This sounded deadly dull to me. One advantage of being a wizard rather than a priest was that the wizards’ school wasn’t always giving us the responsibility of carrying out uninteresting tasks.

But something about this message had bothered Joachim. There was a faint note of concern in his voice that no one who did not know him as well as I did would have noticed. “What’s the problem?”

“I don’t understand why the bishop asked me,” he said, turning his huge dark eyes fully on me. Even after two years, the effect was still intimidating. “Why didn’t he just send one of the priests from the cathedral?”

“Maybe because the hermitage is here in the kingdom of Yurt,” I suggested, puzzled why this was important. “You’re Royal Chaplain, but the cathedral is located in the next kingdom.”

Joachim shook his head. “That shouldn’t make any difference. Both kingdoms are in the bishop’s diocese.”

“Maybe the bishop thinks you’d do the best job.”

He frowned at this. “The bishop should realize I have no special merits.”

I expected the bishop thought the exact opposite but didn’t say so. I was still wondering why being asked to do something which sounded simple and dull should bother Joachim so much, when the constable appeared, walking briskly down the grassy path between the roses.

“I thought I’d find you here, Wizard,” he said. “A message just came in on the pigeons for you. It’s from the count.”

I took the tiny cylinder from him, all that carrier pigeons could handle. Since the royal castle still had the only telephone in Yurt, the rest of the kingdom had to communicate with us via pigeons. I unrolled the little piece of paper. Yurt had two counts and a duchess; this message was from the older of the two counts. The message was, by necessity, brief.