“I know him so well,” Gwennie said bitterly. “He likes me, he trusts my work as his constable, he remembers fondly the times we used to play together as children. If he found me in his bed in the middle of the night, he would be a little surprised, but I know I would quickly be able to find ways to arouse his interest-even having no experience of my own with men. I could even make him believe he was in love with me.”
Although I was quite sure this was not the sort of topic on which royal wizards were supposed to give advice, and although I didn’t like to think that my king could be so easily manipulated by a woman, I said nothing. At the moment Paul seemed ready to leap to do whatever Justinia might suggest to him, and my own situation was hardly an example of male independence and mastery.
“But what good would that do?” Gwennie continued. “If he did not come to love me by himself, with no help from me, it would not be real love. And,” she paused, gulped once, and continued, “and that he could never do, and I as constable of this castle would never allow. He would be the laughing-stock of all the neighboring kingdoms if he took a cook’s daughter as his wife, and what purpose would there be in becoming his concubine?”
It might temporarily take her misery away, I thought to myself, but even I recognized that would only be temporary.
“If he got me with child,” she continued, speaking fast now, her voice trembling on the edge of tears, “I know him well enough to be certain that he would not cast me out.”
She seemed to have thought it all through remarkably well for someone who had summarily rejected this option.
“He would find a place for me to continue to live in Yurt, and our son, if we had a son, would be brought up as a pet of the castle, well-trained and well-educated to serve as a constable or even a knight in some other kingdom, but he could never inherit the throne.”
Like Elerius? I wondered.
“Our daughter, if we had a daughter, would be well provided with a dowry to marry some wealthy merchant-even a petty castellan. But any children would be marked all their lives with the stigma of illegitimacy, and he would never truly consider them his.”
I was glad it was growing too dark for her to see my face. I thought of my “niece” asleep in Gwennie’s room. As she grew up, what stigma would she feel marked her, and would she come to believe I did not think of her as truly mine?
Gwennie had stopped speaking and seemed to be waiting for me to say something. “At least the Lady Justinia seems to have no plans to become queen of Yurt,” I suggested tentatively.
“And why not?” Gwennie burst out. “Does she think an eastern governor’s granddaughter too fine for the king of a small western kingdom? Where does she think she will find a better man, one braver or more true, more open and generous, or capable of greater love? If she’s as shallow as she seems, doesn’t she even realize she won’t find a man more handsome?”
Since this so completely contradicted everything she had said before, I decided to remain silent.
In a moment I heard the faint sound of a suppressed sob next to me. Gwennie rose abruptly. “Good-night, Wizard,” she said unsteadily. “Thank you for listening.”
“Good-night, Gwendolyn,” I said as her room door shut. I had always liked to think that as a wizard I was enough at the fringes of society’s strictures that they did not affect me. But I was affected if the young people I loved and served, whether children of king, duchess, or castle constable, could not become the individuals they wanted to be because of the expectations and silent rules that hedged them in. And in Antonia it touched me even more deeply and personally.
III
I woke up all at once, staring around in the dark. It was only a dream, I tried to reassure myself, nothing but a dream, but the scene was still more vivid than my own moonlit chambers. I had been in the bishop’s bedchamber only once, years before, back when the former bishop was still alive though very ill. But as I forced myself to settle back down and close my eyes again I could see that room clearly, the candles shining on the wood-paneled walls and on the brilliant red coverlets on the bed.
Emerging from the coverlets in the image before me were two heads above two sets of naked shoulders. Their faces were hidden, their mouths and chests pressed close together. One head had black hair streaked with gray, the other tumbled nut-brown curls. I didn’t need to see their faces.
A dream meant nothing, I tried to reassure myself, but found myself unwilling to be reassured. Absolute conviction did not respond well to reason. Suppose the dream did have meaning? Suppose my sleeping mind had provided me with an explanation my conscious mind rejected?
I kicked back the blankets, groped for some clothes, and banged the door shut on Elerius’s sleepy questions as I went out to fly furiously through the night toward the cathedral city.
I pushed past the bishop’s startled servants into his study and slammed the door behind me. He had been reading at his desk after breakfast, but he put his book down at once and looked up.
He’s pretending he doesn’t even realize there’s something wrong, I thought with the fury that had been building all during the long flight from Yurt. I supported myself with a hand against the wall and glared at him. He would learn now that even a bishop cannot trifle with a wizard.
“Joachim, you have been my friend for twenty-five years. We’ve both saved each other’s lives. I love you as the brother I never had. But now I must kill you.”
It sounded ridiculous as soon as I said it, but to his eternal credit he did not laugh, which would have been my own reaction. Nor did he do any of the other things I had expected. He did not shout for help, or leap for the door or the window, or drop to his knees to beg for his life.
Instead he turned his enormous dark eyes toward me, but disconcertingly not quite toward me. In a second I realized he was looking at the crucifix on the wall past my shoulder.
Murderous jealousy, I thought with a belated return of the good sense that had eluded me for hours, would have been more appropriate in a boy thirty years younger. Wizards are bound by iron oaths to help mankind, not to kill them, not even false friends who hide their philandering under a cloak of religion. But I had gone too far to back down now, I thought, clenching my jaw. Nothing the bishop could say or do would stop me now.
But then his eyes calmly met mine. He took a deep breath and turned empty hands palms up. “If you must, then you must. I forgive you and shall bless you as I die.”
Dear God. My knees were suddenly so weak I could scarcely stand. I leaned back against the wall and put a hand over my eyes. If he had tried to run, I would have paralyzed him with a quick spell. If he had tried desperately to plead for mercy, I would have mocked him to his face. If he had screamed for his attendants, I would have blasted them with magic fire. But by doing none of these things, by surrendering at once, he had unmanned me completely.
He reached past me to turn the key in the door, locking us in together. “Before you kill me,” he asked mildly, “could you tell me why?”
Even the wall would no longer support me. Exhaustion and failure hit me together. I found myself on my knees, my face resting on the polished wood of the bishop’s desk, unable to speak and scarcely to breathe for fear I would start sobbing. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do anything-not because I had finally remembered the responsibilities that come with wizardry’s power, but because my will to act was gone. He had taken Theodora from me and I could not get revenge, could not demand her return, could not even threaten him. In a minute I felt a hand stroking my hair.