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  He stopped before the high table, not far from me, jangling his bell-strung baton at the count, who did not seem much pleased.

  Then Scur swung around and waved his bells at the hall in a bid for attention. The audience had already hushed, eager to hear the entertainment.

  “Today we are not in a mood for frivolity!” the count announced in tones even louder than his usual officers’ bellow. His sour-faced wife looked furious. Perhaps she always looked furious.

  “Aye, my lord?” Scur was quite audible, too, even inside his mask. “Is it not when you are most downcast that you are most in need of levity? Furthermore,” he declaimed, with a wild swing back to face the hall again, “we bring you glad tidings! Know that your house today is most extraordinarily blessed, by a great miracle.”

  “And how is that?” Sir Hugh asked loudly. The count’s deputy’s duties might well include playing straight man for the fool.

  “Is it not so, good sir, that mortals walk upon the earth?”

  “It is certainly true that mortals walk upon the earth.”

  “And do not angels soar like birds in the heavens?”

  “Verily, angels do soar like birds in the heavens.”

  “Then, behold!” Scur stomped over to me and gripped my upper arm to raise me. It might be many years since the old warrior had wielded a broadsword, but he had not lost a swordsman’s ferocious grip.

  Resigned to being today’s goat, I stood up.

  “Why here, good sir,” the fool continued, “is your miracle! For he stands on the earth with one foot and soars above it with the other. Surely he is half an angel?”

  The standard of humor in Barton Castle was not high: the audience rated that as very funny. Although few of them could have seen my platform boot, no doubt I had supplied much gossip already. They laughed and cheered and banged things on the tables. Even the count laughed, and I would not expect him to display much wit. I bowed to him, and then to the cheers.

  “But wait!” the jester cried, waving both hands. “If he is half an angel, he must surely be only half a sage. So, in faith can he be a whole man? Can he be a good Christian?” Nobody answered, of course, waiting for the punch line. “Well, let us make sure of that, and baptize him!”

  Having failed to recognize impending danger when the fool had tucked his baton in his belt, out of the way, I was taken by surprise when he tipped a beer flagon over my head. The audience considered that the funniest event of the millennium. The giant rabbit capered around, jingling his bells again, enjoying the applause. Fortunately the flagon had been close to empty.

  I stayed on my feet, wiping beer off my face and licking my fingers. In a moment I was noticed and the laughter stilled.

  “Sir Hugh,” I cried. “Is it not a brave rabbit that mocks a silver fox? I will turn him into a frog!” I bellowed some meaningless Latin at him, waving my hands wildly.

  Sir Scur made his exit, pretending to flee in terror. End of show. That was perhaps the feeblest joke I had ever made, but it was good enough for that company. I was applauded for taking the ribbing in good heart. I sat down.

  Sir Hugh said something, the count nodded. The marshal stood up, large and imposing, and the hall hushed.

  “We all mourn with His Lordship and his family on the tragic and unexpected death this morning of his brother, Sage Rolf de Mandeville, may Our Redeemer cherish his soul. Adept Durwin came to Barton in his train, and will be staying here for a few days. He is young, but has studied for many years under Rolf and other learned sages at the famous academy of Helmdon. We apologize to him for the fool’s pranks and thank him for taking them in good part. The adept will serve here as best he can until a new house sage can be found. He has the count’s full confidence. Pray make him welcome.”

  Applause.

  The adept in question was astonished. My demonstration of the poisoned wine must have been reported by Hugh to the count and must have impressed him just as much. Could I possibly live up to the expectations I had raised?

  And—I wondered, admitting a shamefully selfish idea I had been suppressing—if I could expose the murderer, would the grateful count be willing to sponsor my continued studies at the academy?

  A footman handed me a cloth to clean off as much of the beer as I could. Sir Kendryck rammed a killer elbow in my ribs and leaned close. “What do you want to know?” he whispered.

  Where to start? “Was Sage Archibald popular?”

  “Not with the men.”

  “Who was he humping?”

  “Well I’m too busy at the moment to go into that. Come with me after the meal, and I’ll try to tell you who he wasn’t.”

  Two silver goblets smelling of wine, an unmade bed in the home of an obsessively tidy man, and now a second witness testifying that Archibald had been a lecher. Father Randolf ’s disapproval of him was understandable.

  chapter 18

  by the time another grace concluded the meal, the dogs were already feasting on the discarded trenchers. High table diners trooped out, as did the servants, except the few who began collecting horns and platters. Shouted at to go back to work, the squires reluctantly obeyed. Soon only the knights lingered— squabbling, mocking, quaffing beer, and arguing about the chances of the truce breaking down so the king could resume the war in France. There was no fighting going on anywhere, except for some minor troubles in Wales, and there would be no honor or profit in lancing a pack of hairy barbarians there. Knights are always bored in peacetime, and nothing could possibly happen until spring at the earliest, they agreed. The king was rumored to be coming to hunt in Rockingham Forest, which was not far away. I knew that this was William’s father’s province, but I didn’t say so.

  Then Kendryck, having eaten enough for three men, heaved himself to his feet.

  “Come along, then, silver fox,” he said. “Your pelt looks a bit mangy. Let’s get it properly groomed.”

  Of course he descended the spiral staircase much faster than I could, but mended his manners to stay at my pace on the stairway down the side of the mound. He talked of the tourneys he had entered in the summer, and bragged of ladies whose token he had worn, hinting at the rewards they had provided when he won.

  I could not resist asking, “Only when you won?”

  “Or wasn’t too badly concussed in losing.”

  He led me to the castle laundry, a large building near the gate, where women boiled clothes and hung them up, both indoors and outdoors. The interior was a steamy labyrinth of corridors between wet sheets and baskets of dry garments. Many women were busy in there. Kendryck seemed to know them all and tried to envelope each of them in an enormous bear hug before introducing her to me. The young ones were willing to flirt, the old ones scolded, but all of them seemed well-disposed to the jovial giant, just as all of them regarded the new acting sage with wary respect. Kendryck’s special favorite seemed to be one called Megan, who was built on the same monumental scale as he was. He hoisted her clean off her feet, and then she did the same to him, in what seemed to be a standing comedy act in that company, likely because her name means strong in the old tongue.

  Once all the byplay was finished, Kendryck uttered an audible aside about, “A wild ride, that one!” and began selecting garments at random, picking up, comparing, discarding until he was satisfied. Then he found a private corner and told me to strip.

  “You’ll impress in this,” he said, admiring the gentleman’s blue robe that had been his final selection.

  “I can’t wear that!”

  “Of course you can. You must. At the moment you look more like a stableman than an adept.”

  And probably still smelled like one, too, since I was one most of the time. I undressed as fast as I could, much aware of women’s voices and footsteps just behind the draperies.

  “All right, girls, he’s naked now. You can come and look!”

  “Stop that!” I protested, grabbing for the robe, which of course he whisked away from me, but I was much less troubled by Kendry
ck’s wicked grin than I had been by Alwin’s creepy stare the previous day. Which reminded me, once I got hold of the robe . . . “I got those clothes from Alwin last night. I haven’t gone back to find my own.”

  “Don’t bother. They all get mixed up, and we wear whatever fits both us and our rank. What did you want to ask me?”

  “I’d like to know about the time Archibald was smitten, and how—and when—he died. He couldn’t tend himself, so where was he taken and who looked after him?”

  “Father Randolf would know.”

  “Father Randolf doesn’t approve of adepts. He won’t help me.”

  Kendryck snorted. “Try him. Even a priest must see how the battle is going after what Hugh said. That’s quite a boot you have there. Do you get shod by cobblers or farriers?”

  “One leg each. What happened to Sage Charles?” Rolf ’s murder could be explained as an effort by a worried killer to escape detection, but there was still no obvious motive for Archibald’s death.

  “He died, so I heard.”

  “Where and how?”

  “Old age. He got so bewildered he didn’t know a potion from a poultice. The count found a monastery to care for him.”

  “Northampton?”

  “No, somewhere far away, near some family he had.”

  So Archibald had not been murdered by a dispossessed Charles wanting his old job back. Discard that hypothesis.

  “What academy did Archibald come from—Northampton?”

  “Dunno. He spoke like a Londoner, all sick-cat meowing.”

  Almost any sage would grab at a chance to be a count’s enchanter, so now the hints of bad blood between the academy at Northampton and Sage Rolf might extend to include his brother, Count Richard. Without that antagonism, Northampton could probably supply the count with a replacement sage before nightfall, even if only a temporary one. If the count must send farther afield, my tenure might last for a week or two.

  Sage Guy would be wanting Ruffian back, now the rain had stopped and the hunting could resume.

  I slung my white cape on my shoulders and wished I had a mirror.

  “Come on, then,” Kendryck said. “You look imposing now, very potent. You do still smell a bit beery, but that’s better than stinking of horse like me, because you have a good excuse. I’ve got to go, or the marshal will have my hide for saddle leather. Can you find your way back to your lair?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he led the way back out to the fresh air, managing to pat a few behinds on the way, including Megan’s, but she was not the only one who responded with encouraging sniggers of delight.

  When they were safely out of earshot, I said, “Now tell me about Archibald’s lady friends.”

  The knight chuckled. “Well, you just met at least six of them. Married, unmarried. I’m guessing, but there were few skirts he didn’t lift. He had an unfair advantage.”

  “Scur told me. If he hit the bull’s eye, he could provide an abortion?”

  “Didn’t matter who’d scored, he could.”

  “You mean that was his price?” I asked, disgusted.

  “I mean that there was a potion to be swallowed and a spell to be chanted, during certain actions that only he must perform, although I have it on good authority that he wasn’t as well qualified as some of the rest of us.” Kendryck twisted his big mouth into a lecherous smirk.

  Even an adept knew of herbs reputed to abort unwanted fetuses, and a qualified sage probably had other techniques also. I did not believe that unwelcome coupling would be part of any of them. What Kendryck was describing sounded like outright extortion, a sage requiring women to provide sex as payment for an abortion. If that was Archibald’s procedure, it could easily explain his murder—either by one of his victims or by an outraged husband wanting revenge for being cuckolded. Or for the loss of a future child.

  Mercy! Just about anyone in the castle might have had a motive to kill the scoundrel. But some of those fancy garments in the sage’s bedroom had not belonged to laundry maids.

  “Saxons, Normans, low, or high?” High like barons’ widows? Was that what Scur had refused to discuss?

  Even the ebullient Kendryck knew where this talk could lead. He shot me a warning frown as he said, “Anything’s possible. You go that way.”

  I thanked him and lurched off along the alley indicated. When I spoke the paternoster and entered the sanctum, I found William seated at the table, hard at work, writing—truly a miracle!

  He regarded the newly glorified adept with unconcealed scorn. “Must I kneel to you now, my lord sage?”

  “Not unless you want to. I just thought I’d show you how hard work and dedication can raise you in the sages’ calling. How many responses have you left to go?”

  “Three.”

  Only three? Something very strange had happened to Squire William Legier. His writing was clear, his spelling as reasonable as anyone’s, and it soon became evident that he had worked out the meaning of most of the text without any help from me. The kid was the absolute model of perversity! Give him something to do that you both knew he could do, and he would die in torment rather than do it; give him something far beyond his skills, and he would die proving he could.

  And while I was marveling over that, he said, “There’s a stupid error in the third versicle.”

  A moment later he asked, “Why are you sitting there with your mouth open, Saxon?”

  Because I was remembering all the hundreds of ancient spells that didn’t work in modern times and my triumph at repairing the Hwæt segst. If William, whose training in enchantment was basically zero, could see an obvious error, then why hadn’t some sage noticed it a century ago and corrected it? Because it was deliberate!

  Some ideas are so obvious when you think of them that you cannot imagine why they aren’t general knowledge. Magic must never be allowed to fall into the wrong hands, because it is the enchanters’ livelihood, yes, but also because it is dangerous. So it must have been the custom in ancient times to write the spells with mistakes in them, like trip wires to catch the uninitiated. And somehow the secret had been lost.

  “Show me,” I said. Yes, it was obvious. I dipped my pen and corrected it.

  “I’ve heard Sage Guy warn us that we must never change the wording,” William said suspiciously.

  “That’s what we tell the beginners.” And what I was going to correct Guy on when I got back to Helmdon! “Glad you caught that, Squire. You amaze me. You’ve had knight’s training and you’ve also been taught by priests.”

  “Mind your own business, Saxon.”

  “I am both jealous and impressed.” I sat down and took up the book. “Read me what you’ve done, one response at a time, working backward.”

  “Why backward?”

  “We always rehearse incantations backward, because if you don’t, and make a mistake, it may work in ways you do not want. And you’d better tell me the meaning of each one also.”

  “In what language?”

  “Either, but not Latin.”

  About halfway through, William looked up with a worried frown. “You are going to have me pretending to be the voice of the Archangel Michael? Isn’t that blasphemous?”

  “No more than people playing the holy family in a mystery play. You’re only claiming to pass on his words, not be him.” A well-split hair, that.

  Still uneasy, William continued reading.

  When we ended with the first response, I laid the book down and grinned at him.

  “What’s so shitty funny, Saxon?”

  “I’m trying to imagine Guy’s face when we get back to Helmdon and you turn in an assignment like this for him. He will positively pee in his shoes!”

  “What makes you think I ever would?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to see his reaction?” Getting no reply, I said, “Squire William Legier, I always knew you were smarter than you pretended, but I am truly impressed with what you’re doing here! This is great work, as good as anything I’ve eve
r done or can do. Your Latin is better than most priests’, and your penmanship as fine as any I have seen. Who trained you?”

  William scowled fiercely. “You called off those castle dogs. You’re mothering me!”

  “I just said I needed your help, which I do. The challenges were only put off, weren’t they? You can mash them all later. How many have you got lined up?”

  “Seven.”

  Oh, Blessed Mary! They would kill him. I said, “You’re lucky. I’ve only got one.”

  “You’re going to be first. I wasn’t even counting you. You make eight.”

  “No, we Saxons stand aside and let our betters precede us; I’ll go last. Now let’s keep on and see if we can get this Ubi malum finished before . . .”

  Someone knocked at the door.

  chapter 19

  wacian the bottler graciously accepted William’s invitation to step inside; he had promised to spare the adept a few minutes, so here he was. He did not deign to peer around at the crocodile and other curiosities, but I could not tell whether that indifference was feigned to preserve his dignity or genuine because he was already familiar with the sanctum. He must have noticed my new garb, but his pudgy face expressed no reaction. Likely he approved of that transformation; since the count had accepted this whippersnapper as acting sage, he should dress the part. His bow to me was calculated to the inch.

  “You had something you wished to ask me, Adept?”

  I was assessing our respective stations. Wacian was head of the domestic servants, likely reporting directly to the steward or even the countess, but he was still a servant. I was a scholar, so the servant must remain upright and the adept stay on his stool. William, having closed the door, was standing by the shelves with his hands behind his back, playing respectful retainer.