Free Mage Quest - Wizard of Yurt 3 by C. Dale Brittain Page B

soberly. “The boy has a point.
    It’s one thing to flee a human enemy, another a monster.”
    I, too, was about to protest, to tel Hugo that he knew perfectly wel that the women of the East were not furry, that he himself had suggested to me that his father was surrounded by dancing girls. But then he gave me a broad wink and I stopped in time.
    “We couldn’t leave anyway,” said King Haimeric. The servants have our bags and, down in the stables, they’re reshoeing our horses. Why don’t we just ask Arnulf ifhe has any problems on which he’d like our help?”
    “Al right,” said Ascelin, “but I stil want to leave as soon as our horses are ready. We should al stay close together. “That means you, too, Hugo. I wish the chaplain hadn’t gone off with him.” We moved in a group in the direction that Arnulf and his foreman had gone. I thought irrelevantly that anyone seeing us would assume we had become so accustomed to each other’s company while traveling together that we could not now bear to be separated.
    But we did not find the lord of the manor. “Sire,” I said to the king, “tel the others about the bandits, about how they were apparently expecting to find something in that silk caravan. I can search more quickly by using magic.”
    I left them sitting on a pasture fence and hurried back toward the house. Enormous horned snakes or not, I wished the chaplain had not gone off with Arnulf.
    I found him, unexpectedly, not with the lord of the manor but with the lady. Claudia sat on a bench under a tree in the garden, singing and playing a lute, while Joachim sat at her feet, his dark eyes fixed on her face.
    Surrounded by the colors and scents of a spring garden, dappled with the sunlight that made its way through the young leaves overhead, they seemed caught in a song of heart-wrenching beauty, where the afternoons were endless and the dailiness of ordinary life was so far away to be non-existent. And then I listened to the words. “So kiss me as you say good-bye,” sang Claudia. “Kiss me and ask not the reason why. But my heart shal take an eagle’s wing, away to fly.”
    I froze, caught between feeling I should slip away without disturbing them and feeling that I must stop this at once.
    But Joachim smiled and motioned me to join them. Claudia looked up from her lute, saw me, and stopped in the middle of a word.
    “Please go on,” said Joachim. “I’d forgotten how wel you sing.”
    Flustered, Claudia started again, but a completely different song. This was a seafaring tune about courage and shipwreck.
    I let the melody wash over me while I probed with magic for Arnulf. I found him in the stables—either supervising the reshoeing of our horses, I thought with Ascelin’s suspicions, or else making sure we could not leave.
    “Excuse me, my lady,” I said abruptly when Claudia came to the end of the song. “We’ve al been wondering, perhaps you can tel me. Why did you and your husband ask our chaplain to come visit you now?”
    Joachim frowned at my rudeness. But Claudia seemed too delighted that I had not asked her what she meant by singing love songs to a priest—and her husband’s brother at that—to mind. “Its something to do with our trade caravans,” she said lightly. “We have, of course, hoped for years that Joachim would come home to visit, but there’s some business matter that made it especialy urgent now. Arnulf can explain it to you, I’m sure; I never pay much attention to business myself.”
    “Maybe you should,” said Joachim, but looking at me rather than her.
    “You never did,” she said softly.
    “But you never had any intention of becoming a priest,” he said with a smile, scrambling to his feet, “or, in your case, a nun.” As he and I walked back toward the others, I wondered uneasily if Arnulf knew al the time what his wife was doing.
    If he meant harm to us, he certainly treated us wel in the meantime. Our horses were stil not ready at the end of