I was not nearly as sanguine about the priests’ arrival. But if Joachim was with them, I would at least have the opportunity to reassure him about the nymph.
Both of us stood up, and I gave the hermit the formal bow as I thanked him for breakfast. But I walked quickly away from the hermitage without the slightest intention of going around to the other side and bending my knee before the Holy Toe.
The sun was still hidden behind the eastern valley wall, but the sky was bright overhead, and birds were singing as though last evening’s rain was only a distant memory. This was a lovely place, and the past day had been extremely enjoyable, but if my predecessor’s magic had gone renegade, then I had neglected for far too long my responsibility as a wizard to do something about it.
I wondered if it was too early to disturb Evrard. I turned back toward the part of the grove where the wood nymph had her tree. This time I found the tree immediately. “Evrard!” I called softly.
A tousled red head emerged from the leaves far above me. “Good morning!” he called, as cheerful as I had ever seen him.
“I think we’ve done everything here we came to do.”
“I certainly have!” said Evrard, with a grin I was glad the hermit had not seen.
“We need to get back to the royal castle of Yurt. First we should stop by the duchess’s castle, even though I doubt they’d be there after two days, so-”
“Who’s that?” called Evrard, interrupting me. “Is it more pilgrims?” High in the tree, he could see more clearly than I, but in a moment I too picked up the flicker of rapid movement among distant beeches. Someone was coming down the steep road into the valley.
I quickly began to put together a far-seeing spell, wondering if it was the priests come for the relics of the Cranky Saint. Then I stumbled on the words of the spell as I felt an icy and completely irrational conviction that I would see a man-like creature, not alive and not dead.
At last I had the spell functioning passably and was able to see that it was a single rider. By now the horse had reached the valley floor and was heading toward us. With a start, I recognized the duchess.
PART FIVE — THE DUCHESS
I
A duchess should not be riding unaccompanied through the countryside. “Come on down. Hurry,” I called sharply to Evrard. He floated down from the tree, and we flew over the waterfall and along the trail to meet her, while I imagined all sorts of alarming possibilities. Neither Nimrod nor Dominic was with her.
“There you are,” said Diana with satisfaction. She reined in her horse and dismounted. “I thought I might find you here. You look as though you’ve been sleeping in the woods for days.” I glanced down at myself and realized that I had been wearing the same clothes for three days now.
Evrard hurriedly tried to comb his hair with his fingers; he looked even worse than I did. I wanted to ask Diana what had happened, if she had really eloped with Nimrod, but I could not make myself do it. “The grove has powers of attraction I don’t fully understand, my lady. We’ve been meaning to go to your castle for two days, and somehow we’ve never gotten there.”
“Well, we weren’t there anyway,” she said absently. In her stained riding cloak, she appeared nearly as little like an appropriate member of an aristocratic court as we did.
“But where were you? Is everyone all right?”
“Of course everyone’s all right,” she said, surprised. “But you’re correct about the grove,” she continued. “It’s always had the power to draw people toward it. And not just the pilgrims who come to worship at the shrine of Saint Eusebius or to seek the hermit’s wisdom. The story is that a wood nymph lives here. Thousands of years ago, back when everyone was still pagan, people came to worship
“She still lives here, my lady,” said Evrard, speaking for the first time.
“Is that so?” said Diana slowly, as though understanding more than he had meant to tell her. He reddened under her steady gaze.
She turned back to me. “My father, the old duke, wanted to cut the grove down when I was a little girl. He even started making arrangements for the hermit to move somewhere else. My father said having a nymph’s grove just encouraged women to practice secret rituals-fertility and the like, I presume. I think it was his chaplain’s idea.”
“But what happened?” If Dominic had murdered Nimrod she seemed to be taking it remarkably calmly.
“King Haimeric wouldn’t let him cut down the trees. I was just as pleased myself, though of course I couldn’t say that to my father. The king adjudged that the grove was in royal territory, not ducal territory. I don’t think he cared one way or the other about the wood nymph-or even the hermit. But he hated to see the beeches cut.”
“You still haven’t said why you’re here alone, this early in the morning.”
“Saddle your horses,” said the duchess. “Nimrod should be down at the lower end of the valley by now. We were following what he thought was a trail left by a great horned rabbit up on the plateau. It just looked like an ordinary rabbit track to me, but he’s even better at hunting than I am. The trail went straight down the slope into the valley, and so did he, but I preferred to come around by the road. We caught one horned rabbit yesterday, so this one is the last.” So my paralysis trap would never be tested-probably just as well.
Evrard and I retrieved our saddles and packs from the stone hut. There was no sign of the apprentices, but I scribbled a note thanking them for their hospitality. Our mares, content and well-fed after two days of eating the rich valley grass, looked at us grumpily as we approached but allowed Evrard to catch them.
“And where is Dominic?” I asked Diana as we rode down the valley.
“Last I knew,” she said with a shrug, “he’d gone off to see the old retired Royal Wizard.”
“I don’t understand, my lady. I’d have thought Dominic would be more interested in where you and Nimrod had gone than in the old wizard.”
The duchess burst into laughter. She seemed in an excellent mood this morning. “We hadn’t left yet when he did. He was going to try to force the old wizard to dismantle his monster.”
My heart gave a hard thump. “What?”
“A message I slipped under his door may have helped him decide he ought to go,” said the duchess. She chuckled as she spoke, then turned to look at us gravely. “If you two plan to deceive either Nimrod or me, I’m afraid you’re going to have to do much better. It was clear from what you said at dinner the other night that the former Royal Wizard of Yurt had created a new and terrifying creature.”
My stomach knotted. I put a hand over my eyes, realized this probably wasn’t safe when riding a narrow road immediately next to a river, and instead glared at Diana. “So you sent him off to the old wizard’s cottage, to do goodness knows what, maybe even set the monster loose through his bumbling, just to make sure he didn’t realize that you and Nimrod were leaving together?”
“It worked,” she said mildly. “Besides, I’d already told him we were going hunting again.”
Diana didn’t care who she irritated, but if she continued to flirt with Nimrod even after Dominic had proposed, Joachim and I would have to deal with a furious and humiliated regent for the rest of the king’s absence-assuming he lived through his encounter with the monster. If I loved the people of Yurt, as I had said to Evrard, then I could not pick and choose between them. To love Yurt meant not just the king and queen and baby prince, the chaplain and the constable and Gwen and little Gwennie, the queen’s Aunt Maria and all the knights and ladies, but even- somehow-Prince Dominic.
But then I shook my head and tried to restore a little rationality to my thoughts. Considering how easily my predecessor had dealt with Evrard and me, two theoretically competent wizards, the regent would never be able to get past him and set the monster loose.
We rode several miles down the valley, farther than I had ever gone, to where it opened out into flowering pastureland. “By the way, Wizard,” said the duchess to Evrard, “there’s some sort of booth on the plateau at the head of the valley, and the man there said something very odd about how you might be working for them …”
Evrard interrupted her. “Excuse me, my lady, but might you have any food with you?” He had not, I realized, had anything to eat for nearly two days but the wood nymph’s berries, and even then it had only been stale bread
