The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint Read online

  He gave me a slice of black bread and took a crust for himself. Having had nothing to eat the day before but the nymph’s berries, I devoured it ravenously, washing it down with spring water that tasted exactly the same as the nymph’s water.

  “You seem hungry, my son,” said the hermit with a small smile, and I realized with embarrassment that he had only taken a few small bites of his bread while I was polishing off mine.

  “I thank you, Father,” I said meekly. He wasn’t my father any more than Joachim was, but I felt I had to show respect.

  He put down the rest of his crust uneaten. “If you have finished satisfying your physical needs, then, perhaps I can help your spiritual needs.”

  I was still hungry, but it would have been rude to ask for more, especially since I doubted he always had enough himself.

  He took me by the shoulders and turned me gently toward him. His touch was cool and very light. His bright eyes reminded me oddly of the deep pool in the center of the grove. “You are very confused, my son.”

  I started to deny it, then changed my mind.

  “Surely your friend the chaplain has told you that God is the answer to confusion.”

  Actually Joachim had never said this to me. Oh, well, I thought. Since I had eaten the hermit’s bread, I would now have to listen to him.

  But his next remark surprised me. “Have you ever thought of the origin of your magic?”

  “Magic’s a natural power, part of the same forces that shaped the earth,” I said promptly. That every wizard knew.

  The hermit smiled as though at a clever pupil. “And you know that the earth was formed by God. In performing magic, wizards touch the hem of His garment and take part, even if only in a very small way, in His power of creation.”

  This they had not taught us at the school.

  “You have an awesome responsibility, my son. It would indeed be too heavy a burden for mortal man to bear, were it not for God’s mercy.”

  I started to deny I had any awesome responsibility, then stopped. As I had told the old wizard, with an audacity that amazed me as I recalled it, I was Royal Wizard and responsible for any magical events in the kingdom.

  “But God does not forget the sons and daughters of His creation, even when they forget Him.”

  I looked into the old hermit’s bottomless eyes until I felt I was sinking into them. I felt almost as if in a trance, my breathing deep and regular and my heartbeat slow, though my mind felt unnaturally clear. I could leave confusion behind, I thought, if I gave up my own self-will and dedicated myself to powers far more important than myself, the kingdom, or even wizardry. For a moment I wondered if the hermit would be willing to accept me as an apprentice.

  But then I remembered I had something important to tell him. I fought back to myself like someone swimming up from deep under water I broke eye contact with him and mentally shook my head. Being trained in wizardry had always made me susceptible to powerful outside influences.

  I was a wizard, and the world needed wizardry as much as it needed priests and hermits. Here, I thought, the old hermit would agree with me.

  “Did you know that three priests are on their way here,” I asked, “to see if Saint Eusebius would be willing to have his relics leave with them? They come from some distant city—I forget its name—but it’s where the saint was originally made a priest.”

  “On their way? When will they arrive?”

  “The pigeon message from the bishop said they would reach the royal castle of Yurt—” I paused to calculate and was surprised at the answer I reached. “They should have reached there yesterday.”

  “Then I may see them today or tomorrow,” said the hermit peacefully. “I am sorry they will have had such a long trip without result. But I must not say that. They will certainly find it spiritually refreshing to worship at the shrine. No priest from the church where the saint received his youthful training has been to the grove since I have been hermit.”

  I was not nearly as sanguine about the priests’ arrival. But if Joachim was with them, I would at least have the opportunity to reassure him about the nymph.

  Both of us stood up, and I gave the hermit the formal bow as I thanked him for breakfast. But I walked quickly away from the hermitage without the slightest intention of going around to the other side and bending my knee before the Holy Toe.

  The sun was still hidden behind the eastern valley wall, but the sky was bright overhead, and birds were singing as though last evening’s rain was only a distant memory. This was a lovely place, and the past day had been extremely enjoyable, but if my predecessor’s magic had gone renegade, then I had neglected for far too long my responsibility as a wizard to do something about it.

  I wondered if it was too early to disturb Evrard. I turned back toward the part of the grove where the wood nymph had her tree. This time I found the tree immediately. “Evrard!” I called softly.

  A tousled red head emerged from the leaves far above me. “Good morning!” he called, as cheerful as I had ever seen him.

  “I think we’ve done everything here we came to do.”

  “I certainly have!” said Evrard, with a grin I was glad the hermit had not seen.

  “We need to get back to the royal castle of Yurt. First we should stop by the duchess’s castle, even though I doubt they’d be there after two days, so—”

  “Who’s that?” called Evrard, interrupting me. “Is it more pilgrims?” High in the tree, he could see more clearly than I, but in a moment I too picked up the flicker of rapid movement among distant beeches. Someone was coming down the steep road into the valley.

  I quickly began to put together a far-seeing spell, wondering if it was the priests come for the relics of the Cranky Saint. Then I stumbled on the words of the spell as I felt an icy and completely irrational conviction that I would see a man-like creature, not alive and not dead.

  At last I had the spell functioning passably and was able to see that it was a single rider. By now the horse had reached the valley floor and was heading toward us. With a start, I recognized the duchess.

  PART FIVE - THE DUCHESS

  I

  A duchess should not be riding unaccompanied through the countryside. “Come on down. Hurry,” I called sharply to Evrard. He floated down from the tree, and we flew over the waterfall and along the trail to meet her, while I imagined all sorts of alarming possibilities. Neither Nimrod nor Dominic was with her.

  “There you are,” said Diana with satisfaction. She reined in her horse and dismounted. “I thought I might find you here. You look as though you’ve been sleeping in the woods for days.” I glanced down at myself and realized that I had been wearing the same clothes for three days now.

  Evrard hurriedly tried to comb his hair with his fingers; he looked even worse than I did. I wanted to ask Diana what had happened, if she had really eloped with Nimrod, but I could not make myself do it. “The grove has powers of attraction I don’t fully understand, my lady. We’ve been meaning to go to your castle for two days, and somehow we’ve never gotten there.”

  “Well, we weren’t there anyway,” she said absently. In her stained riding cloak, she appeared nearly as little like an appropriate member of an aristocratic court as we did.

  “But where were you? Is everyone all right?”

  “Of course everyone’s all right,” she said, surprised. “But you’re correct about the grove,” she continued. “It’s always had the power to draw people toward it. And not just the pilgrims who come to worship at the shrine of Saint Eusebius or to seek the hermit’s wisdom. The story is that a wood nymph lives here. Thousands of years ago, back when everyone was still pagan, people came to worship her.”

  “She still lives here, my lady,” said Evrard, speaking for the first time.

  “Is that so?” said Diana slowly, as though understanding more than he had meant to tell her. He reddened under her steady gaze.

  She turned back to me. “My father, the old duke, wanted to cut
the grove down when I was a little girl. He even started making arrangements for the hermit to move somewhere else. My father said having a nymph’s grove just encouraged women to practice secret rituals—fertility and the like, I presume. I think it was his chaplain’s idea.”

  “But what happened?” If Dominic had murdered Nimrod she seemed to be taking it remarkably calmly.

  “King Haimeric wouldn’t let him cut down the trees. I was just as pleased myself, though of course I couldn’t say that to my father. The king adjudged that the grove was in royal territory, not ducal territory. I don’t think he cared one way or the other about the wood nymph—or even the hermit. But he hated to see the beeches cut.”

  “You still haven’t said why you’re here alone, this early in the morning.”

  “Saddle your horses,” said the duchess. “Nimrod should be down at the lower end of the valley by now. We were following what he thought was a trail left by a great horned rabbit up on the plateau. It just looked like an ordinary rabbit track to me, but he’s even better at hunting than I am. The trail went straight down the slope into the valley, and so did he, but I preferred to come around by the road. We caught one horned rabbit yesterday, so this one is the last.” So my paralysis trap would never be tested—probably just as well.

  Evrard and I retrieved our saddles and packs from the stone hut. There was no sign of the apprentices, but I scribbled a note thanking them for their hospitality. Our mares, content and well-fed after two days of eating the rich valley grass, looked at us grumpily as we approached but allowed Evrard to catch them.

  “And where is Dominic?” I asked Diana as we rode down the valley.

  “Last I knew,” she said with a shrug, “he’d gone off to see the old retired Royal Wizard.”

  “I don’t understand, my lady. I’d have thought Dominic would be more interested in where you and Nimrod had gone than in the old wizard.”

  The duchess burst into laughter. She seemed in an excellent mood this morning. “We hadn’t left yet when he did. He was going to try to force the old wizard to dismantle his monster.”

  My heart gave a hard thump. “What?”

  “A message I slipped under his door may have helped him decide he ought to go,” said the duchess. She chuckled as she spoke, then turned to look at us gravely. “If you two plan to deceive either Nimrod or me, I’m afraid you’re going to have to do much better. It was clear from what you said at dinner the other night that the former Royal Wizard of Yurt had created a new and terrifying creature.”

  My stomach knotted. I put a hand over my eyes, realized this probably wasn’t safe when riding a narrow road immediately next to a river, and instead glared at Diana. “So you sent him off to the old wizard’s cottage, to do goodness knows what, maybe even set the monster loose through his bumbling, just to make sure he didn’t realize that you and Nimrod were leaving together?”

  “It worked,” she said mildly. “Besides, I’d already told him we were going hunting again.”

  Diana didn’t care who she irritated, but if she continued to flirt with Nimrod even after Dominic had proposed, Joachim and I would have to deal with a furious and humiliated regent for the rest of the king’s absence—assuming he lived through his encounter with the monster. If I loved the people of Yurt, as I had said to Evrard, then I could not pick and choose between them. To love Yurt meant not just the king and queen and baby prince, the chaplain and the constable and Gwen and little Gwennie, the queen’s Aunt Maria and all the knights and ladies, but even—somehow—Prince Dominic.

  But then I shook my head and tried to restore a little rationality to my thoughts. Considering how easily my predecessor had dealt with Evrard and me, two theoretically competent wizards, the regent would never be able to get past him and set the monster loose.

  We rode several miles down the valley, farther than I had ever gone, to where it opened out into flowering pastureland. “By the way, Wizard,” said the duchess to Evrard, “there’s some sort of booth on the plateau at the head of the valley, and the man there said something very odd about how you might be working for them …”

  Evrard interrupted her. “Excuse me, my lady, but might you have any food with you?” He had not, I realized, had anything to eat for nearly two days but the wood nymph’s berries, and even then it had only been stale bread and lettuce. In spite of my breakfast with the hermit, I was not much better off.

  “I’ve got some hardboiled eggs you can have if you’re hungry,” she said, not quite grudgingly, and reined in to reach into her saddlebag. Neither Evrard, who ate three, nor I, who ate two, took time to worry about her tone.

  Here where the valley widened a wind blew steadily, and the flowers and shrubs swayed beneath a bright sky. Beyond, the valley walls closed in again, leaving only a very narrow gap, just broad enough for the river to rush through and disappear with a faint roar. Through the gap the hills were distant and blue; the plateau itself must drop off steeply here. It would have been nice to go on looking at the scenery, but I had responsibilities.

  “Listen, my lady,” I said. “The king asked me to keep on eye on the kingdom for him. I cannot have you upsetting the whole court while he is away.”

  Diana’s expression softened. “Yes, you’re certainly right. Nothing should happen that will distress Haimeric when he comes back. He’s an excellent king, but he is an old man, and he doesn’t need shocks. Nimrod should be near here,” she went on cheerfully. “I wonder if he’s had any success yet.”

  A bush only a few feet from us suddenly stirred, and the tall huntsman unfolded himself from behind it. “Didn’t think I could hide behind such inadequate cover, my lady?” he asked with a grin.

  Diana, who had jerked with surprise, burst into laughter. “No, I didn’t. What luck have you had?”

  “Nothing yet, but the track’s still very fresh. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that magic rabbit in my nets within the half hour.”

  “Take my wizard with you,” said the duchess, “and go back to your nets. The Royal Wizard and I will stay here, in case the rabbit gets by you.”

  The duchess and I sat our horses, watching Evrard and Nimrod in the distance. Now was my chance. If I was going to deal with the old wizard’s monster, whether loose or locked up, I had to try to clear away every thing else that kept distracting me: the Cranky Saint, the entrepreneurs, Dominic’s strange behavior, and especially what the duchess was doing in asking her wizard for horned rabbits and then carrying on with a hunter who appeared out of the woods to hunt them.

  But she spoke before I could. “Tell me, Wizard,” she said with a flash of gray eyes, “why this sudden prudish interest in my affairs?”

  “You don’t need to assure me of your honor, my lady. I just want you to realize what you’re doing. Even though you put Dominic off with vaporings about maidenly uncertainty, the entire court, including the regent, knows you’ve never been uncertain in your life.”

  She did have the grace to look embarrassed then, but she let me keep on talking.

  “And for you to refuse one man, and then immediately leave on a hunt with another— And you camped out with him, I presume, if you weren’t at your castle? You distracted Dominic by sending him down to the old wizard’s cottage, but that doesn’t mean you can forget him.”

  “You speak as though you thought I had become scandalous in my old age,” the duchess said, coldly and evenly.

  I had certainly never spoken to her like this before, but I did seem to have gained and kept her attention. “You know the royal court must be rife with speculation and rumor. It’s well known that Dominic felt he would have to marry you, to continue the royal line, back before the king met the queen, and that he dropped the plan with relief when the king’s marriage made it unnecessary. For him to propose to you now, without the slightest bit of encouragement in the years between, shows that he’s willing to let himself be insulted and humiliated if he thinks it’s necessary to stop the rumors.”

  “So that’s
your explanation?” she said icily. “That Dominic doesn’t really want to marry me, he only wants to preserve the kingdom’s reputation?”

  “What’s your explanation?”

  She looked at me thoughtfully, her anger draining away. “Dominic’s been living in the royal castle, as royal heir, since he was four years old and his father died. I’m not at all sure he really wanted to be king, but it was all he’d ever known.”

  For two years I had thought of Yurt as my kingdom. Yet at times like this I was reminded that both the kingdom itself and the people in it had lived and had plans and agreements and quarrels long, long before I arrived.

  “Dominic is a little slow sometimes,” Diana continued, “but this last year it’s finally sunk in that he’s actually free, for the first time in his memory. But being Dominic, his first thought is to tie himself down again. He says he wants to leave Yurt, but he can’t imagine doing so by himself.” She laughed. “I guess even I look better to him than some girl from down in the village.”

  “But how could he support himself and his new wife?”

  “I don’t imagine he’s thought that far,” she said with a shrug.

  This might answer some of my questions about the regent, but it still left the duchess’s behavior inexplicable. She outranked me far too thoroughly for me to force her to tell me anything; all I could do was make her angry enough that she’d keep talking. “But how about Nimrod? You’ve been encouraging him, my lady, encouraging him as blatantly as any village flirt. When he finds out that you had no real interest in him, that you were only using him to provoke the regent, isn’t his reaction going to be highly scandalous itself?”

  The duchess’s frown cleared unexpectedly at what I had thought was my worst accusation. But before I could react, I caught a sudden hint of something moving.

  “The great horned rabbit!” Evrard shouted to us.

  We rode quickly to where a net, almost invisible under some bushes, thrashed wildly. Nimrod, wearing enormous gloves, reached into the brush and pulled the net out.