“Has he finally learned it?” Mama exclaimed. “Thank Heaven!”
Alisande turned to her, startled, then laughed gaily and caught her hands. “I shall thank you, too, for I would not have him if it were not for you. But I must ask you to leave me now, for I must tend to affairs of state.”
“Oh, of course!” Mama said, and stepped away to stand beside her son.
“If you don’t mind, Your Majesty, I’ll show them to their suite,” Matt said.
“Of course, Lord Wizard.”
Mama and Papa both turned to stare at Matt.
“There’s a herald listening,” Matt muttered out of the corner of his mouth. He bowed and stepped to the door, then out into the hallway. Mama and Papa followed. They passed a very weary-looking herald, still beating the dust from his clothes with his hat. Both parents glanced at him as the sentries ushered him into the solar, then turned to pounce on their son. “Is this real?” Papa demanded.
“Totally,” Matt assured him, but frowned and nodded toward the guards. “Let’s get you to your suite first, though, okay?”
“It is next to the nursery, Lord Wizard,” the guard told him.
His parents glared a question. Matt ignored them. “Thank you, Sergeant.”
The nursery… the sleeping part, anyway… was down at the end of the hallway. Matt turned to the door beside it, on the left.
“How do you know which one it is?” Mama asked.
“Because Alisande’s bedroom is the door to the right,” Matt explained.
“Alisande’s bedroom?” Mama exclaimed. “You do not sleep together?”
Matt gave her a sunny smile. “More often than not, Mama… but I have the bedroom next to hers. It comes in handy for changing clothes.”
Mama stared, then smiled, reassured.
Matt opened the door and bowed them in. “Welcome to your new home.”
“Home!” Mama bustled in. “Well, we certainly can’t stay that long… Oh!”
The center of the room was filled with a high stack of boxes.
“I see the chamberlain has been his usual efficient self,” Matt said.
Papa stepped in, staring about him. The room was paneled in golden wood, with broad windows that looked out onto the courtyard. Heavy draperies hung to either side, opposite a large tapestry of a maiden and a minstrel.
“But this is luxury!” Mama protested.
“Then you’re finally getting what you deserve,” Matt replied.
“Where do we sleep?”
Matt pointed. “That door in the west wall.”
Both parents stepped to the doorway, then stared. “A four-poster!” Mama exclaimed.
“With feather beds,” Matt told them. “Even so, it’s no innerspring mattress, and there’s no electricity. I’m afraid the ‘running water’ only runs from that pitcher into the basin, and then only when you tilt it, and the sanitary arrangements are a seat with a chamber pot under it, in that little closet over there, but somebody will empty it every day. Not as nice as the home you gave me to grow up in, in some ways… but these are the Middle Ages, after all.”
“Luxury indeed, by medieval standards,” Papa assured him. Then he turned and commanded, “Sit down.”
“Yes, sit.” Mama set the example by going to one of the hourglass chairs and folding herself gracefully into it. She patted the one beside her.
Matt sat down, feeling the dread of the guilty child, and his father sat beside Mama, looking grim.
“Tell,” he commanded, “and make sure it makes sense.”
“That, I can’t do,” Matt protested. “But it’s real, and I’ll explain as much of it as I can understand.”
“You can begin with how we came here,” Papa said, leaning back in his chair.
“Magic,” Matt said, and raised a hand. “No, really! I’m not fibbing! It really is magic, but it took me long enough to figure that out the first time I came here.”
He launched into an account of his arrival in Merovence, triggered by studying the parchment he’d found between the pages of an old book in the university library, studying it until the alien words began to make sense… and when they did, he’d found himself on the streets of Bordestang.
He told his parents about his first misadventures, how he’d slowly figured out that magic really worked here, but that physics and chemistry didn’t. Papa interrupted only long enough to say, “Well, quantum mechanics always did seem like magic to me,” and later on Mama cried, “The brute had stolen her throne from her?”
“And killed her father.” Matt gave Papa an apologetic look. “That’s why she clung so tightly when you called her ‘daughter.’ “
“So she is,” Papa said sternly, “and she can cling whenever she needs to.”
Mama nodded firm agreement, but amended it to say, “I expect she will cling to you more often, though, Mateo.”
“Hope so,” Matt said, grinning, then gave them a brief account of the war to defeat the evil sorcerer Malingo and win back Alisande’s throne. He threw in Stegoman the dragon, Sir Guy the Black Knight, Colmain the giant, Father Brunel the werewolf priest, and Sayeesa the lust-witch. When he’d finished, he was amazed to see that the light had changed; he’d taken at least half an hour.
“Let me understand.” Mama frowned, leaning forward and holding up a palm. “You won back her throne for her?”
“Well, not alone,” Matt amended, “but I do seem to have been one of the crucial elements in her success, yes.”
“So you really are her chief wizard, then,” Papa said, frowning.
“Yes. That’s the government job I told you about.”
“Lord Wizard! When did you become a nobleman?”
“When Alisande told me I was one… and that was before we married, by the way. A year or three before.”
Mama smiled. “She kept you dangling awhile, then? Good for her!”
“I wouldn’t have said so at the time,” Matt said darkly.
Mama grinned. “More power to her, then!” Abruptly, she turned serious again. “I don’t know, though, Mateo… this is so hard to believe.”
“Are you speaking Spanish now?” Matt asked softly.
“Why, no, I am speaking English, and… ” Mama heard her own words and stared, amazed. “I am not!”
“Try talking to me in Spanish.”
“Why not?” Mama said. “All your life, I spoke to you in… ” She stared again. “It still is not! It is the same language I spoke before!”
“You can recite a quotation in Spanish, if you try hard enough,” Matt said, “or in English or French… but it takes a major effort.”
“Ou sont les neiges d’antan!” Papa recited, then frowned. “I see what you mean… it takes great effort indeed.”
“But what language are we speaking?” Mama asked.
“The language of the parchment scrap I found,” Matt told her. “The language of Merovence. When you recited the verse I lined out for you, and the words began to make sense, your mind tuned in to this universe, which helped bring you here… but once you arrived, you were thinking in Merovencian.”
“Helped bring us here?” Papa pounced on the word. “Who did the main work, then?”
“I’m pretty sure it was St. Moncaire,” Matt told him. “He seemed to think I was the missing ingredient for putting Alisande back on the throne… and since Merovence was the only kingdom in Europe that hadn’t fallen to the reign of Evil, it was worth some indirect saintly intervention.”
“The reign of Evil?” Mama leaned forward, her gaze intent.
“White magic works by drawing on the power of God,” Matt explained. “Black magic draws on the power of Satan. Both of them work by chanting poetry or, even better, singing it… that modulates the magical forces, causes the magical elements to fall into line, and makes things happen.”
“Only Good or Evil?” Papa asked, frowning.
“It’s hard for modern people to accept, I know,” Matt said. “Saul still won’t; he keeps trying to figure out some impersonal rules of magic. So does King Boncorro, in Latruria… Italy in our universe… “