The Wood Nymph, the Cranky Saint

“And she and I had to chase them earlier, too,” Evrard said with a rueful expression. “I’d made three and gotten the horns to stay on fairly well. I wanted to test them to see if they’d move and hoot properly out in the wild. This was several days before I met you. We went up to a plateau a few miles from her castle, and they moved so well they escaped!”

“Escaped? And what did you do?” If strange magical creatures had been loose in the kingdom even longer than I thought, then I had clearly been derelict in my responsibilities as Royal Wizard.

“The duchess was terribly upset,” said Evrard. “She said she didn’t dare let anyone see them for a few more days-I don’t know why. We managed to catch two of the three horned rabbits, though it took all afternoon. They’d gotten down into that deep valley that’s cut into the plateau.”

The valley of the Holy Grove. This must be what had made Saint Eusebius cranky enough to want to leave. The king had gone on vacation, the duchess had asked Evrard for horned rabbits, Nimrod had come out of the forest offering to hunt them, and the Cranky Saint had decided to leave Yurt, all within a very short period of time. At least some of these events had to be related.

But the more I thought about it the less sense this made. The saint, with his relics in a grove shared with a wood nymph, must certainly have seen stranger magical creatures than Evrard’s rabbits during the last fifteen hundred years. And I didn’t think there had been enough time, between when the rabbits escaped and when Joachim first heard from the bishop, for the priests in the distant city to have had a vision of the saint, write to our bishop, and for him to write the chaplain.

Another thought struck me. “You didn’t make any other magical creatures besides the great horned rabbits?”

“Of course not,” said Evrard, his blue eyes round in innocence.

“But what did the duchess want the rabbits for?” I demanded.

“I wish I knew,” said Evrard. For a moment, he actually looked troubled. “She never told me. Since they were my first assignment from my first employer, I didn’t want to ask a lot of questions. Then, the afternoon before I met you at the count’s castle, she said I should set free the ones we’d caught.”

The day the king and queen left Yurt, I thought, the day before I had seen them hopping through the nymph’s valley. The duchess had already told me she had wanted to wait until after King Haimeric had gone on his trip before letting the royal court know she had a wizard of her own. I hoped her only motive was not wanting to distract the king from his vacation.

“The count had sent us a message the same day, saying he’d seen one-the one we couldn’t catch. So I guess she decided we might as well have all of them loose.” Evrard smiled again. “When I first met you and we were talking about Elerius, I could barely resist telling you about my rabbits! But the duchess had said it was supposed to be a secret.”

“A secret which I’ve now guessed. Don’t worry. I’m not about to tell everybody else. But why,” having a sudden thought, “if you were able to catch two horned rabbits in one day the first time, has it taken you three days to catch just one?”

“Well, I certainly could have caught it much faster than that,” said Evrard self- righteously. “But the duchess told me this time that she didn’t want them caught with magic. She wanted to use them as a test for her new huntsman.”

No wonder she had refused my assistance back at the count’s castle. Between having her wizard make horned rabbits and her huntsman hunt them, Diana seemed very busy lately testing the people around her. The queen had commented once that the duchess always did exactly what she liked.

“So you think she asked you for rabbits specifically as a test for him?”

“I doubt it,” said Evrard with a shrug. Proud as he was of his rabbits, he was starting to find my questions about the duchess a little dull. “You saw how surprised she was when he first appeared, and I had started making the horned rabbits over a week earlier.”

“Did you break the spell when Nimrod finally shot it?” I asked.

“I didn’t have to. The spell only keeps all the different parts together as long as nothing happens to any of the parts. Even with Elerius’s help, I couldn’t make a rabbit that would hold together once it was trapped or shot.”

“Who is Nimrod, anyway? Do you know?”

Evrard shrugged again. “Just some hunter. I guess she wanted to see how good he was before employing him.” This didn’t seem right, but Evrard didn’t give me a chance to respond. He stretched his arms and smiled. “But that’s enough about the duchess! You and I hardly had a chance to talk properly last week, and I’ve been eager to catch you up on all the news from the school.”

I suddenly felt I had let this whole ridiculous matter, of saints and horned rabbits, become much too serious. I forced my hands and shoulders to relax. “Fine-but first, let me have my dressing gown back. If you don’t have one of your own, tell the duchess you need money for ‘personal purchases.’”

For the rest of the afternoon, Evrard and I swapped stories: exploits in the wizards’ school, exams for which we had never studied, near escapes from the Guardians in the City down below the school, jokes played on other students and, in Evrard’s case, even once on Zahlfast. After dinner, we decided to share a last glass of wine, which somehow became a whole bottle. I had not laughed so much or so long for two years. It was well past midnight by the time we turned out the magic lights.

But as I fell asleep-on the pillow with feet, which Evrard had switched back at some point-I remembered again the footprint, man-like yet inhuman, that I had seen in the Holy Grove.

Early the next day, Evrard and I rode out of the castle on old white mares. I’d assumed a fellow city boy would want a placid mount. We rode down the hill, past the cemetery, into the woods. Our saddles and harnesses creaked, and the horses’ hooves rang hollowly on the bricks of the road, but otherwise the summer morning was nearly silent.

“He’s a fairly irritable old wizard,” I told Evrard, “so try not to say anything that will upset him. For example, he doesn’t like the wizards’ school-he was trained under the old apprentice system himself, long before the school first opened.”

Evrard stifled a yawn and grinned at me. “Now I’m going to be afraid to say anything.”

“And call him Master. He likes that.”

“But the Master of the school-” He stopped, laughed, and shook his head.

I gave Evrard an encouraging smile and wondered why I felt it so necessary to explain everything to him. I had come down alone to meet my predecessor two years ago, without the slightest idea what I would find, and managed fine-well, no, actually I hadn’t managed very well at all.

“He’s getting old,” I said. “And he’s started to lose control of his personal life. He no longer keeps his house tidy, and I think he was even more offensive to me last week than usual, though it’s hard to tell. If he’s lost control in one area, he may also have had his magic get away from him.”

Evrard glanced toward me, worried this time. “Then why are we going to see him?”

“Because I think something has gotten away from him. At the same time you were using some of the old magic to make horned rabbits, he may have been using similar spells to make something almost human.”

He did not answer. We continued along the road in silence.

A half hour’s ride through the fresh green of the forest brought us to the track, marked by the little pile of white stones, which led off from the main road and into the old wizard’s valley. The trees hung low enough here that we walked our horses. After a few turns of the track, we could see the branches thinning up ahead, and then we came out by the bridge.

“Did we really have to get up this early?” asked Evrard, yawning again, but he had not yet seen what waited by the bridge. I smiled to myself and waited.

Then he turned his head and saw the illusory lady sitting on the bank, her golden hair spread out across the grass and the unicorn resting its head in her lap. He was off his horse in a second and down on one knee before her. “Lady, let me put myself in your service. I am Evrard, the ducal wizard of Yurt.”

As she always did when someone tried to talk to her, the illusory lady lifted her sky-blue eyes to him without answering, then rose and started down the valley, an arm around the unicorn’s neck and her hair floating in a cloud behind her.

“Wait, Lady, I didn’t mean to offend you!” Evrard called, still on his knee.