It might be nothing like my nightmare, but in some areas she still felt more strongly about Joachim than me. I pulled her tighter to avoid meeting her eyes and maybe seeing something which-I managed to persuade myself-I would not see anyway.
“But I think he might understand now,” she said, kissing the side of my face. “When he sent for me he said you were very upset and had had a nightmare that I didn’t love you.” Her voice took on a teasing note. “Since you came to him yourself for comfort and guidance, why be surprised that I respect him as much as you do?”
It was more than I deserved that Joachim had not told her that I had threatened to kill him.
“But I don’t follow your reasoning, Daimbert,” she said more seriously. “Somehow I think you’re saying that because I have tried to be a mother on my own, acting strong for Antonia’s sake no matter how hard it is to be separated from you, rejecting the easy path of tying you down with marriage, I’m being conventional?”
“It’s because you want me to behave like an ordinary, unmarried wizard, while you try to act like a virtuous, self-supporting seamstress,” I said lamely.
“It is deliberate, Daimbert,” she said quietly. “If I want Antonia to have any sort of normal childhood, I have to be above suspicion of being just one more woman who threw away her virtue-I hope you are not equating convention with morality! And I really don’t care what ‘ordinary, unmarried’ wizards do. All I want is what will make you happiest, and that is not being driven out of Yurt by your king and snubbed by your school.”
It was clearly no use to argue with her or to point out that she was not giving me the chance to make decisions for myself. And if she worried more about morality than I did- Well, wizards had never had much use for religion anyway.
Something in her comment teased out a thought about Elerius. Would he hold over me threats of revealing all to the school in order to bind me to him for purposes of his own?
But I didn’t have the time or energy to worry about him. I looked into Theodora’s amethyst eyes and managed to smile. “I guess I’d better make it up to the bishop for breaking in on him this morning by trying again to find out more about the strange magic-worker here in the city.”
IV
Theodora had not seen the Dog-Man, but I hoped to learn more from Celia. Escaping from the bishop’s palace, I crossed town to the little castle belonging to the kings of Yurt, where the royal family stayed when visiting Caelrhon. As I hoped, the duchess’s daughters were there.
Hildegarde looked irritated and bored, but Celia appeared to be experiencing intense joy. “Thank you for sending me here, Wizard,” she said, taking both my hands. “This is the chance I have long waited for, that I feared might not exist, and I would not have it but for you.”
“The chance for what?” I said, too startled to appreciate her gratitude.
“To study for the priesthood, of course,” said Celia. “I’ve been so happy that I’ve been sending pigeon-messages to all the people who have encouraged me over the years in a religious vocation.”
And these, I felt fairly certain, did not include her parents.
“She met that Dog-Man all right,” said Hildegarde, leaning against the door-jamb and cleaning her nails with a knife. “And now that the bishop has accepted him into the seminary he’s promised to come teach her in the evenings everything he learns during the day.”
Celia shot a sharp glance at her sister but said only, “I told you not to call him Dog-Man anymore. The children call him that, of course, as a sign of affection, but his real name is Cyrus.”
Cyrus. So at least now I had a name to go with the fragmentary and contradictory things about him I had learned from Theodora and the bishop.
“His religious vocation is so strong,” Celia went on eagerly, “that he spends most nights in prayer, lying before the high altar in the cathedral.”
This, I thought grudgingly, might explain why I had not been able to find him when I was here before. He wouldn’t have had to be hiding from me deliberately. In prayer, he would enter the supernatural realm of the saints and be beyond the reach of my magic. “Any particular sins he’s trying to atone for with all this penitent prayer?” I asked, half as a joke.
But Celia did not take it as a joke. “He feels terrible urges within himself,” she said in a low voice. “That-that is why he has killed innocent creatures. That is what he hopes he will overcome through penitence and through immersion in the sanctity of the seminary.”
“Does the bishop know this?” I asked in amazement.
“He-” She hesitated, then pushed on. “Cyrus may not have told His Holiness everything.”
And she already had my own authorization to act behind the bishop’s back, I thought grimly.
“But his prayers have always restored the creatures,” she said in what was probably meant to be a hopeful tone.
I didn’t like at all the idea of the duchess’s daughter spending time alone with someone with “terrible urges.” I started to forbid her, with a sharp rebuke for her lack of sense, ever to see him again.
But too many people had been telling her what she could and could not do. On the other hand, to be killed by someone I persisted in thinking of as demonic would probably be a mild, even pleasant experience compared to what the duchess would do to me if she thought I had allowed one of her daughters to be hurt. Why, if a young woman decided to find her own vocation and her own way in life, must it be by putting that life in peril?
I looked toward Hildegarde, the one sure defense Celia might have. She nodded her blond head slowly and wordlessly, meeting my eyes. She understood the situation even better than I did.
“Oh,” I said, remembering what had been happening in Yurt while the twins were gone, “you missed some excitement, Hildegarde.” I told her briefly about the warriors’ attack.
She cheered up at once. “It sounds like we’d better get back to Yurt right away,” she said to Celia. “Paul will want me there in case anything further happens. And don’t you think, Wizard, that this might be an attack on the Lady Justinia? After all, she’d just arrived when this happened. So the king may want to post a guard in her bedchamber, and it had better be another woman!”
“Do what you like,” said Celia quietly. “I shall remain here.”
“But you can’t stay here by yourself!” Hildegarde protested.
“Why not? We need not always do everything together. And if I went back to Yurt, Cyrus would not be able to teach me what he learns in seminary.”
Hildegarde fidgeted, eager to show what a woman’s strong arm could do against creatures of darkness, yet unwilling to leave her sister to the Dog-Man. “And we still haven’t showed the wizard’s niece how to deal off the bottom of the deck,” she said to her sister as an added inducement to return to Yurt. “You know you’re much better at it than I am.”
“Uh, Hildegarde, maybe the two of you can stay here just a little longer,” I said. “I’m going to find this Cyrus and talk to him myself.”
“But he won’t want to talk to a wizard,” said Celia, rising abruptly from her chair. “He has had evil experiences with wizardry. In becoming a priest, he intends to break all ties with magic.”
So had this man been at the wizards’ school along with everything else? I really did need to talk to him soon, no matter what Celia might think.
I left the little castle a few minutes later to head out of the city. Although the Romneys had denied categorically any knowledge of someone called Dog-Man, they might have information about someone named Cyrus. Both Yurt and Caelrhon were tiny kingdoms, probably unknown to most of the people in the west, much less anywhere else. If this would-be priest had come here intentionally, rather than just wandering into town by accident, he would have needed directions from someone who traveled here fairly frequently, which would mean either the merchants who brought up goods from the great City or else the Romneys.