The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint

by C. Dale Brittain

  “I came to Yurt to try to catch the horned rabbits,” Nimrod continued. “I did indeed come under a false name, but only because I did not want to put the Duchess Diana under any sense of obligation to me.” He paused as though bracing himself, but when he went on his voice was still clear. “She had, as she has already told this court, rejected my proposals when I met her and spent a season courting her in the great City. It was an unexpected advantage of hunting the horned rabbits that I was able to renew our acquaintance on a friendly basis.” He shot her a quick glance as he finished speaking, but she was studiously not looking at him.

  “But she’ll never have you now!” cried Dominic triumphantly. “She won’t love a coward!”

  “You call me a coward for choosing not to kill you?”

  “When the duchess’s honor was in question, your only interest was your own skin!”

  Nimrod tossed back his hair. The change in him was quite startling. He was furious now himself, and his strength no longer seemed controlled. “No one impugns a prince’s courage like that and lives!”

  “I don’t give much credit to your courage. You slipped out of the royal castle and carried out your attacks on my lady’s virtue where you thought I wouldn’t see you!”

  “And I don’t give much credit to anything said by someone as hopelessly jealous as you are!”

  “Come on!” the regent bellowed. “Come on, you overgrown sprat! Do you want to try your luck with your bare hands?” Nimrod dropped into a defensive pose as Dominic, his fists ready, began to advance.

  Good. This was what I had been waiting for: a formal statement before everyone of what they were fighting over, followed by a new outbreak of unrestrained conflict. I hoped that the duchess would start beating Dominic again—or even Nimrod—but she stood to one side, frowning.

  I didn’t have time to wait for her. “Stop!” I shouted in a bellow of my own. It echoed up and down the valley, until a series of louder and fainter voices all seemed to be crying Stop. “Stop your fighting, before I must ask the knights to restore the order of this court!”

  They both stopped and looked at me.

  “This quarrel is now almost inextricably confused,” I said with the best wizardly glare I could manage without shaggy eyebrows. “This quarrel has become an excuse for verbal abuse and for physical violence, which you know the king—and we as the king’s representatives—consider intolerable. If either one of you hoped that by utter confusion you would avoid a ruling against you, you are mistaken!”

  I paused to give emphasis. “All of you are in the wrong. And that includes you, my lady. This case cannot be settled by a simple determination of right. I have only one option left to me. I am going to swear you to peace!”

  For one second I caught Joachim’s eye. He was smiling.

  “You will have to work out for yourselves,” I went on, “who has been accepted as a suitor and who rejected, who has impugned whose honor and who is a coward, but you will have to do it without violence!”

  For almost a minute I didn’t think it would work. The valley itself seemed to be watching and waiting for their response. But both Dominic and Nimrod had dropped their fists, and at last Dominic said, “So what do you want us to do?”

  I sent Joachim to get his Bible from his saddlebag, so that they could swear on it. The hermitage was closer, but I had no intention of bringing out the relic of the Holy Toe. Even a saint who was not normally cranky might well be irritated by today’s proceedings.

  The three priests of the church of Saint Eusebius had started to confer together again, and Dominic went to join them. I wondered uneasily what the regent might have to say to them. For a brief moment, I wondered if it might also be possible to swear the hermit, the priests, the entrepreneurs, and even the saint to peace, but bringing in the supernatural was, I knew, beyond me.

  Evrard came up beside me. “You continue to surprise me, Daimbert,” he said, which I supposed was a compliment.

  Joachim returned with his Bible, and I had the unlikely triangle of Dominic, Nimrod, and Diana all swear to observe peace toward each other. They even managed to give each other the kiss of peace. I had rather hoped that Nimrod and the duchess might find this a way to break through the new coldness between them, but if so it was not evident.

  “Now that this case has been concluded,” I said, “we as the king’s representatives will end this—”

  Dominic interrupted me. “Wait. I’m still regent. There is another urgent case that needs royal judgment.”

  Joachim and I looked at each other. Whatever Dominic wanted to do, I certainly hoped it did not involve me. “And so it shall be,” I said formally to the regent. “We surrender the jurisdiction of this court to you. And now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  “I need the royal wizard while I’m giving judgment,” said Dominic shortly. From the intimidating glare he gave me, I knew that I had no choice but to stay.

  I had manipulated him into letting Nimrod leave the sanctuary of the Holy Grove, and the regent was (rather generously, I thought) giving me one more chance to work with him. If I didn’t take that chance, we would spend the rest of our lives living in the same castle but not speaking to each other. Of course, if the monster showed up and I couldn’t find a way to control it, neither of our lives might last beyond today.

  Once the knights realized Dominic meant to continue with more legal proceedings, they snapped back into their positions.

  “Although my quarrel with Prince Ascelin has been so wisely concluded,” the regent began, in a tone which left me wondering if he meant it as sarcastically as it sounded, “one issue remains. The honor and purity of the duchess, the leading woman of the kingdom in the queen’s absence, has been cast into doubt. And we who are charged with protecting the kingdom of Yurt must sometimes make personal sacrifices to preserve the welfare and good name of the kingdom.”

  The three priests followed Dominic’s words with serious and approving expressions. They had put him up to it, I thought. Diana, on the other hand, looked shocked beyond ready response.

  “With doubts about the duchess go doubts about the entire kingdom of Yurt. Purity and morality must always come from the top.” I wasn’t sure if the silence of Dominic’s audience was agreement, surprise at his sententiousness, or just attentiveness. “There is only one way to restore the honor and good name of the duchess and, with her, all our people. She must marry as soon as possible!”

  Dominic, I thought, was desperate. Either he really did want to marry Diana herself, in spite of what she seemed to think, or he saw no way to take back his offer. But he also had to try to restore dignity to a proposal she had treated with public ridicule.

  Diana began to laugh. For a second I feared it was hysteria, which would certainly have been my own reaction, but it appeared entirely genuine amusement. “Is this the court’s ruling, then, sire?” she asked when she had recovered her breath.

  “It is the court’s ruling and will.”

  “Then I have a request to make,” she said. Her head was held at an angle which, for reasons I could not have explained, appeared mischievous.

  “Certainly, if it is consistent with the rulings of this court.”

  She smiled widely. “Then let me invite everyone here to my castle! It is not far away, and we can all be more comfortable there than trying to camp here in the valley—especially since camping has taken on such a distinctly immoral tone here in Yurt.”

  Dominic frowned, as though trying to read some secret meaning into her words.

  “Once there, I shall, of course, comply with the wishes of this court. I will be married by my own chaplain, and we can all then proceed with the nuptial feast!”

  Everything was happening so fast that the knights had trouble following it all, but they understood about the feast and raised a hurrah.

  In my gratitude that the regent’s “urgent case” had taken so little time, I was unable to concentrate on the amazing fact that the duchess seemed willing to
accept Dominic. It would certainly be best for Nimrod not to be there for the wedding, and, besides, I needed him. When everyone got underway, I would separate him from the rest.

  III

  Joachim said that he and the priests would stay at the Holy Grove for now, but everyone else began preparing for departure. This left only one more extraneous matter. I managed to draw Dominic aside.

  I took a deep breath. “I’ve finally realized something, sire,” I said. “The entrepreneurs on top of the cliff— You authorized them.”

  For a second the massive regent looked like a boy caught out. “Why do you say that?”

  “You reminded us all that this is royal territory, not part of Diana’s duchy. You would never have ignored something like this money-making enterprise, and yet you seemed very uninterested when I first told you about the booth and the basket. I’d been wondering where you would get your income if you left Yurt. The entrepreneurs told me they needed half their income for ‘overhead,’ and I realize now that that meant paying a backer’s share to you.”

  I held his eyes as I spoke and could see embarrassment and anger struggling for precedence. “Don’t worry,” I said quickly. I had enough problems without further worsening my relations with the regent. “I won’t say anything. Even the chaplain says it’s not actually illegal, as long as people can still go around by the road for free.”

  “I never imagined,” he said coldly, “that you would try to tell me what was and was not illegal.”

  “I hope you have other sources of income lined up as well,” I said. “Even if they get their basket working, they’re never going to get very many paying pilgrims.”

  Dominic twisted his mouth into a hard line but turned away without answering. In a moment I saw him talking to the duchess. She had a much friendlier expression than I could possibly have foreseen an hour earlier.

  “So it looks as though she will marry Dominic after all,” commented Evrard. “I guess a woman’s desire to preserve her honor must overcome everything else.”

  This explanation didn’t seem right, but I didn’t have time to worry about Diana. If we could find the monster quickly and somehow subdue it, we might arrive in time for the last of the nuptial feast, and then we would hear how it all had come out.

  As Evrard and I went to get our mares, he asked, “Do you think I have time to slip back and say good-bye to the wood nymph?”

  “No,” I said firmly. I felt an almost overwhelming need for haste, and the slightest delay was now intolerable. “The knights are mounted already. It’s time we—”

  From the corner of my eye, I spotted someone moving on the top of the cliff. I jerked around so sharply I could feel the muscles in my shoulders popping. It was a human form, but I could not see if it was true human or monster. Before I could find the words of the Hidden Language to shape a far-seeing spell, the figure stepped to the edge and jumped.

  Evrard gave a sharp cry. I threw together a spell that I hoped would slow the figure’s descent, then realized it was already falling far slower than it should have been.

  In fact, it was not falling at all but flying down the cliff face. With a start, I recognized the old wizard.

  Leaving my indignant mare half-saddled, I myself flew to meet him. Evrard was right behind me, flying surprisingly well.

  My predecessor stood calmly at the bottom of the line of toeholds. I expected to find an obvious renegade wizard, out of control, perhaps even emanating evil, but he looked no more out of control than when we last saw him.

  “So you young whipper-snappers are here, too,” he said, straightening out a sleeve that had folded back during his descent. He looked toward the group of priests and knights for a moment, then dismissed them. “You might even be useful.”

  He seemed to have forgotten—or at least be willing to ignore—how rude I had been the last time I saw him. I was not going to remind him. “I know what’s happened,” I said instead. “Your monster’s escaped.”

  His eyes flashed at me from under genuinely shaggy eyebrows. “Not escaped. And not a monster, but a living creature. I let it loose deliberately, but I’m having a little more trouble binding it again than I anticipated.”

  “But, Master, why did you even make it in the first place?”

  “To confound young wizards who think they know more magic than they do,” he said absently, looking down the valley. I attempted, very delicately, to reach his mind, but he had it well shielded. “I think it’s down here in the valley somewhere. It may have gone around to the far end and be working its way back upstream.”

  “Coming, Wizards?” called the duchess.

  “No,” I called back. After trying so long to leave, I now had to stay. “Down here” could be anywhere, could be at the far end of the valley, could be the Holy Grove, could be the bushes beside us.

  A branch above us bent suddenly, with a faint creak of wood and fluttering of leaves. I staggered backwards, but as I looked up I saw that it was the wood nymph.

  The old wizard saw her too. His stern expression changed at once. He called to her in the Hidden Language, not the spell I had derived from the old ducal wizard’s books but something comparable. “How would you two young wizards like to meet a nymph?” he asked as she came further along the branch toward us, then looked over our heads.

  “In fact, we’ve met her and even—” Evrard began, but he never had a chance to finish.

  Someone screamed. I spun around. The creature I had wanted to seek for so long had come to me.

  Or rather, not come to me, but come to the knights of Yurt. I could see it now much more clearly than I had seen it in the glimpse through the old wizard’s door.

  As tall as a man but twice as broad, it had a large blank oval for a face, its only feature its rapidly-moving eyes. It rose from behind a bush almost directly in front of the duchess. Over its shoulder was flung a ragged form which I identified as one of the apprentice hermits. From his choking cries, he was, for the moment, still alive.

  The duchess’s gelding reared with a scream of its own. Diana fought for and lost her seat. As she sailed off, the monster threw the apprentice hermit away like a bag of flour and snatched her instead out of the air. Before any of us could move, it had raced up the track toward the grove.

  After a horrified second, everyone moved at once. Nimrod grabbed his bow; Dominic forced his horse toward the waterfall with the knights behind him; the dogs foamed up the track; and the old wizard, Evrard, and I flew after the creature.

  It ran far faster than I had expected, darting at much greater than human speed toward the grove. It dodged in and under the trees, where Evrard smacked into a trunk and sank to the ground, but the old wizard and I veered desperately as we tried to keep up. At least, on the basis of Diana’s wild kicks, she was still very much alive.

  The creature came to the pool at the center of the grove, splashed straight through while the duchess yelled, made a wide detour around the shrine of the Holy Toe, where the amazed hermit stood watching open-mouthed, and shot out again into the sunlight.

  Flying as fast as I could, I could barely gain on the creature. The duchess was in deadly peril, and both the old wizard himself and this creature he had made, with a magic much more powerful than any thing I could imagine wielding, filled me with horror. I even tried a prayer to Saint Eusebius on the off-chance he might listen.

  Nimrod had his bow drawn, but I was very glad to see him lower it again. From what Joachim had said no arrow could harm the monster, but one of the huntsman’s stag arrows would certainly have a devastating effect on the duchess.

  The creature ran toward the cliff face without even slowing down, altering its course at the last second. And then it headed straight toward the old wizard and me.

  I threw both a binding spell and a paralysis spell at it, but my spells had no effect on the creature. Diana, however, stopped shouting and instantly became rigid. Wonderful. Now I’d made it easier for the monster to carry her. It held her motionless b
ody high over its head while the dogs barked hysterically and snapped ineffectually at its ankles.

  If the old wizard tried any spells, they had no more useful result than mine. Ten feet from us, the creature turned again, giving me a quick look from eyes I could have sworn were alive, and started scrambling down the tumbled rocks a short distance from the waterfall.

  Dominic’s horse had fallen and him with it, but Nimrod, who had dropped his bow, sprang to intercept the creature. It dodged yet again as it reached solid ground, but he made a desperate leap and seized it by the leg.

  The creature lost its balance for a second, and Diana dropped with a hard thump from its hands. It righted itself immediately, but Nimrod clawed his way up the creature’s body and seized it around the neck. The two crashed back to the ground, rolling and grabbing at each other, Nimrod shouting and the creature absolutely silent.

  The dogs caught up again and began biting both of them. The old wizard and I reached them only a second later. Leaving my predecessor to deal with his monster, I snatched at words of the Hidden Language in a desperate attempt to break the spells I had inadvertently put on the duchess. If she could run, she might escape.

  I didn’t know what the old wizard hoped to try, but he never had a chance. The creature lurched to its feet, thrust Nimrod effortlessly away, and raced up again toward the grove.

  Diana came back to life with a start. “Christ!” she burst out. “What happened?” Dominic reached us at that moment, fell to his knees, and tried unsuccessfully to take her into his arms. Rather than tell her that I had paralyzed her myself, I took a quick five seconds to reassure myself that she was not badly hurt, then shot after the monster and the old wizard.

  Evrard joined us near the shrine, rubbing his head somewhat woozily. But the creature was gone.

  It was completely silent within the grove. Not even the leaves moved. “It came straight through here,” Evrard said, showing no desire at all to pursue it further. “It was following the river.”

  I knew then where it had gone. I flew along the banks of the little river, out of the grove, and to the bottom of the cliff. The water poured sparkling out of the cave mouth as though nothing in particular had happened there, but there were a few deep scrambling marks in the gravel. A steady, whispering wind blew from the cave. I dropped down, looking into blackness, and probed with magic.