Free A Bad Spell in Yurt - Wizard of Yurt - 1 by C. Dale Brittain

magic lock on the door to my chambers, and when I came back it was gone."
    Unlike the chaplain, the old wizard would surely know how hard it is to break a properly-constituted magic lock. But he just snorted at me. "Did the spel s wrong, I reckon," he said. His insults scarcely even stung any more.
    "But while you're speaking of locks," he added abruptly, "you haven't tried to get through the locked door of the north tower, have you?"
    "The north tower?" I said ingenuously.

    "Don't play the fool with me. I used to have my study in the north tower, as they must certainly have told you. The constable seemed to think you'd have your study there, too, but I straightened him out fast enough."
    "They gave me a very nice set of chambers," I said cheerful y.
    "When I left I locked the door and windows to the tower with both magic and iron."
    I sat up straighter but managed to cover my surprise with a fit of coughing; tiny tendrils of smoke from the fire were whirling into the room, and I was sitting very close to the hearth. There had certainly been no magic lock on the tower door when I pul ed back the bolt, and al the windows had been unlocked.
    "That sounds pretty secure, then," I said blandly, then fel to coughing again. The smoke real y was getting in my nose, and it had an unusual, almost spicy quality.
    " No one shal go in that tower again while Yurt survives," the old wizard said grimly. "Did you notice that I even ordered them not to whitewash it? I don't want any young men on scaffolding peeping in the windows."
    "I noticed that the tower wal s are dead black while the rest of the castle is white," I responded, wild with curiosity in spite of the headache the smoke was beginning to bring on. "But Master," I continued tentatively, "as long as I'm living in the castle, don't you think it might be better if I knew why you locked up your old study? That way, in case any--"
    "NO!" he interrupted, leaving it quite impossible for me to ask again what he thought he had locked up. "I've taken care that no problems shal ever arise, for reasons of my own, and by methods of my own. Why should anyone else ask me about it?" He glared at me so fiercely that I retreated to the far side of the room, where I finished coughing as quietly as I could. The air was better further from the fire.
    After a moment I caught my breath and looked at the table next to me. As wel as a constant cascade of ice-blue stars, it contained piles of leaves and roots, some in earthenware bowls, some loose on the table. There were also mortars and pestles, fire-blackened pots, and bits of stone rubbed into dust. In spite of his boast about being a wizard of light and air, I thought, the old wizard was not too proud to be a wizard of earth as wel .
    Modern wizardry uses very few herbs and roots. We keep our magic technical, straightforward, capable of being attached to such simple substances as steel and glass and of being reduced to written spel s. But al wizards know, even those, like me, who tended to skip the lectures on the history of wizardry, that there is a natural affinity to magic in some growing things. In the days when books were few and apprenticeships long, young wizards learned how to recognize and gather plants with magical properties, even discover new ones. It occurred to me that, since I hadn't exactly been a huge success as a wizard taught from books, maybe I should give apprenticeship a try.
    That is, of course, if the old wizard would be wil ing to teach me. So far everything I had said seemed to infuriate him. I looked across the room to where he sat rocking by his hearth. The room had darkened, but the fire's glow reddened his face. The rain's beat fel steadily on the oak leaves above the roof.
    "Master," I began, and he whirled toward me abruptly, as though, deep in thought, he had almost forgotten my presence. "Master, I was glad to see that you had brought at least some of your apparatus from the castle to be able to continue your research