expression on her face. “Why didn’t you tell me, my lady?”
“I scarcely needed permission from the Royal Wizard to hire my own wizard, did I?” she said with a laugh. “Besides, I wanted to wait until after King Haimeric had gotten safely off on his trip before I distracted the royal court with anything else. So, how do you like my wizard? As someone who’s been in Yurt longer, do you have any recommendations? Are there certain books I should buy? Should I get in some crucibles and pestles and special herbs?”
“Ask Evrard himself what he needs,” I said, but the smile froze on my lips. This likeable young wizard had been in the kingdom for two weeks. Could he be responsible for the great horned rabbits?
I did a little very rapid magic probing, which I hoped he wouldn’t notice, and felt my shoulders relax. If he had made the rabbits, it was certainly not with supernatural aid. I could understand a school-trained wizard, even one I had barely met, better than anyone else, and there was nothing about Evrard which suggested a plunge into black magic.
At this point, dinner was announced. As we moved toward the table, I noticed the chaplain standing by himself. I had almost forgotten him.
“Joachim,” I said, “let me introduce you to Evrard, the duchess’s new wizard.” His dark eyes had been distant, but at once they came back into focus. “Evrard, this is my very good friend, the Royal Chaplain of Yurt.”
“I am glad to meet you,” said Joachim gravely, shaking Evrard’s hand.
The young wizard winced; Joachim’s grip was strong. “I’m happy to meet you too,” he said.
Joachim smiled then, which he had not done when he first met
At dinner, the count asked us about our trip up to the high plateau. I merely mentioned the Holy Grove, because I wasn’t sure how much of the situation Joachim wanted generally known, talked a little more about the horned rabbits, and did not mention at all the strange footprint or the spell I had sensed.
I would have expected that the duchess would be most interested in the horned rabbits, especially since she had come here at the count’s request to hunt them, but instead she started talking about the shrine. “That’s where the toe of Saint Eusebius, the Cranky Saint, is kept, isn’t it?” she said. “He’s not a saint to trifle with! Who was that man,” turning to the count, “your great-grandfather?”
“Great-great-grandfather,” he said as though embarrassed.
“Anyway,” continued Diana, “our present count’s ancestor was a noted rapscallion and sinner.” It was hard to imagine anyone related to the white-haired count as a rapscallion. “But when he was dying, he started worrying about his soul at last, and he asked to be buried in the Holy Grove, near the shrine. But the Cranky Saint didn’t want someone with so many sins on his soul buried that close. So he rerouted the river so it flowed between the grave and his shrine!”
Everyone but Joachim laughed. The count nodded sheepishly. “That’s right. That count’s son, my own great- grandfather, was so embarrassed he had him dug up and reburied in our castle cemetery. The next day, the river was back in its normal bed.”
I wondered briefly if the Cranky Saint himself might have made the horned rabbits, but realized that someone with that sort of supernatural power would need no spells. If Evrard hadn’t made the rabbits, there might be still another wizard wandering around Yurt. I wasn’t going to let that go on in
I was awakened from an uneasy sleep by a voice in the room with me. “Dear God.”
Abruptly awake, I lay still for a moment in the darkness, trying to remember where I was. There was rapid, shallow breathing from the far side of the room.
Then I remembered that we were still in the count’s castle, not home in the royal castle, which was why my bed felt so unfamiliar. I sat up and lit a candle. “Joachim? Are you all right?”
He pushed himself up on one elbow and looked toward me. The flickering light and shadow from the candle flame made his eye sockets black and empty. But then he turned his head slightly, and his eyes came back. “I had a dream.”
“I was dreaming, too,” I said. “A nightmare about the great horned rabbits. But you’re awake now, and it’s not real.”
He flopped back down without speaking. I reached for the candle to extinguish it, but my hand froze as he spoke. “It was real.”
He was silent so long that I thought he would say nothing more, but I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to hear it anyway. I felt abruptly that there were not enough blankets on the narrow beds in the count’s second-best guest chamber.
“It wasn’t a dream,” he said at last. “It was a vision. Saint Eusebius appeared to me.”
My immediate reaction was highly interested curiosity. I had never had a vision in my life. I wondered how Joachim had known it was the saint, and if he had had the sense to ask what the saint knew about the entrepreneurs on the top of the cliff. I thought of asking if the entire saint had appeared to him, or just the toe, but decided against it. From the strain in Joachim’s voice, seeing a saint had been a deeply disturbing experience. “What did he say?” I contented myself with asking.
There was another long pause. “He doesn’t want to stay at the hermitage,” said Joachim at last. He sounded distant, almost as if he were no longer in the room with me, although I could see his back in the candlelight. “He was very clear on that point. But he wouldn’t tell me where he wanted to go instead.”
He rolled abruptly around to face me. “It was horrible, Daimbert! I’ve never been addressed like that. His face was like a living flame. Yet there is nothing evil in him, only the overwhelming power of good. The sin is in me, not to be able to bear it.”
He put his hands over his face. I blew out the candle and slowly stretched back out in my bed. He said nothing more, and after a while I fell asleep again, although my dreams were more troubled than ever.
III
Diana was surprisingly unwilling to have me help her search for the great horned rabbits. Even though it was the count, not the duchess herself, who had summoned me from the royal castle, I would have expected her to welcome any magical assistance.
“My own wizard and my huntsmen will be plenty,” she told me firmly the next morning. She wore a man’s leather tunic now and a disreputable old stained cloak, her only ornaments the wide gold bracelets she always wore. She realized she usually did not look like a woman of the high aristocracy and enjoyed people’s reactions to her refusal to be conventional. “You can go home and keep an eye on Dominic.”
I was about to protest, to tell her that if there was someone casting a powerful spell in this end of the kingdom then Evrard might need another wizard’s assistance, but I stopped myself in time. He should have a chance to show his new employer his abilities unimpeded. Besides, although I would have liked to put it off, I needed to talk to my predecessor as soon as possible.
The count and countess thanked us for coming and waved from their gate as we all left their little castle. We had gone only a half mile, and Diana had just said she and Evrard would turn off the road in search of tracks, when she abruptly reined in. She started to speak, stopped, and merely pointed.
A man was coming toward us on foot, walking easily with long strides. He wore a green cloak and had a heavy bow slung on his back. He would have looked entirely normal except for his height: he must have been over seven feet tall.
I probed quickly with words of the Hidden Language, suspecting another magic creature. But there was nothing about him that suggested he was other than fully human.
He continued toward us, his long blond hair blowing out behind him. Though his hair was unkempt, his beard was neatly trimmed. Ten feet short of the duchess’s horse, he stopped and went gracefully down on one knee.
“Greetings, my lady. I hear you need a huntsman.” His voice was surprisingly cultured and very deep.
