At the moment, my thoughts kept me from dozing. I was extremely fond of the queen, I told myself, as I was of Paul, and for that matter of everyone else in the court of Yurt. The queen was just as lovely as she had always been, her nature as spirited and as affectionate. But nineteen years of daydreams about her seemed gone as though they had never existed. Even the memory of kissing her in the twilight in the fields outside the castle seemed so far away that it might have happened to different people.
Partly my daydreams had been driven out by Theodora’s reality, I reasoned, and partly my unspoken imaginings had been dissipated by telling Joachim about them. But it made it much easier than I could have expected to ride next to the queen and to talk to her.
Now, if it had not been for Theodora, I told myself, I could have imagined nothing better than continuing as Royal Wizard of Yurt. I thought I would even have been able to think approvingly of the queen’s marriage to Prince Vincent, if I hadn’t been so sure that he was only using it as an excuse to get into Yurt and seize it for himself.
I tried to sound her out, to see if she might know something that would help me even if she did not realize she knew it. “Why did you decide to move up your wedding, my lady?” I asked casually.
She looked up sharply, the sunlight gleaming in her emerald eyes. In spite of her easy and natural manner, I thought, she did remember our last real conversation. But what she saw seemed to reassure her. I wasn’t sure if this meant she too knew me better than I thought she did, or if it meant she didn’t really understand me at all. She answered without awkwardness or embarrassment. “We just couldn’t bear to wait any longer.”
The sudden constriction of my chest made no sense, I chided myself, because I was now ready to hear her talk of such things without pain.
“It seems,” she continued, “that all I’ve done recently is prepare for the two ceremonies: Paul’s coming of age and my own wedding. It would have been easier, of course,” she commented wryly, “if he’d been in Yurt during the last month. I let him go to the cathedral city for a few days, and next I know you’ve kidnapped him!”
“I apologize for taking him with me,” I said, thinking that it could not indeed have been easy to make preparations for a once-in-a-lifetime ceremony when the key person in that ceremony wasn’t even there. “But if it hadn’t been for Paul, the rest of us might still be up in the border of the land of magic.”
She looked thoughtfully toward the red stallion and its rider, running long loops next to the road while the rest of us proceeded more sedately. “He tried to downplay it when he told me about it,” she said, “but I could tell that he had been responsible for finding a way for you all to escape. Of course, I know perfectly well, Wizard,” she added generously, “that you would have come up with something of your own in not much more time.”
“He got to know Prince Lucas much better during the trip, too,” I said, hoping to work the conversation back to Lucas’s younger brother Vincent. “It’s good that the two future kings of Yurt and Caelrhon should be friends.”
“He tended to gloss over the dangers of the trip,” said the queen with a smile, “but I could tell there were at least a few places where you might all have been killed. That’s not the sort of thing a mother likes to hear about, but, now that it’s all over safely, I can reassure myself that maybe he needed a little real adventure. We’ve always tried not to spoil him, but there’s no question that he’s been somewhat sheltered.”
So far I was no closer to finding out anything about Vincent. I could talk indefinitely to the queen about Paul, even though he would be exasperated to know we were talking about him like this. But I still needed to know if she had observed anything about Vincent. “When I came back from the City and first met the prince, my lady,” I began, “there was something about the way that the two of you treated each other which I can only characterize as odd.”
She gave me a surprised look, as well she might, but said nothing.
“You and he seemed happy to be together,” I plunged ahead, “but I had the strangest feeling that I was watching a play, that you had rehearsed what you told me about your whirlwind courtship.”
The queen blushed most becomingly and tugged at a loose stitch on one of her riding gloves. I let the silence stretch out, knowing she would have to answer eventually.
Having exhausted the possibilities of her glove, the queen glanced around to be sure no one else was within hearing distance, cleared her throat twice, and gave what I had to call a giggle. “I hadn’t realized it was that obvious,” she said. “Maybe we were acting in a play, although I hadn’t thought of it that way. But it would have been rather embarrassing to admit that I had been courting him!”
“You were courting him,” I repeated.
“I wouldn’t tell anyone other than you,” she said, which I presumed was meant as a compliment. “But this winter, when I realized that my baby boy was going to be king very soon, and it had been six years since King Haimeric had died, I decided I would remarry. I was never meant to be a nun.”
I nodded but did not trust myself to speak.
“Even you going back to teach at the wizards’ school,” she continued without looking at me, “made me realize that the years were passing, and that if I wanted another husband I should choose him soon. Going over the possibilities, I quickly picked out Vincent. That’s why I invited him to come stay in Yurt this spring.”
I rode in silence without answering. It all sounded cold-hearted and calculating to me, not at all like the queen.
“It sounds very cold-hearted when I put it like that,” she went on, as though reading my thoughts. “But I wasn’t deliberately planning to marry him, because I didn’t know if I would love him. Rather, I thought I would review my options, to see if I could come to love someone else after the king.”
She gave me a quick glance, as though wondering if she should apologize again for never having considered me as a candidate. If so, she decided against it. “Vincent seemed from the beginning the most likely of the lords and princes I knew.”
“So he doesn’t mind that you picked him out?” I managed to ask.
“Not at all! He was highly flattered. He was just a little irritated with me at first for inviting him to Yurt to see if he might be the man I would want as a husband, and then being so slow to make up my mind. You see, he’d always been secretly in love with me.” She gave a dreamy smile that I would gladly have missed. “His only problem was his family; he said his older brother kept suggesting that this might be a chance for Yurt to take over Caelrhon. Vincent, I’m afraid, has always felt somewhat stifled living under his brother’s shadow. He has no use for politics himself, of course.”
This time she fell into a silence that she seemed to have no intention of breaking. I did not believe a word of it.
Or at least I did not believe what she had said about Prince Vincent, even if she thought it was true herself. Her own motivations, I thought reluctantly, might make sense. This was, after all, the same woman who had threatened her parents with becoming a nun many years ago, when they had tried to marry her to someone she did not like. If the young chaplain had started pressuring her to join the Nunnery of Yurt, her immediate reaction would have been to marry again.
And she had always loved parties and dancing. If nothing else, working her way through the eligible men in the adjacent kingdoms would have promised several seasons of festivity.
She pulled her horse over to the side of the road and called to her son. “Paul! I think you’ve tired your horse until mine can match him. I’ll race you to the woods!”
Watching the two of them gallop ahead-the queen had always been an excellent horsewoman-I felt a profound if irrational certainty that Vincent had much more in mind than the kisses of a beautiful woman.