A Bad Spell in Yurt - Wizard of Yurt - 1 (4 page)

"Come on," I said, "I need your help with a magic spel ."

She looked over her shoulder at the others, said, "I'l be back in just a minute!" and came with me, straightening her skirt. "What sort of magic spel ? You're not going to turn me into a frog or anything!"

Ever since that practical exam, I had tried to avoid mention of things being turned into frogs, but she wouldn't know that. "No," I said, "I think I've invented a new kind of telephone, and I want to test it."

In my chambers, I stationed her in the study, at one end of the string, and went into the bedroom. "You listen," I said, "and see if you can hear me." Then, with my mouth close to the other end of the string, I said in my deepest voice, "Al powers of earth and air must obey the spel s of wizardry."

To my surprise, she burst into peals of laughter. "You're the funniest person I've ever met!" she said when she had caught her breath. "Are you sure you're real y a wizard?"

"Did it work?" I said with irritation. "Could you hear me?"

"Of course I could hear you. You were only standing ten feet away! Al powers of earth and air!" Stil laughing, she went back out to rejoin the game.

I looked at my piece of string in disgust. It was stil glowing. I snapped my fingers and said the words to break the spel , but nothing happened. I seemed to have a piece of string permanently able to convey words over the same distance one could hear them anyway.

"Except that it may not even do that," I thought. "Al I know for sure is that it's pink now." Besides, the more I thought about it the more strings seemed like an impractical idea. One couldn't run a string two hundred miles to the City. It was with relief that I heard the gong for dinner.

My good humor was restored by another excel ent meal. At the end, King Haimeric said, "Come with me. I want to show you my rose garden."

He walked on his nephew's arm out of the great hal , through the courtyard, and out through the great gates of the castle. Since I had arrived in the courtyard by air cart, I had not before been through the gates. The portcul is was up and looked as though it had not been lowered for years. Swans were swimming peaceful y in the moat.

A red brick road ran down the hil from the castle gates toward the forest below. Next to the road was a wal ed garden, with roses creeping over the tops of the wal s. Dominic swung the barred gate open, and we went in.

I had thought the roses in the castle courtyard were good, but these were spectacular. "You can leave us, Dominic," said the king. "I'm sure this young man can see me back safely."

His burly nephew gave me a slightly sour look but left. The king seated himself on a bench while I wandered up and down the rows, admiring the different colors, the enormous blooms, the vibrant green of the foliage.

"I'm too stiff to work on them much any more, but I planted every bush you see," said the king. "Most of them are hybrids I developed myself, though I've also picked up a few cuttings over the years. The newest one is that white bush; I planted it the day I married the queen."

It was smal er than the other bushes but growing vigorously. The white blooms faded to pink in the shadows of the petals. When I bent to smel it, the sweetness was almost overwhelming.

"I'm looking forward to meeting the queen," I said, realizing that she must be substantial y younger than the king and wondering why I had ever thought otherwise.

"I've been king of Yurt a long, long time. It's been a good run of years, but in many ways the last four years have been the best, even though I can't crawl around with a trowel any more."

So they'd only been married four years. I had to readjust several of my assumptions. It seemed most likely that the king had found a pliant young princess to marry, someone to adore him and do his bidding and fulfil the adolescent fantasies he had never been able to fulfil in his years in the rose garden. The only difficulty with this picture was that it was hard to see the king as the old goat. "You may think me sil y," I said, "but when I heard the queen was visiting her parents, I'd somehow thought of them as extremely old."

"Old?" he said and smiled. "No, they're not old. The Lady Maria, who lives here with us, is the sister of the queen's father. And you know from a remark at table last night how old she is."

He laughed. "Give me your arm; I want to look across my kingdom."

Though he needed my help to rise, he walked unaided back out of the wal ed garden. I swung the gate back into place, and we stood looking down the hil toward the plowed fields and the variegated green of the woods beyond.

He stood without speaking for several minutes. Somewhere down there, I thought, was the old wizard. I was startled out of conjectures about him when the king said suddenly, "Can you transport me by magic?"

"Transport you?" I said with some alarm. This was worse than telephones.

"Lift me off the ground so I don't have to walk. I've always wanted to try it."

"I think so," I said, and "I hope so," I thought. "Lifting spel s become more difficult the larger the object one is lifting," I explained. I didn't tel him that he was a lot larger than a wine glass.

Inwardly I was wondering how, if I hadn't been sure I could magical y pick up a heavy box or an awkwardly-placed platter of meat, I was going to manage my liege lord. "We'l take it slowly. I'l just lift you a little way, and I'l walk right next to you so you can take my arm if you're feeling unsteady." "Or," I added silently, "if I start to drop you."

The king, I decided as I started pul ing the spel s together in my mind, was actual y not much heavier than a box of books. He stood looking at me with a faint smile as I concentrated, feeling my way into the magic, making sure each word of the Hidden Language was right. Slowly and graceful y, as though he were thistledown blown by the wind, he rose four inches, so that his toes just brushed the grass.

We started toward the castle gates. I walked immediately next to him, just barely not touching him. Fortunately he was silent and let me concentrate. When we reached the drawbridge I had a sudden panic, picturing myself dropping him into the moat, and with my wavering in concentration he started to slip. I found the words just in time to set him down as gently as he had been lifted up.

We walked together across the bridge and under the portcul is. Dominic was waiting for us just inside. "That was extremely enjoyable," said the king. "Could you teach me to do that myself? Not today, but soon?"

This earned him an odd look from Dominic, who had no idea what we were talking about. "I've never taught anyone," I said honestly, "but I could try."

Back in my chambers, I spent the rest of the afternoon practicing lifting things.

V

After two days of loving my kingdom, I woke up the next morning hating it. Bel s awakened me again. When I lifted my head I could hear hard rain on the cobblestones outside. The windows were streaked with water. My door handle rattled and didn't open, since I had remembered to lock it last night, but there was immediately a loud and persistent knocking.

When I opened the door, the servant maid stood there, trying without great success to shield both herself and a tray with an umbrel a. I took the tray and half pul ed her inside. "You're going to get soaked!" I said.

Her umbrel a streamed water on my clean flagstone floor. My tea seemed to have been diluted with rain, and the napkin on the basket was damp. When I pul ed back the napkin, I found not crul ers but cake donuts, which I don't like nearly as wel . They weren't even warm.

"I just wanted to make sure you were up in time for chapel," she said without a smile or any sign of friendliness. She put the umbrel a back up and started out again.

"Thank you very much!" I said quickly, wondering if everyone went to chapel every single day. "You know, I don't even know your name."

"Gwen, sir," she said and was gone. I wondered as I ate if she didn't want to associate with someone as foolish as I must have seemed after the incident with the string. The donuts tasted as though they had been made several days before.

My mood was not improved when I banged my head on the dark stair going up to the chapel and then found, when I reached the top, that the king and the chaplain were the only other two people there. I rubbed my head surreptitiously al during service. At the end, I offered the king my arm, but he shook his head.

"A prerogative of being king is that I don't have to use those stairs." A smal door which I should have noticed before opened half-way down the inner wal of the chapel, presumably into the royal chambers. He went through it and left me alone with the chaplain.

The chaplain fixed me with his dark eyes. "Don't think I don't welcome you in the chapel," he said. "But don't come because you think you have to. I hold service every morning for anyone who needs spiritual refreshment, and the king usual y comes, but the rest of the castle mostly come on Sunday." He turned away without waiting for a response.

"In that case," I thought, "maybe I can start sleeping later." I would have to tel Gwen, if she was stil speaking to me. I wished I could talk to some of my friends at the wizards' school. The chaplain stil seemed like the only person at the castle I could hold a conversation with, and at the moment he was to me profoundly strange and distant.

"There's incentive for me," I thought bitterly, groping back down the stairs. "Al I need to do to talk to them is get the telephone working."

Back in my room, I was looking glumly at the backs of my books, wondering which ones I should try next, when there was a knock. I hoped it was Gwen, come to apologize for the dry donuts, but to my surprise it was Dominic, the royal heir.

He lowered his umbrel a and pul ed off his coat. He looked around my study for a moment in silence, paused for a longer look at my diploma, and closed the door behind him. "May I sit down?"

"Please do," I said, wondering what he could want.

He planted his solid body in a chair by the window, set his elbow firmly on the arm, and leaned his chin on a massive fist. "I've come to talk to you about your duties."

This was it. I knew my problem wasn't the rain or the lack of crul ers. I had spent two days on vacation, but now I was going to have to start work on projects I didn't think I could do. I tried to look intel igent and alert.

Surprisingly, he hesitated for a moment before beginning. "You're an outsider," he said at last--something I already knew!--"and maybe I shouldn't prejudice your mind with too many details. But you have to know one thing now. The king is under a spel ."

This was not at al what I had expected. "Under a spel ? What sort? I talked to him in the rose garden yesterday afternoon, and he never said anything about it."

"He wouldn't have, of course. He doesn't realize it himself. But the spel was one of the major reasons we decided to hire you."

He didn't say who
we
were. He looked at me from under heavy lids, waiting for my answer. "But what sort of spel ? Do you know the source?"

"The king is growing old and feeble. This can only be the result of enchantment. We don't know the source of the spel , but we want you to overcome it."

"But that's sil y!" I protested. "Of course he's getting weaker as he gets older. And besides," thinking that the chaplain should hear me now, "wizardry can't reverse natural aging."

"The king isn't as old as you may think. When he married the queen, only four years ago, no one thought of them as an extremely il -matched couple."

A sudden vision flashed into my mind of a girl married to a much older man, excited at first at the power of being queen, but soon made irritable when she discovered she was not supposed to have a mind of her own, but only be the king's pliant companion. It shouldn't be hard for her, on one of her trips to the City, to find an unscrupulous wizard wil ing to sel her a powder or spel to sicken her husband.

"It must be the queen, then," I said. "She has bewitched him somehow."

A low rumble began somewhere in his barrel chest and emerged in an angry, "No! It's not the queen. It couldn't be anyone at court. It must be a malignant influence from outside."

I modified my vision to have the queen and the royal heir secretly in love, plotting to have the king die so that they could rule together. But I stopped myself. This made no sense. If Dominic were partial y responsible for putting an evil spel on the king, he certainly wouldn't tel me about it.

"Thank you for this warning," I said in a deep voice. "The power of magic to conceal itself is often great, but the skil of the forewarned wizard is potent indeed."

To my surprise, he treated this statement perfectly seriously. "Good. I knew we had done wel to hire you." He started to rise.

"But how about my other duties? The king's talked to me about a telephone system, the constable's said you need more magic lights--"

He waved these away with his broad hand. I was fascinated by the ruby ring on his second finger. Its setting was a gold snake supporting the jewel on its coils. It looked like a perfect ring for a wizard, and I coveted it for myself. "Those are a facade for your real work." He pul ed his coat back on, picked up his umbrel a, and left without saying Goodbye.

I stood by the open door, looking across the rain-drenched courtyard. The paint and the flowers were bright in spite of the dark sky. Could there actual y be dark powers at work here in such a perfect little castle?

I closed my eyes, probing past the closed doors and shuttered windows. There were plenty of minds there, most of which I did not know wel enough to recognize, though I could tel the king and Gwen. Oddly, I didn't find the chaplain. I stayed wel outside their minds, slipping by so lightly they wouldn't even feel me there. I found no powerful evil presence.

But when I opened my eyes a sense of foreboding lingered. Dominic might be right. If not the queen, who wanted the king dead, and how were they doing it? Was the constable, with his talk of lights and telephones, deliberately trying to mislead me? Had Gwen been warned against me?

I shook my head. This would get me nowhere. Maybe while everyone else was sheltering from the rain I should take the opportunity to explore the castle; so far I had seen very little of it. I remembered a spel I had seen once and reached for my shelves. I found it in only the second book I consulted, the spel to keep dry in the rain. "Why didn't I learn this one before?" I asked myself. It was only a variation of the lifting spel , creating a diversion for al the raindrops before they hit one's head.