Unless I merely waited for the monster to reappear, something neither the bishop nor Joachim would want me to do, I would have to search it out. By sheer will power I dragged myself to my feet. The cathedral tower might offer more clues if I looked again.
As I shouldered my way through the crowded streets, thinking of my best approach, I suddenly froze in the middle of a step. A light touch once brushed across my mind. This time it was not just a touch but a voice.
It spoke one word, “Wizard.” It might have been a statement, or it might have been someone addressing me. I looked around wildly but could find no clue. The mental touch was gone as quickly as it had come. But that single word inside my mind had sounded as though spoken with a woman’s voice.
No wonder, I thought grimly, that the town seemed full of magic. It would appear to have almost as high a density of magic-workers as the great City. Besides me, there was whoever had the power to make a monster do his bidding; plus the magician I had seen outside the gates; plus the wizard who had impressed the Romney children; and finally whatever witch had first touched my mind up on the scaffolding and had just done so again.
Then out of the corner of my eye I saw a head of nut-brown hair over a dark shawl.
In two steps I was beside her, the monster and Prince Lucas forgotten. “Excuse me,” I said and touched her on the shoulder.
She turned quickly toward me, but where I had expected a startled look I found a smile that put a dimple in her cheek.
“I am Daimbert, Royal Wizard of Yurt,” I said, flustered. “But I’m afraid I don’t know who you are.”
“My name is Theodora.” Her voice was almost musical in its lilt and deeper than I had expected.
“Theodora,” I said. “It is a very lovely and unusual name.”
“It was my mother’s and grandmother’s name, and I believe my grandmother’s mother’s and grandmother’s as well.”
“Were all of them witches as well?”
She burst into laughter. “I never thought of myself as a witch. Isn’t that something wicked?”
“Well,” I said uncertainly, because she certainly did not appear to be wicked, “witches are women with strange powers.”
“Sometimes I call on serpents from deep beneath the sea,” she said, looking at me with teasing amethyst eyes. “But they haven’t answered me yet. Does that make me a witch?”
“How about bat-winged monsters?” I said, finding it coming out much more harshly than I intended. “Do you call on them too?”
“That’s why the mayor sent for a wizard, isn’t it,” she said, sober for a moment, and I recalled that the first time I had seen her I had been coming from the municipal building. “I didn’t see the creature myself, but it must have been terrible.” Then her eyes danced again. “If you think I’m a witch, why are you surprised that I would want to meet the magic-worker brought in to deal with a monster?”
“Why do you think the mayor himself would have sent for a wizard?” I asked, feeling reluctant to tell a witch that the cathedral dean had invited me here.
“There are three that rule the world,” she quoted, “the wizards, the Church, and the aristocracy. We who are the merchants and the artisans and the farmers don’t count as rulers.”
“My family ran a warehouse in the great City,” I said defensively. “Most wizards don’t come from ruling families.”
“You have authority now. But this social structure gives someone like the elected mayor of a town a flexibility to do whatever he wants. He can ask for help from wizards or priests or aristocrats, whereas those three would be embarrassed to call on each other. I suppose,” the dimple coming back, “if I called on monsters and they answered, then I probably would be a witch, but I’m not.”
“If you’re not a witch,” I said, trying not to sound accusing, “how were you able to speak inside my mind?”
Instead of answering she took my arm. “If we’re going to chat and get acquainted, let’s not do it in the middle of the street. I was just going home for lunch. Won’t you join me?”
Stories I had half-heard twenty years ago flashed through my mind, stories of witches luring men into their caves, of what they did to them there in their mad lusts. The young woman beside me did not appear to be racked with mad lusts. Maybe I was developing an impure mind.
“I’d be happy to eat with you,” I said, “but you may not have enough to spare for a stranger. There’s an inn right around the corner; I’ll even pay for both of us!”
“Now,” I said again when we were seated at the inn and I had ordered, “tell me, if you’re not a witch, how you can speak with me magically, mind to mind?”
She bent her head to reach up and unknot her shawl. Her profile and the angle of her neck made a delightful silhouette against the window beyond her. “Are you a witch?” she asked me.
“I am a wizard. But only men can be wizards, because only men are trained properly in magic. A witch is a woman who has picked up a few rudiments of magic and, being untrained, uses them at best awkwardly and at worst in the service of darkness.” Everything I said sounded in my ears as though I were charging her with unspeakable crimes.
“I am a woman,” she said with a laugh, “and I do know one or two rudiments of magic, but I would not say I was untrained, and I certainly don’t serve the powers of darkness!”
Our mugs of beer were brought, and she looked at me with dancing eyes over the rim of hers. I noticed how long her lashes were. I felt no touch in my mind, but her look implied that she could see all my thoughts and intentions and overall, surprisingly, rather liked what she saw.
“Were you trained by an old ragged magician?”
This she seemed to find the most amusing yet. “Of course not. My mother trained me. In fact, I taught the magician a little fire magic a few years ago. All he’d had before then were some rather flimsy illusions.” If she had known him for several years, I thought, then I could give up my rather vague suspicions that he was a very powerful wizard in disguise, who had for reasons unclear come here to attack the cathedral.
Theodora looked down at her plate for a moment, then toward me again. “You’re one of the wizards he told me about, aren’t you, one of the ones who finished the whole program at that school?”
“Yes, I am, but that doesn’t mean I know all the different sorts of magic there are. Watch this.” I snapped my fingers, said two words, and the candle on the table came alight. “I worked that out this morning, but only this morning, and I’m afraid it’s all the fire magic I know. Could you teach me more?”
“And could you teach me illusions? Yours, I know, would not be flimsy or pathetic. It hardly seemed worth it to ask the magician to teach me his magic, and I was always afraid he would think I was trying to compete with him, keeping an ‘honest magician’ from earning a living.”
We both laughed at this. Our conversation seemed to be going nowhere, and almost every question was answered with a different question, but I felt intrigued. Something about her resisted my efforts to understand her, yet in a very few minutes I had started to feel I had known Theodora for weeks or even longer, and she seemed always to have known me.
“Are you perhaps one of the Romneys?” I asked as we ate. I brought out the gold hoop earring I still had. “Did you lose this?”
She brushed back the hair from both ears, tilting her head forward in the angle I liked. Long pendant earrings sparkled against her cheeks. “Doesn’t it look like I still have my earrings?”
“But are you a Romney?” I persisted.
“No, I’ve lived all my life in the kingdom of Caelrhon, and as far as I know all my ancestors have too,” she said, giving me a straighter answer than most. “But I’ve become friends with some of the Romneys. There’s one band that often camps outside the city.”
I thought rapidly. “Why didn’t they want me to know about you?”