C. Brittain - Daughter of Magic

“She loves you, Daimbert,” Theodora said in reassurance. “She’s just more used to women. That’s why I’m so glad you’re having a chance to be together.”

If we ever did. I realized Antonia, happy to sit on my lap but not laughing at my most amusing illusions, had the same inner private reserve as her mother.

“And what did the bishop need?” Theodora continued. She kissed the corner of my cheek. “This is probably not what a wizard likes to hear, but one of the best side-benefits of knowing you has been the opportunity to become, at least a little bit, friends with a bishop.”

She laughed as she spoke, but there was an emotional note to her voice when she mentioned Joachim that sounded as though she rated him more highly than any wizard. But I dismissed this thought. I was just being irritable because I was worried about the purported miracle-worker.

“There’s someone working magic-or something-here in Caelrhon,” I said abruptly. “The children call him the Dog-Man. Do you know him?”

Theodora turned in the circle of my arm to look at me. It was full dark outside now, and the lamp made wavering points of light in her eyes. “It’s not any magic I know,” she said quietly.

I pulled her closer. “Then you’ve met him? Is he really working miracles? Or-” and found I couldn’t say it.

She shook her head, her hair moving against my beard. “I don’t know what he’s doing. I’ve not met him in person, only sensed his mind. There’s something about him that is, well-not right. I can’t say that he’s evil, but there is nothing about him like the force of good that flows from the bishop.”

Joachim again. I kept silent.

“A lot of the children in the neighborhood have made something of a pet of him. I’ve gotten to know the children well through Antonia, and they talk to me about him. He’d been living in a little shack on the docks, made from scrap lumber, and the children bring him food from home. I told Antonia I didn’t want her down there. I don’t think she’s disobeyed me yet…. That was part of the reason I wanted her in Yurt now. But I couldn’t tell you that yesterday, with her standing right there.”

This sounded to me too like an excellent reason to have Antonia in Yurt. The castle had had a giant pentagram put around it by my predecessor as Royal Wizard. Unless someone had moved the stones over the years, no demon would want to enter the castle because he would be unable to leave again. “I tried without success to find the man. No one has seen him since yesterday.”

Theodora went still a moment, slipping her mind away into her own magic. “I don’t find him either,” she said then. “Maybe he’s gone.”

That was fine with me. Maybe he’d left Caelrhon for a kingdom where the Royal Wizard would spot him before the local bishop did, where no one would be too squeamish to call for a demonology expert. “Then I don’t have to worry about him anymore,” I said, finding Theodora’s lips. “Say! You know you’re always worried that Antonia will wake up-”

She laughed, pushing me away with hands on my chest. “I’ll kiss you as much as you like, as loudly as you like-but wouldn’t that be disgusting, to make big smacking kisses just because no one is here to overhear them? — but that’s it. Remember our agreement.”

I leaned back, exasperated. “I don’t remember making an agreement that would last this long.”

“Yes, you do,” she said teasingly, though I was not about to be teased back into good humor over this. “I know the bishop explained it to you. We have sinned, been penitent, and been forgiven, but that means we must be even more careful. We are not married, and we cannot act as though we were.”

“So we made one mistake,” I said in irritation, “one big mistake six years ago, and now it’s going to ruin the rest of our lives?”

“We have Antonia,” she said mildly. “I would not call her the ruin of our lives. She is rather a reason for us to be supremely grateful.”

“And do whatever the bishop tells us,” I grumbled. Maybe I should have been angry with Joachim, but this all seemed like Theodora’s fault. “Since when does a witch pay so much attention to a Church that considers all magic dangerous- especially women’s magic?”

“Since when does a wizard come racing to town the instant a bishop telephones him?” she shot back.

But then she looked at me, gave a smile that brought out the dimple in her cheek, and took me by the ears and kissed me on the eyelids. “Don’t be angry, Daimbert. I get so little chance to see you. I want to talk to you about what’s happening in Yurt. Let me make us some tea.”

She was right, I thought, watching her light the fire for the water and forcing myself to stop frowning. I didn’t want to waste this time with her by arguing. The easiest answer, of course, would have been to get married, but I no longer dared ask her. She had always refused, always would refuse, saying it would be the ruin of my wizardry career. But sometimes, like now, I wondered if that was the real reason. As fond as she was of me, I apparently did not “excite her to the very core of her being,” or whatever it was King Paul was waiting for: she herself did not want to marry me.

“Are you sure there isn’t somebody else?” I asked, trying to make it sound like a joke and not succeeding.

“Of course not,” she said briskly, getting out cups. “I promised you years ago that you would be the only one.”

When people got married, I thought gloomily, they promised to forsake all others and cleave only to each other. Theodora seemed happy with the first half of that promise but not the second. I was a wizard, with powers supposedly so great that the only reason I served a king rather than being a ruler of men myself was the service tradition of institutionalized magic. Yet here I was stymied by a witch and a five-year-old girl.

“A flying creature is coming,” Antonia told me calmly. She had tugged open the door of my chambers, looking in from the sunlit courtyard to where I was finishing a late breakfast back home in Yurt. “Do you think it’s a dragon?”

I was past her and out into the courtyard in a second. Something small and dark, flying much too fast to be a cloud, approached from the south. I snatched her up as I tried to put a far-seeing spell together. “I always wanted to see a real dragon,” she said.

But it was not a dragon. It was a flying carpet.

Dark red with tasseled corners, it flew purposefully toward the castle, hesitated and rotated a moment overhead, then plunged down to land in the middle of the courtyard. On it, feet shackled together, stood a young elephant. As I watched in amazement it raised its trunk and trumpeted, the sound echoing from the cobblestones.

But the elephant was not all the carpet carried. A person was also seated on it, surrounded by boxes and parcels that tumbled off as the carpet came to a stop.

“In the name of all-merciful God,” came a high woman’s voice, “is this at last the kingdom of Yurt, or have I passed quite beyond the fringes of the civilized world?”

I stepped forward cautiously. I had only ever seen elephants once before, years ago on our quest to the East. The woman rose with a swirl of black hair that reached to her waist. “This is indeed the kingdom of Yurt,” I said, keeping an eye on the animal.

Antonia, who had been staring in as much astonishment as I, elbowed me as though to remind me of better manners. “Welcome to Yurt!” she called out. In a confidential undertone she added, “That’s an elephant, Wizard. Mother showed me a picture of one in a book. They aren’t dangerous unless they step on you.”