The Wood Nymph, the Cranky Saint

abruptly to decide to get married after all these years, for Diana to hire a wizard, commission horned rabbits, and flirt outrageously with a huntsman-

“Do you think Dominic will still want to marry her if she’s run off with Nimrod?” asked Evrard. “I must say I was surprised he proposed. I wouldn’t have thought their temperaments would be similar enough.”

“If Dominic has decided it’s finally time to get married, he may not have a lot of women to choose from. The only alternative I can think of is the queen’s aunt Maria, and they would be even less compatible.”

“But if Dominic and the duchess do get married, and he wants to leave Yurt, do you think she’ll go with him? Will she still want a ducal wizard?”

I didn’t answer. More relevant was the question of whether Dominic would murder Nimrod-and maybe Diana as well. She would have a lot to answer for if King Haimeric came home to find that his kingdom as he knew it no longer existed. For that matter, so would I.

Evrard broke into my thoughts again. “Are you going to try to make the wood nymph leave the hermit’s grove?”

“I want to see if the old spell to talk to her really works,” I said, “and you and I should catch the rest of your rabbits if they’re still at that end of the kingdom-this business of creating magical animals just to hunt them has gone far enough. And while we’re at it I’m afraid we probably ought to find the duchess and Nimrod. As for the nymph, I told the chaplain I would talk to her, and I really should do so before the priests of Saint Eusebius arrive.”

I had been going to add that I also wanted to see if the entrepreneurs were still on the cliff above the Holy Grove, but Evrard interrupted me. “It seems to me, Daimbert,” he said in exasperation, “that you let that priest boss you around much too much. Didn’t they warn you at school about staying out of the Church’s affairs?”

“I’m not being bossed around,” I said, determined not to be angry. If Evrard and I didn’t present a united front, the situation would become even worse. “As wizards, we need to examine all magical phenomena. I’ve never talked to a wood nymph before.”

Evrard nodded, somewhat mollified, but he did not speak again. After a short distance, we passed the village from which the different claimants had come whose case the king had judged. The place was full of activity, and the big wheel on the mill was turning. I thought of pointing it out to Evrard but decided to say nothing.

From two years of associating with Joachim, who had never been good at light chatter, I was accustomed to long silences. But it occurred to me that it would be a real effort of will for someone like Evrard not to say something. As we rode through the hills of Yurt, past high fields where hay was being raked and low meadows where cows raised their heads to look at us, past streams and sudden valleys and distant hilltops where a church spire rose from a cluster of houses, I considered the irony of the situation. The last time I had ridden this way, Joachim had felt constrained in talking to me because I had no interest in religious issues. This time, Evrard was behaving exactly the same way, but because I had too much interest in such issues.

But when we stopped to rest our horses Evrard turned to me as though there had been no tension. “Tell me more about the wood nymph. Is she as beautiful as that unicorn lady?”

“She is lovely,” I said, “but she doesn’t look anything like that lady. The nymph has violet eyes and dusky skin, the color of shadows in the deep forest. She’s not human, even though she looks human-she may even be immortal. Apparently she’s lived in the grove for centuries. Let me run through the spell to call a nymph.”

He paid close attention and mastered the key elements far faster than I had-although, I reminded himself, I had not had his advantage of having someone else organize and explain it all clearly.

As we remounted our mares, I was startled to feel a sudden constriction around my body. I could not move my arms or even keep my balance. My mare gave a little jump as she felt me starting to shift. I toppled slowly and majestically from the saddle. There was barely enough movement left in my lower legs to get my feet free of the stirrups in time, and I was just able to snatch at a few words of the Hidden Language to break my fall.

Then I heard Evrard laughing. He reined up a few yards ahead and turned back. “So you don’t think I can do a good binding spell? I told you I don’t make the same mistake twice!”

It was a good binding spell. But I didn’t give him the satisfaction of saying so, instead turning my attention to unraveling it. Someone else’s spell always takes longer to break than one’s own, and since he showed no signs of helping, it took me several minutes to get free.

Then I allowed myself to smile as I rubbed a bruised elbow and went to retrieve my mare, who had started once again to graze. “Not bad,” I said with a guileless grin, swinging up into the saddle. “You really did surprise me. It might not equal the old wizard’s spell, but you certainly had me tied tight.”

“I’m sorry, Daimbert,” said Evrard, still laughing and sounding not at all penitent, “but you’ve been acting so serious about everything that I thought I should-”

He did not finish the sentence. He rose straight up from the saddle to a distance of about ten feet, shot sideways, and dropped. I managed to set him down quite lightly.

Now it was my turn to laugh, so hard that my mare turned her head around to look at me. After dusting himself off and giving me one truculent look, Evrard joined in.

Dominic and the duchess, I told myself, could take care of themselves. I was the wizard of this kingdom, and my concerns were magical, not social.

“Let’s call a truce,” I said to Evrard. This was as good as being back in school. “If we keep binding and lifting each other, we’ll never get to the wood nymph’s grove.”

“Truce it is,” he said cheerfully. Just like back in school, I immediately and surreptitiously started preparing a new lifting spell, just in case. He approached his startled mare, making reassuring sounds, and remounted. “Did you ever hear the joke about the nun, the nixie, and the wood nymph?”

II

In mid-afternoon we reached a fork in the trail. Turning one way would take us duchess’s castle, and the other way up onto the high plateau, toward the valley of the Holy Grove. The day had turned hot and the road dusty. I hesitated, taking a pull from my waterskin.

Evrard interrupted my thoughts. “Which road gets us to the wood nymph’s grove the fastest?”

“This way,” I said with sudden decision. It would be shadowy and refreshing down in the limestone valley where the hermit and the wood nymph lived. The duchess could wait.

The wind blew up on top of the plateau, drying the sweat on our foreheads, as we approached the low wall where one could look down into the valley. Evrard looked thoughtfully at the view. “I didn’t get a chance to ask the duchess when we were up here,” he said. “Were there once castles in this valley?” pointing toward the rock formations. The white limestone, emerging in tall, tumbled shapes from the trees that clung to the valley walls, did indeed look like ruins.

“I think those are all natural. The stone weathers like that over the millennia.” It was such a responsibility being burdened with Evrard’s continuing education.

As we continued along the valley rim, I was surprised to see some raw wooden scaffolding, partially erected. It looked as though the entrepreneurs were going ahead with their plan to build a giant windlass to lower pilgrims to the Holy Grove. I had almost persuaded myself that it was all a facade, designed only to irritate Eusebius, the Cranky Saint, enough to make him leave. But it looked as though both Joachim and I were wrong on this point.

The young man in the feathered cap came out as we approached his booth. The sign was still there, proclaiming, “See the Holy Toe! Five pennies on foot, fifteen pennies in the basket.” But there was something different about the booth. On the little shelf in front, small shapes were clustered. As we came closer I could see that they were ceramic figurines.

“Greetings, Wizard!” said the young man cheerfully, recognizing me at once. “Have you changed your mind? Do you want to join us? As you can see, we’ve got our figurines and brochures, including the story of how someone prayed to the saint to be healed of the pox after years of mocking him, and the saint only healed him along one side to teach him a lesson. We’re going to add vials of water from the holy spring this week. And we’re almost ready for the basket, though we still think it would be better if people could be raised and lowered by magic-certainly it would be more impressive!”