Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 (7 page)

"Gwennie, I— I'm flabbergasted! It never occurred to me you wouldn't want to marry me!"

"It can occur to you now," she said briskly and turned on her heel.

"Now, if you will excuse me, sire, I need to return to my duties."

Paul jumped to block her path. "Gwennie, wait! You can't just leave me like this!"

"You've had your answer," she said, not meeting his eyes. "What more do you need?"

"A reason! I thought you loved me."

She kept her gaze resolutely fixed somewhere beyond his left ear. "My feelings do not come into this. As castle constable, I am sworn to uphold the best interests of Yurt, which precludes allowing its king to become a laughing-stock through such a misalliance."

"Laughing-stock! Gwennie, you can't be serious. It's— I see it now! You love somebody else! You don't want to marry above your station because you'd feel uncomfortable being a queen. It's that stable man, isn't it!"

For a second Gwennie looked as though she might laugh but changed her mind. "Do not make yourself jealous, sire, over any stable man. But you are quite correct." Her voice had turned to ice. "I have no interest in marrying someone who thinks I am aspiring 'above my station.'"

"No, Gwennie, that didn't come out right." He took her arm, and she, looking imperious, stood stiffly while waiting for him to release it. "I mean, don't all young girls dream of growing up to be queen?"

"I dreamed of becoming castle constable," she replied without any expression.

At this Paul burst out, "Damnation, Gwennie, I love you!"

"It would have helped," she said through frozen lips, "if you had mentioned that before, and not in that tone of voice."

This was becoming almost too painful to observe. I retreated back into my chambers, but I could still hear their voices clearly through the open casement, and after a few seconds I silently stepped back to where I could see them again.

"Of course I love you," Paul said defensively. He had released her arm but still blocked her path, and she made no attempt to get by. "I said so! I said the ring stood for the 'love and harmony we would share together.' I know I said that."

"Then let me remind you of what
else
you said," she answered, able to restrain her fury no longer. "I would have had to refuse you no matter how you proposed, but you've made it remarkably easy for me, sire! You told me you couldn't possibly marry your own cook's daughter. You told me the only reason you decided to marry now was because you liked children. You told me you'd always been sure that I loved you, and that all girls want to grow up to be queen. What am I
supposed
to make of this, sire?"

"Can't you even call me Paul like you usually do?" he broke in plaintively.

"I'll tell you,
sire
, what I make of this." She faced him squarely, fists on her hips, eyes flashing—both beautiful and terrifying. Paul's own features seemed to turn to stone as she spoke.

"You're comfortable as king of Yurt, so you didn't want to complicate your life with anyone new. What better way, you thought, to resolve the problem of the inheritance than to make your oldest chum serve as a brood mare as well? After all, you decided, thinking of the years I've faithfully served you and sure that I must love you—without ever asking if I did!—I would serve you in this too. An entirely reasonable fear of social stigma held you back for a while, until this 'patent of nobility' notion came to your attention. The last inconvenience out of the way for a convenient and comfortable marriage. Well, let me tell you something, sire. You say you didn't want to insult me by asking me to be your mistress. I would almost rather that you had. In that case, you might have least have felt compelled to say from the outset that you loved me!"

Her voice broke with the final words. She spun past him, and this time he made no attempt to stop her. The tears were already running down her cheeks as she fled away across the courtyard.

Paul hesitated until she was almost out of sight, then shouted,

"Gwennie! Wait!" and started after her. I could hear a door slam over on the staff's side of the castle long before he had a chance to catch up.

Several minutes later there were rapid hoof beats on the stones of the courtyard, and Paul's red roan stallion shot out of the stables, the king leaning low over his neck. For a second the hooves sounded hollow on the drawbridge, then they were gone.

I slowly shook my head. Paul would not be back until dark, if then. My own personal life had had a few disasters along the way, but the king seemed at the moment far ahead of me.

"And if the chief authority of a kingdom can't even make a cook's daughter do what he wants," I said to no one in particular, "then it's completely hopeless for wizards to try to control all of humanity."

Something caught my eye, sparkling in the sunlight out in the courtyard. I went out to take my air cart around to the stables, now that things were quiet again, and stooped to pick it up. It was the diamond ring.

Neither Paul nor Gwennie was at dinner that evening. No one said anything about overhearing them, or about seeing the king belatedly chase a weeping Gwennie toward her chambers, and there weren't even any whispers. But there was a distinct undercurrent of
knowing
. Conversation was stilted, and topics that might generally come up—such as marriage and children, jewelry, even Paul's and Gwennie's names—were not even mentioned.

"I believe," commented the queen mother as we ate, "it must be at least a month since the Princess Margareta has visited Yurt. The poor girl will think we're neglecting her. I'll call the royal court of Caelrhon this evening and invite her."

After dinner I determinedly took out the old wizard's ledger and pulled close a magic lamp. It couldn't hurt, I told myself again, to have a look at the old spells of the wizard who had taught the wizard who had trained the Master and founder of the school. The thought occurred to me as I reluctantly sat down at my desk that my time this evening would be much better spent out looking for Paul, who was still not home, but I told myself firmly that the king could take care of himself.

I started conscientiously at the beginning of the book. Dust from the crumbling cover made me sneeze as I opened it. The first page said, in letters that still twinkled like stars in spite of the passage of centuries, "I, Naurag, most wise of all wizards, record herein my experiences and my spells. Let only the stalwart of heart and most learned of mind peruse them." The handwriting was careful and clear—to me it looked like a very young man's.

The volume started off with a few weather spells, that appeared remarkably like what we still used at harvest-time, then turned to what seemed a highly improper spell, which would allow one to see inside another's clothes—if, I supposed, one still had doubts about the shape of the mayor's daughter. "This most cunning and mischievous spell have I devised myself," the long-dead wizard Naurag had written proudly at the end of it. But I should not let myself be distracted. The spell for the Dragons' Scepter should be in here somewhere.

The next several pages were blank, to be followed not by new spells but by a sort of memoir, written in a more rushed hand. "Having been most grievously maltreated, I shall bid adieu to the confines of this kingdom and cast my fate and that of my purple companion to the eddies of the air."

Purple companion? I bent closer, growing more interested in spite of myself. This purple companion, it appeared as I continued to read, was winged, and the wizard rode upon it. Naurag seemed to have had some sort of quarrel with his king, although I couldn't determine over what—all that he told me was how his enemies had conspired against him, "casting truth from them as one would a spent gourd." Gourd? I read on.

"For belike 'tis the jealousy of that magic-caster whom I drove hence which now poisons the thoughts and actions of the man I believed ere now to be my faithful lord. That one's aim is e'er bent on securing my purple companion to himself."

I knew that back in the days before the wizards' school was founded, western wizards quarreled with each other constantly, and in this case it looked as though a disagreement with another wizard had escalated until Naurag, whose ledger I now held, had been forced to flee his own kingdom. And what was this 'purple companion'?

The creature seemed as devoted to Naurag as a large dog, readily obeying the wizard's magical commands even while he was still working out the exact words to use for them, sleeping with its wings spread over him at night as they fled across the Western Kingdoms, expecting in return only a steady diet of melons and gourds.

Suddenly I realized what it must be. An air cart. Not the dead skin but the living purple flying beast from which it had originally been made. I knew that such beasts lived up in the northern land of wild magic, but I had never seen a live one. Too bad—this one sounded rather likeable.

I wondered somewhat guiltily how the two flying beasts whose skins now served as the school's air cart and mine had happened to die. I rather hoped they had lived long and happy lives, watching little flying beasts grow up around them, until, rich with experience, they had expired naturally, happy in the knowledge that even when they were gone their skins would keep on serving the men who had been their friends.

Out in the courtyard I heard the sound of hooves, then voices—King Paul, home again at last. He always took off for a miles' long run on his stallion whenever he had something to think over. In this case, I thought, turning a parchment page, his thinking was unlikely to have resulted in any satisfactory conclusions.

This part of the memoir was rather disjointed, having apparently been written at odd moments as the wizard and the flying beast fled from their enemies. The kingdoms still had the same names, and it was disconcerting to see places I knew mentioned here as being ruled by cruel kings with savage and volcanic tempers, unlike the rather peaceable lot into which we wizards had, ever since the Black Wars, shaped the lords we served.

"Having perfected the commands which my purple companion is most wont to obey, I hereby record them for the benefit of the next wizard who may essay to tame one of these creatures." The spells, written down carefully in the Hidden Language, were exactly what we still used to direct the air cart—the spells I had recently been teaching Antonia.

I sat back, chewing thoughtfully on a pencil. The castle had grown quiet around me. Was this perhaps not a real memoir at all, but something the Master had created just for me? Were references to what the kings of men could do to each other without organized wizardry to oppose them supposed to make me realize how necessary it was for someone responsible to take over the school's direction?

But I shook my head. The Master was dying, without nearly the energy to have forged an elaborate document that looked so convincingly like something eight hundred years old. Besides, he would have seen no need for such a ruse to work on my conscience—he thought I had already agreed to succeed him.

And if the spells looked familiar, I thought as I pulled the volume toward me again, it was because school spells had not been created in a vacuum. Many were in origin the spells the Master taught to the wizardry students because he himself had learned them as an apprentice, from a wizard who had in turn studied with Naurag.

But in here were spells that had never been taught, spells that were supposed to bind dragons. I found my place and kept on reading. These spells, if anyone was ever to use them again, were to be learned by me directly from Naurag.

I kept on reading long into the night, falling into bed only when my eyes began watering so badly I could no longer focus. A knock woke me what seemed only minutes later: not mysterious wizards this time, but my breakfast. "Leave it on the table," I mumbled, rolled away from the light, and went back to sleep.

When I woke several hours later, it was again to the sound of a knock. I pushed the hair out of my eyes, pulled on my dressing gown, and opened the door.

This time it was Gwennie. "I have come for your breakfast tray," she said stonily, not meeting my eyes.

"Um, I haven't quite finished yet," I said, retreating. I took a quick swallow of cold tea and bit into a regrettably stale cinnamon cruller.

"Maybe if you came back in a few minutes—"

She followed me inside. Now that I thought about it, it was curious that Gwennie should be running kitchen errands. Ever since she had become castle constable in her own right, her mother the cook had given up her plans to make Gwennie her own successor.

She slammed my door shut and showed no further interest in the tray.

"Were you listening yesterday?" she asked, low and intense.

It was clearly no use pretending ignorance. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, her fists clenched at her sides. "I'm sorry, Gwendolyn, I'm afraid I couldn't help it," I said from behind the inadequate shield of a teacup.

"My windows were open, and you and King Paul were right outside when—"

"Then let me explain something," she said in a voice of ice. "You in fact heard nothing at all. He did not speak. I did not answer. Is that clear?"

"Very much so," I said quickly, stopping myself just in time from adding, "My lady." At this point she would have considered it the gravest possible insult. "By the way," I ventured to add, "is the king around this morning? I had something I needed to ask him—on quite a different topic," I continued hastily, "than the topic which, of course, never came up in the first place."

"I understand he is still lying lazily in bed this morning," she responded loftily, already moving back toward my door. "Some plaintiffs have come to receive his judgment, and I have been forced to make them wait." And she was gone, without taking my tray.

I dipped the cruller into the rest of the tea and considered what I had learned last night. Paul had doubtless spent fruitless hours lying awake, alternately cursing Gwennie and himself, but I had actually discovered something. Spells to master dragons really might exist after all, and it was possible I could work them.