The Wood Nymph, the Cranky Saint

and lettuce. In spite of my breakfast with the hermit, I was not much better off.

“I’ve got some hardboiled eggs you can have if you’re hungry,” she said, not quite grudgingly, and reined in to reach into her saddlebag. Neither Evrard, who ate three, nor I, who ate two, took time to worry about her tone.

Here where the valley widened a wind blew steadily, and the flowers and shrubs swayed beneath a bright sky. Beyond, the valley walls closed in again, leaving only a very narrow gap, just broad enough for the river to rush through and disappear with a faint roar. Through the gap the hills were distant and blue; the plateau itself must drop off steeply here. It would have been nice to go on looking at the scenery, but I had responsibilities.

“Listen, my lady,” I said. “The king asked me to keep on eye on the kingdom for him. I cannot have you upsetting the whole court while he is away.”

Diana’s expression softened. “Yes, you’re certainly right. Nothing should happen that will distress Haimeric when he comes back. He’s an excellent king, but he is an old man, and he doesn’t need shocks. Nimrod should be near here,” she went on cheerfully. “I wonder if he’s had any success yet.”

A bush only a few feet from us suddenly stirred, and the tall huntsman unfolded himself from behind it. “Didn’t think I could hide behind such inadequate cover, my lady?” he asked with a grin.

Diana, who had jerked with surprise, burst into laughter. “No, I didn’t. What luck have you had?”

“Nothing yet, but the track’s still very fresh. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that magic rabbit in my nets within the half hour.”

“Take my wizard with you,” said the duchess, “and go back to your nets. The Royal Wizard and I will stay here, in case the rabbit gets by you.”

The duchess and I sat our horses, watching Evrard and Nimrod in the distance. Now was my chance. If I was going to deal with the old wizard’s monster, whether loose or locked up, I had to try to clear away every thing else that kept distracting me: the Cranky Saint, the entrepreneurs, Dominic’s strange behavior, and especially what the duchess was doing in asking her wizard for horned rabbits and then carrying on with a hunter who appeared out of the woods to hunt them.

But she spoke before I could. “Tell me, Wizard,” she said with a flash of gray eyes, “why this sudden prudish interest in my affairs?”

“You don’t need to assure me of your honor, my lady. I just want you to realize what you’re doing. Even though you put Dominic off with vaporings about maidenly uncertainty, the entire court, including the regent, knows you’ve never been uncertain in your life.”

She did have the grace to look embarrassed then, but she let me keep on talking.

“And for you to refuse one man, and then immediately leave on a hunt with another- And you camped out with him, I presume, if you weren’t at your castle? You distracted Dominic by sending him down to the old wizard’s cottage, but that doesn’t mean you can forget him.”

“You speak as though you thought I had become scandalous in my old age,” the duchess said, coldly and evenly.

I had certainly never spoken to her like this before, but I did seem to have gained and kept her attention. “You know the royal court must be rife with speculation and rumor. It’s well known that Dominic felt he would have to marry you, to continue the royal line, back before the king met the queen, and that he dropped the plan with relief when the king’s marriage made it unnecessary. For him to propose to you now, without the slightest bit of encouragement in the years between, shows that he’s willing to let himself be insulted and humiliated if he thinks it’s necessary to stop the rumors.”

“So that’s your explanation?” she said icily. “That Dominic doesn’t really want to marry me, he only wants to preserve the kingdom’s reputation?”

“What’s your explanation?”

She looked at me thoughtfully, her anger draining away. “Dominic’s been living in the royal castle, as royal heir, since he was four years old and his father died. I’m not at all sure he really wanted to be king, but it was all he’d ever known.”

For two years I had thought of Yurt as my kingdom. Yet at times like this I was reminded that both the kingdom itself and the people in it had lived and had plans and agreements and quarrels long, long before I arrived.

“Dominic is a little slow sometimes,” Diana continued, “but this last year it’s finally sunk in that he’s actually free, for the first time in his memory. But being Dominic, his first thought is to tie himself down again. He says he wants to leave Yurt, but he can’t imagine doing so by himself.” She laughed. “I guess even I look better to him than some girl from down in the village.”

“But how could he support himself and his new wife?”

“I don’t imagine he’s thought that far,” she said with a shrug.

This might answer some of my questions about the regent, but it still left the duchess’s behavior inexplicable. She outranked me far too thoroughly for me to force her to tell me anything; all I could do was make her angry enough that she’d keep talking. “But how about Nimrod? You’ve been encouraging him, my lady, encouraging him as blatantly as any village flirt. When he finds out that you had no real interest in him, that you were only using him to provoke the regent, isn’t his reaction going to be highly scandalous itself?”

The duchess’s frown cleared unexpectedly at what I had thought was my worst accusation. But before I could react, I caught a sudden hint of something moving.

“The great horned rabbit!” Evrard shouted to us.

We rode quickly to where a net, almost invisible under some bushes, thrashed wildly. Nimrod, wearing enormous gloves, reached into the brush and pulled the net out.

Struggling against the cords was a real rabbit.

Nimrod laughed and freed it carefully. But as it flashed away, the duchess turned to Evrard with a look of irritation. “So your magic couldn’t tell you the difference between a magical creature and an ordinary one? I’ll tell you what. We’re in a hurry, so why don’t you try a wizardly calling spell to bring the great horned rabbit into our nets?”

Evrard flushed deeply but started at once on a spell. It wasn’t one I recognized; I wondered if it might be something else he had learned in Elerius’s course.

The chirping of birds, which had been a constant background sound, was suddenly intensified. A flock of sparrows congregated from all over the valley and settled, with madly flapping wings and incessant chirps, on Evrard’s head and arms. “Been taking some tips from the wood nymph?” I said sarcastically. Even I had never attracted sparrows by mistake. Evrard disappeared under a wave of brown feathers.

Laughing over the birds’ voices, he said the words to end his spell. No longer drawn by magic, the sparrows hesitated, then shot off. Evrard reemerged into view and tried to brush off his sleeves. “But it should have worked-” he began, then stopped short.

Something was thrashing in the nets a little further down, something highly charged with magic, yet not alive.

A cry came, a cry that could have been an owl and could have been a soul in torment. It was no less bone- chilling because I knew what it was. My normally calm mare reared, setting all the bridle bells ringing, and even Diana was for a moment hard-pressed to stay on her gelding. I kicked my feet out of the stirrups, dropped the reins, and flew forward.

Nimrod was there before me. The netted creature’s tiny red eyes stared from beneath its sharp horns in what looked like living hate, and long fangs snapped at him. I dropped to the ground and threw a binding spell onto the horned rabbit. I scarcely dared hope it would work, but the creature fell heavily to its side.

Nimrod leaped onto the still form at once, adding a cord to the binding properties of my spell. “Good work, Wizard,” he said over his shoulder. “We’ve got it now.”

But even as he spoke it began to disintegrate. The eyes went lifeless, and first one and then the second horn dropped from its head. The spell that had given the rabbit the appearance of life was breaking up. My binding spell was too much for something that was only held together precariously in the first place. In a moment there was nothing but horns and skin and the smell of decay.

Diana came up, leading my mare. “So you caught the last great horned rabbit?” she said to Nimrod. “Pretty