note: the uc text of this was in bad shape so I did some cleaning and ran it through a program to fix up some paragraphs. no corrections but more readable now.

The Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint
C Dale Brittain
PART ONE 
	The Hermitage When it was over, the living back where they belonged or someplace else, and the dead buried, I thought again of the day it all began. I wanted to keep Yurt the charming, bucolic, little out-of-the-way kingdom it was, but I had also wished for a little excitement.
	A wizard should know better than to wish for something. Sometimes wishes come true.
	As Royal Wizard, arrayed in midnight-blue velvet, I was supposed to give an air of deep wisdom to the court proceedings. But I no longer nad the slightest idea what that days case was about.
	My king, however, seemed to have an excellent grasp of the details. I leaned against the wall and watched him. King Haimeric bent forward on the throne, pulling his ermine-trimmed cloak tighter around his thin shoulders as the late afternoon breeze came in the open doors and windows of the great hall.
	He settled his spectacles more firmly on his nose 2 and looked at the people before him with shrewd eyes. "So even though he struck you, he didn't try to deny that you had a right to bring your cows into the field? ' "Of course he didn't deny it!" "I only struck him when he started beating me with his stick!" "Don't listen to him! You can't believe someone who'd dig up a grave!" "Listen to his lies!" "Look at my leg; the bruises are there yet!"
	"His wife was the worst, and she knew she could thump me all she wanted because I wouldn't hit a woman!" "Anyone can tell you I cleared every stump out of that field with my own hands!"
	Two dozen men and women, all from a village located five miles away, stood in front of the throne. I still hadn't sorted out which were the claimants, which members of their families, and which the character witnesses they had brought along. A young woman with straight flaxen hair was crying openly. Over to one side, apart from the rest, a man with very broad shoulders was moodily examining the tiles of the fireplace as though trying to dissociate himself from the whole quarrel.
	The knights of Yurt, ranged along the wall to help give authority to the proceedings, looked both bored and tired, with an air of having long ago stopped hearing what anyone said. Even the kings burly nephew Dominic, who used to pay very close attention to legal cases, had wandered off, but then he had been acting somewhat distracted lately anyway.
	During pauses in the arguments, I could hear faint clangings from the kitchen.
	The smells of supper gradually became more pronounced. Several times already a servant had peeked around the door to see if we were done yet.
	Abruptly, King Haimeric pushed aside his lap robe and stood up. "I ve heard enough!" he exclaimed. The excited arguing of the group before him stopped short.
	"You brought this to me as a property dispute," he said sternly. "But both your documents of property 3 rights and your witnesses are highly suspect and highly contradictory."
	"We already told you, Your Highness, that they stole our deed and substituted a lying fake!" one woman put in bravely.
	"And it's become clear," the king continued, not even pausing for the interruption, ' that much more than property is involved. This field has become the excuse for verbal abuse and for physical violence, which you know I consider intolerable. Some of you have even claimed that others have dug up somebody's relative and hidden the body, don't interrupt me! And now you've told me that the quarrel over this field has even been the cause of a serious breach of promise."
	I had missed this final detail amid everything else, but it explained the weeping young woman.
	"If those of you who were in the wrong originally," the king continued, "hoped that by utter confusion you would avoid a ruling against you, you are mistaken."
	All of the principal disputants looked jubilant, as though secure in the knowledge that not they but the others had originally been in the wrong.
	But the king's next words took the smiles from their faces. "All of you are in the wrong. This case cannot be settled by a simple determination of right."
	I certainly agreed with him there. I even had to abandon what would have been my own solution, to divide the field down the middle between the two claimants, if indeed there were only two.
	The king crossed his arms and glared. "I have only one option left to me. I am going to swear you to peace H The knights all straightened to attention and slapped their sword hilts ritually.
	"But in that case, " someone began.
	Again the king paid no attention. "You will have to work out for yourselves who has the right to plow and gather, who to pasture cows on the stubble, where 4 your cousin is buried now, and who will many whom, but you will have to do it without violence!"
	He turned and motioned toward Joachim, the Royal Chaplain, who had been standing on the other side of the throne from me. A dissatisfied murmuring and shuffling began with the king's words but stopped immediately as the chaplain came forward, carrying a heavy Bible in both hands.
	He was as young as I and didn't even have my wizardly white beard to give an aura of mysterious wisdom. But the absolute seriousness of his gaunt face and his enormous and compelling black eyes always gave him an air of dignity and authority that I knew I would never be able to equal. This was made even worse by the knowledge that in his case the effect was entirely unintentional.
	The chaplain set the Bible on a table beside the king. "Come forward!" the king commanded. "Each of you, put your right hand on the Bible. Swear before God and the saints that you will practice violence no more, but that you will seek peace with these your neighbors."
	With covert glances at the tall and silent chaplain, all the disputants and all their witnesses came forward, abashed, and swore individually. The broad-shouldered young man came over from the fireplace to swear last of all.
	"Now take each other by the hands in fellowship," the king continued. "All of you. Take each one's hand to symbolize the peace that now exists between you."
	The flaxen-haired woman, her cheeks still wet but no longer weeping, went at once to the young man. She stopped as though abruptly shy two feet short of him, but he reached for her hands and said something to her. She slowly started to smile. While the rest went back and forth, shaking each other's hands, sometimes with what I thought unnecessary firmness, the two stood silently, looking at each other's faces.
	 5 When the whole group left a moment later, they were still holding hands.
	The king, the chaplain, and I went out into the courtyard with them and through the gates, to watch them walk down the hill from the royal castle of Yurt.
	The sun was low and red in the west. The king continued to stare sternly after them until they were out of sight.
	"Well," said King Haimeric in satisfaction, his usual good humor reappearing as soon as they were gone, I don't think well hear from them again. And that's the last of this month's cases. I don't know about you two, but I find giving justice hungry work. It's hard for an old man to have to wait for supper!"
	We went back into the great hall where, just in the few moments we had been gone, the servants had illuminated the magic lamps that dated back to my predecessor's time and brought out the trestle tables for supper. Now they were spreading the tablecloths and lighting the fire in the fireplace. In the little balcony high on the wall, the castle's brass choir tuned their instruments.
	"In fact," said the king, "there shouldn't be any more urgent cases this summer.
	I think I deserve a vacation, say for a month or six weeks. How would you two like to try running the kingdom?"
	The chaplain and I exchanged surprised glances. In the two years I had been wizard of Yurt, I had never known the king to leave his castle for more than a few days at a time.
	"You mean," I said, "exercising royal authority, " I had only recently managed to make myself into a passably competent wizard, and it would certainly be a challenge to become a competent substitute for a king.
	The king smiled. "No, I wouldn't really make you two act as regents. But I am serious about taking a vacation."
	The knights and ladies of the royal court were 6 assembling in the hall. The queen came in, carrying the baby boy all of us considered the most important person in the castle. His nurse hurried behind, frustrated as usual because the queen kept stepping in to do things the nurse felt were her proper duties.
	"So you finished up the last case?" said the queen, smiling at the king affectionately. She was less than half his age and the most beautiful woman I had ever met in my life. "I'm sure you handled them all with justice and wisdom."
	She set the little prince down on the flagstone floor. He crawled determinedly to the table, took hold of a table leg, and started cautiously pulling himself to a standing position. His face carried an expression of intense concentration.
	The queen caught him just before he reached the tablecloth. Holding onto one of her hands with both of his, the prince swayed a little but remained standing and gave a wide smile of triumph. He already had four teeth. "Dwrg," he said.
	"Did you hear that?" asked the queen in delight. "He called you 'Daddy.' "
	The king seemed happy to believe it. I decided not to mention that just the day before the little prince had looked directly at me and indubitably said, "Gizward."
	Above us, the brass choir began to play and we went to our seats, the king at the head of the main table and the queen, with the prince in her lap, at the foot.
	The king had said nothing to the queen in my hearing about a vacation. I glanced again toward the chaplain, whose place was directly across the table from mine.
	He gave a slight shrug, with no better idea than I. Could the king really be planning to leave Yurt?
	Servants brought steaming trays from the kitchen and we all began to eat, too hungry for more than minimal conversation. It was early summer when the days are longest, and yet the sun was setting outside.
	 7 But as we reached dessert, people settled back more comfortably to talk. I sat at the table, as I always did, with the queen's aunt on my right side and the king's nephew on my left.
	Dominic, royal nephew and presumptive heir until the birth of the baby prince, was built along the lines of a bear, large and solid. The layer of fat that had begun to replace his muscles did not conceal the fact that plenty of muscle still remained. Like a bear, too, he moved slowly, these last few months especially,  but there was always the suggestion that he could move very rapidly if he wanted to.
	The Lady Maria, on the other hand, gave an impression of constant motion even when quite still. Although, in the two years since I had come to Yurt, her golden curls had turned a rather attractive ash gray and she had given up lacy gowns for dark colors and severe styles, her manner still verged on the girlish.
	"I'm always so impressed with King Haimeric when he gives judgment," she told me. "He cuts right through to the truth!"
	"He certainly had a complicated case this afternoon," I agreed.
	"I'm sure it's a great help to him to have the assistance of a Royal Wizard at his side!" she added with a smile. "Our old wizard hardly ever assisted in legal affairs."
	The implied insult to my predecessor, I realized, was actually supposed to be a compliment to me. "I can claim no credit, my lady; the settlement today was all the king's idea." It was interesting to hear that my predecessor had not stood, as I had, through long afternoons of complicated quarrels. I could appreciate his point of view. Listening to dull court cases was not the challenge to my magical powers I had anticipated when becoming a royal wizard.
	The old wizard, who had been Royal Wizard of Yurt for a hundred and eighty years before me, through 8 five generations of kings, was still alive. He lived by himself with his magical roots and herbs in a little green house down in the woods. Although when I first came to Yurt I had negotiated a truce with him, which is about the best one can hope for between young and old wizards, and he had taught me some of his herbal magic, there were still a large number of things about him I did not know.
	But the Lady Maria moved on to other topics. As dinner ended, people rose and stood talking around the fireplace. The evening air, coming through the hall doors laden with the scent of roses, was just cool enough to make the fire's warmth welcome.
	The king said to me, "How about some of your illusions to round out the evening, Wizard? I may not get a chance to see many more of them for a while."
	So he really did mean to go. As I put together the words of the Hidden Language to shape my spells and produced a few simple but effective illusions, a golden egg that pulsated with fire and hatched into a phoenix and then a twenty-foot giant who strode the length of the hall while waving its club and roaring silently, I wondered how he could bear to leave. I couldn't imagine wanting to go anywhere else.
	n And yet I also surprised myself by envying him. Wherever the king was going, he would see new people, new sights. Yurt was a wonderful place, but sometimes I had to admit, very quietly to myself, that it could be a little dull.
	I went to talk to him the next morning. Every morning that the weather was fair King Haimeric spent a few hours in his rose garden outside the castle walls, weeding, pruning, trimming off faded blossoms, examining the bushes for slugs and insects, and planning which varieties to plant or breed next. It was hard to 9 imagine the castle without the king in it. As I came across the drawbridge, I saw that the barred garden gate was swung open and could hear his and the queen's voices at the far end of the garden. I proceeded slowly along the grassy paths, taking time to admire the roses.
	Some bushes were tall and robust, others propped against tiny trellises. Some blossoms had scores of petals and were as big as saucers, while other bushes were covered with tiny blooms no bigger than my thumbnail. Every shade of white, pink and red was represented. At the far end, where the voices came from, was a section of yellow roses. The king had begun his rose garden when a young prince, but he had only started on the yellows within the last eight or ten years.
	The mingled scents from the different blossoms were almost overwhelming.
	I spotted the king and queen sitting together on a bench. He looked happy and not at all regal, with a broad-brimmed straw hat on his white head and grass stains on his knees. A bowl of cut roses and his garden shears were beside him.
	The queen had put the baby prince down on a blanket, but he kept crawling off it. As I watched, he reached for her skirts to try to pull himself upright.
	She reached down and lifted him into her lap with a smile of affection and maternal solicitude that made my heart turn over.
	I had been in love with the queen since the first moment I saw her. As a mother, she seemed even more beautiful to me than ever. However, this was certainly something I had never felt appropriate to tell the king. For that matter, my feelings had also never been something to tell a woman so obviously in love with her husband as the queen, even if he was more than twice her age.
	"I thought I saw you come in, Wizard," said King Haimeric. "Come join us. We were just talking about our trip. And look at my new bush; the buds started opening today."
	10 It was one of his yellows, with pale blooms almost the color of parchment but tinged very delicately with red on the edges. I bent down to get a faint whiff of scent. "So where are you going?"
	"To visit my parents," the queen answered. "I think Baby Buttons here is old enough to travel safely."
	The castle without the queen in it would be even worse. "Why can't your parents come visit us?" I asked.
	The queen laughed. "They visited here last year when their grandson was born.
	And you know they hate traveling. I think they got their fill six or seven years ago, going around the western kingdoms trying to find someone appropriate to marry me to, until I found someone myself r with a smile for the king.
	"I'm still a little concerned about my garden," said the king. "You know, I've never been away from the roses in June. Some of the bushes haven t bloomed yet, and I'm starting to worry about them."
	The little prince looked up at me from his mother's lap. He had startlingly bright emerald eyes, the same shade as hers. He gave an unexpected chortle.
	"Giz-ward," he said.
	"Did you hear that?" asked the queen, so quickly that I almost wondered if he might not have said what had seemed so clear. "He just said 'Wizard'!"
	In spite of the king's concerns about leaving his rose bushes in June, the trip almost immediately became something for which the whole castle was preparing.
	The king and queen would travel with a relatively small party: the baby's nurse, the queen's Aunt Maria, a few ladies, and a half dozen knights. The king was leaving his chaplain and me behind, although we had often accompanied him on short trips.
	"You'd be bored silly in two days,' he told me with a conspiratorial smile.
	"The queen's parents are very dear people, but ... besides, I trust you to keep an eye on Dominic."
	 11 Since they planned to be gone over a month, the king took the precaution of appointing his burly nephew as regent. Prince Dominic listened to the announcement without any apparent emotion. He merely nodded and slowly twisted the ruby ring he always wore on his second finger. The ring's setting was a golden snake, with the jewel resting on its coils, and I had always felt it would be a much better ring for a wizard than for a prince. This regency, I thought, might be the closest Dominic would ever come to being king of Yurt, and I would have expected more reaction from him.
	I had sometimes wondered at Dominic's calm acceptance of the birth of his young cousin. After all, the royal nephew had probably spent most of his life, until the baby was born, assuming he would someday be king. I wondered if he planned to revolutionize the running of the castle while the king was away and rather hoped he didn't, for, if so, I might be the first to go.
	Less than two weeks after the king and queen first announced they were going, they were gone, riding off in the cool of the early morning accompanied by a fanfare of trumpets. Tne whole party rode white horses with bells on their harnesses.
	Everyone had come out to say good-bye and, for several minutes as the riders mounted, there was a great deal of laughing and calling final messages and instructions. The baby prince, riding in a pack on his nurse's back, frowned at us all. Dominic alone stood stolid and dignified, as though already feeling the weight of his responsibilities and wanting to be sure we all knew it.
	The king reined in his horse just as they all started down the hill. "Be sure to cut the roses every day," he told the constable. "As I already told you, it's better to cut them in the bud than to have the blossoms all fade on the bushes."
	12 "Yes, you already told me, sire," said the constable respectfully, but with a hint of an indulgent smile.
	'All right, all right," said the king, who did smile before hurrying to catch up to the rest.
	They reached the edge of the woods below the castle's hill and disappeared from sight with a final ringing of harness bells. The morning suddenly seemed extremely quiet and extremely empty.
	"Well, it looks like you're in charge of the castle now, Prince Dominic," I said to break the silence. "At least until the royal family comes back."
	The regent was juggling something heavy in his hand which I recognized as the royal seal of Yurt. "But it's not my castle, and they're not my wife and child,"
	he growled, turned on his heel, and stomped across the drawbridge into the castle.
	The staff and the Knights and ladies who were staying behind drifted back inside, but I didn't feel like going in yet. The day had gone flat, and it would be at least three more days before we could expect a telephone call, telling us that the royal party had arrived safely at the castle of the queen's parents.
	My biggest wizardry accomplishment since coming to Yurt had been the installation of magic telephones. They were not like the magic telephones common down in the great City, but then, very little of my magic seemed to be like anyone else's. This was largely due to the fact that I often had to improvise to compensate for all the courses at the wizards' school where I had not paid proper attention, in this case I had managed to avoid courses in the technical division completely, but I preferred to think it demonstrated my unique flair and creativity.
	In the meantime, I didn't want to mope for three days, waiting for the telephone to ring, imagining the royal family attacked by bandits or dragons without their wizard there to protect them.
	"Joachim," I said to the chaplain, who was also still 13 looking off across the green fields of Yurt, "let's go sit in the king's garden for a moment."
	He gave a start, as though he had forgotten my presence, but answered calmly.
	"All right, Daimbert."
	We were the only people in the castle who used each other's names, being Father and Wizard to everyone else. We didn't always understand each other and I had long since despaired of giving him a proper sense of humor, but we had managed to become friends, at least most of the time, though traditionally priests and wizards do not get along at all. For that matter, wizards don't usually get along with other wizards.
	We sat on the bench by the king's yellow roses. The king had been up at dawn, pruning everything one last time before he left, so the only blooms on the bushes were the buds that were just opening.
	"Do you know what's bothering Dominic?" I asked. "I'd expected he'd be delighted to have a chance to act as king of Yurt."
	"I think that's his problem precisely," said the chaplain. "He loves the little prince, everyone must love him, but Dominic had been heir apparent to the kingdom his entire life, and now he isn t. Being named temporary regent must emphasize for him that the future he'd always thought he was preparing for will never come to pass."
	If Dominic was undergoing some sort of emotional crisis, I just hoped he didn't bother me with it. "Well, at least it's not us," I said cheerfully. "What shall we do first while the king is gone? How about if I try to discover a spell to raise up armed men from dragons' teeth?"
	Joachim stretched his long legs out in front of him and glanced at me from deep-set eyes. "I'm afraid we have no dragons' teeth," he said, perfectly serious. "But I have a task of my own. I received a message from the bishop yesterday, asking me to investigate 14 the situation at a hermitage at the far eastern end of the kingdom."
	This sounded deadly dull to me. One advantage of being a wizard rather than a priest was that the wizards' school wasn't always giving us the responsibility of carrying out uninteresting tasks.
	But something about this message had bothered Joachim. There was a faint note of concern in his voice that no one who did not know him as well as I did would have noticed. "What's the problem?"
	"I don't understand why the bishop asked me," he said, turning his huge dark eyes fully on me. Even after two years, the effect was still intimidating.
	"Why didn't he just send one of the priests from the cathedral?"
	"Maybe because the hermitage is here in the kingdom of Yurt," I suggested, puzzled why this was important. "You're Royal Chaplain, but the cathedral is located in the next kingdom."
	Joachim shook his head. "That shouldn't make any difference. Both kingdoms are in the bishop's diocese.' "Maybe the bishop thinks you'd do the best job."
	He frowned at this. "The bishop should realize I have no special merits."
	I expected the bishop thought the exact opposite but didn't say so. I was still wondering why being asked to do something which sounded simple and dull should bother Joachim so much, when the constable appeared, walking briskly down the grassy path between the roses.
	"I thought I'd find you here, Wizard," he said. "A message just came in on the pigeons for you. It's from the count."
	I took the tiny cylinder from him, all that carrier pigeons could handle.
	Since the royal castle still had the only telephone in Yurt, the rest of the kingdom had to communicate with us via pigeons. I unrolled the little piece of paper.
	Yurt had two counts and a 15 duchess; this message was from the older of the two counts. The message was, by necessity, brief.
	"Have strange magical creature here. Don't think it represents immediate danger, but wish you would look at it, soon as possible."
	I read it again. It made no more sense the second time.
	"Look at this," I said, handing Joachim the piece of paper. "What do you think he means? If they 'have' a magical creature, does that mean that theyve captured it? Or does he mean that some nixie is flitting around the castle at night?
	Any magical creature poses potential danger, yet he claims this one doesn't, or at least not immediately. But if it's not dangerous, why was he concerned enough to write me?"
	Joachim shook his head, with no better idea than I.
	'The count's castle is over at the eastern end of the kingdom," I said, "so it must be quite near your hermitage. If we go together, we can investigate both at the same time. All right then," turning to the constable without giving Joachim a chance to object. "Send the count a message to expect us. We'll leave for his castle as soon as I tell the regent we're going."
	If nothing else, this certainly solved the problem of what to do while waiting to hear from the king and queen.
	in We sat under a beech tree, eating bread and cheese. Our horses, their saddles off, grazed before us. If I had been going alone, it would have been faster to fly, but flying is hard mental and physical work, and I still wasn't as good at it as a qualified wizard really ought to be. Besides, I was glad of Joachim's company.
	"You had been starting to tell me about this hermitage," I said, brushing crumbs from my lap and leaning 16 back against the tree trunk, which rose smooth and white above us.
	"Yes, but I'm beginning to wonder if I am wrong to bring a wizard into the affairs of the church without consulting the bishop," Joachim said slowly.
	I was glad I wasn't a priest. There seemed to be all sorts of things over which one could have moral dilemmas, none of which would have bothered me in the slightest.
	"But perhaps it's best that I have," he continued after a moment, "for the hermitage has a magical creature of its own. The hermitage is built in a grove at the source of a little river. There has always been a wood nymph living there."
	I sat up straight. "How very exciting! I had no idea we had a wood nymph in Yurt. I've never seen one before, I'll definitely have to visit this grove. So how do she and the hermit get along? Is that what you're going to investigate?
	I wonder if it's the nymph who is annoying the count?"
	He looked at me and looked away, seeming to find the idea of a wood nymph much less exciting than I did.
	"The old wizard, my predecessor, must know about the nymph," I continued.
	"I'll ask him when we get home again. There's a lot of the old magic of wood and earth that he knows but which they don't teach at the school."
	"My investigations have nothing to do with the nymph directly," said Joachim.
	"But with you along, it may be easier to deal with her if she appears, I've never seen a nymph myself. The bishop nas sent me to the hermitage on a matter concerning the saint's relics kept there." This sounded dull again. But apparently it was not dull to the chaplain. "Why would the bishop send me on such an important commission?" he burst out.
	I lay back again with my legs crossed, looking into the leaves above us. Very high up, hidden from view, 17 a bird was singing gloriously. "You've been Royal Chaplain of Yurt," I said, "what is it, five years now? And I know you were at the cathedral for a year or two after leaving the seminary before becoming chaplain. The bishop has had plenty of time to see your abilities. Maybe he trusts your judgment more than that of the priests in his cathedral chapter."
	"If he's giving me this kind of responsibility," said Joachim gloomily, "I'm afraid he may even be thinking of making me a member of the cathedral chapter."
	I sat up abruptly. This gloom I could understand. "But if he did, you'd have to leave Yurt! How could you bear to leave the king and queen and the little prince?"
	His huge dark eyes were turned toward me, but did not seem to see me. "That's not the real issue. The issue is that I know I am not worthy of such an honor."
	"Wait a minute," I said. "I don't understand. Why would it be such an honor to be a cathedral priest? I thought you had been one already."
	Joachim looked at me soberly. "You really don't know how the church works, do you?"
	"Not me! We wizards prefer to have as little to do as possible with the details of organized religion." If I had been the chaplain, I would have rolled my eyes at me. So far, I had never managed to make Joachim roll his eyes, but I still had hopes.
	"I'll explain it to you again,' he said patiently. "I went from the seminary where I was trained, two kingdoms away from here, to the cathedral of Caelrhon, the cathedral that also serves Yurt. The bishop who headed my seminary knew the bishop here and recommended me to him. Young priests are always sent away from the dioceses where they are trained."
	"I already knew that," I said promptly.
	"But I was never a member of the cathedral chapter, just one of the many young priests attached to the 18 church. Only the most senior and spiritual priests of the diocese are chosen to join the chapter."
	"But the bishop of Caelrhon appointed you Royal Chaplain," I objected. "Isn't that more of an honor than being a priest in his cathedral chapter?"
	His eyes became intense and distant again, no chance now of getting him to roll them. "To serve the cathedral is a much greater honor and a much greater responsibility. As chaplain, I am only responsible for the souls of the royal court, but the bishop and his cathedral chapter must mediate between God and all the people of the twin kingdoms of Yurt and Caelrhon. I fear I do not have a heart and mind pure enough to take on such a burden."
	I wanted to ask who did, in that case, but he went on without giving me a chance.
	"And at the same time as I think this, I am filled with doubt, whether it is only my pride that even makes me imagine the bishop has such a plan. If I were truly humble, I would take the duties God sends me without worrying either about a possible promotion or my ability to carry out those duties."
	"So leaving Yurt wouldn't bother you," I said, highly irritated. To me, having Joachim leave the kingdom permanently would be almost as bad as having the royal family leave. Apparently he saw it differently. "All that bothers you is some moral dilemma."
	Now his eyes did focus on me again. "I shouldn't have tried to explain it to you," he said stiffly. "I should have realized a wizard wouldn't appreciate moral concerns."
	The bird had stopped singing. We resaddled our horses and rode on toward the count's castle.
	"It runs like a rabbit," the count told us as we ate dinner. So far, I thought, this did not sound like a particularly frightening magical creature. The count was a little younger than the king, but not by much. He had the same wispy white hair, but otherwise was 19 built very differently, being round and jolly-looking. "But it's much bigger than a rabbit, closer to the size of a fox, or even a small hound."
	"So you've seen it?" I asked, setting down my fork.
	"I saw it yesterday, just once," the count said, "but my men have seen it several times in the last two days. It has, how can I describe this, an unfinished appearance. It moves awkwardly, almost as though it was about to fall apart. But the strangest thing about it," he paused and I felt a cold finger touch the back of my neck, "is that instead of rabbits' ears, it has horns."
	"Horns?"
	"That's right. Long, straight horns. Almost like a young sheep."
	I caught Joachim's eye across the table. He frowned as though wondering if this could be something diabolical.
	"And don't forget to tell him about the strange sound it makes," said the countess.
	"What kind of sound?"
	The count hesitated. "A strange sound. Not like you'd expect a rabbit to make, even a horned rabbit. It sounded almost more like an owl." He turned slightly pink, then smiled half-apologetically. "I'll make the sound for you." He raised nis hands to his mouth and gave a long, low hoot. An awkward cross between a rabbit, a sheep, and an owl should have seemed funny, but somehow it didn't.
	"What has it done so far?' I asked.
	"Well," said the count slowly, "it hasn't actually done anything. A little girl said she saw it late yesterday afternoon, heading east, up toward the high plateau. If she was right, we may not see it again. But I don't like it. It's not right for strange unnatural creatures to roam around the land of men."
	"Don't call it unnatural," I said absently. "Magic is a perfectly natural force.
	But I do agree with you on the key point," I continued more forcibly. "I don't like 20 it either. Great horned rabbits don't belong here. I've never heard of one before, and if I had, I would have expected it to be thousands of miles north of here, up in the land of dragons and wild magic. Modern wizardry usually tries to keep such creatures there."
	"I hope you don't mind," said the count, again apologetic, 'but since I wasn't sure if you'd be able to come right away, "
	"Yes? I prompted when he hesitated.
	"At the same time as I sent you a message, I also sent one to the duchess. I thought perhaps she could help us hunt the homed rabbit. The duchess, whose castle was about five miles from the old count's, was a noted huntress. "She sent a message back that she would be here tomorrow. I'd hoped she and her huntsmen could find its trail and track it up onto the plateau, or wherever it's gone."
	Joachim had said nothing so far, but he suddenly put in, with a look toward me, "I'm going to the high plateau tomorrow myself."
	"Good," I said. "We'll go together. While you talk to the hermit, I'll search for this magical horned rabbit there. A wood nymph's grove might even attract it. At the same time, the duchess ana her hunters can be looking for its trail down here. Between all of us, we should catch it."
	IV In the early morning, the high plateau was half hidden by mist, but the sun rising behind it gave the rows of trees against the sky a halo of light. When the count's stable boy led our horses into the courtyard, I saw at once that he had switched the harnesses. The bay Joachim had been riding had the correct ran saddle, but its bridle had bells, whereas my old white mare had no bells.
	Joachim did not actually become angry; he never The Wood Nymph & the Cranky did. "I'm a priest and a representative of the cathedral," he said. "I can't go visit a hermit while riding a horse with bells," and he proceeded to lengthen the stirrups on my mare.
	"Wait a minute, Father, I can change the bridles," said the mortified stable boy.
	"It's not your fault," the chaplain said quietly. "I have no time to wait, but think no more of it.' His long legs reaching well below the mare's belly, he rode out through the gates while I scrambled up on the bay, hastily tugged up the stirrups, and hurried to catch him.
	We rode in silence, through a woods where dark pines stood tall on either hand, then slowly up and out of the pines as the road ascended toward the plateau.
	Our horses were breathing hard when we emerged at the top.
	Joachim pulled the mare over to the side to rest and sat stroking her mane.
	Here the wind blew across pastures thick with wild flowers. A mile away, I could see a group of brown and white cows and a stone bam, but otherwise we seemed to have the plateau to ourselves. In the bright sun and air, it did not seem the place for a great horned rabbit.
	It also did not seem a place to be quarreling with the chaplain. "We'll want to rest the horses for a few minutes anyway," I said. "Why don't we change the harnesses now?"
	He turned his dark eyes on me, then unexpectedly smiled, a genuine smile that worked its way up from his mouth to his cheekbones and eyebrows. You're right,"
	he said. "I'm being both silly and stubborn." He swung down off the mare. "I wanted to arrive early at the hermitage, but fifteen minutes isn't going to make any difference. Let's give the horses a rest, and I can tell you what we're likely to find."
	Whether the chaplain felt he needed a wizard's protection against the horned rabbit or he was worried about the wood nymph, I was pleased he might still 22 want the company of someone who didn't appreciate moral issues.
	But he hesitated for a moment before beginning. "As you may know," he said at last, "there is a deep limestone valley cut into this plateau. The hermitage is located in a grove at the upper end, where the valley's river is born. I visited it once when I first came to Yurt, before you became Royal Wizard. The hermitage is also a shrine, sacred to the memory of Saint Eusebius." He paused for a long look at me. "Did you ever hear of Saint Eusebius of Yurt?"
	I shook my head. Wizards don't learn very much about saints.
	"I know you," he said slowly, "so I feel I should warn you. There's a special relic of the saint at the shrine, and the hermit will not appreciate it if you laugh at the relic."
	' But why should I laugh at a relic?" I protested.
	"Because," he answered, almost reluctantly, "because it's the saint's big toe."
	He had turned away, but for a moment, I half imagined he might find this funny himself.
	"The saint's big toe? But what happened to the rest of the saint?"
	"Eusebius was eaten by a dragon," said Joachim, looking at me as soberly as if it had never occurred to him that a saint's toe could be amusing.
	"When was this?" I was amazed that I had never heard the story.
	"It must be," he hesitated as though calculating, "a good fifteen hundred years ago, long before the kingdom of Yurt or the rest of the western kingdoms even existed, back in the latter days of the Empire." That explained why I had never heard of Saint Eusebius; I had never been strong on history, especially ancient history.
	The morning sun shone on our heads, and what looked like a hawk soared high above. It was hard to believe in either saints or dragons, or, for that matter, in great horned rabbits, on a lovely June day like this.
	 23 "Saint Eusebius himself was living in the grove, then," Joachim continued.
	"He lived alone, spending his days in devotion and contemplation. But when a dragon appeared up on the plateau and started eating the people's flocks, he felt he had to do something.' "He should have called on a wizard," I provided. "I know there were wizards, even back then."
	Other than giving me a quick look, he paid no attention to my interruption.
	"Saint Eusebius took his crucifix and went to face the dragon, to command it in the name of Christ to leave the area."
	"But, Joachim, you know that wouldn't work. It might work with a demon, but dragons aren't inherently evil, just magic."
	It was harder this time for him to ignore my interruption, but he managed.
	"Inspired by the devil, the dragon began to eat the holy man. But a desperate group of peasants had banded together, armed with spears and meat hooks. When the dragon tried to swallow the saint, it miraculously began to gag and choke on him. While the dragon was thus occupied, the peasants burst out of hiding and attacked it. One of them got in a lucky stroke with a meat hook and pierced the dragon's throat at the one spot where it was vulnerable.' He paused as though the horror of it were almost too much. "But they were too late to save Saint Eusebius. All that remained of him was his left big toe."
	I felt rather proud that I did not even smile. "And so they preserved the relic at the hermitage where he had lived," I said, "and subsequent generations of hermits have succeeded Eusebius there ever since. Is that it? But what do you have to investigate now?"
	"Saint Eusebius was always a rather, well, difficult,  if holy, man, even while he was alive. Now, fifteen hundred years after his death, some say he's a difficult saint."
	"What do you mean, difficult?"
	24 "WeD," said Joachim after an almost imperceptible pause, "here's an example.
	A lady, a very lovely and vain one, went to his shrine to pray for help in overcoming her faults. The saint began with her vanity, by putting a giant wart on her nose."
	I could see the problem. What was the church supposed to do when the forces of good turned out to be a real pain?
	Joachim hurried on without waiting for a response. "His, uh, difficult nature is why the bishop sent me here. Certain priests, in a church two hundred miles from here, have written to the bishop. They say that Eusebius appeared to them in a vision, saying that he was 'fed up with having his relics at this shrine, and that he wanted his toe to be preserved at their church."
	Although a saint who induced giant warts had seemed to have promising possibilities, the situation now sounded like the confusing and dangerous churchly concerns they used to warn us against at the wizards' school. "If he's been dead so long, why does it matter where his toe is?" I asked irritably.
	Joachim answered with infuriating patience. "The saints are still here with us on earth at the same time as they are in heaven. Even you must know that."
	"But why would priests in a distant city want an old dead saint's toe anyway?"
	Joachim sighed. "This may be hard for you to understand. Their church, the church where Eusebius originally made his profession, has wanted his relics for fifteen hundred years. He was a priest in their city, the son I believe of a provincial administrator under the empire, before he came to this valley to become a hermit."
	A city boy like me, I thought, or at least like I used to be.
	"After the saint was martyred," Joachim continued, "the priests there rededicated their church in his name.
	 25 "But that was all so long ago!"
	Joachim shook his head with the air of someone who had known all along that I wouldn't understand. "Individuals forget and individuals die. But churches are undying institutions and they never forget." He took a deep breath. "But you don't need to worry about either the saint or the hermit who lives there now.
	That's my responsibility. I want you to worry about the wood nymph."
	He stood up and took the offending bridle with bells off his horse. In a few moments, with our harnesses where they should be and the stirrups readjusted, we continued on across the plateau.
	In another mile, the road turned abruptly to the left. Ahead of us was a low stone wall. Rather than turning, Joachim rode his bay up to the wall. "Look at this."
	Although one could not see it until almost on top of it, before us was a narrow and very deep valley. I pulled my mare's head up more sharply than necessary when I realized we were standing at the very edge of a cliff, with only the low wall between us and an abrupt drop. The morning mists still lingered below in the shadow of the valley walls. Beneath the vertical white cliffs, an intensely green valley curved away, a narrow river rushing down its center.
	"Directly below us," said Joachim, pointing downward, "hidden by those trees, is the hermitage, built at the source of the river. There is a direct path down or, I should rather say, steps cut into the cliff just a little farther along, but the road itself takes two more miles to get down to the valley floor." Off to our left, at a spot where the cliffs were not quite so steep, I could see the white line of the road winding its way sharply down into the valley, appearing and disappearing among the beeches.
	Joachim shook his horse's reins and started along the road. I followed after one more look down. I could 26 have flown down myself easily enough, but I would not want to tiy it carrying the mare.
	We had gone less than a hundred yards when Joachim stopped again, pulling up the reins so hard that his normally gentle bay half reared and gave a protesting whinney. Wondering if it might be the mysterious horned rabbit, I hurried my Horse to join him, then stared with equal surprise.
	Before us was a little wooden booth. No one was inside, but a large brightly colored sign proclaimed, "See the Holy Toe! Five pennies on foot, fifteen pennies in the basket."
	I was trying to work out what this could mean, if perhaps whoever had painted the sign was offering us a chance to see the holy toe on someone else's root, and why a toe in a basket should be more valuable, when there was movement under a nearby tree. A young man in a feathered cap stood up and came out from the shadows.
	"Greetings, my fine gentlemen!" he said in the hearty tones of someone manning a booth at a fair. "Are you here to see the Holy Toe of Saint Eusebius the Cranky?
	I'm afraid we don't have the basket ready quite yet, but if you want to go down on foot, it's not a bad climb, and cheaper, too!"
	Joachim dismounted and looked sternly at him. "So you're charging people just for the privilege of climbing down the cliff to the Holy Grove?"
	The man gave a start, as though feeling the impact of the chaplain's eyes, but he recovered almost immediately. "Excuse me, Father, I didn't notice your vestments at first. If you're worried that we're restricting access to the relics, you needn't be; people can still go around by the road for free.
	We're just providing an extra service."
	"Charging them to climb down the steps is an extra service?' "Ah, but we've improved the path!" said the man proudly. "And our real service is going to be the 27 basket. As I said, we don't have it ready quite yet, but we should in a few weeks."
	"What is this basket?" I asked.
	The man looked at me properly for the first time. "Excuse me," he said with a delighted smile, "but are you a wizard? You are? This is wonderful! You have no idea how much we'd been hoping to be able to attract a wizard.
	"You see," he went on, "the basket is all very well, but it would be so much better if we could have a wizard working with us. Wouldn't it be more exciting and appealing to have people carried up and down the cliff by magic than lowered in a big basket at the end of a pulleyr I'm sure we could charge more, too.
	We'd give you a fair cut of the profits; you needn't worry about that. You wouldn't even need to be here! Just set up the spell and teach us how to keep it working and well do the rest."
	There were so many things wrong with his assumptions I scarcely knew where to begin. "I'm afraid a spell to lower people down the cliff couldn't just be 'set up' and then kept working with no wizard here," I said at last.
	He looked thoughtful. "That might be a problem. But maybe you'd prefer to be here yourself at least during the summer months when business will be best!
	I'm sure this will be enormously profitable once word gets out. Do you have a post at the moment?"
	"I'm Royal Wizard of the kingdom of Yurt," I said gravely, "and this is the Royal Chaplain. I don't need any extra income."
	The man was taken aback for a moment, but he seemed to have quick powers of recovery. "Well, then, maybe you know some other wizard who might be interested.
	Or maybe you'd even like to lend a hand yourself when the king doesn't need you!
	I should put the proposition up to him myself, explain that this will really make Yurt a well-known place, not just a novelty as one of the smallest of the western kingdoms."
	28 "We'll take the road down to the Holy Grove," said Joachim, abruptly swinging back up into the saddle.
	"But I haven't even had a chance yet to tell you about all our souvenirs, Father!" the man said eagerly. "As you can see, we're not quite ready for business yet, out in the next week or two we hope to have reproductions of the Holy Toe itself, figurines of a dragon, children always like things like that, and booklets telling of the life and miracles of the Cranky Saint."
	Joachim's shoulders stiffened into rigidity, but he made no answer. Instead he kicked his horse sharply into a trot. I was right behind him. The man in the feathered cap waved cheerfully after us.
	After three-quarters of a mile, as the road left the level plateau and began its steep descent toward the valley floor, I had suppressed silent laugher enough that I dared ask a question. Even for me, originally the son of a city merchant, this seemed to have gone much too far. ' Had you known about all this?"
	"The bishop made a brief reference to 'some inappropriate activities' at the site," said Joachim, looking straight ahead. "But I hadn't realized it was this bad. No wonder Saint Eusebius wants to leave."
	For the next twenty minutes, we had to give all our attention to our horses, keeping them at a slow walk as the steep road wound and twisted its way down the side of the valley. The road leveled out at last and we rode back toward the grove at the head of the valley, parallel to the road we had followed at the top of the cliffs. There were some stone huts near the road, but we saw no people.
	A few goats, feeding in the meadows along the merrily running stream, lifted their heads to look at us in surprise, apparently travelers to the Holy Grove were not all that frequent. The air 29 was fresh and cool, the valley and the trees intensely lovely.
	"Can't you, as the bishop's representative, just make them stop?" I ventured at last.
	Joachim shook his head. "As long as they do not impede the free access of the faithful to the Holy Grove and the saint's relics, they're not actually doing anything sinful. It's shameful, of course, to be trying to make money from Saint Eusebius as though he were a two-headed calf at a fair, but it isn't evil or even against church law. But if the saint was 'fed up' to begin with, this must make him furious."
	He shot me a quick, worried glance. "I'd assumed that we, the bishop and I, would try to persuade those priests two hundred miles away that they had no right to the saint's holy relics. Now I'm not so sure. And it may be difficult to break that news to the hermit."
	As we rode, the sound of rushing water became louder and louder in front of us.
	We came around a corner to see a waterfall, white water splashing in the sunlight. Long grass and dark green ferns festooned the edges of the falls.
	At the top of the falls I could see a small level area, dense with trees.
	Beyond the trees, the white cliff face rose abruptly. My eyes traveled to the top.
	That was where we had stood looking down; the cliff appeared even higher and steeper from below than it had from above.
	Looking to the right, I was able to spot the steps that had been cut into the cliff for a quicker descent than we and the horses had taken. They were still little more than toeholds in spite of the entrepreneurs' "improvements."
	Here, presumably, was where they were planning to set up a pulley and a basket to lower the pious, if less agile, pilgrim and the adventurous tourist.
	"If you don't mind," said Joachim, "I'd like to introduce you to the hermit.
	He and I will have a lot to 30 discuss after that, but you might be interested in trying to find the wood nymph."
	We tied our horses' reins to a branch and scrambled up a steep track at the side of the waterfall. At the top, the stream emerged from the dark shadow of a grove of trees. We continued along its edge, ducking our heads where the branches swung low. Here, the water course widened into a swirling pool. In a few more yards, I saw what seemed to be a stone hut, like those we had seen further down the valley.
	But I was more interested in the river. When Joachim had spoken of its source, I had visualized a spring where water gurgled up from the earth, and I was wondering how the river could carry so much water and so rapidly. I went a little further, with Joachim following, and then spotted the real source.
	The river did not gurgle up from the earth but rather poured out of the face of the cliff. A cave mouth, only a few feet high but at least twenty feet broad, opened in the limestone, and the water boiled from it. A faint but steady wind accompanied the rushing river. After emerging and making a quick eddy under the branches of the grove, the water rushed over the edge of the falls and disappeared down the valley.
	"Has anyone ever gone into the cave to follow the river back further?" I asked.
	There seemed to be a low, damp ledge along one side of the river, along which it might De possible to walk or crawl.
	"I don't think so. The cave's too small and there's too much water," said Joachim absently. We walked back to the stone hut and he went down on one knee before it, dropping his head reverently.
	I saw then that it was not merely a nut, but that the side toward us contained a stone altar, only partially protected from the elements by protruding stone walls. Next to the rough wooden crucifix on the altar was a reliquary, a shining box where the saint's relics would be kept. From where I stood, it looked as 31 though it was made of pure gold. It was indubitably made in the shape of a giant toe.
	I hung back, having no intention of going down on my knees before the preserved toe of a long-dead saint who had not even had the sense to ask a wizard for help against a dragon.
	Joachim rose again after a minute. At the same time, I caught a flicker of motion in the shadows beyond the hut. I turned toward it quickly, hoping it was the great horned rabbit, or, even better, the wood nymph.
	Instead, it was an old man in a coarse brown robe that reached to his ankles.
	Below the robe, his feet were bare; I noticed that he himself had very large and horny toes.
	This, then, was the hermit. My eyes had become adjusted to the dim light in the grove and I could see that the hut, beyond the altar, would make an adequate shelter for someone who had deliberately given up comfort. The old hermit had a ropy beard that reached nearly to his knees and a beatific smile that he turned on both of us.
	"Greetings, my son," he said to me, and "Bless me, Father," to Joachim and knelt before him.
	Joachim blessed him in evident embarrassment and helped him back to his feet.
	"I should rather kneel to you, Father," he said. "Priests who are busy with the sins and affairs of the world have much to learn from hermits whose days are spent in contemplation and prayer."
	The hermit looked at him more closely. "You're the Royal Chaplain, aren't you?
	I thought I recognized you."
	Joachim beckoned to me. "Let me present Daim-bert, Royal Wizard of Yurt and my close friend."
	Mollified at being called the chaplain's close friend, I made the hermit the full formal bow, first the dipping of the head, then the widespread arms, finishing by dropping to both knees. I reassured myself that to 32 kneel in this way to a living holy hermit, as a wizard might to a superior wizard or to his king, would not be a discredit to the position of institutionalized magic. Besides, Joachim looked pleased.
	"Have you come to see the wood nymph?" the hermit asked me. I rose and met his eyes. I had somehow expected them to be distant and dreamy, but they were surprisingly sharp under long, shaggy eyebrows.
	"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 who 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, carefulfy 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. 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 33 no apparent expression. Her only clothes were a few strategically placed leaves.
	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 ner head slighdy, 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 nave. 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, out 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 die 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 bis gentle side. He came to this grove originally, as a young hermit, because he wanted to put trie 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.
	34 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 seemea 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 comer of my eye and turned slowly.
	And there were 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.
	 35 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 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."
	37 38 He smiled approvingly. "One sometimes hears that wizards are too dismissive toward concerns ot 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. 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 39 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 saddlebag 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 thinx 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 predecessors.
	But wood nymphs, as I 40 understand it, are immortal and, thus, they are outside of the human drama of sin and salvation."
	And so, I thought, was whatever had made that footprint.
	Joachim hesitated for a moment before continuing. "Ive mentioned before," he said at last, "that the bishop is very uneasy about my friendship with a wizard.
	But I wrote him that, in this case, it could be advantageous to have access to someone who might be able to influence a nymph. Therefore," with a sideways glance from his enormous eyes, "I do hope you can do something."
	I said nothing for a moment but thought about this. The bishop seemed to have issued the chaplain a veiled threat: Either I proved my ability and willingness to help the church or else the bishop would pressure Joachim to end our friendship. I thought of suggesting that if the bishop became angry with him, then he could stop worrying about being asked to join the cathedral chapter, but decided this would push him too far.
	Instead I said, "I'll try my best, but it may be hard if the nymph won't even talk to me. I'll want to consult my books back at the royal castle, perhaps talk to my predecessor about her, and maybe even telephone the wizards' school.
	They don't want young wizards calling them up with every little problem, but if my books don't give me much help, I may have no choice."
	Joacnim had started to mount his horse, but he seemed to hear something in my voice I had not meant him to hear. He swung back down and looked at me. "I'm sorry. I was thinking of the need to get back to the count's castle, to send the bishop a message by the pigeons immediately. But he can wait a little while longer. What's really bothering you about the wood nymph?"
	"It's not the nymph," I said. "It's something else I saw." And I tola him about the horned rabbits, the footprint that was almost, but not quite, a man's, and 41 the strange sense of renegade spells lurking amid the magic of the valley.
	' So I know now the horned rabbits aren't creatures from the land of wild magic," I finished. "It looks as though someone took dead rabbits, attached sheeps' horns, and then, I don't know how, brought them back to life. Some wizard must have made them. But my predecessor and I are the only wizards in the kingdom.' "Do you think the old wizard's practicing black magic?" asked Joachim quietly.
	' I don't know what to think," I said in despair. "I'll have to go talk to him at once. He would have been almost the last person I'd suspect of dealing with the powers of darkness, but if he's able to create life, he's gotten supernatural help from somewhere."
	Joachim nodded thoughtfully. "That's the shortcoming of wizardry, isn't it.
	Because it's a natural power, you can't use unaided magic to alter the earth's natural cycle of birth and death.
	"But why would he do it?" I burst out. "He's retired, he doesn't have to prove anything to anyone 1 any more.
	'When he decided to retire, back before you came to Yurt, he told all of us that he wanted to spend more time on his research. Maybe this is what he's been researching."
	"I still can't understand it," I said gloomily, catching Joachim's intense gaze for a second and looking away again. "He knows as well as anyone the perils of dealing with the forces of evil."
	'Do you want me to talk to him?"
	I actually considered this for a moment. It was certainly appealing to contemplate someone else going down to the little green house at the edge of the woods to confront my cantankerous predecessor. But he had never liked Joachim; "young whippersnapper" was about his most flattering term for the chaplain.
	"I'm afraid he wouldn't say anything to you,' I said. "It will have to be me."
	42 "But isn't it my duty, as Royal Chaplain, to talk to someone who might be imperiling his soul?"
	This was the difficulty of having a conversation with Joachim. Sooner or later I always ran up against the fact that he was a priest. I shook my head. 'This is a magical problem."
	'Then let's get under way."
	We had ridden only a short distance down the valley when a young man suddenly ran out from behind the trees toward us. Between the nymph and the great homed rabbits, my ability to see sudden motion without jerking convulsively was limited.
	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 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 warily from a 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 Eusebi-us'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 43 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. We rode at a trot until the road started the steep climb 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 ne 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-puliey contraption, it sounds horribly dangerous to 44 me, I must say. If the talk of baskets and souvenirs is no more than talk, then we'll know it's only a fagade, 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 enougn piece of paper," said Joachim.
	n 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 01 my men reported seeing a great homed 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 returned 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 45 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 ofiash-ion. She and the queen were distant cousins and had the same midnight black hair, but Diana was some ten years older. 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 46 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 shoula 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' 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.
	"When will he be coming to Yurt?"
	"That's the real surprise, here he is!"
	She turned and beckoned, and someone broke away from the small group by the fire. I had assumed, without looking, they were all members of the count's court. This one was no young lord, this was a wizard.
	I was struck first by his hair. It was so thoroughly auburn that it glowed nearly carrot-colored in the firelight. His cheeks were spattered with freckles below wide-set and very light blue eyes. At first I thought 47 he was clean-shaven, as were most wizardry students, but then I spotted a few rather half-hearted red wisps on his chin. He wore a black velvet jacket, embroidered all over with moons and stars.
	"Evrard," said the duchess, "I'd like to introduce you to Daimbert, Royal Wizard of Yurt."
	He turned to me with an amazed grin and wrung my hand. "You're Daimbert? Of course you are! What an honor! We learned all about how you invented the far-seeing telephone, and within just a few months of taking your first post.
	Let me tell you, it's a real inspiration to the rest of us!"
	I smiled modestly.
	"Especially you're an inspiration to all of us who've never worked very hard, because we know that you spent as much time in the city taverns as with your books. And of course, in transformations class, old Zahlfast always uses your experiences that time with the frogs as a warning!"
	My smile faded.
	He looked at me with his head cocked for a minute. "I knew who you were, or thought I did, when you were still at school, even though I'm not sure I ever talked to you. But I don't know if I would have recognized you now. You look a lot older than the person I thought I remembered."
	"I remember sometimes seeing you in the halls," I said, "but I'm afraid that's it. You probably don't recognize me because of the white beard."
	He tugged in disgust at one of the wisps on his own chin. "Your beard looks very wizardry. Mine is coming in red, so I'm afraid I'm going to look more like a bandit than a wizard. If it ever grows in, maybe I'll try bleaching mine, too."
	My hair and beard were, in fact, not bleached; they had turned white overnight, six months after I first came to Yurt, but I didn't want to go into that rather harrowing episode now. "How is Zahlfast?" I asked instead.
	48 "Doing fine. He and the rest of the teachers always seem to be above the problems and the worries of all the students. He warned me, which I'd expected, that I was on my own now, that I couldn't expect the school to come help me with 'every little problem.' He did ask to be remembered to you and said you'd probably see him later this summer."
	Every year or so, one of the teachers would visit the young wizards at their posts throughout the western kingdoms. With luck, I would be able to present Zahl-fast, when he arrived, with a tidy solution to the problem of the great horned rabbits.
	"You know," Evrard continued, "I've always rather liked old Zahlfast, but after what happened to me in the transformations practical, I didnt dare meet his eye for the rest of the semester." In spite of being highly curious about what had happened to him, I didn't dare ask for fear he'd allude to the frogs again and in more detail. "Therefore, I was shocked when he called me in to tell me he had a post for me, I'd been afraid he was going to tell me the school had decided to take my diploma back!"
	We both laughed. "But I did pay more attention in my classes this last year,"
	continued Evrard. "Did you know, Elerius came back to teach a course?"
	"Elerius? You mean they've put him on the faculty already?" Elerius, three years ahead of me, was generally rumored to have been the best student the school had ever had.
	"No, no, he's still Royal Wizard in that big kingdom way off at the base of the eastern mountains. He just taught the one course. It was very interesting, some of the old-fashioned magic of earth and stone the school doesn't teach any more.
	He said he'd learned it from an old magic-worker who lived high up in the mountains and who taught it to Elerius just before he died."
	I was jealous at once. I had thought I was rather unusual in learning herbal magic from my predecessor at Yurt, and here Elerius had not only learned some 49 of the old magic, but was actually being invited to teach it.
	But I couldn't say that to Evrard. "So have you just arrived here in Yurt?" I asked.
	"No, I've been here for two weeks."
	I turned to the duchess, who was following our conversation with her hands on her hips and a pleased expression on her face. "Why didn't you tell me, my lady?"
	"I scarcely needed permission from the Royal Wizard to hire my own wizard, did I?" she saiu with a laugh. "Besides, I wanted to wait until after King Haimeric had gotten safely off on his trip before I distracted the royal court with anything else. So, how do you like my wizard? As someone who's been in Yurt longer, do you have any recommendations? Are there certain books I should buy?
	Should I get in some crucibles and pestles and special herbs?"
	"Ask Evrard himself what he needs," I said, but the smile froze on my lips.
	This likeable young wizard had been in the kingdom for two weeks. Could he be responsible for the great horned rabbits?
	I did a little, very rapid, magic probing, which I hoped he wouldn't notice, and felt my shoulders relax. If he had made the rabbits, it was certainly not with supernatural aid. I could understand a school-trained wizard, even one I had barely met, better than anyone else, and there was nothing about Evrard which suggested a plunge into black magic.
	At this point, dinner was announced. As we moved toward the table, I noticed the chaplain standing by himself. I had almost forgotten him.
	"Joachim," I said, "let me introduce you to Evrard, the duchess' new wizard."
	His dark eyes had been distant, but at once they came back into focus.
	"Evrard, this is my very good friend, the Royal Chap-Iain of Yurt."
	"I am glad to meet you," said Joachim gravely, shaking Evrard's hand.
	50 The young wizard winced; Joachim's grip was strong. "I'm happy to meet you, too," he said.
	Joachim smiled then, which he had not done when he first met me. "I think Daimbert will be pleased to have another young wizard in the kingdom.' At dinner, the count asked us about our trip to the high plateau. I merely mentioned the Holy Grove, because I wasn't sure now much of the situation Joachim wanted generally known, talked a little more about the horned rabbits, and did not mention at all the strange footprint or the spell I had sensed.
	I would have expected that the duchess would be most interested in the horned rabbits, especially since she had come here at the count's request to hunt them, but instead she started talking about the shrine. "That's where the toe of Saint Eusebius, the Cranky Saint, is kept, isn't it?" she said. "He's not a saint to trifle with! Who was that man," turning to the count, "your great-grandfather?"
	"Great-great-grandfather," he said as though embarrassed.
	"Anyway," continued Diana, "our present count's ancestor was a noted rapscallion and sinner." It was hard to imagine anyone related to the white-haired count as a rapscallion. "But when he was dying, he started worrying about his soul at last, and he asked to be buried in the Holy Grove, near the shrine. But the Cranky Saint didn't want someone with so many sins on his soul buried that close. So he rerouted the river so it flowed between the grave and his shrine!"
	Everyone but Joachim laughed. The count nodded sheepishly. "That's right.
	That count's son, my own great-grandfather, was so embarrassed he had him dug up and reburied in our castle cemetery. The next day, the river was back in its normal bed.' 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 51 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 Gount'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 suddenly 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 nad appeared to him or just 52 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! Ive 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 l>ear 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. After a while I fell asleep again, although my dreams were more troubled than ever.
	ni Diana was surprisingly unwilling to have me help her search for the great homed 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 53 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 ana 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' 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.
	"Its 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 54 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. Ill 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. 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 The Wood Nymph & the Cranky^aint 5S""
	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. . . .
	I followed the brick road a few miles through the trees, gliding along five feet above it, turned off at a track marked by a little pile of white chalk, part of a giant protective pentagram the wizard had made for himself when he retired, and proceeded down his narrow green valley. As usual, an illusory lady and unicorn waited by a little bridge. The lady raised her sky-blue eyes to me as I passed over. Beyond, the wizard had a volley of magic arrows ready to repel the unwary, but the spell was tripped by someone walking down the valley floor and no arrows bothered me today.
	Usually when I came to visit my predecessor, I found him sitting on a chair in front of his little green house, built under the spreading branches of an enormous oak. But today I saw no one and the door was closed. I dropped to the ground, remembering guiltily that it had been several months since I had last come to visit.
	I thought again how strange it would be if someone who prided himself on being a wizard of light and air, who had even mocked me for the moon and stars on my belt buckle the first time I had met him, had descended into black magic.
	56 The wizard's calico cat emerged from the long grass and pounced at my socks, making me jump. I squared my shoulders and raised my fist to knock at the door, expecting the old wizard to call for me to come in even before I had a chance to rap. Little happened in his valley of which he was unaware. But no voice called.
	I did knock then and had to wait several moments for an answer, even though I immediately heard a loud crash inside. But then the door opened and the old wizard glared out at me.
	"It's you,' he said, as though highly disappointed. Where I had been steeling myseli to face someone deeply sunk in evil, I found only an irritable old man.
	"Excuse me, Master," I said. "I don't want to interrupt your experiments, but I need your wisdom and advice." He was not in fact my master, but I had always called him that, feeling it was appropriate for his superior age and experience.
	"No wonder, being trained at that school," the old wizard snapped. He seemed unusually brusque, even for him. I wondered briefly how the Cranky Saint would hold up against him in a contest of irritable natures.
	"I won't keep you very long." I glanced around surreptitiously, wondering how I could bring up the topic of the great horned rabbits. "But with your knowledge of tne magic of earth and growing things, I thought you might be able to counsel me what do about the wood nymph."
	To my surprise, his expression immediately softened. "The wood nymph, he said with a hint of a smile. "I haven't seen her in years."
	Emboldened by his mood change, I asked, "May I come in?"
	He scowled again at once, but then he nodded grudgingly. "You might as well."
	I probed, very quickly, for supernatural influences and did not find them.
	There was nothing about him, 57 any more than there had been about Evrard, that indicated the use of black magic. He turned and I followed him inside, enormously relieved but still wary.
	I was shocked when I came through the green door into the cottage's single room.
	Even though it had always been full of herbs, books, mortars and pestles, and piles of dishes, he had managed to preserve some semblance of order, and the floor had always been swept clean. Now, mounds of decayed plant material were heaped on the floor and the furniture, amidst dirty crockery. There was an acrid smell to the place I could not identify. Shards of broken glass lay in front of the fireplace, the result, I guessed, of the crash I had heard. The calico cat sensibly refused to come in with me.
	"Find a chair," said the old wizard with a vague wave of his hand. The word "find' seemed well chosen; it took a moment for me to identify which of the shapeless masses around me might be a chair at base. "I'm afraid the place has gotten a little messy."
	I let this understatement pass and shifted a pile of dead leaves and a plate with the remains of what might once have been a fried egg. Having thus uncovered a chair, I pulled it up next to his rocking chair, the only piece of furniture not covered with debris.
	He sat down and arranged his long white beard over his lap. It seemed full of twigs and bits of food, at which he picked as he rocked. Even his ring, shaped like an eagle in flight, was dirty and tarnished. But nothing here suggested he had been using diabolical power to bring dead rabbits back to life.
	The old wizard had already been well past two hundred years old when he had abruptly decided to resign as Royal Wizard of Yurt. He was starting to feel himself old and even incapable two years ago, when he moved down here from the castle. I wondered uneasily if his decline might have been accelerated by living alone, with no one to talk to besides his cat.
	He kicked half-heartedly at the broken glass and 58 continued to rock in front of his cold hearth. He seemed willing to let the silence stretch out until I finally decided to break it. "I need your advice,"
	I began, "on how I might be able to shift the wood nymph out of her grove." If I started with her, I might be able to work around to the rabbits, and whatever had made that inhuman footprint. "I gather she's been there for generations. Is it even possible to shift a nymph?"
	The old wizard smiled, quite pleasantly for him. "Are you sure you want to move her? Leave her where she is, treat her gently and with dignity, and she may agree to come down out of her trees so you can see her."
	"I did see her," I said. "She was down from the trees at least for a moment, but when I tried to speak to her she disappeared at once, without saying anything."
	"A nymph's conversation takes time," he answered, again with a reminiscent smile. "But it's worth it in the end." He leaned forward abruptly. "Why do you want to move her out of the grove?"
	"Well," I said uneasily, "the bishop had asked the Royal Chaplain to ask me what I could do. The church considers that grove a holy grove, and they don't like having a nymph in it."
	The old wizard stopped smiling and snorted as though thoroughly disgusted. "I thought I'd warned you about becoming too good friends with that chaplain.
	Why should you do errands for the Church anyway? They've always done their best to discredit wizardry, so we certainly don't owe them any favors. Why should a wood nymph have to leave the grove where she's always been happy, just because some bishop becomes fastidious about her proximity to an old hermit? Afraid she's going to corrupt him, is that it?"
	I did not try to deny it. Clearly I would get no help from the old wizard here.
	I almost agreed with him 59 anyway and would have agreed completely if Joachim had not seemed so troubled.
	"I'm sure you're right, Master," I said hastily, trying to recover something from this conversation before he threw me out. "But I have another question for you. Some strange magic creatures have started appearing in the kingdom, and it looks as if they were made with wizardry.' "Strange magic creatures," he interrupted with another snort, "and you, a supposedly competent wizard, can't even deal with them yourself?"
	I pushed ahead. "I had merely hoped, since you'd been in Yurt so long, you might nave seen something similar before and would have some suggestions. They look like rabbits, but big rabbits, and they have horns.' "Horned rabbits," he said, looking at me thoughtfully. "So there are horned rabbits in the kingdom and you don't know what to do about them. I hope you weren't going to accuse me of making something so silly. Unless you created them yourself, eh? I suggest you talk to your fancy school. An apprentice wizard in the old days wouldn't have had these problems!"
	I expected in fact that an apprentice wizard of a century or two earlier would have had just as much trouble, but I didn't say so. Rather, I decided I ought to leave before I did any more damage to our dubious relationship.
	"And how many horned rabbits have you seen?" he asked as I stood up to go.
	"There are at least three of them." I wondered if there had been great horned rabbits in Yurt before or if the old wizard was just pleased to see me facing,  certainly not for the first time!, a problem I didn't know how to handle.
	The old wizard smiled grimly. "If you've got a renegade wizard here in the kingdom making horned rabbits, rabbits!,  there may be a lot more before you're through."
	I left with this discouraging comment. As I flew 60 back home, I thought that at least the old wizard himself didn't seem to be creating great horned rabbits, or anything else at the moment, and certainly not with diabolical assistance. But that left me back at the beginning. Where had they come from, and why had they now appeared in Yurt?
	IV That evening, as I'd hoped, the telephone call came from the castle, halfway to the great City, where the queen's parents lived, telling us that the royal party had arrived safely. Dominic spoke to the king, but standing at his side, I could see the king with the queen and the baby prince behind him, tiny figures in the base of the glass telephone.
	"Yes, we're all well," said the king. "Any problems yet you can't handle, Dominic?"
	Tne royal nephew and regent took this comment entirely seriously. "Nothing I can't handle, sire."
	I thought that, on the contrary, there was a great deal happening in Yurt over which Dominic had no control. I wondered if it could be pure coincidence that Nimrod and the great homed rabbits had both appeared in the kingdom at the very time the king left. I even wondered for a moment if Dominic himself might be responsible, if he had arranged for the kingdom to be invaded by magic creatures in the king's absence to demonstrate his ability to deal with them.
	But this seemed a little far-fetched. There was no question, however, that Dominic was throwing himself into the role of royal regent. When we had reached home the day before, we nad found him sitting on the throne in the great hall, gripping the arms and staring grimly at nothing in particular.
	Hearing from the king made everyone more cheerful, except for Joachim, who was still waiting to hear from the bishop. He had hoped that an answer to his message of the preceding day would be here when we reached the royal castle yesterday, but no pigeons had arrived. The cathedral had never put in a telephone, probably afraid that to do so would be a concession to the forces of institutionalized wizardry, and Joachim could do nothing but mutter about pigeons being lost or caught by hawks, all of which was quite possible,  before going up to bed early.
	Perhaps the most cheerful person in the castle was Gwen, the assistant cook.
	She and I had been friends since I first arrived in Yurt, when she was still a kitchen maid. Not only was she glad the royal family was safe, she was pleased that they were at least temporarily out of the way. She ana her husband, who played in the castle's brass choir, were the only people in Yurt who did not consider the baby prince the most important person in the kingdom. That honor they gave to their own baby daughter.
	"I think she's going to start crawling soon," Gwen said to me. Her daughter was lying on a rug on the flagstone floor of the great hall. "Look at her kicking!"
	The little girl, four months younger than the royal prince, was indeed kicking with great enthusiasm and pride of accomplishment.
	I sat down on the floor next to her and patted her on her diapered bottom.
	She gave me a wide, toothless smile. "I nke baby girls," I said to Gwen. "She's so full of energy; are you sure she isn't going to get into trouble once she starts moving around?"
	Little Gwennie grabbed the hem of my trouser leg and tried to pull it toward her mouth. Gwen disengaged her. "There is a lot she could crawl into in the kitchens, they're much more dangerous than anything the little prince is likely to get into," she added pointedly.
	We were interrupted at this point by Dominic coming toward us. I frequently had the uncomfortable feeling that, despite bis silence and apparent slowness, 62 he saw and recognized every one of my inadequacies, and probably a lot of inadequacies I didn't even have. But he was also capable of surprising me by speaking to me on occasion as though he had no doubts of my competence.
	"It sounds as if the count and the duchess are having a great deal of trouble in their neighborhood these days," he said as I scrambled to my feet, "what with treat horned rabbits and a troublesome nymph." I ad, of course, given him a sketch of our trip as soon as we returned. From the stony look I had received then, I was rather surprised now much of it he'd understood, even though he didn't now mention the people trying to restrict access to the holy relics.
	"Do you think it would help if I rode over to that side of the kingdom tomorrow with a few knights?"
	"Not for several days, anyway," I said. "Brute force won't be any good against the nymph. If any of our knights are good trackers, however, I m sure the duchess would appreciate their help tracking the horned rabbits."
	Dominic considered, as though wondering again why his uncle the king had even taken me on in the first place. "And are you doing anything about these strange events?"
	"I'm checking what my books of magic have to say about such things," I said with dignity. Since I had been meaning to get to my books very soon, I didn't feel this was too great a prevarication.
	Unexpectedly, Dominic's frown turned into a smile. "It was good to hear the royal family is well," he said, "especially the little prince."
	I agreed wholeheartedly, although somewhat surprised, since Joachim had felt Dominic might be jealous.
	"His hair is so light blond it's almost white," continued Dominic with a sentimental smile. "They tell me mine was just the same color when I was his age. Tell 63 me, Wizard," with a sudden sharp look, "have you ever thought of getting married?"
	"Me? Of course not,' I said, startled by this sudden change of subject.
	"Wizards never marry."
	"That's right," said Dominic and turned abruptly away, leaving me wondering what was really bothering the regent.
	The next morning, I dug out the massive old books of spells that had once belonged to the wizard employed by the duchess' father. I had had them some time without ever looking at them and had almost forgotten about them, but meeting Evrard reminded me.
	If there was no demon-assisted wizard in Yurt bringing dead bones back to life with supernatural power, then maybe it was possible, with unaided wizardry, to create new animals and give them the semblance of life if not Me itself. I knew they had taught us nothing of the sort in school. But the night before, in reading through the books I had brought with me to Yurt, I found a brief mention in the first volume of Ancient and Modern Necromancy which hinted tantalizingly that such things might be possible.
	The old ducal wizard, one of the last to be trained by the apprentice system, had retired thirty years earlier, even Defore Diana inherited the duchy, and when he went, he left a lot of his books behind. I had found these books and unabashedly stolen them on a visit to the duchess' castle a year and a half ago.
	Now I turned to them in the hope of finding something that the clean, printed pages of my books of modern magic did not cover.
	The ink had faded and the spells were written down in no particular order, sometimes interspersed with what appeared to be chess puzzles or laundry lists.
	But the magic was fascinating. For two days I did little besides eat and work my way, page by page, through the volumes.
	64 Much of it was herbal magic and rather ineffective herbal magic at that. I had learned enough of the magic of growing things from my predecessor during the last two years, during the interludes in which we were fairly friendly, at least to recognize spells that were unlikely to work. The spell to summon a swarm of honeybees looked as though it had promise, as did the spell to help heal a cow with a sore udder, but I did not have much faith in the spells which purported to be able to turn the moon black or put a burning cross on the forehead of a previously unsuspected murderer.
	In the third volume I found a mention of the wood nymph. What started as a rather dry, scientific description of her attributes quickly disintegrated into a personal account. I smiled as I deciphered the cramped and faded handwriting.
	It seemed the old ducal wizard had thoroughly enjoyed himself. I remembered my predecessors softening at the mention of the wood nymph and thought that she had certainly cut a romantic swath through the wizards of the kingdom of Yurt a generation ago. I wondered if the look she had given me when we met presaged a similar set of plans for me ... an intriguing possibility. . . .
	My thoughts were interrupted at this point by a knock at my door, and Joachim came in. He threw himself into a chair and came as close as he ever did to scowling. "Look at this."
	"This" was a tiny square of paper. A quick glance showed that it was finally a message from the bishop,  if you could call it a message. "Continue investigations. Gain more information. Pray for guidance."
	I scowled, too. "So what does the bishop expect you to do?"
	"I wish I knew." Joachim stopped, as though remembering that he probably ought not to be grumbling about the bishop to a wizard, and passed a hand over his eyes. "I'm sorry to bother you with this," he 65 said and stood up to go. "I don't want to interrupt your research."
	"Sit back down," I said. "I'm glad to take a break from reading."
	I watched him make a deliberate effort to stop worrying about the bishop.
	"So, have you found anything useful so far?" he asked.
	"Some of these books that used to belong to the old ducal wizard should help.
	I think I've figured out at last how to talk to a wood nymph. But I d like to wait until it's clear whether the saint's relics and the old hermit will stay or go before I try to move her."
	Joachim nodded slowly without answering.
	'I already told you there's no indication that my predecessor is practicing black magic. I think, however, it might be possible with the old magic to make a horned rabbit that would move as though it were alive, even though it wasn't.
	I didn't see any immediate sign of the old wizard making anything, but he could have hidden all sorts of bones under the rubbish. It would mean he had lost his mind, rather than his soul, I guess that could be an improvement."
	"Of course it would," said Joachim, surprised there could be any question.
	"I'm a little worried about him. The condition of his house is appalling. But he may just have been concentrating so hard on the spells to create great horned rabbits, if he made them after all, that he had lost track of everything else."
	"Are you sure you don't want me to go talk to him?" Joachim asked with a long look from his deep-set eyes.
	"No, no," I said hastily. "I should have the spells worked out soon and then I'll visit him again. By the way," I went on, "has the saint appeared to you again with any clearer indication of what he wants?"
	"No, he hasn't," he said, looking somewhere beyond my head.
	"And I presume you can't summon a vision?"
	66 "The bishop's right," said Joachim bleakly, standing up and opening my door.
	"I'd better pray for guidance.
	I shook my head as the door closed, glad again I was not a priest. My own inclination would have been to leave the hermit and the toe in the Holy Grove with the apprentices, perhaps finding some way to get the entrepreneurs off the cliff top, but as nearly as I could tell Saint Eusebius had told three different sets of people three different things: He had told the hermit he wanted to stay where he was, the distant priests that he wanted to move to their church, and Joachim that he wanted to leave but not necessarily go there.
	I shrugged and returned to the old ducal wizard's rather racy personal account of how one might deal with a wood nymph, but it had no more practical information than I had already been able to glean. I leaned back, stretching my stiff shoulder muscles. So far, I had found nothing that might in any way apply to great horned rabbits, much less creatures with semi-human footprints, and I had only one volume to go.
	If Joachim had been waiting with eagerness and trepidation for his message from the bishop, I had been waiting to hear from the duchess. Someone as good at hunting as she had always been ought to have been able to capture one of the horned rabbits by now, especially if they were starting to multiply. And I would like a chance to talk more to Evrara, to find out if he knew any spells that might be useful. I wondered again, more uneasily, about Nimrod.
	If I didn't hear from them soon, I'd create a magical excuse and go back to that end of the kingdom. Perhaps I could make it rain moles.
	It was late in the afternoon. Dinner would be served shortly. I closed my books and went into the courtyard and out across the drawbridge to get some fresh air.
	If the old ducal wizard's last volume was not informative on strange magic creatures, I might have to swallow my pride and telephone the wizards' school.
	A light breeze blew around my ears. The sky above was scaled with high, faint clouds. I thought somewhat wryly that, for someone who had spent all his life in the great City before becoming Royal Wizard of Yurt, I had certainly learned quickly now to find reassurance and repose in nature.
	As I looked down toward the woods at the bottom of the castle's hill, a little group of horses and riders emerged. For two seconds I thought it might be the king and queen, back already, but then I realized it was the duchess.
	She was accompanied by half a dozen mounted men, one of whom had bright red hair. Striding by her stirrup was a tall blond man in a green cloak. Nimrod appeared to have no trouble keeping up with the horses.
	Evrard spotted me and waved. The riders kicked their horses for the last climb up the hill. "Well, here we are!" Diana said cheerfully, including both me and Nimrod in her smile.
	I wasn't sure what evil I expected from the tall huntsman, but so far he and the duchess seemed to be getting on very well. She no longer appeared flustered as sne had when she first met him, but her usual confident self.
	"Did you catch one?" I asked. "One of the great horned rabbits?"
	"I finally shot one this morning," said Nimrod with a grin for the duchess.
	"I've never before had to hunt 68 something for three days before I caught it! Now we'll find out what it is, something from the land of wild magic or something supernatural. My lady Diana said that her wizard could analyze it, but I told her I wanted the best.
	Nothing would do but bringing it straight to the Royal Wizard of Yurt."
	Diana interrupted before I could respond to this implied slur on Evrard's abilities. "I'm sorry you didn't get my message on the pigeon that we were coming," she said loudly. "A hawk must have gotten it!"
	But she pulled me aside as the rest of her party, including Nimrod and Evrard, passed over the drawbridge and into the castle. "Actually, I didn't send you a message," she said with a wink. "I didn't want to give Dominic a chance to tell me to stay home. I don't trust him to do a good job as regent without someone like me to keep an eye on him.
	The constable, with Dominic behind him, came out to greet the duchess with reasonably well-concealed surprise. She introduced Evrard and Nimrod and apologized for the loss or delay of the nonexistent carrier pigeon.
	'I had been about to ride over to visit you and the count," said Dominic.
	"Have you made any progress?"
	"Well, Nimrod's got a magic rabbit for your Royal Wizard to look at," she said.
	For a second I wondered if she was irritated he had brought it here. "I wouldn't have wanted you to bother yourself coming to my castle, I know you have so many responsibilities."
	Dominic frowned as though suspecting flippancy and not quite seeing it.
	"Let me see that horned rabbit," I said. Nimrod handed me his gamebag.
	As I took the leather bag, I thought that it felt very strange, not at all the way a gamebag should feel. A chill touched me that was not caused by the late afternoon breeze. By feel alone, I would have guessed the bag held not a homed rabbit but sticks and bones.
	what's wrong?" asked Nimrod, catching my concern.
	 69 I had been about to take the bag into my chambers, but I now decided to open it here, in the middle of the courtyard. My apprehension became stronger as I slowly unbuckled it. "When did you put the rabbit in here?"
	"Late this morning."
	I had the bag open now; a powerful smell emerged in a wave, the smell of decay.
	Without reaching inside, I held the bag upside down and shook it. Scraps of fur, bones with bits of rotten flesh still clinging to them, and two long, straight horns fell out and clattered on the cobblestones.
	Nimrod reached down and picked up a horn and a piece of bone. "These look like the bits and scraps someone might use if making some sort of artificial horned rabbit."
	"That's my thought exactly," I said grimly.
	Dinner was lively that evening with the addition of the duchess' party. Even Dominic, who kept looking thoughtfully at Diana, seemed to be making an attempt to be witty and charming. I remembered vaguely that there had been a story that Dominic had once intended to marry the duchess, back before the king and queen even met, but nothing had ever come of it. The mere thought of the stolid royal nephew trying to woo the lively duchess made this outcome easy to understand.
	Nimrod, with his neatly trimmed beard and cultured speech, appeared to make the transition easily from a rough outdoor life to a royal court. I would have expected him to sit at the servants' table with the rest of the duchess' huntsmen, but she took his arm, laughed, and put him next to her at the main table.
	"Have you heard the story about the peacock?" Evrard asked the youth next to whom he was seated.
	Hugo was a young cousin of the queen's who was 70 doing some of his knighthood training at the royal castle. "No," he said, puzzled.
	"You should have," replied Evrard with a grin. "It's a beautiful tale!"
	"All right," replied Hugo with a grin of his own. Other conversation at the table had stopped. "What did the ocean say to the ship?"
	"Nothing. It only waved! Why are flowers considered lazy?' "Because they spend all their time in beds! At which of his battles did King Chalcior say, 'I die contented'?"
	Evrard frowned. "King Chalcior? I remember him from history, but,  Is this still a joke?"
	"His last one!" cried Hugo, and the whole table, even Dominic, was convulsed.
	I was the only one who did not feel lively. After spending two days persuading myself that I would, very soon, find a spell in the old ducal wizard's books that would give the semblance of life without supernatural aid, seeing the rotting rabbit's bones had made me again fear that someone in the kingdom was practicing black magic.
	"Wizard!" called the duchess to Evrard over dessert. "How about entertaining us with a few illusions?"
	Evrard gave a start and shot me a second's look of panic, then seemed to recover. He began muttering and moving his hands in the air, with far more flourishes than illusions actually required. In a moment, a fairly credible baby dragon appeared, about six inches long and colored bright blue. "There!" he said triumphantly.
	He held it up for everyone to see and got a polite round of applause. It was not nearly as impressive an illusion as the last ones I had done to entertain the court, shortly before the king left, but no one was so ill-bred as to mention this. I hoped the duchess wasn't going to demand too much of Evrard too fast; I had been at Yurt three months before doing illusions 71 before an audience. The baby dragon perched on Evrard's shoulder until it dissolved into air.
	After dinner, he came back to my chambers with me. I had a couch in my outer chamber that folded into a bed; Evrard had happily agreed to sleep there.
	It had started to rain gently and the evening air was cool. I kindled a fire, lit the magic lamps, and we drew our chairs up by the hearth. I'm delighted to have another wizard here in Yurt," I said, "because we've got a serious magical problem."
	Evrard looked at me attentively, then spoiled it by stifling a yawn.
	"You and the duchess have been tracking the great horned rabbits for three days now," I said. "Do you have any idea what they are or how they could have been made? I haven't been able to find any indication of the supernatural about them, but those bones this afternoon didn't have any magic left clinging to them at all."
	Evrard shook his head and smiled, he really did have a charming smile. "Not now, Daimbert! It s the end of a long day and I don't need this on top of everything!"
	I apologized at once. "Of course. I've been looking forward so much to having you as a colleague that I'm afraid I've gotten over-eager." I remindea myself that a newly graduated wizard, especially one who had not been anywhere near first in his class, should not be pushed too much. I myself had not even bought all the books for my own second-year classes and still had gaps both in my library and in my knowledge as a result. If I didn't watch out, I would turn into a strict crank like my predecessor, though a much younger one.
	In the morning, a steady rain was still falling, good for the crops, I firmly reminded the city boy I used to be. Evrard went off somewhere, but I settled down to finish the last of the old ducal wizard's books.
	72 At first, it contained only the same mishmash of odd spells and herbal magic I had seen all along, but after several hours I found something else. I pulled the magic lamp closer and squinted at the handwriting. With growing excitement, I realized that the old ducal wizard had known, or thought he knew, a way to give dead flesh and bones motion and the semblance of life. It required no pacts with the devil, only a detailed knowledge of herbal magic and mastery of what looked like incredibly complicated spells.
	Of course, spells which dated from before the advent of modern school magic were often more quirky and complicated than they needed to be,  something that could also be said of some of my own spells.
	I didn't have any herbs or bones in my chambers, but I decided to improvise.
	I pushed the chairs back to leave a clear place on the flagstone floor and assembled a pillow, the poker from the fireplace, and several pencils together in a vaguely reptilian shape. Standing well back, I read out the heavy syllables 01 the Hidden Language which should give my creature the semblance of life.
	Not all the words in the book made any sense, some were illegible, and I had to add new sections to the spell to compensate for the lack of herbs, but in ten minutes I thought I had it. I said the final words, slammed the book shut, and looked hopefully toward my creature.
	The pillow heaved itself up, tottered, and collapsed again. The poker clattered to the flagstones and rolled away. I walked over slowly to see what I had made.
	At first I thought there had been no change at all. The poker certainly looked no different. But then I realized that all my pencils had turned pink and, when I picked up the pillow, I discovered it had grown what seemed to be three primordial feet at one end. I 73 tickled them experimentally but got no response, not even a twitch.
	Oh, well. I hadn't really expected it to work. I said the words that should have returned the pillow to itself, but the feet obstinately remained. I put it on Evrard's bed and sat down again.
	Even if I couldn't work the spell, and I wasn't at all sure the old ducal wizard had been able to, either, this was what I had hoped to find. But though I knew now that a wizard could have made the great homed rabbits with natural magic, I still didn't know which wizard might have done so.
	But I was going to find out. No other wizard could practice magic under my nose like this with impunity.
	I caught glimpses through my rain-streaked windows of figures hurrying across the courtyard and realized it must be noon. But I was not hungry. I opened the book again but was interrupted almost immediately by a knock.
	The door swung open before I had a chance to speak and Dominic's massive form stood blocking the doorway, dripping water on my floor. He closed his streaming umbrella. "I would like a word with you."
	"Of course," I said in surprise and pulled up a straight wooden chair for him, not sure it would support nis weight, but not wanting him soaking through the cushions on my bigger chairs. "Is it about the great homed rabbits?"
	He glowered at me, pulled off his jacket, and sat down. The chair creaked but held. "It's about that huntsman with the duchess."
	"Nimrod?"
	"Clearly a false name," said Dominic without hesitation.
	"What about him?"
	Dominic looked out the window at the indistinct courtyard, then turned to glare at me again. If he had any confidence in my abilities, you couldn't have told 74 it from that look. "Before the king left, he told me to consult with you or the chaplain on all important matters. I'm not sure why he wanted me as regent if he didn't trust my judgment, but I shall obey his commands, of course."
	What a disappointment. And I had imagined the other day that he actually wanted my advice.
	"And what important matter has come up now?"
	"Isn't it obvious, even to you?" said Dominic with a scowl. It crossed my mind that far too many people had been scowling in my chambers lately, including me.
	"Duchess Diana acts toward that low-born giant like a flirtatious girl, and he's eating it up."
	It had not been obvious to me, but then I had been too preoccupied with the question of how someone was making great horned rabbits to pay much attention.
	"Don t you think the duchess is old enough to take care of herself?" I asked.
	Dominic made a sound that was half a snort and half a growl. "All I know is that she met some hunter out of the woods, took him home to her castle with her, and now has brought him here. If she wants to play fast and loose with ner dignity at home that's one thing but, as regent of Yurt, I can't have her doing it here in the royal castle. That's why I want you to have a quiet conversation with her, tell her that her behavior has gone beyond respectable bounds." Me?
	"Of course you. Why do you think I came to talk to you? She's always seemed to like you, for some odd reason, whereas I m afraid she might deliberately do the opposite of whatever I suggested, just to irritate me."
	He had a point. "I'll try to find a chance sometime today," I said reluctantly.
	"What's wrong with right now?" demanded Dominic. Being regent certainly seemed to have put steel resolve into his usually lethargic personality. "It's lunch time. You can observe her behavior at the 75 table for yourself and talk to her immediately afterwards.
	There seemed to be no way out of it. My wish for new challenges was certainly being granted. I closed the battered volume and got my umbrella off its hook.
	PART THREE The Old Wizard The chaplain and a few of the ladies had chambers from which they could reach the great hall without going into the courtyard; everyone else arrived for mncn dodging through the rain, and a line of wet umbrellas stood against the wall.
	I still wasn't hungry and took only a little soup and none of the meat pie.
	Gwen gave me a concerned look from the servants' table, but I had no attention to spare for her. I was trying, as I had promised Dominic, to pay attention to the duchess and Nimrod.
	I had to admit that Dominic was right. Nimrod and Diana sat with their heads bent together, talking about topics unrelated to whatever the rest of the table was discussing. During pauses in their conversation when the duchess was addressing a remark to someone else or busy eating, I saw the giant huntsman's blue eyes fixed on her almost caressingly.
	The duchess had flirted with me as well when we first met, and my first thought was that this was just more of her teasing. But if so, it didn't seem fair to Nimrod, who was taking it quite seriously. She had 77 78 never married because, as far as I could tell, she had never met a man who could keep up with her. I had sometimes wondered if Diana realized that her tendency to keep those around her off balance, to do or say things just to see the reaction she got, was in its own way highly predictable.
	But now ner behavior seemed oddly out of character, even for someone as determined to be outrageous as Diana. There had always before been limits.
	She enjoyed being a member of the aristocracy as much as she enjoyed behaving like no other duchess in the western kingdoms; she would no more have given up her castle and her authority than I would have given up magic. Dominic was right that Nimrod could not possibly aspire to be her social equal, despite his surprisingly cultivated speech and good manners. For that reason, I tried to reassure myself, whatever the regent might think, her obvious affection for a hunter without status or family would never lead to any permanent liaison or anything seriously harmful to her reputation.
	As everyone stood up from lunch, I went over to her chair. It was one thing dealing with magical challenges in the king's absence, but it really would become complicated if I had to deal with everyone's personal problems as well.
	"Could I have a private word with you, my lady?"
	Diana agreed at once. Nimrod smiled at her and walked away, I assumed things hadn't proceeded so far that they shared their chambers. Dominic caught my eye and nodded, an abrupt motion with his chin. For once, he approved.
	The rain haa let up enough that the duchess and I, our umbrellas spread over us, were able to walk, rather than run, to the door of her chamber and arrive relatively dry. "Have a seat," Diana said, taking off her cloak. "It's chilly enough that I'm going to start a fire."
	She knelt at the hearth, put some twigs and wood shavings together against the front of a large log, and 79 soon had a small blaze going, the duchess would never bother calling a servant for something like this. She added some slightly thicker twigs and, in a moment, the log was glowing red. Sitting down next to me, she said, "There. That should take the chill off the afternoon."
	The fire had provided only a momentary distraction. I pushed aside my reluctance to speak. "I d like to ask you something, my lady, and hope I don't offend you."
	"You haven't managed to offend me yet," she said cheerfully.
	"You seem to have become very friendly with Nimrod, considering that he just appeared out of the woods a few days ago. What have you learned about him?"
	Her gray eyes narrowed slightly, but she was determined not to be offended. ' I haven't been quizzing him about his ancestry and family wealth, if that's what you mean," she saia, smiling to keep the comment mild. Something about the way she phrased it made me wonder if she might already have a good idea of his ancestry and family. "I know he's very intelligent as well as very handsome and he's a far better hunter than anyone I've ever seen. You probably haven't had a chance yet to see him use that enormous bow of his, but he's an absolute dead shot."
	I had heard too little of Nimrod's conversation to be able to tell if he could keep up with her humor and often biting wit, but as a hunter I was sure she had met an equal.
	"In fact, I even, " She stopped without finishing what might have been a very interesting sentence. Instead, she looked at me with a frown. Your question doesn't really sound like you. Did Dominic tell you to talk to me?"
	I nodded ruefully, rather glad in fact that she'd guessed the truth.
	Fortunately, she seemed to find this highly amusing. "So he's worried that a member of the high aristocracy, 80 the queen of Yurt's own third cousin, is flirting with a nobody? I ought to become really outrageous about it, just to teach Dominic a lesson.' 'I'm sorry, my lady, I wouldn't have said anything if he hadn't insisted. In fact, well, Dominic has been acting a little strangely lately."
	"In what way?"
	"After the royal family called the other night, he was talking about the baby prince and asked me if I'd ever thought of getting married!"
	She unexpectedly became serious. "So it's bothering Dominic, too," she said, which made no sense. But then her eyes twinkled. "I presume you told him that even an adorable little blond prince wasn't going to make you forget that wizards never marry?"
	I took a deep breath. "The regent's going to ask me what you said.
	She looked down her aristocratic nose. "Tell him," she said with a smile twitching the corner of her mouth, "tell him that I was deeply offended at your insult to my honor, that I told you I would always behave in the most honorable way possible and that, since I was sure of that point, I would always do exactly what I wanted."
	Back in my own chambers, I found Evrard wearing my best dressing gown and sitting in my favorite chair with his feet up, leafing through the first volume of my copy of Ancient ana Modern Necromancy.
	I sat down across from him. "I need to talk to you."
	"Fine," he said brightly. "I was just reading again about the Black Wars.' When I cocked an eyebrow at him, he continued, "Surely you remember the end of the Black Wars." He waved the book in his hand. The first volume of Ancient and Modern Necromancy, which I'd never read very closely, was almost entirely devoted to history.
	"I'm afraid I've never given very much attention to the history of wizardry,"
	I answered. I was trying to 81 remember if the Black Wars had come before or after the period in which Saint Eusebius was eaten by the dragon, after, I decided.
	'You haven't? But I love history! Didn't you want to study all about how the wizards ended the fighting in the western kingdoms? Isn't that what made you decide to study wizardry in the first place?"
	"No," I said sheepishly, thinking that maybe I could skim the book this evening after he was asleep. But I didn't want to be distracted by history. "You've taken courses at the school more recently than I, and some of them were different. I want to show you a spell I found this morning and ask if you've ever seen anything similar." I pulled the heavy volume onto my lap and found the place. "I don't think it is written down entirely correctly, but this gives the general outline."
	"What is this book?" asked Evrard, sneezing from the dust.
	"It used to belong to your predecessor, the old ducal wizard, thirty years ago,"
	I said with a sideways glance. "There are four volumes. If you want them, you can have them once we're done.' "I guess so." He wrinkled his forehead at the handwriting. "I'd rather have a nicely printed book, but, " He stopped, and his forehead cleared. "But this is the same spell ..."
	"Yes?" I prompted.
	"Nothing,' he said quickly. "Nothing. I thought I recognized it, but of course I don't."
	He sat back with a cheerful smile. I looked at him in silence, putting several things toge