“Did you catch one?” I asked. “One of the great horned rabbits?”
“I finally shot one this morning,” said Nimrod with a grin for the duchess. “I’ve never before had to hunt something for three days before I caught it! Now we’ll find out what it is, something from the land of wild magic or something supernatural. My lady Diana said that her wizard could analyze it, but I told her I wanted the best. Nothing would do but bringing it straight to the Royal Wizard of Yurt.”
Diana interrupted before I could respond to this implied slur on Evrard’s abilities. “I’m sorry you didn’t get my message on the pigeon that we were coming,” she said loudly. “A hawk must have gotten it!”
But she pulled me aside as the rest of her party, including Nimrod and Evrard, passed over the drawbridge and into the castle. “Actually I didn’t send you a message,” she said with a wink. “I didn’t want to give Dominic a chance to tell me to stay home. I don’t trust him to do a good job as regent without someone like me to keep an eye on him.”
The constable, with Dominic himself behind him, came out to greet the duchess with reasonably well- concealed surprise. She introduced Evrard and Nimrod and apologized for the loss or delay of the non existent carrier pigeon.
“I had been about to ride over myself to visit you and the count,” said Dominic. “Have you made any progress?”
“Well, Nimrod’s got a magic rabbit for your royal wizard to look at,” she said. For a second I almost wondered if she was irritated he had brought it here. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to bother yourself coming to my castle-I know you have
Dominic frowned as though suspecting flippancy and not quite seeing it.
“Let me see that horned rabbit,” I said. Nimrod handed me his gamebag.
As I took the leather bag, I thought that it felt very strange, not at all the way a gamebag should feel. A chill touched me that was not caused by the late afternoon breeze. By feel alone, I would have guessed the bag held not a horned rabbit but sticks and bones.
“What’s wrong?” asked Nimrod, catching my concern.
I had been about to take the bag into my chambers, but I now decided to open it here, in the middle of the courtyard. My apprehension became stronger as I slowly unbuckled it. “When did you put the rabbit in here?”
“Late this morning.”
I had the bag open now, and a powerful smell emerged in a wave, the smell of decay. Without reaching inside, I held the bag upside down and shook it. Scraps of fur, bones with bits of rotten flesh still clinging to them, and two long, straight horns fell out and clattered on the cobblestones.
Nimrod reached down and picked up a horn and a piece of bone. “These look like the bits and scraps someone might use if making some sort of artificial horned rabbit.”
“That’s my thought exactly,” I said grimly.
Dinner was lively that evening with the addition of the duchess’s party. Even Dominic, who kept looking thoughtfully at Diana, seemed to be making an attempt to be witty and charming. I remembered vaguely that there had been a story that Dominic had once intended to marry the duchess, back before the king and queen even met, but nothing had ever come of it. The mere thought of the stolid royal nephew trying to woo the lively duchess made this outcome easy to understand.
Nimrod, with his neatly-trimmed beard and cultured speech, appeared to make the transition easily from a rough outdoors life to a royal court. I would have expected him to sit at the servants’ table with the rest of the duchess’s huntsmen, but she took his arm, laughed, and put him next to her at the main table.
“Have you heard the story about the peacock?” Evrard asked the youth next to whom he was seated.
Hugo was a young cousin of the queen’s who was doing some of his knighthood training at the royal castle. “No,” he said, puzzled.
“You should have,” replied Evrard with a grin. “It’s a beautiful tale!”
“All right,” replied Hugo with a grin of his own. Other conversation at the table had stopped. “What did the ocean say to the ship?”
“Nothing. It only waved! Why are flowers considered lazy?”
“Because they spend all their time in beds! At which of his battles did King Chalcior say, ‘I die contented’?”
Evrard frowned. “King Chalcior? I remember him from history, but- Is this still a joke?”
“His last one!” cried Hugo, and the whole table, even Dominic, was convulsed.
I was the only one who did not feel lively. After spending two days persuading myself that I would, very soon, find a spell in the old ducal wizard’s books that would give the semblance of life with out supernatural aid, seeing the rotting rabbits’ bones had made me again fear that someone in the kingdom was practicing black magic.
“Wizard!” called the duchess to Evrard over dessert. “How about entertaining us with a few illusions?”
Evrard gave a start and shot me a second’s look of panic, then seemed to recover. He began muttering and moving his hands in the air, with far more flourishes than illusions actually required. In a moment, a fairly credible baby dragon appeared, about six inches long and colored bright blue. “There!” he said triumphantly.
He held it up for everyone to see, and got a polite round of applause. It was not nearly as impressive an illusion as the last ones I had done to entertain the court, shortly before the king left, but no one was so ill-bred to mention this. I hoped the duchess wasn’t going to demand too much of Evrard too fast; I had been at Yurt three months before doing illusions before an audience. The baby dragon perched on Evrard’s shoulder until it dissolved back into air.
After dinner, he came back to my chambers with me. I had a couch in my outer chamber that folded out into a bed, and Evrard had happily agreed to sleep there.
It had started to rain gently, and the evening air was cool. I kindled a fire and lit the magic lamps, and we drew our chairs up by the hearth. “I’m delighted to have another wizard here in Yurt,” I said, “because we’ve got a serious magical problem.”
Evrard looked at me attentively, then spoiled it by stifling a yawn.
“You and the duchess have been tracking the great horned rabbits for three days now,” I said. “Do you have any idea what they are, or how they could have been made? I haven’t been able to find any indication of the supernatural about them, but those bones this afternoon didn’t have any magic left clinging to them at all.”
Evrard shook his head and smiled-he really did have a charming smile. “Not now, Daimbert! It’s the end of a long day, and I don’t need this on top of everything!”
I apologized at once. “Of course. I’ve been looking forward so much to having you as a colleague that I’m afraid I’ve gotten over-eager.” I reminded myself that a newly-graduated wizard, especially one who had not been anywhere near first in his class, should not be pushed too much. I myself had not even bought all the books for my own second-year classes and still had gaps both in my library and in my knowledge as a result. If I didn’t watch out, I would turn into a strict crank like my predecessor-though a much younger one.
In the morning, a steady rain was still falling-good for the crops, I firmly reminded the city boy I used to be. Evrard went off somewhere, but I settled down to finish the last of the old ducal wizard’s books.
At first it contained only the same mishmash of odd spells and herbal magic I had seen all along, but after several hours I found something else. I pulled the magic lamp closer and squinted at the handwriting. With growing excitement I realized that the old ducal wizard had known-or thought he knew-a way to give dead flesh and bones motion and the semblance of life. It required no pacts with the devil, only a detailed knowledge of herbal magic and mastery of what looked like incredibly complicated spells.
Of course, spells which dated from before the advent of modern school magic were often more quirky and complicated than they needed to be-something that could also be said of some of my own spells.
I didn’t have any herbs or bones in my chambers, but I decided to improvise. I pushed the chairs back to leave a clear place on the flagstone floor and assembled a pillow, the poker from the fireplace, and several pencils together in a vaguely reptilian shape. Standing well back, I read out the heavy syllables of the Hidden Language which should give my creature the semblance of life.
Not all the words in the book made any sense, some were illegible, and I had to add new sections to the spell to compensate for the lack of herbs, but in ten minutes I thought I had it. I said the final words, slammed the book shut, and looked hopefully toward my creature.
