the castle runs under your direction,” I said and waited again, knowing this was not what she wanted to talk about. For that matter, I had never realy thought myself about the merits of barley versus rye. Gwennie was again silent as shadow filed the castle courtyard.

“This morning,” she said at last in a low voice, not looking at me. “Did you hear what that eastern princess tried to tel me?” It didn’t seem worth denying. “I’m afraid I couldn’t help overhearing.”

“The worst of it is,” she said, so quietly I had to strain to folow, “I almost found myself agreeing with her.”

“Ahh,” I said as noncommittedly as possible. This sounded more like something for which a castle employed a Royal Chaplain than an issue for the Royal Wizard. But then I wouldn’t have taken a moral dilemma to our chaplain either.

“I know him so wel,” Gwennie said bitterly. “He likes me, he trusts my work as his constable, he remembers fondly the times we used to play together as children. If he found me in his bed in the middle.of the night, he would be a little surprised, but I know I would quickly be able to find ways to arouse his interest—even having no experience of my own with men. I could even make him believe he was in love with me.”

Although I was quite sure this was not the sort of topic on which royal wizards were supposed to give advice, and although I didn’t like to think that my king could be so easily manipulated by a woman, I said nothing. At the moment Paul seemed ready to leap to do whatever Justinia might suggest to him, and my own situation was hardly an example of male independence and mastery.

“But what good would that do?” Gwennie continued. “If he did not come to love me by himself, with no help from me, it would not be real love. And,” she paused, gulped once, and continued, “and that he could never do, and I as constable of this castle would never alow. He would be the laughingstock of al the neighboring kingdoms if he took a cook’s daughter as his wife, and what purpose would there be in becoming his concubine?”

It might temporarily take her misery away, I thought to myself, but even I recognized that would only be temporary.

“If he got me with child,” she continued, speaking fast now, her voice trembling on the edge of tears, “I know him wel enough to be certain that he would not cast me out.” She seemed to have thought it al through remarkably wel for someone who had summarily rejected this option.

“He would find a place for me to continue to live in Yurt, and our son, if we had a son, would be brought up as a pet of the castle, wel trained and wel educated to serve as a constable or even a knight in some other kingdom, but he could never inherit the throne.”

Like Elerius? I wondered.

“Our daughter, if we had a daughter, would be wel provided with a dowry to marry some wealthy merchant—even a petty castelan. But any children would be marked al their lives with the stigma of ilegitimacy, and he would never truly consider them his.”

I was glad it was growing too dark for her to see my face. I thought of my “niece” asleep in Gwennie’s room. As she grew up, what stigma would she feel marked her, and would she come to believe I did not think of her as truly mine?

Gwennie had stopped speaking and seemed to be waiting for me to say something. “At least the Lady Justinia seems to have no plans to become queen of Yurt,” I suggested tentatively.

“And why not?” Gwennie burst out. “Does she think an eastern governors granddaughter too fine for the king of a smal western kingdom? Where does she think she wil find a better man, one braver or more true, more open and generous, or capable of greater love? If she’s as shalow as she seems, doesn’t she even realize she won’t find a man more handsome?” Since this so completely contradicted everything she had said before, I decided to remain silent.

In a moment I heard the faint sound of a suppressed sob next to me. Gwennie rose abruptly. “Good-night, Wizard,” she said unsteadily. “Thank you for listening.”

“Good-night, Gwendolyn,” I said as her room door shut. I had always liked to think that as a wizard I was enough at the fringes of society’s strictures that they did not affect me. But I was affected if the young people I loved and served, whether children of king, duchess, or castle constable, could not become the individuals they wanted to be because of the expectations and silent rules that hedged them in. And in Antonia it touched me even more deeply and personaly.

Ill

I woke up al at once, staring around in the dark. It was only a dream, I tried to reassure myself, nothing but a dream, but the scene was stil more vivid than my own moonlit chambers. I had been in the bishop’s bedchamber only once, years before, back when the former bishop was stil alive though very il. But as I forced myself to settle back down and close my eyes again I could see that room clearly, the candles on the wood-paneled wals and on the briliant red coverlets on the bed.

Emerging from the coverlets in the image before me were two heads above two sets of naked shoulders. Their faces were hidden, their mouths and chests pressed close together. One head had black hair streaked with gray, the other tumbled nut-brown curls. I didn’t need to see their faces.

A dream meant nothing, I tried to reassure myself, but found myself unwiling to be reassured. Absolute conviction did not respond wel to reason. Suppose the dream did have meaning? Suppose my sleeping mind had provided me with an explanation my conscious mind rejected?

I kicked back the blankets, groped for some clothes, and banged the door shut on Elerius’s sleepy questions as I went out to fly furiously through the night toward the cathedral city.

I pushed past the bishop’s startled servants into his study and slammed the door behind me. He had been reading at his desk after breakfast, but he put his book down at once and looked up.

He’s pretending he doesn’t even realize there’s something wrong, I thought with the fury that had been building al during the long flight from Yurt. I supported myself with a hand against the wal and glared at him. He would learn now that even a bishop cannot trifle with a wizard.

“Joachim, you have been my friend for twenty-five years. We’ve both saved each other’s lives. I love you as the brother I never had. But now I must kil you.” It sounded ridiculous as soon as I said it, but to his eternal credit he did not laugh, which would have been my own reaction. Nor did he do any of the other things I had expected. He did not shout for help, or leap for the door or the window, or drop to his knees to beg for his life.

Instead he turned his enormous dark eyes toward me, but disconcertingly not quite toward me. In a second I realized he was looking at the crucifix on the wal past my shoulder.