“Say,” Xyphia says casually, arranged just so in her chair to appear diffident and composed. She brushes beneath her chin with her knuckles, as if a passing thought had struck her, and glances sideways at her orb, in which a tiny fisheyed likeness of her old friend, Sidell of the Hundred Iron Arrows, flickers. “You’re not terribly busy in the spring, are you? How would you like to exchange towers for a week or so, have a little holiday?”
“Oh, gosh, Xyph,” Sidell says. “You haven’t got any better at lying at all. What’s happening in the spring?”
Xyphia covers her eyes, groans, and confesses: “A wedding, which I’m — anxious about.”
“It’s not Gvalder, is it?” Sidell’s head turns, expression perturbed; there’s a faint noise of rummaged-through correspondence. “What’s that, his sixth? Have I overlooked an invitation? Oh, just pretend you never got it, I’ve avoided an entire two of his marriages that way—”
“No, no,” Xyphia says wretchedly, sliding down a little in her chair, as if hiding from her own shameful lack of fortitude. “It’s — two of the locals. Tradespeople.”
“Oh!” Sidell says, cocking her head in puzzlement. “I’m not quite seeing the problem, Xyphia, just — surely they don’t expect the local wizard to turn up to arbitrary festivities? Inviting you is a formality, I’m sure, you can simply not go.”
Xyphia groans again, dramatically.
“Xyphia,” Sidell drawls, and so Xyphia is obliged to explain a little — as little as she can get away with.
“Well, I can’t, Xyph,” her old friend says finally, in a kind sort of way, and forestalls her by raising a hand. “What I mean to say is that your tradesfolk seem unusually set on having a wizard…well. What if, in your absence, they expected to prevail on me?”
“Oh,” Xyphia says meekly. “I…hadn’t thought of that.”
It makes sense, she supposes; any wizard’s as good as another for lordly tyranny, and the mistaken object of the idea need not be Xyphia. The thought pains her oddly, which she immediately and firmly resolves not to think about very hard — a shameful upwelling of ego, no doubt.
“My wife would, in that event, shuck both you and I out of skins and cram us in rock tumblers filled with coarse salt until we forgot how to be anything other than contrite, and then probably a little longer for good measure,” Sidell says cheerily.
“Of course,” Xyphia says morosely. “Do say hello to her for me.”
“Xyphia says hello, darling!” Sidell’s likeness calls over her tiny, flickering shoulder; Sidell’s wife calls back something not quite audible, from presumably within the same room. “She says — well, she says hello,” Sidell relays, clearly editorialising, which no doubt means that her wife thinks Xyphia is an amusingly hapless idiot, if rather dear to them both.
“Maybe I’ll just visit the two of you anyway,” Xyphia says, with an awkward pretence at cheer. She won’t, and they all know it; just as one shouldn’t be a hatless wizard, one’s tower shouldn’t be wizardless.
“I confess I don’t really understand why you can’t just tell them no, Xyph,” Sidell says, sympathetic in tone.
“I have!” Xyphia protests.
“I’ve witnessed you say no to a good many things, in entirely convincing and undeniable fashion,” Sidell tells her. “If you’d done so properly to these locals, no matter how determined, I hardly think they’d be capable of gainsaying you — you are Xyphia the wizard!”
Xyphia covers her eyes and groans once more, miserably heartfelt.
