The duchess came in, fresh blood stains on her cloak. “I heard the Lady Maria was thrown. Is she all right?”
“She says she is. She’s been resting this afternoon.”
“I’ll go up to see her.” I accompanied the duchess as she strode toward the stairs; I wanted to be sure myself. “You missed a great hunt, Wizard!”
The Lady Maria was awake, sitting up in bed and wearing what I was fairly sure was the frilly pink item I had seen her sewing last month. She blushed when I came in.
“This wizard worries too much,” she told the duchess with a pretty laugh. “It was just the merest fall, as both you and I have had many times.”
“I hear the boar almost smashed into you.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve especially noticed these last few months, maybe you’ll laugh at me but it’s true, I just seem unluckier away from home. Nothing bad like this ever seems to happen to me in the castle of Yurt.”
“Probably because there are very few wild boars in the castle,” said the duchess.
But this went beyond joking. For a moment I was unable to move or even breathe. I had been incredibly foolish, but I thought at last I understood it all.
“Are you going to want to come to dinner,” said the duchess, “or will you want a tray sent up?”
“Oh, I’ll come to dinner, of course!” She glanced in my direction. “In a minute, when you’re gone, I’ll get dressed and come down. I certainly will want to hear all the details of the hunt. The stratagems, the beast’s last stand, who finally thrust the spear home, the heroism of the villagers- I’m sure it will all be terribly exciting.”
“I have to wash and change myself,” said the duchess gaily. I guessed that she might have thrust in the final spear herself, but at this point I scarcely cared. “Come on, Wizard.”
As I carefully dressed in the red and black velvet suit that had been my best suit until a short period on Christmas morning, I realized that I was looking forward to dinner in the assumption it was the last meal I would ever eat on earth.
III
There were indeed tales of the hunt at dinner, which I scarcely heard. At the servants’ table, two of the kitchen maids were giggling and one was almost in tears because the cook, faced with five hundred pounds of pork to deal with, had discovered that her own best butcher knives had not come from Yurt, and she was not at all sure that the duchess’s would do.
The Lady Maria had come down with a slight limp and had a small bandage placed artfully on one cheek. She told the story of her fall several times, with embellishments, including the despair of “her knight,” who was apparently me, when he had thought she might have been killed. When the fruitcake had been served, I whispered in her ear, “Could I come see you in your chambers, my lady?”
She laughed and even blushed, though after all this time I would have expected her to realize that my intentions were strictly honorable. As the dessert tray went around a second time, she and I slipped away. I helped nurse the fire in her room back to life, and we were soon cozily settled in soft chairs.
“I don’t want you to go riding again,” I told her.
She smiled. “You’re a dear man, but you really do worry too much. Everyone who rides gets thrown sooner or later.”
“But I think you’re in special danger.”
“You’re thinking of what I told the duchess? Well, we’ll be back in the royal castle soon, and then I’ll be lucky again.”
I was afraid I knew where her “luck” came from. Since I was also fairly sure she would not answer a straightforward question, I started telling her my best guesses, in the hope that she would confirm them. “You told me once, my lady, that you’d seen time run backwards. Was that when you had recently come to Yurt, and you and Prince Dominic tried to get the old wizard to teach you some magic?”
“How did you know?” she said with a laugh.
“Oh, I just guessed,” I said cheerfully. “You know I told you time can’t run backwards, normally, so it must have been pretty powerful magic, so I’d like to hear how it worked.”
She looked at my face, to see if I was going to accuse her of anything or scold her, but she saw only an interested smile. I did not say that I had at last realized, long after I should have, that the key event that touched off the situation in Yurt four years ago was not the arrival of the queen so much as the arrival of the Lady Maria with her.
“Well, the old wizard told us to come up to his room in the tower,” she said. “It was very exciting and mysterious, because normally he would never let anyone in his chambers. He wasn’t like you that way at all.”
I decided to let this pass. It was far too late for me to become exciting and mysterious.
“And then he said a spell, a really long spell-and I knew it must be important to get every word right, because he had it written out on a piece of parchment that he looked at just before he said it.”
The wizard might want to be sure such a critical spell was said correctly, I thought, but the Lady Maria, with her ear for the Hidden Language and her total ignorance of the dangers, would have needed no such prompting.
“And you’ll never guess what appeared!”
“A demon.”
“No, silly!” She slapped at me playfully with a cushion. “First everything grew very dark, and then a man appeared, but a very tiny man, maybe only six inches tall. And you’ll never guess! His skin was bright red.”
A demon, I thought, but said nothing.
“The old wizard had drawn a complicated star on the floor, and the little man appeared right in the middle of the star.”
No wonder, I thought, that the old wizard had at first denied that the supernatural had ever been active in the castle. He would not have wanted to admit, even to me, that he had been showing off for Dominic and the Lady Maria. After all those years without an apprentice, and with nothing other than dessert illusions to occupy him….
“And then the little man asked if we wanted anything! The old wizard said we wanted a demonstration of time running backwards.”
“And did you get it?”
“Well, I thought his was a pretty silly demonstration, but he did it! We each drank a glass of water, and then, it was the strangest thing, the water was coming back up our throats and into our glasses, and then we had to drink it again. And even when we poured the water on the floor, the little man made it run back up into the glass!”
A demon, firmly within the pentagram, will, if asked correctly, perform a few very basic tricks. I personally thought even the trick with the glass of water might have been skirting the danger-line; at school they had sent the demon back as soon as it appeared, without asking anything at all. A demon may be willing to make a brief demonstration of its power for free, but very soon it will be demanding payment in human souls.
“And what happened next?”
“That was actually it. I’d been hoping that maybe I could ask it for something, and I was certainly planning to ask for something better than a trick with glasses! But the old wizard said some words, really quickly, and it was gone, and he rubbed out the star.”
“And what happened next?”
“Nothing at all,” she said complacently.
Since I knew this wasn’t true, I took a teasing tone. “Well, I know something else happened. You decided to try the spell yourself, didn’t you! You can’t hide your secrets from wizards!”
Making jokes and coy statements was the last thing I felt like at the moment, but it worked. She laughed. “I should have known you’d guess it sooner or later. After all, you saw me repeat your spell with the telephones! By the way-did you ever get them working?”
“No,” I said, refusing to let her distract me. “Go on about how you summoned the little man yourself.”
She giggled. “Do I really have to tell you? Well, since you’ve already guessed most of it, maybe I do, though it’s actually rather silly. I’d asked Dominic, of course, if he wanted to help me, but he seems to have turned against magic for some foolish reason, and he didn’t want anything more to do with it.”