“That’s right,” I said, deciding not to worry him with the horned rabbit.
“It’s those poor souls up on the top of the cliff that are worrying you?” the hermit asked Joachim with another smile.
“That, and a letter the bishop has received.” I could hear the unease in the chaplain’s voice and realized that the hermit must not yet know that certain priests were insisting the Holy Toe be taken two hundred miles from his grove. Since I didn’t particularly want to be there when he received the news, I excused myself as they sat down on mossy stones beside the pool.
The area around the pool itself, next to the shrine, seemed an unlikely place to find a nymph, but the grove stretched further along the bottom of the cliff. I walked slowly on spongy soil, following slightly drier paths marked with rows of tiny white stones. Here there did seem to be several springs of the sort I had originally expected, sending smaller trickles of water to join the larger stream.
I picked my way across an especially muddy patch of ground and looked up. A young woman stood directly before me, carefully trimming dead twigs from a small tree.
It took only the briefest glance to realize that this was not some local village girl.
She turned toward me, but her face was perfectly still, with the intense beauty of a pastoral landscape. She leaned back against the pale trunk of a beech, one arm stretched above her head, and watched me with no apparent expression. Her only clothes were a few strategically placed leaves. Both her skin and her hair were dusky, the color of shadows deep within the woods, and her eyes a brilliant violet. Her unbound hair, which hung to her waist, looked incredibly soft.
“Excuse me,” I faltered. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’m the Royal Wizard of Yurt. Are you the wood nymph of this grove?”
She moved her head slightly, neither nodding in affirmation nor denying it.
“I’d been hoping to meet you,” I pushed on. My heart began beating rapidly, and I felt much more flustered than I should have. Still she did not answer.
“Have you lived here long?” I asked inanely.
This time, she did more than not answer. She disappeared. One second she was standing before me, and the next she was gone. It seemed as though she might have slipped quickly around the tree, but when I looked there was no one behind it. I glanced up. Far above me, I saw for one second a motion that might have been the leaves on the tree or might have been a swift form among the branches.
I spent the next fifteen minutes walking through the grove, seeing all the little upwellings of water and all the smooth-trunked trees, but no more sign of the nymph.
I returned to where Joachim and the hermit were sitting. “But the saint often appears to me,” the hermit was saying to the chaplain with a pleasant smile. “I know some people have nicknamed him ‘the Cranky Saint,’ but I have always been blessed by seeing his gentle side. He came to this grove originally, as a young hermit, because he wanted to put the city behind him. And he’s never told me he wanted to leave.”
I continued past them, following the path back down along the waterfall to where we had left the horses. They were grazing industriously, unbothered by entrepreneurs, saints, or nymphs.
I reached into my saddlebag and pulled out the packet of lunch the count’s cook had prepared for us, not so much because I was hungry as because eating would give me time to consider.
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?”