The Wood Nymph, the Cranky Saint

There was more happening here, I could sense, than I had yet been told. Negotiating with a holy old hermit, who from his demeanor might be declared a saint himself one day, and finding a way to deal with souvenir sellers, who might not be doing anything illegal but who still seemed scandalous, even to me, could turn out to be more serious responsibilities than I had originally thought. Joachim might well be right that the bishop was testing him to see if he was the sort of priest they wanted in the cathedral chapter.

I didn’t like this any more than the chaplain did, although for different reasons, but right now I had responsibilities of my own, which I’d been neglecting. To maintain the good name of wizardry, I should set about finding and coping with the strange magical creature the count and his men had seen.

As I strapped up my saddlebag, I caught a glimpse of motion from the corner of my eye and turned slowly.

And there two of the creatures, the size of small dogs but shaped like rabbits. My first hope was that they were some bizarre illusion, but they were very real. They came hopping awkwardly along the edge of the stream, ignoring my presence. Rather than ears, they had long, pointed horns.

I stepped back involuntarily. Instead of broad rabbits’ teeth, they had protruding fangs, and instead of wide, placid rabbit eyes, they had small red nasty eyes. And those horns looked sharp.

One flicked its red eyes toward me and gave a much higher hop. At the same time, it emitted a cry, a low, hooting sound, almost like an owl. The other creature responded with the same cry. Both redoubled their speed, made a sharp turn, and disappeared rapidly across the meadow toward the base of the cliff.

I stood idiotically, just watching them go. The count had only spoken of one great horned rabbit, not of two. They looked so ridiculous that I felt I ought to laugh. But that hooting, haunting call had stifled any laugh within me.

I shook my head hard. I should be trying to catch them, not staring after them. I hurried across the meadow, putting together a probing spell to help me find them.

As soon as I opened myself to it, I found that the valley was thick with magic, making it virtually impossible to probe for anything. Most of the magic seemed unfocused, which meant that it was wild, unchanneled by wizardry. And yet- Somewhere behind me, in the grove, I thought I could sense the presence of a powerful spell.

I clenched my jaw. This was even worse than I had thought. If the rabbits were the product of that spell, then they were not magical creatures from the land of dragons, which would have been bad enough, but rather the creations of a renegade wizard. Since neither of the counts nor the duchess kept a wizard, and my predecessor was retired, I was, I had thought, the only active wizard in Yurt.

As I started back toward the grove, I hesitated again. This was not where I had seen the rabbits disappear. How many of them might there be?

When I came back into the grove, the denseness of magical forces made me lose track of the spell that had seemed so strong a moment ago. I walked swiftly along the little paths between the springs, without seeing anything but trees. But then something caught my eye in the muddy earth.

It was a footprint, about the size of a man’s foot, even roughly the right shape, but somehow wrong. I knelt down for a closer look, but I already knew. That print had been made by nothing human.

PART TWO — THE YOUNG WIZARD I

Back at the shrine, Joachim and the hermit were still talking. I hesitated, not liking to mention the wood nymph before the hermit, and certainly not wanting to terrify him with the horned rabbits or that inhuman footprint.

But the hermit beckoned me to join them. “Your chaplain’s been trying to tell me that Saint Eusebius has appeared to some priests in a vision, asking to leave the grove, but I’m sure they’re mistaken. Perhaps they are not aware of the miracle that occurred only a year after the saint’s death.”

I sat down at the hermit’s feet, willing to listen while waiting for my mind to come up with better ideas than I had now.

“You’ve doubtless heard that a reliquary was made immediately after the saint’s death,” continued the hermit, “to contain all of his mortal remains that had not been eaten by the dragon. You do know about the dragon?”

“Yes, I know that story.”

He smiled approvingly. “One sometimes hears that wizards are too dismissive towards concerns of the church, or even laugh at them, but I’ve never felt that myself.”

I tried not to meet either his eyes or Joachim’s.

“And so for a year,” the hermit continued, “the holy toe was peacefully kept here, at a shrine built onto the side of the little hermitage where the saint had spent his days-in fact, this very hermitage where I now live. One of Eusebius’s pupils lived there as a hermit in obedience to his master’s precepts.

“But one day three priests arrived in the grove. They said they had come from the church where Eusebius had originally been made a priest and that they intended to take his holy relics back with them! The young hermit, as you can imagine, almost went mad with despair, and he fell on his face in the mud before the shrine and begged Saint Eusebius, his old master, not to leave him.

“And the saint heard his prayer. For when the three priests tried to lift the reliquary, they found it so heavy they could not budge it. They went for a block and tackle and tried again, but they themselves were hurled into the pool from the strain. And yet when the young hermit lifted the reliquary, it was as light as a feather in his hand. And thus the saint showed that he wanted to stay here, rather than going back to the city he had purposely left behind him. And after all these centuries, after generations of hermits of which I am the last and the least worthy, he has not changed his mind.”

I nodded, impressed in spite of myself.

“As I already told you,” Joachim said quietly, “he seems to have changed his mind now. The letter the bishop received said that the saint was ‘fed up’ with having his relics here.”

The hermit turned his smile on the chaplain. “Excuse me, Father, if I tend to discount the testimony of priests who spend their days on secular concerns. I’m sure they mistook his meaning. I realize the saint expresses himself forcibly at times-and error must always be rebuked firmly, as our Lord showed when He drove the money-changers from the Temple-but when he has appeared to me, it has always been with a gentle face and a willingness to be my guide.”

“Then I’ll tell this to the bishop,” said Joachim, rising to his feet. I was glad of the excuse to stand up as well; the damp moss on which I was sitting had started soaking through my trousers.

After the chaplain and the hermit exchanged final expressions of esteem and reverence, we picked our way back down the steep path by the waterfall to where we had left the horses. I surreptitiously looked for footprints in the mud and saw none but our own.

“Will this settle it?” I asked. “Will the priests who wanted the saint’s relics take the hermit’s word that the saint doesn’t want to leave?”

“It depends on whether the bishop takes the hermit’s word for it,” said Joachim distractedly. He pulled the lunch out of his saddle bag and started eating, but not as though he tasted it. “Did you find the wood nymph, then?”

“I found her and even tried to speak to her, but she wouldn’t answer.”

“That’s something else the bishop was worried about. He feels that it has been a mistake having both a saint’s shrine and a nymph share the same grove all these centuries. The modern Church needs to eradicate all remnants of superstition, and the uneducated may find it a stumbling block to their faith if they come to worship God and His saints and find themselves in the realm of a wood nymph.”

“Especially one as lovely as she is,” I provided.

Joachim gave me a quick look. “I think the bishop knows better than that,” he said, answering a question I had not directly asked. “There has never been the least doubt about the moral purity of this hermit-or any of his