Dominic, I thought, had had the good sense to be terrified of a demon. It was at last finally clear to me why the hoped-for match between Dominic and the Lady Maria had never come about. Aside from the differences in their personalities, he would never have allied himself with someone he feared might at any time foolishly summon a demon.
“So I had to do it myself. I made the star, just like the wizard had, and I repeated the spell.”
“And the little man appeared,” I said through frozen lips.
“And I told him I wanted to see time run backwards, but not just as a silly trick. That is, I-”
“You asked to become younger,” I said, because she seemed to be having trouble saying it herself.
She nodded, grateful for my understanding. “And the man explained that I didn’t really want time to run backwards, as that would just make everything exactly as it had been years ago, but that instead I wanted to get some extra youth.”
“And he said he could do it.”
“First, though, he said I had to rub out the star, so he could move about more easily. When I did it, he grew so that he was the size of a normal man, and his skin wasn’t red anymore. He said he had to find the extra years for me.”
“And he found them.”
When the old wizard had discovered the demon, I thought, Dominic had offered to help him catch it. He had managed to keep secret the Lady Maria’s responsibility for summoning it, but he had had more problem with me, since I was too obtuse even to realize what was happening in Yurt. The old wizard had retired, convinced that the demon was locked safely away, and Dominic had no reason to think it had escaped, but he could tell that the king was continuing to grow weaker. He would have had to admit his own original involvement to tell me openly that there was a demon in the castle, but he certainly hoped I would be able to overcome its evil magic, prompted by his hints.
The Lady Maria looked at me with eyes that were suddenly brimming with tears. “He found some extra youth for me for a few years. But when I talked to him most recently, he said that it was too late for that-”
I had been a fool since the day I arrived at Yurt. It should have been obvious at once where the demon had gotten the extra years he had given the Lady Maria. He had taken them from the king.
When the saints had intervened and saved the king from death, her years had been reclaimed from her, and the demon couldn’t get them back again. This was when she had decided to ask for something entirely different. This was when she had told the demon she wanted to see a dragon.
“You fibbed to me,” I said, shaking my finger at her until she giggled. “You told me no one had been in your chambers that day, when actually you were requesting things from your magic man.”
Did she realize that her “request” had nearly destroyed the castle? Since the dragon’s presence had been extremely exciting, even romantic, and since, as it turned out, no one had been killed and the damage to the castle all seemed reparable, she was just delighted to have been able to see a real dragon.
“Maybe he couldn’t make me younger anymore after he had been back in that star,” she said thoughtfully.
“Was that just before I arrived?”
“It was, actually,” she said, surprised. “The old wizard had left two days earlier, and the constable told us you were coming at the end of the week. It was a very strange experience. I hope you won’t think I imagined it.”
“Wizards are used to strange experiences,” I said encouragingly.
“It was late at night, and I’d been in bed, so at first I thought it must be a dream, except that my bathrobe was all damp from the rain, so I knew it couldn’t be a dream.”
“Go on,” I urged her when she seemed to be stopping.
“As I say, I was lying in bed. And then I heard his voice, almost inside my brain. He was calling me. You reminded me of it, that time you spoke inside my brain with the telephones. He told me to come stand at the base of the north tower, and so I put on my bathrobe and I did.”
“But the door was locked,” I provided.
“That’s when the second strange thing happened,” she said. “I started rising into the air. At first I was terribly frightened, but then I decided it was only a dream and that I should enjoy it. When I got up to the top, I was able to look in the window and see my man in there. He’d been shrunk back down, and he was caught in the star.”
“So what did you do?”
“I kicked out the glass in the window-I’d put on my riding boots when I left my room, because of the rain.”
So much, I thought, for the magic locks on the casement latches.
“And I went inside and talked to him. There was one little flow of rain water that had cut across the chalk lines, but he said he needed me to rub it all out so he could help me again. So I did, and then, maybe he put me to sleep, but the next thing I remember it was morning and I was back in my own bed. That’s why I thought it was a dream at first.”
“You’ve only had the one magic man here in the castle, haven’t you?” I said as casually as I could.
“Well, yes.” There was something in the way she said it that made me break out all over in a cold sweat.
“You didn’t send for any others who might be able to find some extra years for you?”
“Well, I tried, early this fall,” she said, looking at me accusingly. “At first when I freed him from the star everything seemed fine, but then it seemed he couldn’t make me young anymore. You’d promised to teach me magic spells, so I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to rely on that man-and, frankly, sometimes he made me feel a little, well, funny. But then you just gave me all that grammar. That’s why I decided I would have to call on a different magic man.”
“And did you?” I managed to croak, even though my tongue felt paralyzed. If there were two-or even more-demons in Yurt, we were all moving to the City and never going back.
“No,” she said, with the tears of frustration at the edge of her eyes. “I tried, but it’s been three years since I said the spell, and I could only get part way through it.”
I said the best prayer of thanksgiving that I knew.
But there was something else, even more important, that she probably did not know and which I myself had only just admitted. Sweet, silly, pretty Lady Maria, sitting comfortably in her chair by the fire, wearing the white silk shawl I had given her for Christmas, had sold her soul to the devil.
It felt like the middle of the night, though I knew it was much earlier, as I staggered from the Lady Maria’s chambers toward my own. If she had died in her fall this afternoon, if we all had died in the dragon’s attack, she would have gone straight to hell. If the dragon had destroyed Yurt, probably some of the rest of us would have joined her in hell, including me for all I knew, but for her there could be no doubt.
In my room, with the fire blazing, I pulled out the Diplomatica Diabolica with nerveless fingers. As I read, the duchess’s castle grew silent around me. The only sounds were the crackling of the fire and my own heartbeat, which grew louder and louder in my ears as night wore on. As the first morning light came in the window, I closed the book and tried to stretch the knots from my shoulders. I knew what I had to do and just hoped I knew how to do it.
IV
I swung the door of the chaplains’ room open with a bang. The duchess’s chaplain, whose room this actually was, had been on the point of opening it from the inside, and he jumped back, startled.
“Excuse me,” I said, as calmly as I could. He went past me with a concerned look and hurried down the corridor.