kingdom.”
She turned swiftly, smiling at us over her shoulder, and stepped behind a trunk. When we followed her a second later, we saw no one. But almost immediately a voice called from the branches above. “Come up!”
I put together the flying spell and rose slowly upwards. Evrard bit his lip, frowned, and then followed, without enough hesitation to make it worth commenting.
Forty feet up, a number of branches growing close together formed a hidden platform, on which were spread rugs and cushions. Rustling green leaves formed a partial roof, but from the platform one could also look out and up, toward the magnificent crown of the tree, the white limestone cliffs of the valley, and the deep blue of the sky beyond.
The wood nymph was already seated in the green shadows. As we arrived, she held out a wooden bowl toward us. “Have some raspberries.” As she leaned toward us, offering the bowl, her hair fell over her shoulder and brushed my hand. It was just as soft as it looked. I almost expected the berries to vanish, but they stayed real and delicious all the way down my throat.
Evrard looked around thoughtfully. “Is this all there is to your house?”
She smiled. “It’s all I need. It’s humans, not wood nymphs, who try to build and create.”
“What do you do when it rains?”
The nymph laughed, a charming sound like wind through the leaves. “I thought the necessary magic would be obvious to a wizard.”
Evrard shook his head, almost blushing. “You live and breathe magic, Lady. We wizards have to learn it, and I’m afraid I’m still learning. Have you lived here long?”
“I’ve lived here all my life,” she said with another smile. Even Evrard knew better than to ask her how long that had been.
III
We sat on her cushions, eating raspberries and drinking spring water, while the blue slowly faded from the sky far above us. Tiny breaths of wind fluttered the leaves and touched our faces as gently as a caress. The water- or maybe the wood nymph’s conversation-went to my head like fine wine. Sheltered as we were by branches above us and on either side, the broader world soon seemed very inconsequential.
The worrisome affairs of the duchess, Nimrod, and Dominic shrank in importance, becoming something trivial they’d work out for them selves. It was clear that Saint Eusebius would never really want to leave such a lovely place-I could have stayed here forever myself.
The nymph asked us questions about the royal castle of Yurt, listened to our answers with her full attention, laughed approvingly at our jokes, and kept our water glasses full. Her own wit both kept us teasingly at bay and invited further confidences. Every movement was graceful, every look and word from her as sensuous as a sun- warmed breeze.
If I had not already been in love with the queen, I would have been in love at once. I tore my eyes away from the nymph long enough to look toward Evrard. He had never even met the queen, and he didn’t have a chance.
With a start, I realized it was evening. I glanced upward to find that all the branches above us had lost their detail in darkness, and the sky beyond was only a somewhat lighter shade of gray. When I looked again toward Evrard and the wood nymph, they were invisible, hidden in shadows. I had been able to see perfectly until a glance upward, to the world outside of the nymph’s cozy nest, showed me that it was so dark I shouldn’t have been able to see for the last hour.
The nymph too knew it was late. I could hear her standing up. “Come see me again tomorrow,” she said, the smile clear in her voice.
We floated slowly down toward the ground. Evrard was silent as we groped our way through the grove and then, once free of the trees, lifted to fly over the waterfall towards our mares, slightly paler gray shapes in the darkness. As we mounted, he gave a long, contented sigh. “She wants us to see her again tomorrow. I’d like to see her every day of my life.”
“You can’t bind yourself to a wood nymph,” I said reprovingly. “She’ll live forever, or at least for many more centuries, whereas a wizard isn’t good for more than two or three hundred years. And you know wizards don’t marry anyway.”
Evrard’s laugh came out of the darkness. “You’re being a school teacher again, Daimbert.”
He was right, but at the moment I was more concerned about our horses’ footing. My mare stopped, unwilling to go further on the uneven trail. I was not even sure we were still on the trail. I looked up toward the sky, a slice of stars between the darkness of the cliffs.
“We need a light,” I said. What we really needed was a magic lantern. I tried lighting up my mare’s bit and bridle, which worked quite nicely to light up the path, but made her jerk her head so violently that I ended the spell at once.
“How far is it to the duchess’s castle?” Evrard asked. “Do you think we’ll be able to make it?”
I had been wondering the same thing. “Her castle must be nearly ten miles from here, and the old count’s isn’t much closer. I think we’d better stay here.”
“How about going back to the nymph’s tree?”
I’d known he’d suggest that. “We can’t very well impose on her. Besides, I don’t want to grope around the grove, trying to find her. It was confusing enough in daylight.”
Evrard gave another happy sigh. I realized with a shock that I had no clear idea what we and the nymph had discussed for the hours we had been in her tree, only the warm feeling that it had been a delightful conversation. If my purpose in coming to the valley was to persuade her to leave the Holy Grove, I was no closer to doing so than I had been before-in fact further, because I had as little wish as Evrard did to see her leave Yurt.
From the corner of my eye, I suddenly thought I saw a flash of light. There was a faint whispering sound that was not the whispering of the leaves. I probed quickly with magic and found several people moving toward us. After a startled second I remembered: the old hermit’s apprentices.
The young men approached us, carrying a torch. One stepped out of the shadows next to my mare, making her jerk hard against the bit. The torch light gave his badly-shaved head the unreal quality of something out of a bad dream. But his voice was both polite and frightened.
“Excuse me, Father, but we heard your voices. Has something happened to the hermit?”
I realized he must think I was Joachim. “I’m not the royal chaplain,” I said, “but the wizard who was with him when we saw you before. I’ve come to the valley with another wizard on a different mission entirely. As far as I know, no one is planning to take your master away from here.”
There was a pause, and one of the other apprentices whispered something. “It’s the wood nymph, isn’t it,” said the apprentice who had already spoken.
“What do you know about the wood nymph?” I asked quickly. But he shook his head without answering.
“Is there somewhere near here we could stay tonight?” Evrard put in suddenly.
This seemed to delight the apprentices. All of them stared at us for a second and then began to grin. “Hospitality,” said the one who appeared to be their leader. “We’ve had very little opportunity to practice hospitality, and yet that is a duty of the solitary hermit. You can stay in our huts with us!”
The stone huts had never looked very appealing, but they had to be better than sleeping in the open. The apprentices lit our way with their torches.
I thought of saying, “Well done, young wizard,” to Evrard but decided I had already sounded like a schoolteacher enough for one day. “Good work,” I said instead. “But don’t let them see any satisfied smirks if we talk to them about the nymph. We shouldn’t shock their chaste sensibilities.”
From the single blanket roll in the corner of the one-roomed hut, I assumed that only one of the apprentices lived here, probably the one who served as leader. Each of them must have his own hut in which to practice living in isolation. It didn’t look as though being an apprentice hermit was anywhere near as entertaining as being a student wizard.
All five of the apprentices crowded in with us. “We need food for our guests,” said our host, and two
