The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint

by C. Dale Brittain

  “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’s 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 life 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 had a 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 before 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’s 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.

  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 predecessor’s 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 myself. “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 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?”

  “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 left 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 Evrard, 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 anyway. Perhaps I could make it rain moles.

  V

  It was late in the afternoon, and 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 how 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 she had when she first met him, but instead 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 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 himself 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 non existent carrier pigeon.

  “I had been about to ride over myself 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 almost 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 horned rabbit but sticks and bones.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Nimrod, catching my concern.

  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, and 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’s 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 outdoors life to a royal court. I would have expected him to sit at the servants’ table with the rest of the duchess’s 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 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 with out supernatural aid, seeing the rotting rabbits’ 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 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 before an audience. The baby dragon perched on Evrard’s shoulder until it dissolved back into air.

  After dinner, he came back to my chambers with me. I had a couch in my outer chamber that folded out into a bed, and Evrard had happily agreed to sleep there.

  It had started to rain gently, and the evening air was cool. I kindled a fire and 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 reminded 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.

  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 lo
oked 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 of 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 tickled them experimentally but got no response—not even a twitch.

  Oh, well. I hadn’t really expected it to work anyway. 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 myself—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 horned 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.