“Would you like to come back to my tree with me?” she asked. “I would like to learn more about priests.”
Now Evrard was definitely jealous.
“I don’t think I had better, my daughter,” said Joachim. No one who didn’t know him as well as I did would have realized he was smiling.
“But I have strawberries and the sweetest honey,” she said, looking at him with dancing violet eyes. Soon, I thought, the round priest would explode, which would leave only two priests trying to appropriate Saint Eusebius’s relics. “We could eat my berries and drink spring water while you explained the supernatural to me. Only humans, out of all of nature, have access to eternity, but only a few of you know very much about it.”
“A visit with you sounds delightful, but I still must refuse. Thank you very much for an offer I am sure you have extended to few men.”
“Isn’t it only hermits who will refuse an invitation to a nymph’s tree?”
“Priests too, my daughter,” said Joachim gently.
“And you aren’t even in love with anyone,” she said thoughtfully.
“I have taken an oath to forsake all sins of the flesh.”
Her eyes danced again. “But Saint Eusebius explained that to me! Because I am not human, I have not fallen, and therefore cannot sin any more than I can be saved.”
It sounded to me as though she had a point. But the chaplain did not hesitate.
“You cannot sin, but I can.” She nodded slowly but looked puzzled again. Joachim paused and then asked what I would have asked the nymph myself if there had been the slightest indication she would listen to anyone but him. “Is there a way you can help us catch the inhuman monster that is now in the valley?”
She shook her head so hard her hair swung in an arc behind her. “The magical creature that broke these branches? No! Trees I know, and hermits, and wizards, and now priests. But I do not know inhuman monsters.” She leaped up and caught a branch. But just before she swung up and out of sight, she leaned forward, kissed Joachim lightly on the forehead, then was gone.
I watched the three priests fighting back a number of things they might have said. Disconcerting as they clearly found the bishop’s representative, they just as clearly did not dare irritate him.
“Shall we join the hermit up at the shrine?” he said to them, perfectly soberly.
If they had business at the shrine, I thought, squaring my shoulders, I had business with an inhuman monster which the wood nymph might not know but my predecessor knew all too well.
The old wizard was still standing by the cave entrance. “Was your creature drawn here by the magic forces of the valley, Master?” I asked. I didn’t tell him he had just missed the wood nymph, not wanting him as well as Evrard jealous of a priest with no interest in what she offered.
“There certainly are magical forces here, as I thought you knew,” he said grumpily. “In most of the western kingdoms the forces that created the world in the first place are not very evident, unless wielded by a wizard. But in a few places they’re still very strong: the northern land of wild magic especially, but also in a few pockets like this valley. That’s why the wood nymph is here. And that’s why I thought I’d better come here when my creature got loose.”
Or you turned it loose, I thought. Aloud I said, “I know all about the magical forces here. They’ve kept me here for two days.”
“Don’t blame it on ‘magical forces,’” said the old wizard with a snort. “A wizard may find the raw power of magic appealing or seductive, but this valley couldn’t hold you against your will. You were just having too much fun with the wood nymph.
“The magical forces of the valley may make my creature a little harder to catch,” he went on. “Did you see how fast it could run? Even my magic wouldn’t give it that kind of speed anywhere else,” he added regretfully.
This, I thought gloomily, is exactly what I needed to hear: first my predecessor had made a creature almost too powerful for his own magic, and certainly much stronger than either Evrard’s or mine, and now its strength was increased dramatically.
“I’d better go see if I can find some herbs,” said the old wizard. “I’ll need them for my binding spell. You and the duchess’s wizard could try putting some kind of barricade across the opening to the cave. I don’t believe my creature will try to come out again during the day, after we all frightened it, but it might after dark. I’d ask you to help me, but you wouldn’t recognize the right herbs.”
His chief concern, I thought as I watched him stump off, was that we might have “frightened” his creature! This left it all up to Evrard and me-which meant, I was afraid, me.
Although I called the old wizard Master, he was not my real master. If I thought of anyone in the paternal role in which Joachim put his bishop, it was the Master of the wizards’ school, who had been willing to take on-and even keep-a young man who must have been a very unpromising wizardry student. Since my own parents had died when I was young, the white-haired Master of the school had been the closest I had had to a father.
Yet in the two years I had been in Yurt, I had come to admire my predecessor, in spite of his crankiness. And I had certainly learned a tremendous amount from him, not just the herbal magic they did not teach at the school, but, partly out of shame at his example, a lot of the school magic I had not learned properly the first time.
And now something had happened to him, whether he had been pushed into unwise new experiments by Evrard’s creature, overcome by pride, or (quite unaccountably) made jealous of me. Even aside from catching up to his creature, I knew I had to catch him.
Meanwhile I’d better make sure of my only other ally. “When you and my predecessor followed the monster into the cave,” I asked Evrard, “how far back did you pursue it?”
“Not far. He made a light on the end of his staff. It wasn’t very bright, but better than I could do and enough for us to see. We got back to where the cave widened, the room that Nimrod mentioned-or, rather, Prince Ascelin. It’s an enormous room, and a lot of tunnels open off it. The monster must have taken one of them. I’m afraid, like the prince, we fell into the river on the way back out.”
“I don’t trust the old wizard,” I said, “not his motivations, not even his magic. Catching this monster is going to be up to you and me.”
“Oh, please, Daimbert!” cried Evrard. “Let me catch it myself! Don’t you see, it’s my last chance to impress the duchess, before she gets fed up with me and sends me back to the City in exchange for a different wizard. And since the monster tried to carry her off, it’s my responsibility as ducal wizard to avenge her.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said, feeling that Evrard was more like ten years younger than me rather than two. “Neither one of us could possibly capture it alone. Our only chance is to do it together.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Evrard, but not as though convinced.
He would become convinced soon enough. “First,” I said, “it would help if we knew what the monster is made out of. Since this creature is no illusion, it has to be made of something. And it’s not sticks this time. Human bones, maybe?” In spite of keeping my voice remarkably calm, I could feel a thin trickle of sweat working its way down my back.
Evrard had clearly never thought about this. Now his eyes grew so wide that white showed all the way around the iris. “But where would he have gotten human bones?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” I said grimly. “We’ve been worrying about the creature killing a person, now that we know it’s killed some chickens. But has the old wizard himself already killed someone?”
We both looked involuntarily down the valley where the wizard had gone. I thought I could see him a half mile away, where the valley started to curve, poking about on the river bank.
Evrard hugged himself as though standing in a bitterly cold wind. “But even the wizards trained under the old apprentice system must have taken the oath to help and guide mankind.”