I wondered briefly if the Cranky Saint himself might have made the horned rabbits, but realized that someone with that sort of supernatural power would need no spells. If Evrard hadn’t made the rabbits, there might be still another wizard wandering around Yurt. I wasn’t going to let that go on in my kingdom. Or, as I had thought earlier, the retired Royal Wizard had lost all his good sense and summoned the powers of evil.
I was awakened from an uneasy sleep by a voice in the room with me. “Dear God.”
Abruptly awake, I lay still for a moment in the darkness, trying to remember where I was. There was rapid, shallow breathing from the far side of the room.
Then I remembered that we were still in the count’s castle, not home in the royal castle, which was why my bed felt so unfamiliar. I sat up and lit a candle. “Joachim? Are you all right?”
He pushed himself up on one elbow and looked toward me. The flickering light and shadow from the candle flame made his eye sockets black and empty. But then he turned his head slightly, and his eyes came back. “I had a dream.”
“I was dreaming, too,” I said. “A nightmare about the great horned rabbits. But you’re awake now, and it’s not real.”
He flopped back down without speaking. I reached for the candle to extinguish it, but my hand froze as he spoke. “It was real.”
He was silent so long that I thought he would say nothing more, but I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to hear it anyway. I felt abruptly that there were not enough blankets on the narrow beds in the count’s second-best guest chamber.
“It wasn’t a dream,” he said at last. “It was a vision. Saint Eusebius appeared to me.”
My immediate reaction was highly interested curiosity. I had never had a vision in my life. I wondered how Joachim had known it was the saint, and if he had had the sense to ask what the saint knew about the entrepreneurs on the top of the cliff. I thought of asking if the entire saint had appeared to him, or just the toe, but decided against it. From the strain in Joachim’s voice, seeing a saint had been a deeply disturbing experience. “What did he say?” I contented myself with asking.
There was another long pause. “He doesn’t want to stay at the hermitage,” said Joachim at last. He sounded distant, almost as if he were no longer in the room with me, although I could see his back in the candlelight. “He was very clear on that point. But he wouldn’t tell me where he wanted to go instead.”
He rolled abruptly around to face me. “It was horrible, Daimbert! I’ve never been addressed like that. His face was like a living flame. Yet there is nothing evil in him, only the overwhelming power of good. The sin is in me, not to be able to bear it.”
He put his hands over his face. I blew out the candle and slowly stretched back out in my bed. He said nothing more, and after a while I fell asleep again, although my dreams were more troubled than ever.
III
Diana was surprisingly unwilling to have me help her search for the great horned rabbits. Even though it was the count, not the duchess herself, who had summoned me from the royal castle, I would have expected her to welcome any magical assistance.
“My own wizard and my huntsmen will be plenty,” she told me firmly the next morning. She wore a man’s leather tunic now and a disreputable old stained cloak, her only ornaments the wide gold bracelets she always wore. She realized she usually did not look like a woman of the high aristocracy and enjoyed people’s reactions to her refusal to be conventional. “You can go home and keep an eye on Dominic.”
I was about to protest, to tell her that if there was someone casting a powerful spell in this end of the kingdom then Evrard might need another wizard’s assistance, but I stopped myself in time. He should have a chance to show his new employer his abilities unimpeded. Besides, although I would have liked to put it off, I needed to talk to my predecessor as soon as possible.
The count and countess thanked us for coming and waved from their gate as we all left their little castle. We had gone only a half mile, and Diana had just said she and Evrard would turn off the road in search of tracks, when she abruptly reined in. She started to speak, stopped, and merely pointed.
A man was coming toward us on foot, walking easily with long strides. He wore a green cloak and had a heavy bow slung on his back. He would have looked entirely normal except for his height: he must have been over seven feet tall.
I probed quickly with words of the Hidden Language, suspecting another magic creature. But there was nothing about him that suggested he was other than fully human.
He continued toward us, his long blond hair blowing out behind him. Though his hair was unkempt, his beard was neatly trimmed. Ten feet short of the duchess’s horse, he stopped and went gracefully down on one knee.
“Greetings, my lady. I hear you need a huntsman.” His voice was surprisingly cultured and very deep.
The duchess looked flustered, which was surprising in her. “Where did you hear that?”
He looked up and smiled. He had a slow smile that lit up his face like the sun. “It’s scarcely a secret that you’re trying to track some magic creatures. Horned rabbits, aren’t they?”
“And you think you could help?” She almost sounded nervous, but not as though she felt any fear of this huntsman-rather, if it had been anyone but the duchess, I would have called it girlish shyness.
He stood up and came over to her horse, where he faced her nearly at eye-level. “I’ve never failed as a hunter and tracker,” he said, still smiling. “Call me Nimrod.”
“And Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord,” quoted Joachim in a low voice next to me.
Diana studied him in silence for thirty seconds. “All right, Nimrod,” she said abruptly, almost triumphantly. “I’ll give you a chance to prove your ability. We’ve spotted the great horned rabbits several times. But we’ve never been able to catch one.”
“Then let’s begin. I’ll leave you to place your huntsmen and your hounds.” He strode off purposefully toward the woods.
“All right,” said the duchess. “Well, good-bye, and thanks again for your offer of help!” she added to me, then kicked her horse into motion. Evrard waved at us and galloped after her.
Joachim and I looked at each other a moment in silence, then started up again for the long ride back to the royal castle. We had ridden a mile when Joachim asked, “Do you think he might have made the great horned rabbits himself?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It would take a wizard, and one wizard should always be able to recognize another. But he certainly seemed fully informed about them. Do you think the duchess already knew him?”
“It seems unlikely,” said the chaplain. “After all, he had to tell her his name.”
“I must say,” I answered slowly, “there seems to be a whole lot going on in this end of the kingdom that I don’t yet understand.”
We had gotten a late start from the count’s castle, and the sun was setting by the time we came up the hill to the royal castle. In the courtyard, the staff was just finishing a volleyball game.
“I think you should probably wait until morning to go see the old wizard,” said Joachim.
“Of course,” I said, startled at the implication that I might not. I had no intention of going into a black forest, full of creatures composed of dead bones and magic life, to face a wizard who might be growing senile or might have sold his soul to the devil, or both.
But the next morning saw me flying down the hill from the castle and into the woods below. In daylight, what I might find at the wizard’s cottage seemed at least slightly less terrifying than it had the night before.
For a relatively brief distance, I was always happy to fly. The rush of air past my face was exhilarating, now that I had become good enough that I no longer had to give constant attention to my spells, and I liked the chance to show the old wizard that, even though I had been trained in the school he scorned, I was still perfectly competent. Not that he ever seemed fully convinced …