C. Brittain: A Bad Spell in Yurt

The king, I decided as I started pulling the spells together in my mind, was actually not much heavier than a box of books. He stood looking at me with a faint smile as I concentrated, feeling my way into the magic, making sure each word of the Hidden Language was right. Slowly and gracefully, as though he were thistledown blown by the wind, he rose four inches, so that his toes just brushed the grass.

We started toward the castle gates. I walked immediately next to him, just barely not touching him. Fortunately he was silent and let me concentrate. When we reached the drawbridge I had a sudden panic, picturing myself dropping him into the moat, and with my wavering in concentration he started to slip. I found the words just in time to set him down as gently as he had been lifted up.

We walked together across the bridge and under the portcullis. Dominic was waiting for us just inside. “That was extremely enjoyable,” said the king. “Could you teach me to do that myself? Not today, but soon?”

This earned him an odd look from Dominic, who had no idea what we were talking about. “I’ve never taught anyone,” I said honestly, “but I could try.”

Back in my chambers, I spent the rest of the afternoon practicing lifting things.

After two days of loving my kingdom, I woke up the next morning hating it. Bells awakened me again. When I lifted my head I could hear hard rain on the cobblestones outside. The windows were streaked with water. My door handle rattled and didn’t open, since I had remembered to lock it last night, but there was immediately a loud and persistent knocking.

When I opened the door, the servant maid stood there, trying without great success to shield both herself and a tray with an umbrella. I took the tray and half pulled her inside. “You’re going to get soaked!” I said.

Her umbrella streamed water on my clean flagstone floor. My tea seemed to have been diluted with rain, and the napkin on the basket was damp. When I pulled back the napkin, I found not crullers but cake donuts, which I don’t like nearly as well. They weren’t even warm.

“I just wanted to make sure you were up in time for chapel,” she said without a smile or any sign of friendliness. She put the umbrella back up and started out again.

“Thank you very much!” I said quickly, wondering if everyone went to chapel every single day. “You know, I don’t even know your name.”

“Gwen, sir,” she said and was gone. I wondered as I ate if she didn’t want to associate with someone as foolish as I must have seemed after the incident with the string. The donuts tasted as though they had been made several days before.

My mood was not improved when I banged my head on the dark stair going up to the chapel and then found, when I reached the top, that the king and the chaplain were the only other two people there. I rubbed my head surreptitiously all during service. At the end, I offered the king my arm, but he shook his head.

“A prerogative of being king is that I don’t have to use those stairs.” A small door which I should have noticed before opened half-way down the inner wall of the chapel, presumably into the royal chambers. He went through it and left me alone with the chaplain.

The chaplain fixed me with his dark eyes. “Don’t think I don’t welcome you in the chapel,” he said. “But don’t come because you think you have to. I hold service every morning for anyone who needs spiritual refreshment, and the king usually comes, but the rest of the castle mostly come on Sunday.” He turned away without waiting for a response.

“In that case,” I thought, “maybe I can start sleeping later.” I would have to tell Gwen, if she was still speaking to me. I wished I could talk to some of my friends at the wizards’ school. The chaplain still seemed like the only person at the castle I could hold a conversation with, and at the moment he was to me profoundly strange and distant.

“There’s incentive for me,” I thought bitterly, groping back down the stairs. “All I need to do to talk to them is get the telephone working.”

Back in my room, I was looking glumly at the backs of my books, wondering which ones I should try next, when there was a knock. I hoped it was Gwen, come to apologize for the dry donuts, but to my surprise it was Dominic, the royal heir.

He lowered his umbrella and pulled off his coat. He looked around my study for a moment in silence, paused for a longer look at my diploma, and closed the door behind him. “May I sit down?”

“Please do,” I said, wondering what he could want.

He planted his solid body in a chair by the window, set his elbow firmly on the arm, and leaned his chin on a massive fist. “I’ve come to talk to you about your duties.”

This was it. I knew my problem wasn’t the rain or the lack of crullers. I had spent two days on vacation, but now I was going to have to start work on projects I didn’t think I could do. I tried to look intelligent and alert.

Surprisingly, he hesitated for a moment before beginning. “You’re an outsider,” he said at last-something I already knew! — ”and maybe I shouldn’t prejudice your mind with too many details. But you have to know one thing now. The king is under a spell.”

This was not at all what I had expected. “Under a spell? What sort? I talked to him in the rose garden yesterday afternoon, and he never said anything about it.”

“He wouldn’t have, of course. He doesn’t realize it himself. But the spell was one of the major reasons we decided to hire you.”

He didn’t say who we were. He looked at me from under heavy lids, waiting for my answer. “But what sort of spell? Do you know the source?”

“The king is growing old and feeble. This can only be the result of enchantment. We don’t know the source of the spell, but we want you to overcome it.”

“But that’s silly!” I protested. “Of course he’s getting weaker as he gets older. And besides,” thinking that the chaplain should hear me now, “wizardry can’t reverse natural aging.”

“The king isn’t as old as you may think. When he married the queen, only four years ago, no one thought of them as an extremely ill-matched couple.”

A sudden vision flashed into my mind of a girl married to a much older man, excited at first at the power of being queen, but soon made irritable when she discovered she was not supposed to have a mind of her own, but only be the king’s pliant companion. It shouldn’t be hard for her, on one of her trips to the City, to find an unscrupulous wizard willing to sell her a powder or spell to sicken her husband.

“It must be the queen, then,” I said. “She has bewitched him somehow.”

A low rumble began somewhere in his barrel chest and emerged in an angry, “No! It’s not the queen. It couldn’t be anyone at court. It must be a malignant influence from outside.”

I modified my vision to have the queen and the royal heir secretly in love, plotting to have the king die so that they could rule together. But I stopped myself. This made no sense. If Dominic were partially responsible for putting an evil spell on the king, he certainly wouldn’t tell me about it.

“Thank you for this warning,” I said in a deep voice. “The power of magic to conceal itself is often great, but the skill of the forewarned wizard is potent indeed.”

To my surprise, he treated this statement perfectly seriously. “Good. I knew we had done well to hire you.” He started to rise.

“But how about my other duties? The king’s talked to me about a telephone system, the constable’s said you need more magic lights-”

He waved these away with his broad hand. I was fascinated by the ruby ring on his second finger. Its setting was a gold snake supporting the jewel on its coils. It looked like a perfect ring for a wizard, and I coveted it for myself. “Those are a facade for your real work.” He pulled his coat back on, picked up his umbrella, and left without saying Goodbye.