PART TWO — THE QUEEN
I
I stayed with Joachim for four days. The cantor Norbert avoided me pointedly, the rest of the cathedral priests ignored me, and none of them showed any sign of trying to destroy me.
Every night I went out to check for magical influences on the new construction, and every night I found nothing. Although in the evenings the dean and I caught up on some of the conversations we had not had since he left Yurt, there was little for me to do during the day except fret about the queen. I did not even feel again the fleeting mental touch which I now concluded I had imagined.
“Telephone me if anything else happens,” I told Joachim as I prepared to leave. “But I really do think the magician or whoever was responsible must have been warned by the Romneys. Once he realized a wizard had arrived in town, he decided it was safest to stop his mischief.”
“I would certainly like to think so. Give my best wishes to everyone in Yurt.”
Though I left the quiet cobbled street behind the cathedral on foot, once I had made my way through the city streets and out the wide gates to where the Romneys had been camped I soared upward for the flight home. The whole way, I was trying to imagine what could have possessed the queen to want to marry again.
I came over a stretch of thick forest and saw before me the fields and castle of the kingdom of Yurt. It always looked from the air like a perfect child’s toy of a castle, with its whitewashed turreted walls and the pennants snapping from the towers. As I swooped down I noticed someone working in the old king’s rose garden, just outside the moat, so I landed there.
She saw me descending and came to greet me. I was flabbergasted. It was the queen, and for the first time in six years she was not wearing black.
“You’re home!” she said with delight. She had a smile that lit up her whole face and made whoever saw it want to smile too. “When your books arrived from the City, I knew you couldn’t be far behind!”
“I’ve been down in the cathedral city of Caelrhon, visiting the dean for a few days,” I said, wondering how I could possibly have stayed away as long as three months.
She gestured toward the garden. “As you can see, I was pruning the king’s roses. But I’ve just finished. Shall we go inside?”
The queen swung the gate shut and slipped one arm through mine, holding her gardening gloves and pruning shears in the other hand. She was wearing a very simple, but also undeniably very bright red dress. Red had always gone well with her complexion and her midnight hair. Although her hair now had an attractive white streak in it, red still suited her. She was, as she had always been, the most beautiful woman I had ever met.
I squeezed her arm with mine and said, “It’s good to be home.”
“If you’ve seen the dean, maybe he’s told you my news,” she said gaily as we crossed the drawbridge into the castle. “I’m thinking of marrying again!”
I realized from the thud of my heart that I had been hoping for four days that it was not true. But hearing her talk about it so blithely made it real in a way that seeing the words on paper had not. “Who are you marrying?” I asked and was surprised to hear my voice sound almost normal.
“His name is Vincent,” she said, again with that smile but this time not directed at me. “I’m sure you’ve met him, as he’s visited here several times over the years. He’s the younger son of a king-in fact the king of Caelrhon, where you’ve just been.”
I did indeed remember Vincent, well enough to detest him now. “But a king’s younger son!” I protested. “He is not worthy of you, my lady!” I stopped myself just in time from adding that he was much too young for her.
“You forget that I myself was only a castellan’s daughter before I became queen of Yurt,” she said with a laugh. Then she answered my unspoken comment as well by saying, “With him I feel almost like a girl again! Vincent is very different from King Haimeric, but I’m sure he would be delighted to see me happy again.”
She was at least right, I thought gloomily, about the old king of Yurt. He would have approved of the marriage even though I did not. “What do your parents think?”
“They’re pleased, of course. But you ask,” she added with another laugh, “as if I were still a girl too young to know my own mind!”
It was not hard to think of her as a girl in spite of the white streak in her hair. She gave a quick little whirl, almost a dance step, and said, “Vincent’s coming tomorrow so you can renew acquaintances. Your chambers should be ready. The constable put your books inside, but he didn’t unpack them-he was afraid his eye might fall on a spell accidentally and he would turn himself into a frog!” And she went off laughing at her own joke.
I was gloomily reshelving books when I heard a knock at the door. “Come in!” I called, hoping it was the queen come to say her plan to marry Vincent was just another joke, and in rather poor taste.
But it was Prince Paul, royal heir to Yurt. He seemed to have shot up several inches in three months and had to duck through the doorway. “Welcome home! I just heard you’d arrived. Did you have a pleasant stay in the City?” His good manners did not mask the intensity of whatever had brought him here. I had barely begun a congenial response when he added, “I need to talk to you privately. Can you come for a ride?”
Paul loved riding and was very good at it. I thought ruefully that I was going to be made stiff after months of not being on a horse, especially at the pace I was sure he would set. He led the way across the courtyard with rapid strides; his legs still had the slenderness of a boy’s, but they were appreciably longer than mine.
In a few minutes we were mounted and riding out across the bridge, me on an old white mare and Paul on a gelding. “I think Mother’s going to get me a horse for my eighteenth birthday,” he said in a low voice, smiling in anticipation. Temporarily, his other concerns seemed forgotten. “I heard her talking to the constable about horse breeders and about the horse fairs this summer. They didn’t know I was listening so I had to slip away, but I’m fairly sure she knows I want a roan stallion.”
“Your mother is a good judge of horses,” I said. “She used to ride a magnificent black stallion before you were born.”
“I know,” he said regretfully. “I still don’t understand why she sold him. But then,” with a grin, “I’ve never liked black horses that well anyway.” Paul kicked his horse to a faster pace. He was bareheaded, and the wind swirled his hair. When he was young his hair had been so blond it was almost white, and even now it formed a golden halo around his head.
We rode for a mile, more rapidly than I would have liked but not as rapidly as I had feared, down the hill from the castle and then along a deep tree-shaded lane by the meadows. Larks soared over the long grass, and in the distance I could see people starting to harvest the hay.
Paul tied his reins to a branch and threw himself down on the grassy verge. “No one will overhear us,” he said, intense once again.
I reminded myself as I eased out of the saddle that I couldn’t treat him like a boy. Legally he would be of age in another three months, and with his mother’s fire and his father’s sweetness of temperament he would be a formidable king. If I let his boyish enthusiasm for horses remind me too strongly that I had given him horsy-rides on my knee not long ago, I was never going to have his confidence. “What’s bothering you?” I asked, seating myself beside him. “Is it your mother’s remarriage?”
“Yes,” he said gloomily, lying down with his hands under his head. “It wasn’t hard to guess, was it?” He jerked back up to a sitting position. “How can she do it? Why would she want to marry anyone, after Father? If she has to marry somebody, why does it have to be Prince Vincent?”
Since I had been asking myself exactly these questions, I found it difficult to answer.
Paul was now examining one of his riding boots, rubbing his thumb on a scrape. “I even tried talking to Aunt Maria,” he said. “If Mother remarries it will affect the entire kingdom.” He shifted his attention to the other boot. “But she just said something foolish about how a woman like her deserves her happiness.”