C. Brittain: A Bad Spell in Yurt

I stood up and yawned. Maybe Yurt didn’t need a complete telephone system. Maybe it would be possible just to work out a way to communicate with the City and with wherever the queen’s parents lived. I stopped in mid-yawn and thought about this. It seemed to have possibilities.

I found a piece of string that had been used to tie up my luggage and strung it between my bedroom and study. I already knew how to communicate, without speaking, to another wizard, at least if he was next to me and willing to listen to the thoughts I sent him. Therefore it should be possible to attach a communications spell to a string. An object with a spell attached became a magic object, and anyone could operate it.

“It’s like invisibility,” I said to myself cheerfully. A ring of invisibility will always work, even though invisibility is one of the harder spells. For some reason, even though it is straightforward to make the empty air take on solidity in illusions, it is very hard to make solidity look empty. There is probably a good theoretical explanation, but I have never paid much attention to theory, preferring the practical.

I paused to see how well I could make myself invisible. I had been working on the spells intermittently for almost a year now. Concentrating hard, breaking off pieces of the flow of magic and controlling them with the Hidden Language, I watched my feet disappear, first the left one, then the right one. At this point, however, things stopped. My knees remained obstinately visible. I snapped my fingers in disgust and my feet came back. Just last week I had made it almost all the way up my thighs.

“But I’m not trying to make a ring of invisibility anyway,” I told myself firmly. “I’m making a communications string.” I put both hands on the string and concentrated on it, thinking of how one reaches out, slides just the corner of one’s mind into the stream of magic while leaving most of it firmly anchored to one’s body (one of the most dangerous moments for young wizards is discovering how to slip one’s mind out without losing oneself forever). I alternated the spells that seek another mind with attachment spells, and suddenly the string stiffened and glowed pink.

I rushed out into the courtyard. Since it was Sunday, the servants were only doing necessary chores, and a number of them were now playing volleyball while the others watched and cheered. I found my own saucy servant girl, flushed and laughing after having just been replaced at the net.

“Come on,” I said, “I need your help with a magic spell.”

She looked over her shoulder at the others, said, “I’ll be back in just a minute!” and came with me, straightening her skirt. “What sort of magic spell? 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, “All powers of earth and air must obey the spells 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 really 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! All powers of earth and air!” Still laughing, she went back out to rejoin the game.

I looked at my piece of string in disgust. It was still glowing. I snapped my fingers and said the words to break the spell, 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. “All 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 excellent 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 hall, 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 portcullis was up and looked as though it had not been lowered for years. Swans were swimming peacefully in the moat.

A red brick road ran down the hill from the castle gates toward the forest below. Next to the road was a walled garden, with roses creeping over the tops of the walls. 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 smaller than the other bushes but growing vigorously. The white blooms faded to pink in the shadows of the petals. When I bent to smell it, the sweetness was almost overwhelming.

“I’m looking forward to meeting the queen,” I said, realizing that she must be substantially 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 fulfill the adolescent fantasies he had never been able to fulfill 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 silly,” 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 walled garden. I swung the gate back into place, and we stood looking down the hill 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 spells become more difficult the larger the object one is lifting,” I explained. I didn’t tell him that he was a lot larger than a wine glass. Inwardly I was wondering how, if I hadn’t been sure I could magically pick up a heavy box or an awkwardly-placed platter of meat, I was going to manage my liege lord. “We’ll take it slowly. I’ll just lift you a little way, and I’ll 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.”