Matt stared. If he looked at her coldly and objectively, he would still have to say she was no raving beauty-but looking at her coldly and objectively was something he could no longer do. Whatever spell the sorcerers laid on the royal consorts, it was working overtime on Flaminia. Her eyes seemed to beckon, no, to pull; her smile made her lips seem more than enticing-compelling. Compelling all too well-Pascal was moving toward her with a fixed gaze and robotic step. Matt managed to catch him and steer him back toward guarding the hat, then struck the strings and began to sing.
He managed another verse, enjoining the crowd to forget they had ever seen Flaminia. Since they had to forget her, they drifted away, looking bored-which was just fine with Matt. Of course, that could have just been the effect of his singing, and the songs definitely lacked both character and action. The guards might just not have noticed she was missing yet. Matt wished he could be sure whether his magic was working or he was just having good luck. As the last listener turned his back, Matt slung his lute and grabbed Pascal before he could quite manage to catch Flaminia in an embrace that would have shamed a sumo wrestler. “Come on, let’s go!”
Flaminia looked definitely disappointed for the half second before Matt caught her wrist and yanked her along. He dragged the reluctant couple down the street and into the arcade he had checked out earlier. Keeping the two of them moving was a major task, since all they seemed to want to do was to stop in the middle of the street and grapple, and never mind who saw. But Matt did mind, and kept them in motion, even though he was right between them and they kept trying to reach around him to get at each other. In fact, they were growing frantic, and beginning to get angry, when Matt finally slung them into a shadowed alcove, panting. “Now! Go to it!”
They did, falling into one another’s arms with a fervor that made Matt long for Alisande, and the way they were groping each other with their mouths glued together certainly didn’t help his concentration. Even so, Matt raised his hands and chanted,
The combined form of the entwined lovers began to fade, then grew more vivid again. It began to fade again, but came back again-again and again, pulsing. No surprise. Matt could feel the Latrurian environment fighting his magic. In desperation, he sang the first thing that came to mind for young people:
It must have been the Latin that did it, for the resistance let go with a shock. There they were-and there they weren’t! Not quite instantaneously-they sort of did a fast fade, so there was no gun-shot crack of air rushing in to fill a sudden vacuum. Matt lowered his hands, relaxing-at least they shouldn’t have attracted any undue attention. Which made it all the more puzzling when the finger tapped his shoulder and a voice right behind him said, “Most neatly done. I could not have been more adroit myself.”
Matt froze. He knew that voice. Then, very slowly, he turned around. “Good afternoon, your Majesty.”
Chapter 18
“I trust it is a good afternoon indeed,” the king replied. “Let us go out from this arcade into the sunshine, so that you may look your last upon it.”
Matt stared at him while he waited for his stomach to hit bottom. He saw Rebozo and the ranks of soldiers behind the king, and the unremitting hostility in the chancellor’s gaze, and felt his stomach take another plunge. Nonetheless, he managed to say, “Can’t have been all that neat, if I attracted your attention. You were just waiting for me to try this, weren’t you?”
“It was a trap most neatly laid,” Boncorro confirmed. He turned to the chancellor. “I must congratulate you, Rebozo, on so adroit a piece of maneuvering. You chose exactly the right damsel to abduct.”
The chancellor smiled and bowed. “It was nothing, Majesty. This foolish do-gooder is so lacking in suspicion!”
Why was it that paranoids created more paranoids? “I take it your Majesty is sore about losing a very promising concubine.”
“What, that?” King Boncorro tossed his head in dismissal. “She matters nothing, nor does her swain. Indeed, I hope they will be happy together.”
But Rebozo’s eyes flashed with malice, and Matt realized that he was apt to track down Pascal and Flaminia out of pure spite. “You, on the other hand, matter a great deal,” the king said. “It is customary for a man of power to announce himself when he enters another country-surely when he comes to the court of its king.”
“Who, me? I’m nothing!”
“I think you mean that, in some strange way.” Boncorro regarded him narrowly. “I can only say that your humility is excessive. Any wizard who can overcome the spells of allure laid about my women’s quarters is no mean wizard indeed.”
“Well, it was nice to know Flaminia hadn’t really been all that fickle.”
“You are a wizard, of course,” Boncorro said. Well, that put it to the test. Matt wished Christianity let you deny it to save your life once or twice-but he had to declare his loyalty. “I am, your Majesty-but you are, too.”
“I suppose I must be, since I am not a sorcerer.” Boncorro sighed. “But I will not take power from either Heaven or Hell, as you no doubt know.”
The chancellor flashed him a glare of annoyance, very quickly masked. Matt had guessed rightly-he was a sorcerer. “I had gathered that, yes. But how, then, do you work magic?”
“By virtue of a prodigious memory.” Revenge could always be postponed in favor of a good chance at shop talk. “You might say I grew up with it-I watched my grandfather work his spells, as I was compelled to do along with half the court, that we might tremble at the mere thought of disobeying him. He never thought that I would remember every word, every gesture, since they were meaningless to me. In like fashion, I saw my father work spells that, he claimed, drew on the power of God or His Saints-in fact, he taught them to me, most earnestly.”