Although I had told the queen I would give up wizardry for her, I knew I could not. It had become such a part of me that it would be like trying to give up breathing. I loved Theodora and wanted her, but it would still be impossible never to practice magic again. On the other hand, I told myself, just because I gave up all recognized posts for wizards did not mean I would have to give up practicing magic. I could be another itinerant spell-caster, just one who happened to have a degree from the school.
Maybe, I thought, Theodora and I could take off in a caravan with a pony. But I had promised Joachim he could come in my caravan, and he might not like her company. Or maybe I could settle down here in the cathedral city and do tricks in the market place, even if the old magician did become furious at me. I had thought when I met him that doing simple magic tricks for pennies would be a degrading way to spend one’s life, but if Theodora were with me it might have unexpected benefits.
I wondered briefly if she had been falling in love with me as I fell in love with her, or if she had picked me out even before we met face-to-face. If so, was it with the intention from the beginning that we fall in love? But I didn’t like this line of thinking and tried to dismiss it. “Maybe I can make your ring glow itself with a spell of my own,” I suggested.
The spell worked even better than I had hoped; the gold blazed into light while the letters remained black and finally intelligible, spelling out words in the Hidden Language that I recognized.
Carefully I put the magnifying glass down, feeling stabbed with cold. “Theodora, this is a spell to reveal what is hidden. When you put on the ring, you not only make yourself invisible, you make yourself able to see other invisible creatures. You’ve got to tell me about these ‘things’ you see. Are they here in the city now?”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly, completely serious for once. “I try not to use my ring very often and, as I already told you, I don’t see them every time.”
“When was the last time you saw them?”
She closed her eyes. “I don’t like thinking about them. It must have been two months or so ago.”
I put a hand on her arm. “Where were they?”
She opened her eyes and put her hand over mine. “On the new cathedral tower. I had been climbing up there at night. When I was near the top, where the workmen had some cut stone piled ready for use, I noticed it was all in disarray as though the piles had been pushed over. And then as I was coming down I almost ran into the watchman. I put on my ring just in time.”
I could feel her trembling and realized that she had been deeply frightened. “And then?”
“I saw two of them, almost like big lizards. I just caught a glimpse of them out of the corner of my eye. But they had wings and-and what looked like hands.”
The winged red lizard the guard had spotted down on the docks. It had disappeared into the air-made itself invisible. Though I had assumed there was only one, and that whatever wizard had brought it had taken it away again, maybe there had been several of them in the city the whole time. The dean wasn’t going to like this at all.
Neither one of us said anything for several minutes. This then explained the tumbled building material that had originally appeared on the new tower at the same time as Theodora’s magic lights. But I still did not know what relation it might have to the bat-winged monster. The room was silent except for occasional tap-tap of steps going by outside. The cat made me jump by suddenly meowing. Theodora picked it up and stroked it until it began to purr.
“Somebody’s working magic here besides you and me,” I said at last. “Whoever it is must be bringing creatures from the northern land of magic and making them invisible.” Might the Royal Wizard of Caelrhon have been dismissed just before his death for summoning enormous lizards?
The cat was going to sleep in Theodora’s lap. “Do you mean it’s something to do with this city, and not with my ring?”
“Unless the world is fuller of invisible creatures than I had thought,” I said grimly.
“You do know,” said Theodora, “that there’s another wizard in the city right now.”
I took her by the shoulders so sharply that I jostled a highly indignant cat off her lap. “Another wizard? Here? Now? No, I didn’t know!”
But I should have known it perfectly well. After all, Norbert had gotten that book from somebody. I had grabbed a quick breakfast while Joachim was still at morning service and gone out before he returned, preferring to postpone a discussion of books falling from the ceiling. Thinking about Theodora had distracted me from what I knew I should have been doing.
She pulled back as though almost frightened of me. In the uncertain candlelight her eyes looked gray instead of amethyst. I made myself loosen my fingers from her shoulders. “He’s been in town all week,” she said.. “Haven’t you felt his presence?”
I put my forehead on my fists, feeling like a fool. A wizard who had resisted my best spells to find him seemed to be transparently obvious to a witch. I stopped myself from asking Theodora why she had not told me about him. I had not asked her.
I forced myself to look up. “Where is he right now?” I judged how devastated I must look by Theodora’s expression.
She put out a hand and touched my face. “I don’t know where he is, but I can help you look for him.”
Might it be the old magician I thought I had warned away? Someone that destitute might have been forced by hunger to sell even his tattered old book of spells if Norbert had offered him enough. Maybe, and I clenched my jaw at the thought, just as he had persuaded Theodora to teach him a little fire magic he had persuaded some wizard to teach him how to summon invisible and even demonic creatures.
“Not demonic,” I said. “They’re not demons.”
“How do you know?” I didn’t realize until she spoke that I had said it aloud.
I pulled her toward me. “I don’t.”
She started kissing my face, my cheeks, my eyes. In a moment I thought that she was doing a remarkably good job of making me forget my fears. “I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely frank with you,” I said, pulling back. “You already know that I came here to find the source of the magical apparitions here in the city. The mayor didn’t send for me, however; the dean of the cathedral did.”
This did not seem to strike her as a particularly startling revelation. “Maybe you haven’t been able to find the other wizard because he’s afraid of your powers and is deliberately hiding from you,” she said, “whereas it never occurred to him he had to shield his mind from a woman.”
“Well, then,” I said, trying to regain my good humor, “if you can help me find him, maybe I can make sure he doesn’t summon any more invisible creatures to bother you.”
“Come on,” she said, jumping to her feet. “We’ll look for him now.”
But Theodora and I were unable to locate the wizard or magician. She could find his mind quite easily but not actually touch it, so she had no information on his exact location. I could not find him at all.
“You don’t sense him?” she said in frustration. “You don’t find him right-there? Are you sure you’re using the right words of your Hidden Language?”
“Maybe witches are just better at finding other people than wizards are,” I said, equally frustrated. “You found me long before I found you.” I was using discovery spells powerful enough that I doubted I could have shielded against them myself, school spells that should have sliced straight through the old magic of earth and herbs, without the slightest result.