“But I still don’t think I know all your secrets,” she replied with a smile, in the same tone, clearly eager to pretend that our afternoon’s conversation had never taken place.
“There’s one person’s secret I hope you might tell me,” I said coyly while the soup dishes were being cleared, taking advantage of the rattle of china to mask our conversation. “When the king and his party met you and the present queen’s party for the first time, here at the duchess’s castle, had there been a rumor that the king might be about to marry the duchess?’
“Oh, no,” she said with a little tinkling laugh. “It wasn’t like that at all.” A servant leaned between us at that point to place the silverware for the next course, and I had a sudden fear that the rumor had in fact been that the king would marry the Lady Maria, and that I had just deeply insulted her by never before having considered this possibility.
But she bent toward me as soon as the servant stepped back and whispered in my ear. “The rumor had been that Dominic was going to marry the duchess.”
I came within half a breath of saying, “Dominic?” out loud but stopped myself in time. He was sitting only four places down the table and would certainly have reacted to the sound of his own name.
“Yes,” she continued in my ear, clearly enjoying the fact that everyone else at the table noticed we were whispering. “The duchess’s servants told our servants that the king wanted to insure the inheritance of Yurt past his own death, so he felt his nephew and heir had to marry. They had come here expressly to arrange a marriage, when our party fortuitously happened to arrive at the same time, and the king met the queen! I don’t need to tell you what happened after that!”
“Wizard!” called the duchess from the end of the table. “Does a woman have to be blond for you to let her whisper sweet nothings in your ear?”
“As long as she’s as lovely as all the ladies here present,” I said gallantly, ignoring what I could tell was a warning stare from the chaplain, “I don’t care what color is her hair.”
This remark seemed to amuse most of the ladies, and the Lady Maria and I went back to eating. This meant, therefore, that the queen had not married the king to keep him from the duchess, my original and only half-serious thought, even though there was clearly no deep affection between the cousins.
From something that the Lady Maria had told me that summer, I could guess that Dominic had hoped, once he met her, that he and the queen would make a match, and that even the queen’s father, Maria’s brother, had made some plans in that direction. I didn’t know for certain why the original plan for a marriage between Dominic and the duchess didn’t go through, but I could guess: he had never been extremely enthusiastic about the plan in the first place, and then when he met the queen he had decided not to take the one cousin when he could not get the other. The king, hoping for a little son of his own, would have stopped worrying about finding a wife for his nephew.
So was that the answer to why the queen had married the king, that she wanted to get away from her father’s plans to marry her to someone suitable, when some of these suitable persons might have been even worse than Dominic? It seemed a plausible answer, but it did not answer the real one: who in Yurt had been practicing black magic?
PART FIVE — THE STRANGER
I
I was relieved to be heading home again. The queen seemed also to be glad to go, although the king, bidding the duchess an affectionate farewell, appeared to have enjoyed his visit thoroughly. I guessed that he had no idea the cousins were not highly fond of each other. But while the queen was merely happy to be leaving the duchess behind, I was eager to get back to the castle of Yurt and reassure myself nothing had happened in our absence. We had received no messages via the pigeons, and had not expected to, but if the castle had been swallowed by a giant hole in the earth they might not have had time to release the pigeons.
Packed in my saddlebags were the books I had found in the room of the old ducal wizard. I had quite brazenly stolen them, reassuring myself that it was not theft to take something no one wanted. They had clearly been undisturbed for thirty years, and if the duchess did indeed hire someone from the wizards’ school, as she had threatened to do, he would probably throw them out immediately.
At dusk we came out of the woods and up the hill toward the castle. A chill wind mixed with a little sleet whipped about our ears, and our horses were eager for the stables. I looked up, expecting to see welcoming lights shining out, and instead saw only the castle’s dark shape against the dark sky.
“The constable knew we were coming home today,” said the queen in surprise.
“Everyone may just be sitting warm in the kitchen,” said the king.
A chill had gone through me far colder than the sleet. I looked toward Joachim and saw that a similar fear had gripped him, for he had reached into his saddle bag and taken out his crucifix. He too, I thought, must have been feeling that elusive sense of evil in the castle, and he must have been worried about it in ways that he never told me.
“At least the drawbridge is down,” said one of the knights. The king’s optimism was not shared by the rest of our party.
For a brief moment we hesitated by the bridge, looking in through the gates toward the dark and silent courtyard. Then the king said cheerfully, “They’ll light the lights as soon as they hear us. Just don’t let your horses slip going in!” He led the way, the rest of us following single-file behind.
No one spoke as we crossed the bridge and then the courtyard toward the lightless stables, but our horses’ hooves on the cobblestones and the bells on their bridles made a sound that should have awakened any sleeper. There was an abrupt clattering sound from the direction of the great hall, then to my intense relief I heard the constable’s voice. “On!” he shouted, and all the magic lamps in the hall blazed into light.
More lights came on then around the castle, and the constable ran out to meet us, disheveled and embarrassed. “Forgive me, sire,” he said, holding the king’s stirrup while he dismounted. “I don’t know what happened to me. I must have fallen asleep. I didn’t mean for you to come home to a dark castle.”
Everyone else was now talking and dismounting, and a stable boy started taking the horses. The others seemed to have dismissed whatever fears they had felt looking up at the lightless bulk of the castle against the twilight sky. But the chill I had felt then was still with me. I caught Joachim’s eye and knew that he too was not completely satisfied.
The cook came rushing into the hall from the kitchens, highly flustered, at the same time as we came in from the courtyard. She spoke quickly to the constable and rushed out again. “We’ll have a hot dish for you very quickly, my lords and ladies,” said the constable apologetically. “The cook somehow had let the fire go out, but she’ll have it going again in just a minute.”
The hall fire too was quickly built up again. We all stood around it, warming ourselves after the ride, waiting for supper. While we waited, I wondered what could have happened to cast everyone in the castle into slumber, and what had wakened them again. Only a small part of the staff was there, as the rest-including Gwen and Jon-would not be back from their vacations before tomorrow, but it was certainly not natural for all of the staff present to have been overcome with sleep at the same time.
And had it merely been the sound of our horses that wakened them? I put my coat back on and slipped away, taking one of the magic lamps with me. As I went by the kitchens, I could hear loud clattering and the cook giving rapid orders, and could smell supper cooking, a smell so delightful after a long day’s cold ride that I had to stop myself from going in for a sample bite.