He saw me then. “Good evening, Wizard,” he said, looking up from undoing the knots he had just finished tying. “I decided not to spend another night at that old ruined castle I’ve been exploring but to come on home.”

I took and let out a deep breath. “I hope you realize, sire,” I contented myself with saying, “that you came very close to being trapped at best by a paralysis spell-or even transmogrified into a frog.” The problem with being Royal Wizard was that I was supposed to have mature wisdom to offer my king but was not in a position to spank him as though he had been twenty years younger.

“Then I have both a competent wizard and a competent night watchman,” Paul said cheerfully. “Have you ever been to the ruined castle, Wizard? It’s over in the next kingdom, but I think you’d find it very interesting. I’ll just take care of my horse; I left him outside the moat. Good-night.” And he disappeared back out the gate.

I helped the watchman up. He rubbed his wrists where they had been chafed by the cord and retrieved his sword. “And I helped train him myself,” he said with pleased pride.

This was not my own reaction. Paul had been king only a few years, and if he thought testing his castle’s defenses by putting his own life in danger was nothing more than a joke, then he needed to find more to do to keep himself occupied. Either that, the thought struck me with depressing force, or else the castle’s main source of mature wisdom was going to have to teach him some.

But my first thoughts the next morning were not for Paul. “My, uh, my niece would like to visit me here at the castle, my lady,” I told the queen mother. “That is, if it’s all right with you.”