Joachim, however, reined in and turned calmly toward the young man. “What is it, my son?”
He was very young, not much more than a boy. His head was shaved, and he wore only scraps of rough dark cloth, held together by safety pins. He dropped on his knees before the chaplain, holding up clasped hands. “Oh, Father, please forgive me, and please tell me. Are you going to take our holy master from us?”
“The hermit?” said Joachim in surprise. “I have no intention of taking him from you. Why did you think I might?”
The young man flushed but pushed on determinedly. I noticed, back under the trees near the stone huts, several others with shaved heads watching from a wary distance. “Ever since those people built their booth at the top of the cliff, we’ve feared that someone from the cathedral would be here sooner or later,” he said breathlessly.
“At least for now,” said the chaplain gently, “I see no reason why the hermit should leave Saint Eusebius’s shrine, at least until God summons him home.”
The boy’s face was transformed by a sudden smile. “Thank you, thank you!” He jumped up and ran like a deer back into the trees. As we turned back down the valley, I could see him and the other ragged young men talking excitedly.
Apprentice hermits, I thought. Wizards too used to be trained as apprentices. It would have been hard enough being trained under my predecessor; these young men’s apprenticeship must be made even more difficult by the fact that a hermit rarely speaks to anyone, including his apprentices.
Joachim suddenly seemed to remember he was in a hurry to send the bishop a message. He slapped his legs against his horse’s flanks, and in a moment the apprentices were far behind us. We rode at a trot until the road started the steep climb back up out of the valley.
“What do you think?” I asked as our horses slowed to a walk. “Is it just coincidence that the entrepreneurs decided to set up their booth at precisely the same time as somebody wrote the bishop to ask for Eusebius’s toe? And why do you think they don’t have their basket or their souvenirs ready yet?”
Joachim looked at me sharply, but the ghost of a smile was on his lips. “You have a suspicious mind,” he said. “I thought of it too. Since Eusebius is widely considered to be a, well, troublesome saint, one could suspect that those priests in the distant city thought the easiest way to get his relics was to be sure he became irritated with life in Yurt.”
“Do you suspect it?”
“I don’t know.” His dark eyes grew troubled. “According to the bishop, the priests were very positive that the saint wanted to move his relics to their city, yet the hermit here is equally positive that the saint wants to remain. The difficulty is that I don’t know which came first. Did Eusebius appear in a vision to the priests after these entrepreneurs decided to make money off him, and that’s why the priests have written the bishop now? Or did the priests first decide they wanted him and then tried to ensure by devious means that he’d be happy to go?”
“We’d better speak again to the man at the booth,” I said. “We’ll find out how recently they set up, and if they really plan to put in this elaborate basket-on-a-pulley contraption-it sounds horribly dangerous to me, I must say. If the talk of baskets and souvenirs is no more than talk, then we’ll know it’s only a facade, designed to make the saint angry.”
But when we reached the top and rode back along the rim of the valley, we did not see the man in the feathered cap. The sign on the empty booth still invited us to see the Holy Toe.
“I hope I can get my whole message to the bishop on a small enough piece of paper,” said Joachim.
II
We came over a rise and saw the count’s castle before us, its shadow stretching long over the grassy meadows around it. As soon as we were inside the walls, the chaplain hurried up to the pigeon loft in the tower to send his message.
The count’s constable took our horses, and the count came out to meet me with his jolly smile. “Did you even get up onto the plateau, or did you spend all your time tracking the horned rabbit?”
“I saw the horned rabbit, or rather two of them, in the valley cut into the plateau,” I said, puzzled.
His smile dropped away. “That means there are at least three of them. I’d hoped there was only the one. Almost immediately after you left, one of my men reported seeing a great horned rabbit just west of here, and we spent several hours, without success, trying to pick up its trail. We were actually rather surprised not to see you there too, because we’d assumed you would have spotted it.”
The expression, “Multiplying like rabbits,” flitted through my mind, but it seemed best not to say it.
Joachim came back down from the tower. “It took three pigeons for my whole message to the bishop,” he said. He looked relieved. He did have one advantage over me in not being a wizard, though I wasn’t going to tell him this. Once he had told the bishop about his visit to the Holy Grove, it was, at least for the moment, out of his hands. But there was no one to whom I could pass the responsibility for the wood nymph, the great horned rabbits, and whatever had made that footprint.
As we came into the great hall for dinner, I saw a slim woman’s figure silhouetted against the fire. She came toward me, holding out her hands to take mine. It was the Duchess Diana.
I had always liked the duchess. She had ruled in solitary splendor for over twenty-five years, ever since the old duke, her father, died when she was still a girl. When not treating my wizardly abilities with respect-something that didn’t happen very often-she enjoyed teasing me as if I had been a friend’s favorite younger brother.
Duchess Diana prided herself on the knowledge that a number of people considered her outrageous. She was wearing a long dress the color of marigolds, which even I could recognize as hopelessly out of fashion. She and the queen were distant cousins and had the same midnight black hair, but Diana was some ten years older, and other than their hair the two women were very dissimilar.
“I’m delighted to see you,” she said with a wide smile. “I’ve got a surprise for you!”
“A surprise?”
“Well, you know you’ve been telling me for over a year that I ought to hire my own ducal wizard. I finally decided to do so!”
“About time, my lady! How will you find one?”
“I found him by writing to your wizards’ school, of course. After all, I’d met the Master of the school the other Christmas. I said that I wanted someone as much like you as possible.”
“You don’t really want someone like me, my lady,” I began, but she wasn’t listening.
“My father always kept a wizard, back when I was little, so I decided it was high time the duchy had one again.” She smiled up at me, her gray eyes dancing.
“This is very good news,” I said, wondering if the school would send her one of the young wizards I knew. They would not send a wizard who had been first in his class to a post in a small ducal court, but then I had been far from first in my class myself. “What made you decide at last?”
She stopped smiling for a moment. “I think it was the baby prince. If my young cousin the queen can have a baby who’ll be walking soon, I should certainly be able to set up a proper establishment myself, and the first thing I needed was my own wizard.”
I was oddly reminded of Dominic. But I didn’t want to worry about why the baby prince should make apparently sensible people feel discontented.
Abruptly, I found myself looking forward enormously to the arrival of the duchess’s wizard. Even though Joachim and I managed to be friends much of the time, the differences between us kept coming up and always would. Another wizard would not continually be disturbed by deadly serious moral dilemmas that wouldn’t bother me for a moment. And he should have more recent memories than mine of some of the lectures in the advanced courses and might have all sorts of ideas on what spells would work in the problem of the great horned rabbits Since Diana had asked the school for someone like me, her wizard should even have a sense of humor.