The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint

by C. Dale Brittain

  “Do you think Dominic will still want to marry her if she’s run off with Nimrod?” asked Evrard. “I must say I was surprised he proposed. I wouldn’t have thought their temperaments would be similar enough.”

  “If Dominic has decided it’s finally time to get married, he may not have a lot of women to choose from. The only alternative I can think of is the queen’s aunt Maria, and they would be even less compatible.”

  “But if Dominic and the duchess do get married, and he wants to leave Yurt, do you think she’ll go with him? Will she still want a ducal wizard?”

  I didn’t answer. More relevant was the question of whether Dominic would murder Nimrod—and maybe Diana as well. She would have a lot to answer for if King Haimeric came home to find that his kingdom as he knew it no longer existed. For that matter, so would I.

  Evrard broke into my thoughts again. “Are you going to try to make the wood nymph leave the hermit’s grove?”

  “I want to see if the old spell to talk to her really works,” I said, “and you and I should catch the rest of your rabbits if they’re still at that end of the kingdom—this business of creating magical animals just to hunt them has gone far enough. And while we’re at it I’m afraid we probably ought to find the duchess and Nimrod. As for the nymph, I told the chaplain I would talk to her, and I really should do so before the priests of Saint Eusebius arrive.”

  I had been going to add that I also wanted to see if the entrepreneurs were still on the cliff above the Holy Grove, but Evrard interrupted me. “It seems to me, Daimbert,” he said in exasperation, “that you let that priest boss you around much too much. Didn’t they warn you at school about staying out of the Church’s affairs?”

  “I’m not being bossed around,” I said, determined not to be angry. If Evrard and I didn’t present a united front, the situation would become even worse. “As wizards, we need to examine all magical phenomena. I’ve never talked to a wood nymph before.”

  Evrard nodded, somewhat mollified, but he did not speak again. After a short distance, we passed the village from which the different claimants had come whose case the king had judged. The place was full of activity, and the big wheel on the mill was turning. I thought of pointing it out to Evrard but decided to say nothing.

  From two years of associating with Joachim, who had never been good at light chatter, I was accustomed to long silences. But it occurred to me that it would be a real effort of will for someone like Evrard not to say something. As we rode through the hills of Yurt, past high fields where hay was being raked and low meadows where cows raised their heads to look at us, past streams and sudden valleys and distant hilltops where a church spire rose from a cluster of houses, I considered the irony of the situation. The last time I had ridden this way, Joachim had felt constrained in talking to me because I had no interest in religious issues. This time, Evrard was behaving exactly the same way, but because I had too much interest in such issues.

  But when we stopped to rest our horses Evrard turned to me as though there had been no tension. “Tell me more about the wood nymph. Is she as beautiful as that unicorn lady?”

  “She is lovely,” I said, “but she doesn’t look anything like that lady. The nymph has violet eyes and dusky skin, the color of shadows in the deep forest. She’s not human, even though she looks human—she may even be immortal. Apparently she’s lived in the grove for centuries. Let me run through the spell to call a nymph.”

  He paid close attention and mastered the key elements far faster than I had—although, I reminded himself, I had not had his advantage of having someone else organize and explain it all clearly.

  As we remounted our mares, I was startled to feel a sudden constriction around my body. I could not move my arms or even keep my balance. My mare gave a little jump as she felt me starting to shift. I toppled slowly and majestically from the saddle. There was barely enough movement left in my lower legs to get my feet free of the stirrups in time, and I was just able to snatch at a few words of the Hidden Language to break my fall.

  Then I heard Evrard laughing. He reined up a few yards ahead and turned back. “So you don’t think I can do a good binding spell? I told you I don’t make the same mistake twice!”

  It was a good binding spell. But I didn’t give him the satisfaction of saying so, instead turning my attention to unraveling it. Someone else’s spell always takes longer to break than one’s own, and since he showed no signs of helping, it took me several minutes to get free.

  Then I allowed myself to smile as I rubbed a bruised elbow and went to retrieve my mare, who had started once again to graze. “Not bad,” I said with a guileless grin, swinging up into the saddle. “You really did surprise me. It might not equal the old wizard’s spell, but you certainly had me tied tight.”

  “I’m sorry, Daimbert,” said Evrard, still laughing and sounding not at all penitent, “but you’ve been acting so serious about everything that I thought I should—”

  He did not finish the sentence. He rose straight up from the saddle to a distance of about ten feet, shot sideways, and dropped. I managed to set him down quite lightly.

  Now it was my turn to laugh, so hard that my mare turned her head around to look at me. After dusting himself off and giving me one truculent look, Evrard joined in.

  Dominic and the duchess, I told myself, could take care of themselves. I was the wizard of this kingdom, and my concerns were magical, not social.

  “Let’s call a truce,” I said to Evrard. This was as good as being back in school. “If we keep binding and lifting each other, we’ll never get to the wood nymph’s grove.”

  “Truce it is,” he said cheerfully. Just like back in school, I immediately and surreptitiously started preparing a new lifting spell, just in case. He approached his startled mare, making reassuring sounds, and remounted. “Did you ever hear the joke about the nun, the nixie, and the wood nymph?”

  II

  In mid-afternoon we reached a fork in the trail. Turning one way would take us duchess’s castle, and the other way up onto the high plateau, toward the valley of the Holy Grove. The day had turned hot and the road dusty. I hesitated, taking a pull from my waterskin.

  Evrard interrupted my thoughts. “Which road gets us to the wood nymph’s grove the fastest?”

  “This way,” I said with sudden decision. It would be shadowy and refreshing down in the limestone valley where the hermit and the wood nymph lived. The duchess could wait.

  The wind blew up on top of the plateau, drying the sweat on our foreheads, as we approached the low wall where one could look down into the valley. Evrard looked thoughtfully at the view. “I didn’t get a chance to ask the duchess when we were up here,” he said. “Were there once castles in this valley?” pointing toward the rock formations. The white limestone, emerging in tall, tumbled shapes from the trees that clung to the valley walls, did indeed look like ruins.

  “I think those are all natural. The stone weathers like that over the millennia.” It was such a responsibility being burdened with Evrard’s continuing education.

  As we continued along the valley rim, I was surprised to see some raw wooden scaffolding, partially erected. It looked as though the entrepreneurs were going ahead with their plan to build a giant windlass to lower pilgrims to the Holy Grove. I had almost persuaded myself that it was all a façade, designed only to irritate Eusebius, the Cranky Saint, enough to make him leave. But it looked as though both Joachim and I were wrong on this point.

  The young man in the feathered cap came out as we approached his booth. The sign was still there, proclaiming, “See the Holy Toe! Five pennies on foot, fifteen pennies in the basket.” But there was something different about the booth. On the little shelf in front, small shapes were clustered. As we came closer I could see that they were ceramic figurines.

  “Greetings, Wizard!” said the young man cheerfully, recognizing me at once. “Have you changed your mind? Do you want to join us? As you can see, we’ve got our figuri
nes and brochures, including the story of how someone prayed to the saint to be healed of the pox after years of mocking him, and the saint only healed him along one side to teach him a lesson. We’re going to add vials of water from the holy spring this week. And we’re almost ready for the basket, though we still think it would be better if people could be raised and lowered by magic—certainly it would be more impressive!”

  “And it might even be safer,” said Evrard, looking dubiously at the scaffolding.

  “Are you another wizard?” the young man cried in delight, noticing the moons and stars embroidered on the jacket slung over Evrard’s saddlebag. “I knew it! The Royal Wizard has brought you here, hasn’t he, to join in our enterprise. It’s a wonderful opportunity, I assure you! Once the hordes of tourists and pilgrims start to arrive, the silver pennies will just pour in.”

  I had dismounted for a closer look at the figurines, but I froze when Evrard did not answer. I swiveled around toward him. Could he possibly be taking such a proposal seriously?

  Still mounted, he turned his blue eyes ingenuously toward the young man. “I’ll have to take it under advisement,” he said gravely. “You realize, of course, that unless you were able to pay me at least five hundred silver pennies a week, it wouldn’t be worth my while. That’s what the duchess is paying me. And of course I’d need a month’s advance before I could even consider beginning.”

  I turned my back to hide a sudden grin and picked up a figurine of a toe.

  The young man gasped behind me. “But five hundred silver pennies—” He paused briefly. “Well,” he continued then in a calculating tone, “if we charged them twenty-five pennies each for a magic ride, and were able to get at least twenty pilgrims a week, we would gross that much. And although we’d been thinking of twenty-five pennies for the round trip, we might be able to charge them fifteen pennies to descend and twenty more for the ascent. But by the time we divided it …”

  “How many ways were you planning to divide the money made by my magic?” asked Evrard.

  I held my breath, listening.

  “Well, five, counting you, although we need half the receipts for ‘overhead,’ and we’d also promised …” There was a long pause. “And we’ll have to negotiate on the month’s advance. Look, why don’t you give me a chance to talk to the others, and we’ll be in touch. You say you’re working with the duchess now?”

  “Who are the others?” I demanded, turning sharply around. Joachim had said three priests were coming, and I suddenly wondered if they might be this young man’s still unseen associates.

  His answer did nothing to dissuade me on this point. “Just some friends of mine,” he said vaguely. “Keep in touch, Wizards!”

  He stepped back under the shade of the big tree across from his booth, without even trying to persuade me to buy the ugly figurine of the Holy Toe I was still holding. I put it back down next to a rather misshapen dragon and remounted.

  When we had ridden a hundred yards from the booth I turned to Evrard and said, “Try telling the duchess she’s paying you five hundred silver pennies a week. You may be surprised at her answer.”

  The walls of the narrow valley stretched their shadows over us as we followed the river upstream toward the holy grove. The cooler air and the murmur of the flowing water took away the incipient headache which had been growing during our dusty ride, but I also realized how late in the day it had become.

  “First we should set traps for the horned rabbits in case there are still any in the valley,” I said. “How did you catch them before?”

  “The first time,” said Evrard with a frown, “I used a calling spell, flew up to them once they came near, and grabbed them. I had to get them by the rear end, or they’d bite—and even so they kicked. I didn’t try a trap for fear they would disintegrate. But these past few days, they were moving much faster and seemed much more cunning, so I’m not sure grabbing them will work anymore.”

  The results of the old wizard’s improvements, I thought. “Well, let’s try a trap now,” I said. I found some string in my saddlebag from which I tried to weave a net.

  “That doesn’t look very effective,” commented Evrard.

  He was right; city boys never learn much about nets. But I wasn’t going to say so. “It will be fine,” I said loftily, “once I attach a paralysis spell.”

  I had actually made myself fairly good at attaching spells to objects. In a few more minutes, I had my net arranged under a bush, where I hoped a rabbit might hop. Anything that entered the net should immediately become paralyzed. I doubted the spell would last more than a short time, so any other creature that blundered in would soon be able to escape again, but with any luck the spell would cause a horned rabbit to disintegrate. “We can check later,” I said, “and see how many we’ve caught.”

  Evrard gathered what he told me were especially tempting herbs for rabbits and dropped them into the net, from a height of several feet so as not to imprison his own hand.

  “But since they’re not alive, they don’t eat,” I objected.

  “I think they still have the habit of eating,” he said gravely, “laid down in the bones. I saw them nibbling on plants like this before.”

  As we started up the path toward the waterfall and the grove, I said, “Remember what I warned you. Even if we don’t actually see the hermit, we shouldn’t make any remark about the Holy Toe that he might overhear—we don’t want to insult him.” To sound less like a schoolteacher, I added, “It may be hard. It is awfully silly.”

  “From what you say,” said Evrard, much more seriously than I expected, “the saint, the wood nymph, and a succession of hermits have all been living here together for generations. The hermits—and for that matter the saint himself—must have gotten used to the nymph. She can’t always have made respectfully pious remarks, yet by now they must be able to get along.”

  I glanced back toward the rough stone huts among the trees. Today I saw no sign of the hermit’s apprentices. “But maybe some of her remarks have helped keep the saint cranky. And that still doesn’t mean they are used to the comments of young wizards.”

  I paused, struck by a new idea. “But maybe it does! After all, both my predecessor and the old ducal wizard seem to have known the wood nymph quite well, a long time ago. If the hermits, the saint, and the nymph have made a threesome for generations, then maybe the wizards of Yurt have been a consistent fourth.”

  “Well, who else would keep a nymph entertained?” asked Evrard with a mischievous sideways glance from his wide blue eyes. “A hermit’s not going to provide her with much action—and even less so a disembodied saint, when all that’s left of him is his toe!”

  But when we reached the grove, he seemed suitably respectful. “So—there it is,” he said in a colorless voice, looking at the shrine of Saint Eusebius. If the detailing on the golden reliquary matched the saint’s toe accurately, he had had an ingrown toenail. Perhaps that was one of the reasons he was cranky. “I don’t see the hermit. Should we call him?”

  “He’s probably praying,” I said. “We shouldn’t disturb him. Last time I saw the nymph beyond those trees. Let’s start over there.”

  We picked our way across the damp ground, following the faintly marked trails between the little springs. There was nothing in or behind the first dozen trees we looked at. In a short distance the thick foliage and the smooth, silent trunks had managed to confuse me, so that I was no longer sure where I had come when I was here before. I was however fairly sure the nymph was teasing us deliberately. Several times we nearly lost our footing in the mud.

  I had almost decided we should start for the duchess’s castle before it became any later when I heard Evrard catch his breath. I turned my head very slowly.

  She leaned against the pale trunk of a beech, as I had seen her before, her enormous violet eyes fixed on us but no expression on her face.

  “Good day,” said Evrard tentatively, which drew no response.

  But I began at o
nce with the words of the Hidden Language. When I finished the spell I paused, watching her. Her expression altered like ice breaking up in the spring. She began to smile, a smile both delighted and delightful.

  “The spell worked!” I thought and just managed not to say out loud.

  “Greetings, Wizards!” she said. “It’s been a long time since a wizard has been here, much less two!” Her eyes twinkled. “If I’m not mistaken, one of you is the new Royal Wizard of Yurt, and the other the new Ducal Wizard.”

  “Greetings, Lady,” said Evrard, apparently perfectly at ease. “Daimbert has been Royal Wizard for two years, but he hasn’t had a chance to meet you before. I’m Evrard, the duchess’s wizard. I’ve just recently arrived in the kingdom.”

  She turned swiftly, smiling at us over her shoulder, and stepped behind a trunk. When we followed her a second later, we saw no one. But almost immediately a voice called from the branches above. “Come up!”

  I put together the flying spell and rose slowly upwards. Evrard bit his lip, frowned, and then followed, without enough hesitation to make it worth commenting.

  Forty feet up, a number of branches growing close together formed a hidden platform, on which were spread rugs and cushions. Rustling green leaves formed a partial roof, but from the platform one could also look out and up, toward the magnificent crown of the tree, the white limestone cliffs of the valley, and the deep blue of the sky beyond.

  The wood nymph was already seated in the green shadows. As we arrived, she held out a wooden bowl toward us. “Have some raspberries.” As she leaned toward us, offering the bowl, her hair fell over her shoulder and brushed my hand. It was just as soft as it looked. I almost expected the berries to vanish, but they stayed real and delicious all the way down my throat.

  Evrard looked around thoughtfully. “Is this all there is to your house?”