She smiled. “I don’t mind about my dress.” I wondered if this was because it was the dress that was the same color as the duchess’s dress. “We’ll order you a new suit at once. I can see we’ll have to order quite a few things in the next few days. Do you want midnight blue again, or would you prefer a different color?’
“One just like this would be exactly right.”
I lowered myself into a chair, feeling more bruised than I had originally thought. The king was back and talking to the constable about arranging for repairs.
“Come here, Master,” I called to the old wizard, and he came toward me, frowning. He had the calico cat in his arms, but all the cat’s fur was standing on end and its eyes were wild. “I want to thank you for saving my life. I can’t thank you for saving the castle, but only because it’s not my castle.”
“At least you took advantage of what little magic you knew,” he said grumpily.
“Also I wanted to ask you something,” I said, starting to feel more cheerful. If the king did not think Yurt was irredeemably destroyed, maybe it had not been. After all, he had already been out to make sure his rose garden had not suffered. “I’ve heard that being bathed in dragon’s blood makes one’s skin harder than steel. Is this true?’
The queen excused herself to talk to the cook, who was showing no signs of starting dinner.
The wizard snorted. “I don’t know what kind of old witch’s story they tell you at that school, but all dragon blood does is make you stink. You’d better take a bath. And that reminds me. You there!” to the constable. “You’d better get the dragon’s body cut up and dragged away from the castle right away. It will start rotting in a few hours, and the castle will become unbearable.”
The constable sent out some of the young men with saws. I decided I was enough of a wounded hero not to have to join in.
“I’m going to take a bath right away, Master,” I said. “But before I do, I want to talk to you about that dragon.”
“I’d warned you what all this loose wizardry would come to.”
The hubbub of the hall was all down at the far end, and no one was near us. “That dragon didn’t just come by itself. That dragon was summoned.”
He thought about this for a moment in silence. “So who do you think summoned it? You’re not accusing me, are you?”
“No. But I think you know far more about what’s happened in Yurt in the last three years than you’ve told me, and I think the dragon’s coming is part of that. Did you know that your magic locks were gone from the north tower?”
“I found out this morning. Went out to inspect them while you were flirting with the duchess after breakfast.”
So much for my efforts to keep an eye on the wizard!
“Why didn’t you tell me, young whipper-snapper? Were they just broken today?”
“They’ve been gone since I first arrived. I didn’t dare tell you because I was afraid you’d blame me, and you’d said there was nothing up in the tower anyway. Master, you’ve got to tell me. What’s escaped from the tower?”
For a minute I was afraid he would say nothing. He kept patting the cat, which was gradually calming down, although it clearly did not like the smell of blood on me. At last he said, “Well, you’re Royal Wizard of Yurt now, and I’m retired, so it’s your problem.” And he told me.
Even though I had been expecting this, my veins turned to ice. I would have to get into a hot bath before I died, but I knew I would never have another chance to talk like this to the old wizard. “How long has it been here?”
“I first found it three years ago.”
I decided it would be undiplomatic to remind the old wizard that he had categorically denied any supernatural presence in the castle while he was Royal Wizard.
“I don’t know who summoned it to Yurt in the first place,” he continued, “but finding it wasn’t very difficult, once it arrived. The old chaplain, this one’s predecessor, found it too. He blamed me for it, even though I’d never imagined to myself that the powers of darkness were romantic-not like you!”
I nodded, not daring to protest.
“Interfering old busy-body! He tried to catch it himself, with his bell and candle. Pretty ineffective, I thought. No wonder it killed him.”
He must have seen the horror on my face, even though his eyes were directed toward the cat, for he snorted. “I’m sure the old priest died with his soul ‘intact,’ if that’s what you and your friend the young chaplain are worried about. He was chasing it around the parapets, and he fell off. Nobody knew how he’d fallen, except for me, and I didn’t see any reason to say. Terrible accident, they all agreed. You can imagine I didn’t tell that young priest anything about it!”
“But you caught it?” I said in a low voice, as he stopped and did not start again.
“It took me close to three years. It took all the magic I knew, and then some. But I finally cornered it in my study and put the binding spells on it. It had been out far too long for me to send it back, but at least I could bind it so it couldn’t move.”
Except that it had moved.
“I locked the tower so the person who had summoned it couldn’t get in to free it, and, just in case it did break loose, I put separate spells around the outside of the castle, so it couldn’t cross the moat.”
“Did Dominic know about this?”
The old wizard glanced at me sideways. “How did you guess that? He did. I needed his help, near the end. He’s not the person I would have chosen, but he’d somehow already found out about it. He was the one who did the drawing while I held it down with my spells.”
The cat was almost asleep on the wizard’s lap now. “We caught it just in time, too. I was afraid black magic was starting to kill the king, so I was pleased to see him so much better when I arrived yesterday. Maybe he’s hoping for that baby boy again!”
The wizard stood up abruptly, scooped up the startled cat, and settled it on his shoulder. “Well, young wizard, it’s your castle and your problem now. Capturing it once wore me out so thoroughly I decided to retire at once. Catching it again is the job for a youngster with fancy magic from the City.”
He started stumping toward the door.
“Where are you going?” said the king. “You can’t be leaving already! We haven’t even had Christmas dinner!”
“I’d rather eat my vegetables at peace in the woods than eat a fancy dinner to the smell of dragon’s blood!”
I turned toward my own chambers, in search of a bath, without waiting to see the end of the argument, for I already knew how it would end. At least I was pleased that the old wizard’s hand, with which he was gesturing, wore the king’s Christmas ring.
Lying in the bathtub, completely submerged except for my face, I could feel my bruised muscles starting to relax, but I did not dare relax too much. The old wizard had clearly guessed more than he had told me. But even he might not know why the dragon had appeared today.
As long as I stayed in the tub, I imagined, I would not have to deal with this. After all, evil had been loose in the castle for three years, without permanent damage to Yurt, so maybe another three years wouldn’t matter much either.
But I could not persuade myself of this, because I knew it was not true. The old wizard had known that too, and that was why he had returned abruptly to the forest, before I could enlist his aid.
The bath water was cold. I surged up and out of the tub, reaching for a towel. This was my kingdom and my problem.
III
The hall, with its fireplace destroyed, was unusable for dinner, but the kitchen was just about big enough to squeeze in the tables, and it was certainly warm enough. Pushed companionably close together, so that the smell of singed hair was all around us, we ate oyster stew, roast beef, and plum pudding.
Several of the kitchen maids had broken down completely and were unable to help, and the cook’s own stability had lapses, so dinner was served in a leisurely manner, with pauses between courses while the next course was prepared. The queen, the Lady Maria, and several of the other ladies helped, all of them considering it quite a joke.