In the tiny glow of the ring, we could see bare bones lying among the scraps of what had once been clothing. A belt buckle and a brooch lay at one side. The skull was at the back, a thin gold circlet loose around it and turned to an incongruously jaunty angle. The empty eye sockets glared at us balefully.
“Someone’s opened the tomb, looking for something,” said Ascelin.
“This ring,” I said in sudden conviction. “And they didn’t find it.”
“By the way,” said Joachim, who had not spoken since Hugo started pulling at the stone, “I wonder where the priests of this church are.”
Ascelin leaped to his feet and reached for his sword. “A trap. I should have known it. We’ll have to fight our way out.”
Joachim put his hand on the prince’s hilt to push the sword back into its sheath. “Don’t forget that this is a house of God and no place for weapons of violence.”
“Stay back,” I said. “There’s only one way they can come in. I don’t want any more of you held hostage before I can disarm them.” I flew the length of the church, wishing for the calm courage to match my words and hoping Joachim would not call after me that God’s house was also no place for violent magic.
I stopped short of the door and probed with magic, expecting to find a mass of armed knights on the far side. But I found nothing. Just to be sure, I pushed the door open a crack and peeked out. The square in which the church sat was empty except for our horses, swishing their tails peacefully.
“There’s no one there, Ascelin,” I said and flew back. “Your hunter’s instincts have failed you this time, I’m afraid.”
“Let’s get out of here before I’m proven right.”
“Just a moment,” said King Haimeric. He crawled partially into the tomb; when he backed out a moment later his gray cloak was filthy, and he looked grim but satisfied. “You’re right, Hugo, that it doesn’t make sense to take his bones with us now. But at least I’ve straightened them out.”
“Come on,” said Ascelin. He helped ease the tombstone back into place, pushing it in tight this time, then we all hurried toward the door. Realizing I was still holding Dominic’s ring, I slid it onto my thumb, since it was too big for any of my fingers, and pulled my glove on over it.
I stopped the others short of the entrance, in case armed men had come up during the last minute, but my probing still found nothing. We hurried out, and I caught brief glimpses of faces in windows high up around the little square. The faces looked frightened rather than hostile and disappeared immediately.
In a moment we were onto our horses and riding recklessly fast through the city streets. But the worst danger we encountered was a cart of vegetables pushed out of a side street almost directly into our path, which Whirlwind vaulted and the rest of our horses scrambled around. Outside the city gates, we covered two miles as fast as Ascelin, who ran holding onto Dominic’s stirrup leather, could go.
“All right,” he said at last, throwing himself to the ground under a tree. “We got away safely this time. Now I’d like to know what’s actually happening.”
“So would I,” I said, dismounting and carefully removing my gloves. “And I think it starts with this ring.”
I had always coveted Dominic’s ring. The coiled gold snake and the ruby made it just the thing to suggest wizardly wisdom and mystery. I had inherited a ring shaped like an eagle in flight from my predecessor as Royal Wizard of Yurt, but it wasn’t the same.
Slowly I turned the ring in my hands, watching the ruby catch the light. “There might,” I said, “just might, be a spell attached to this, something like the message spell Sir Hugo’s wizard left for us in Warin’s castle. I’ll have to see if it’s still working after fifty years. Sire, did your brother take a wizard with him?”
“No,” said King Haimeric in surprise. “I only ever had the one Royal Wizard before you, and I don’t believe my brother’s household ever kept one.”
“Then the spell, if there is a spell,” I said, “was put together by a wizard of the eastern kingdoms, someone trained differently than I. This may take a while.”
I said that in the hopes that it would not take very long at all, and that I could impress the others with my abilities, but this ring was not nearly as ready to yield its secrets as Evrard’s black box.
“Then the carving of the snake on the tomb was a message,” said Hugo to Dominic, “your father’s way of telling you, and only you, that the ring he had sent back to Yurt was somehow special. He just didn’t think it would take you this long to get here.”
Dominic ignored the second half of this comment. “Do you know if my father acquired all his jewels together,” he asked the king, “or a few at a time?”
“As I remember,” said King Haimeric thoughtfully, “it was a hoard he discovered or picked up somewhere-or perhaps captured in battle. His servant who brought the jewels back to Yurt told me at the time, but I’m afraid I didn’t pay very much attention to that part of his account.”
And that servant was long dead. Any secrets from beyond the grave would be revealed through wizardry or not at all.
I sat down under the tree, my back to the rest, and murmured likely-seeming spells under my breath. Behind me, Ascelin asked the chaplain, “Did your bishop visit the church of the Holy Twins?”
“He never got into this part of the eastern kingdoms,” said Joachim. “He took the main pilgrimage and trade route down along the rivers, west of the mountains.”
“Ha!” I said suddenly and out loud. The ruby on Dominic’s ring was held in place not just by the goldsmith’s art but by magic, and by a spell I recognized. With a few quick words of the Hidden Language, I loosened the spell. In three twists, the stone came loose, and something tiny, scarcely bigger than a pin head, dropped into my hand.
I had an audience now. With no time to search carefully for the best spell, I improvised, trying a variation of a trans formations spell to transform whatever tiny object I held into something bigger, without, I hoped, changing any of its other properties.
And that turned out, almost to my surprise, to be the right spell. I was suddenly holding a piece of parchment in my hand with a message written out clearly. I looked first at the formal signature, “Dominicus princeps Yurtiae,” and then at the heading, “To my dearest wife and son.”
I handed it to Dominic. “I think this is for you.”
III
He read it out loud. “By the time you read this I will be dead.” Dominic stopped, looked at the king, cleared his throat, and continued reading. “The servant by whom you will have received this ring will also have given you a more open letter of farewell. I hope the Royal Wizard will quickly discover this ring’s secret, but if not, the snake I asked to have carved on my tombstone will be a clue for you.”
“I was right,” said Hugo. Dominic ignored him.
“The wizard I have taken into my employ, who will hide this message magically in the ring for me, is one I trust thoroughly, totally, and explicitly.”
“That means he didn’t trust him at all,” interrupted the king.
“What?” said Dominic and I together.
“Didn’t I ever teach you that code, Dominic?” asked King Haimeric. “Your father and I worked it out when we were boys. Because normally you say that you trust someone implicitly, trust them completely without having to say anything, to say that you trust them explicitly is to say just the opposite, that you express your trust only with your lips.”
I tried to remember any occasions when the king might have said he trusted me explicitly. Fortunately I couldn’t think of any.
“Is it possible,” asked Ascelin, “if Prince Dominic employed a wizard after all, that he might have been the ‘magnificent warrior’ of the border guards’ story?”