Below the Wizards' Tower (The Royal Wizard of Yurt Book 8) (14 page)

The other patrons, I realized, all
looked disgruntled, but apparently not with me.
 
The pretty dark-haired waitress stood in
the corner, her teeth in her lip and a handkerchief to her eyes.
 
The waiter was trying to talk to her,
but she turned her shoulder sharply toward him.

It looked like our departure had put
a serious dent in the service.

The waiter saw me, shook his head,
and scurried around the tables.
 
“I’m sorry.
 
It will be out
in just a minute.
 
There was a
delay.
 
It will be ready very
soon.
 
Let me refill your wine.
 
I’m sorry!”

The waitress stalked toward me, eyes
red and handkerchief balled in her hand.
 
“So which one are you now?” she asked coldly.

“Still not Marcus,” I babbled, “but
he’ll be here soon.
 
See, I’m
back!
 
I
didn’t
run
away as soon as I heard your news.
 
Congratulations, by the way.
 
What’s its name?
 
Boy or
girl?”

She did not respond to this highly
inadequate apology.
 
There was a
flutter of wings, and a seagull put its head in the open door.
 
It gave a long, piercing cry in my
direction.

Before the startled waiter could
shoo it away, I rattled off a few quick words in the Hidden Language, and
Marcus reappeared.
 
For a second he
moved his arms as though still feeling them as wings to be folded,
then
he stepped inside.

“Drinks for the house!” I called
recklessly.
 
The waiter, frowning
heavily at me, burst instead into a smile.

It took several minutes, but the
restaurant settled down again.
 
Patrons who believed—and were more than ready to say—that
magical stunts had no place in a civilized eating place were mollified by free
drinks, even though service continued very slow.
 
The waiter ended up working all the
tables, because the waitress was sitting with us.
 
When our cheese and pudding finally
arrived, she absently ate more than half of them.

“So I’m a father,” said Marcus
blankly.
 
She had recovered from
both her justifiable anger at his effort to switch personas and her fear that
he had raced away the second he heard the news, and she had been able to give
him a coherent account of the last year.

“I’ve always liked you as well as
any girl I know,” he continued.
 
“So
I’ll marry you if you like.
 
But be
warned—we may have to travel a lot, and that will be hard with the baby.”

This was far from what I would have
considered a romantic proposal, but I prudently kept silent.

She didn’t seem to mind the lack of
romance.
 
She reached over and
patted his shoulder.
 
“It’s all
right, Marcus,” she said, and the dimple was back.
 
“You don’t have to marry me.
 
Of course I wanted you to know about the
baby, but I knew all along you weren’t one to settle down.
 
For all I know you have sweethearts in
dozens of other ports up and down the coast.”

Or right here in the City, I
thought, keeping silent some more.

“
He
wants to marry me,” with an
affectionate glance toward the harried waiter, “and has been after me to agree
ever since you left town.
 
Maybe
I’ll just take him up on it.
 
But
why don’t you come by this evening, when my shift is over.
 
I’m still in the same place.
 
I’ll introduce you to our daughter.”

The mention of her shift seemed to
remind her that she was, after all, a waitress, and with a quick word of excuse
she went to help the young man who was, apparently, now her intended.

“That was a very nice dinner.
 
Thank you,” Marcus said to me as I paid
up, an hour later.
 
Two dinners,
drinks for the house, and a very large tip for the waiter cleared out the rest
of my own money.

Leaving me with just the money that
had been sent with me to buy supplies.
 
All I’d gotten so far was the lace—assuming it could still be
used.
 
I pushed the money into
Marcus’s hand.
 
“Give this to the
girl.
 
Even if you’re not going to
marry her, you have to do
something
for her.”
 
Those back in Yurt, I hoped, would
understand
,
especially if I paid them back.
 
The king paid me quarterly.
 
They wouldn’t have to wait
too
long.

I considered telling Marcus to go
straight to the girl’s house, not stopping at a tavern on the way.
 
But he was going to have to do this on
his own.

For a moment I contemplated the man
who looked so much like me, and who others said sounded like me, though in my
own ears my voice was much more firm and resonant than his.
 
How close had I come to being just like
him?
 
If the Master of the wizards’
school hadn’t taken me on as a student, I too might have ended up wandering
around the Western Kingdoms, never really living anywhere—certainly not
in Yurt—picking up jobs and money wherever I could.

Would I have been as generous with
whatever money I
had
as he seemed to be, or would I
have been more prudent with mine?
 
Would I have been as easy-going about being locked up by the municipal
guard or abruptly if briefly being turned into a seagull?
 
Would I have loved a series of different
women, rather than giving my heart only to one who did not love me?
 
But I was quite sure that I would never
have had
nearly
as many sweethearts as he did, nor, if I did,
that they would still consider me fondly after I had loved them and left them.

No one knew or cared where Marcus
was most of the time, and he seemed to like it that way.
 
But a man without a family that I was, I
myself had developed deep connections, and I would not want to break them.
 
The wizards’ school had taught me magic,
given me friends, instilled in me a drive to help humanity, and made possible
my home in Yurt.

For Marcus, the school and its
towers were just a feature of the City where he had been born.
 
He had developed by himself his own
determination not to hurt anyone, rather than always thinking of using his
abilities to help others in the context of school lessons.
 
But I could never get out of the shadow
of the school.

For that matter, neither could
Sengrim, even though he seemed to think of the school primarily as a group of
wizards who did not appreciate him properly.
 
And Elerius?
 
The school seemed always in his
thoughts—and that gave me a germ of an idea….

“Tomorrow I’ll be heading back to
Yurt,” I said to Marcus.
 
“Come by
the school before I go.
 
We should
stay in touch.”

“I’ll probably be moving on tomorrow
myself,” he said.
 
“It may be hard
to stay in touch.
 
With you off in
one inland kingdom, that nice priest in another, and me going up and down the
coast, we may seldom if ever all
be
together
again.
 
But I’ll certainly come say
good-bye, Daimbert.”
 
He
grinned.
 
“For one thing, I haven’t
had a chance yet to tell you what it was like being a seagull.
 
Did you know, when you’re a gull
yourself, it’s very easy to tell which are the females?”

XII

The Master of the school denied that
he had sent any wizard after me last night.

I sat in his office with morning
light coming in the window, hoping he would not give me an argument about going
home to Yurt.
 
Considering that
graduates of the school were usually left to get into and out of trouble by
ourselves
, he and Zahlfast had seemed unusually solicitous
for my safety.
 
I was ready to
explain that being trailed by another wizard hadn’t provided protection
anyway.
 
And the sooner I handed
over what had once been delicate lace, so that the queen and her aunt could try
salvaging it, probably the better.

The Master did not give me an
argument.
 
But I didn’t like what he
said instead.

“After you went flying off to
Caelrhon two days ago,” he said, smiling and stroking his beard, “it became
clear that it would be pointless to have another wizard delegated to protect
you.
 
Either you don’t want to be
protected, or you could protect yourself.”

“But I saw a member of the technical
magic faculty following me!”

“Probably just heading out to
dinner,” said the Master without concern.
 
“Nothing to do with you at all.
 
But the renegade wizard, the one who trapped you in the cave and
threatened you last night, we
have
identified him.”

I sat up straighter.
 
“You have?
 
Who is he?
 
Where is he?”

“It’s probably too generous to call
him a wizard,” the Master continued.
 
“Really just a magician.”

A magician, someone who knew a
little magic but not enough to become a wizard, could not have been responsible
for the powerful paralysis spell that had imprisoned me—and had come
close to imprisoning Marcus.
 
But I
nodded, waiting to hear more.

“After you came in late last evening
and told the doorkeeper what had happened, he told Elerius.
 
And, while you slept, Elerius was able
to track him.”

“But—” I started to protest,
then stopped.
 
“Go on.”

“He caught up to him, maybe fifty
miles away.
 
The magician was
fleeing, doubtless realizing his error in trying to oppose someone with your
abilities.
 
Elerius says he
recognized him, someone who had started at the school at the same time he had,
but who had been forced to drop out because he just wasn’t good enough.”

Someone who left only a year or two
would not yet have learned to fly, I thought but did not say.
 
And a disgraced former student would not
have been down in the cellars, slapping magic locks on doors.
 
I was having more and more doubts about
this “renegade.”

“I don’t know what Elerius
threatened him with,” the Master continued with a chuckle, “but I think we can
be sure that he won’t bother you again.”

“So was he responsible for the griffins?”
I managed to ask.

The Master shook his head.
 
“A partially-trained magician would not
be able to control magical creatures, much less bring them down from the land
of wild magic.
 
They must have found
their own way over the mountains and south into lands of men.
 
Zahlfast spoke on the telephone this
morning to Sengrim in Caelrhon, and he seems confident he can get them safely
home again.”

If the Master seemed satisfied, I
couldn’t contradict him.
 
“So has
Elerius gone home to his kingdom?” I asked as if casually.
 
“I really should thank him.”

“I spotted him in the library just a
little while ago.
 
He was trying to
get the librarian to agree that he could take some books away with him.”

“Well, he and I both have pressing
responsibilities as Royal Wizards,” I said vaguely.
 
“Guess I’d better finish packing.”
 
But when I left the Master’s office I
went straight to the library.

The librarian seemed to have stepped
out, but several student wizards were reading there.
 
My expression must have been grim, for
they leaped up, excusing themselves, and hurried away without even taking their
books and notes.

Elerius looked up from his own
reading and smiled blandly.
 
“Heading back to your little kingdom?
 
I trust the Master told you that that
renegade magician won’t bother you again.”

I hooked a chair with my foot and
sat down facing him, my elbows on the table.
 
“I certainly
hope
you
are not planning to kidnap either me or Marcus again,” I said in a voice much
firmer and more resonant than Marcus’s.

Elerius tilted his head in
surprise.
 
“Goodness, Daimbert, I
hope you are not imagining that
I
had anything to do with your
unfortunate treatment!
 
You have
always had a vivid imagination, it’s true.”

“It took me a while, I admit,” I
continued, trying to hold his eyes with mine, though his kept shifting
away.
 
“At first I suspected you,
then Sengrim.
 
But the answer should
have been obvious.
 
The two of you
were working together.”

He closed the book he was reading
and pulled back his lips in a smile.
 
“This
is
imaginative.
 
I mentioned to you a few days ago that Sengrim might have made a better
master of magical creatures than Titus, and from that chance remark you’ve
constructed a whole conspiracy!”