Demons, on the other hand, love wicked hearts and perverted motives, and are, at least sometimes, even tractable if one knows precisely what to say. That was why black magic is not only possible but the single biggest danger, as they repeatedly warned us, for overly-ambitious young wizards.
The answer must be that Maria had become involved in someone else’s black magic, undoubtedly the same spell that had blighted the king and still suffused the cellars with a sense of evil. This put me back where I had been before, wondering who of the people of Yurt, all of whom I liked, could have been willing to give themselves to the devil.
“Let’s be calm and rational,” I told my horse, who had responded to a lack of commands from me to slow first to walk and then a complete stop. Maria came to Yurt four years ago with the queen. She and Dominic, who some people thought might make a match, amused themselves during their courting by asking the old wizard to show them some magic tricks. Had he introduced them to black magic?
I didn’t feel I knew my predecessor well, but I thought I had spent enough time with him to be able to say, fairly confidently, that he himself had not succumbed to evil. In some ways it was easier to tell with a wizard-I had spent eight years surrounded by nothing but wizards, and even someone trained in the old magic was not as strange to me as the duchess or the Lady Maria.
But who else could it be, if not the stray visitor to the castle that Dominic would have had me believe? I kept on coming back to the chaplain, who had come to the castle a year after the Lady Maria, just about the time that the black magic first had its effect, if I assumed the king’s illness was indeed part of that effect.
“No,” I said out loud. “Zahlfast is wrong.” Maybe theoretically someone who healed could also sicken, but I refused to believe it here. I had paid very close attention in the part of the course that dealt with demons, and I knew that demons would not listen to a request to do good to someone else. A demon would happily do evil to others, but would only be helpful to the person whose soul he claimed.
Therefore, as I had thought all along, the supernatural power that had healed the king had been the power of the saints. Would the saints have listened to Joachim if his heart had been full of evil?
“Unless he’d since repented of that evil,” I answered myself, “and his heart was truly contrite.” I startled my mare by suddenly digging in my heels. I was not going to allow myself to take this reasoning any further. But then I was suddenly struck by the thought of the old chaplain, the one who had died unexpectedly. Could he have turned to evil, worshipping the devil in his heart while his lips addressed God?
This was a truly terrible thought, and I felt myself go cold and stiff again. If a castle’s chaplain had invited in the powers of darkness, had died with his immortal soul in the devil’s grasp, would a castle ever be able to recover?
I reassured myself with the thought that a chapel where a man could pray to the saints for a miracle was not a chapel where imps and demons frolicked unchecked. This left me Dominic as my final suspect. I wished I did not feel so much righteous pleasure in suspecting him.
In spite of the highly intermittent nature of my riding, I had at last arrived at the castle gates. I crossed the bridge into the courtyard, with more questions than I had had before but fewer answers. I needed to ask Dominic about his and Maria’s attempts to learn magic from the old wizard, and I had no idea how I was going to ask him.
I was nearly as startled as I would have been to meet a demon to find Dominic’s slightly red face looking at me as I entered the stables with my mare.
“Prince Dominic!” I stammered. “I thought you were out hunting!”
He frowned, clearly wondering what I could have been doing to make me react so guiltily to his presence. “I’m still worried about my horse’s leg,” he answered, “so I came in from the hunt.”
The thought passed wildly through my mind that the horse’s leg might recover more quickly with a lighter rider, but fortunately I was able to suppress any such comment. “I’m glad to see you here, as I’d wanted to ask you some questions,” I managed to say instead, wondering what I would ask him.
“But first I have some questions for you,” he said, standing up. He always seemed when I was close to him much larger than I remembered. “A royal wizard is supposed to use his powers to serve his king and kingdom, and I’d like to know what you think you’re doing with yours.”
“Serving the king and kingdom,” I said promptly, with as much of a smile as I could manage.
He seemed to find neither humor nor reassurance in this. “All you’ve done,” he said, scowling down at me and speaking slowly and distinctly as though I were slightly demented, “ever since you’ve come to Yurt, is to produce illusions that terrify the women-”
Fortunately I managed to keep a perfectly expressionless face.
“-and, I discover now, recklessly try to teach the king to fly.”
“Didn’t you know that?” I said inanely. “He asked me to months ago, back during the summer while the queen was visiting her parents. He wanted to surprise her when she came home.”
“I most certainly did not know it,” he said, his face growing darker red. This explained, then, the look of fury he had turned on me when we first arrived here and the king had used his rather limited flying powers to dismount. Thinking quickly, I realized that Dominic had never been there before on any of the very few occasions when the king had showed off his ability.
“But what’s the harm in it?”
“The harm,” he said, still in that careful voice in which rage seemed to boil barely suppressed, “is that any interference in magic processes, as you tried to tell me once yourself, can lead to terrible consequences, and the king’s too much of- too trusting to recognize the dangers. I shouldn’t have to remind you of this, Wizard.”
I was quite sure he had been going to say that the king was too much of a fool to realize magic’s dangers. I wondered if some of Dominic’s resentment of the king’s flying was that it freed the king from the dependency on his nephew he had had when the queen was away. But now that the king was well-and Dominic had seemed as delighted as anyone else-this dependency would not be at issue anyway. Maybe Dominic himself had already experienced some of the terrible experiences of misused magic.
“And I shouldn’t have to remind you,” I said, making myself as tall as I could, “that you yourself once interfered in magic processes, and have refused to tell me about what happened then. It’s my duty as royal wizard to know all the magic being done in the kingdom.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Dominic, taking half a step backwards.
I hesitated. My immediate reaction was to push my advantage, to call him a liar to his face, but if he openly denied having ever been involved in magic I knew he never would tell me about it. “Then I’ll bid you good day,” I said calmly and left the stables.
So far, I thought, crossing the wet cobblestones of the courtyard, I knew no more than I had known that summer. The only advance I seemed to have made was in somehow leading the duchess to believe that I was a well-qualified wizard.
The Lady Maria was at dinner that night, which almost surprised me, but she seemed very cheerful. Since we had been sitting next to each other all week, it would have looked very odd if either of us sat elsewhere, and I also felt it necessary to reestablish our light banter.
“You know everyone’s romantic secrets, my lady,” I said in a low voice to her during the soup. The soup was made of fish and herbs, actually one of the better productions of the duchess’s kitchens, but I could tell that it was ocean fish, not local river fish, and therefore must have been packed up from the City on ice at a remarkable cost.