As I pulled my door shut and attached the lock, I wondered again why my spell had not worked at first. Had I just said one of the many words wrong in setting up the spell, or had an outside magical force broken it for me?

The seating arrangement at dinner the first night was maintained, and I ate every noon and evening between Dominic and the Lady Maria. Occasionally Dominic would be away in the middle of the day, but she and her golden curls were always at my right. The Lady Maria seemed, if possible, to be growing younger. She liked to engage me in lively conversation, punctuated with girlish laughter. If I tired of her laughter, I had only to look across the table to meet the chaplain’s completely sober eyes.

But in fact I started to like the Lady Maria. As long as I could keep her off the topic of how young and charming she still was, she had a lively mind that was hungry for new ideas and information. She repeatedly pressed me for details on the dragon in the wizards’ school cellars. I decided to have her help me with the telephones.

During the two days that the armorer was making steel plates for my lights, I set to work trying to derive the right spells. I decided that the first step would be to make it possible for two telephones in the castle to talk to each other; if that worked, then maybe I could start on the much more complicated task of starting communication with telephones elsewhere.

The king seemed stiff and said nothing more about learning to fly, and Dominic asked no questions about malignant spells, so I devoted full time to the telephones. It occurred to me that I was becoming obsessed with them, but at least at every meal the others all asked me interested questions about how I was coming and seemed, I thought, to be drawing comparisons between the old wizard and myself with the comparison favorable to me. I tried not to think what they would say when I gave up the project in despair.