C. Brittain - A Bad Spell in Yurt

“Sir, could I speak with you?” she said somewhat timidly.

“Of course!” I said, motioning her to a chair. Gwen hadn’t seemed to want to talk to me since the first days I had been in Yurt. She now seemed subdued, not at all inclined to laugh at me. Maybe seeing me gaping at the queen had had the salutary effect of making her jealous.

Her first words destroyed any hope I might have had in that direction. “Sir, do wizards make love potions?”

“Love potions! My dear, why would anyone so charming as yourself need a love potion?” I realized I sounded as though I were her uncle and about forty years older than she was, but I couldn’t think of what else to say.

She ignored the compliment if she even noticed it. “No, I don’t need a love potion myself. But I’m afraid Jon is going to use one on me.”

“Jon?”

“You know him. He’s one of the trumpeters, and he also does the glass-blowing. He made you your glass telephones.”

“He does very good work, too,” I said, wondering why she would need a love potion used on her. “He seems a very nice young man.” Now I was sounding like an uncle again, trying to persuade the coy niece to accept her gallant suitor.

“I like him, sir, I really like him a lot. But he wants to get married, and I’m not sure I’m ready. Maybe not ready to marry anybody, and certainly not to marry him. He gets so jealous! Can you imagine, when you first came he even was jealous of you? He made me promise not to speak more to you than absolutely necessary.”

This, of course, was devastating. At first I had thought someone had warned her against me, and had speculated whether this might have something to do with the strangely distant yet evil touch I felt in the castle. Then I had decided she had had to restrain her affections before her heart broke. And now it seemed it was all due to a jealous glass-blower, who she thought should have known better than possibly to be jealous of me!

“I guess I’m breaking my promise talking to you now, but I really do feel I have to.”

“If you’re worried he’ll use a love potion to make you marry him,” I said with as much dignity as I could, “where do you think he’ll get it?”

“At first, of course, I was worried he’d get it from you, that he might even have asked you for it the day he blew that glass for you. But a month has gone by, and I know he hasn’t tried to slip me a potion yet, and I haven’t seen him talking to you again, except a few words in front of a lot of other people.”

“I don’t make love potions,” I said honestly. “That’s not something they teach us in the wizards’ school. That’s more something for magic-workers at carnivals than real wizards.”

“I think the old wizard, your predecessor, might have made love potions.”

This was entirely possible, but I didn’t say so. “I don’t, at any rate, so you need fear nothing from me.”

“But he might get it somewhere else, then, at a carnival, or even from the old wizard. How can I tell if he’s put it in my food?”

A good question, and the same question I was wondering about the king. A wizard can recognize another wizard at once, but since magic is a natural force, someone simply carrying a magic potion is not particularly obvious. If someone could poison the king, then Jon could try to make Gwen love him.

“Don’t ever eat or drink alone with him,” I said, which was not a particularly useful answer, but was all I could think of. “He wouldn’t mind taking the love potion himself, since he’s already in love with you, but I don’t think he’d dare have anyone else fall in love with him. ” Gwen looked at me skeptically, as though disappointed that such obvious advice was all I could give. “And smell your food,” I said. “Love potions are made of herbs and roots and usually smell rather nasty.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, rising and taking my now-empty tray.

“Thank you for the crullers!” I called after her. “They were delicious.”

A little later that morning, I sat with the Lady Maria in my outer chamber, the curtains drawn, and the telephone instruments before us. I didn’t really need her for what I was trying, but after what I had said at dinner I felt I ought to include her. Besides, she had been talking to Dominic in the great hall when I went to find her, and he had given me an almost furious look when I interrupted and asked her to join me. If Dominic had turned against me, I wanted him as uncomfortable as possible.

“Now keep perfectly silent while I work this spell,” I said. “I’m trying something different this time. It’s a far-seeing spell, and extremely difficult. They never even taught it to us at the wizards’ school.” They might have taught some of the other students, but they most certainly had never taught me. “I’m going to try to attach it to the telephone.”

The Lady Maria did as she was bid, even breathing virtually without a sound, as I checked the spell one last time in the book, put it away, and closed my eyes to begin. The heavy syllables of the Hidden Language rolled from my tongue. It was a long spell.

I opened my eyes and looked at my glass telephone in the dim light of the room. It looked exactly the same. I was about to try speaking a name to it, to see if it might respond, when I was almost knocked from my chair by the surprise of another voice speaking the Hidden Language.

It was the Lady Maria. Her eyes closed, she was resting her hands on the telephone instrument in front of her and repeating the long spell I had just given, word for word.

In ten minutes, at the last syllable, she opened her eyes and gave me a saucy look that Gwen could not have equalled. “There! You probably didn’t think I could work magic.”

“But can you?” I cried, flaggergasted. I hadn’t thought anyone could say a spell, except one of the very simple ones, without actually learning the Hidden Language, knowing what the words meant as well as how they were pronounced. And I was quite sure there was no way to learn the Language other than a lengthy apprenticeship or years in the wizards’ school.

“If your spell works, mine should too,” she said complacently. “I just said everything you’d said, the same way you said it.”

“Let’s try yours, then,” I said and pulled the curtain open. I picked up the receiver and spoke the name attached to the telephone at the wizards’ school in the City.

Very faintly, from the receiver, I could hear a distant ringing. Triumph at last! I thought, but dared say nothing. I held the receiver so Maria could hear as well. She leaned close to me, her hair brushing my cheek.

“Look!” she said with indrawn breath. The glass base of the telephone had lit up. Inside was a miniature but very real scene, a room at the wizards’ school, a telephone sitting on a table, and one of the young wizards, one I knew but not well, picking up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Hello!” I cried. “Can you hear me?”

“Hello?” somewhat more dubiously. “Is anyone there?”

The tiny figure inside the telephone base turned his head, as though talking to someone else. “No, I can’t hear anyone. It’s just silent.”

“We’re here! We’re here! Hello?” I shouted.

“Maybe someone’s idea of a joke.” We watched his hand move to replace the receiver, and then our telephone went blank.

“We did it!” said Maria, giving me a hard hug that startled me so much that I couldn’t answer at once. “We made the telephones work!”

“In fact, we didn’t,” I said, trying to catch my breath.

“Let me try this time.” Before I could say anything she had picked up the receiver and spoken another name. Again I could hear the faint sound of ringing. Then, once again, the telephone base lit up with a miniature scene within it. This time, it was a liveried servant picking up the receiver.