The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint

by C. Dale Brittain

  There was no question. My predecessor’s monster had gone this way.

  “He’s back in the cave,” I said as the old wizard and Evrard came out of the trees. Let them chase it now. I flew back down the valley to make sure the duchess really was all right.

  She had pushed Dominic away and was sucking a barked knuckle. “I would have been able to rescue myself, without help from anyone,” she said angrily, “if it hadn’t put some sort of spell on me.” As Diana was usually a rational person, I knew that this boast was a sign of how really frightened she had been.

  So far we had been enormously fortunate. The creature had let both the apprentice hermit and the duchess go without killing them, or even badly wounding them. Next time we might not be so lucky. Had it deliberately chosen these two out of all of us in the valley, or would it seize randomly at different people—and maybe, or maybe not, let them go again—until it found some specific one it sought?

  Nimrod—or rather Prince Ascelin—actually was in worse condition than the duchess. The priests and the knights had all come up, and he sat in the middle of an attentive circle, picking grit out of a bloody knee. There were several marks of canine teeth in his lower legs. “None of those dogs had better be rabid,” he said in irritation. “Don’t you knights of Yurt train them better than to bite the person they’re supposed to help?”

  “But that’s exactly what we do train them to do!” put in young Hugo with a wink.

  The dogs now sat happily panting, not at all repentant. Diana was sitting beyond Nimrod, and I was surprised to intercept an amused glance she aimed toward his hunched shoulders.

  The apprentice hermit whom the creature had originally seized did not look physically damaged as a result of his adventure, but he sat a little apart from the others, his knees up to his chin and his eyes enormous. The youngest of the three priests unbent far enough to go sit beside him and say things which I hoped were reassuring.

  For a brief moment, like the pause between two claps of thunder, peace had returned to the valley. “I always forget a wizard can fly,” said one of the knights to me in what I hoped was admiration. In times of peace, which was now most of the time, Royal Wizards might do little more than illusions for months at a time. I didn’t point out that flying had so far been useless against an undead monster running across the ground.

  “I’m impressed you were able to get the better of the monster,” I said to Nimrod, “even if only for a moment.”

  “I never did have the better of it. Wrestling it was like trying to wrestle a boulder! All I could do was throw it off balance for a second. Did you have any better luck with magic? Where is it now?”

  “It’s crawled back into the cave where the river comes out.” He looked up briefly and nodded. “My predecessor and the ducal wizard are pursuing it.” But the pursuers appeared a few minutes later, dripping wet and without a monster.

  The old wizard took me aside, wringing out the hem of his cloak as he spoke. “It’s far back in there now. We’d better get all these people out of the valley, and then you and I can go in and get it.”

  His voice was quiet, and he kept his eyes lowered. I was surprised and gratified he wanted my help, considering his usual opinion of my abilities. But I wondered how he could speak so calmly of catching a monster we had just pursued entirely unsuccessfully around the head of the valley. And then he looked up sharply, and for one second I thought I saw a glimmer in his eye as twisted as the glimpse I had had before of his mind.

  IV

  I was afraid that Dominic or Nimrod or both would insist on leading the hunt for the monster, but they both seemed eager to escort Diana back to her castle, and her own normal enthusiasm for hunting was greatly diminished.

  Joachim and the priests, however, were still determined to stay in the valley. And although I tried suggesting to the hermit that he might want to leave, it was clear that even the dragon that had eaten Saint Eusebius would not budge him or the apprentice hermits.

  “We came to assess the will of the saint, and to remove his sanctified relics to a safer place, if necessary,” said the thin priest. “What we have witnessed today may make our task even more needful. Those who fear the righteous wrath of God do not fear the terror by night, or the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”

  My predecessor gave a snort and stamped off to watch the entrance to the cave, and the hermit and his apprentices retreated to the shrine. Evrard and I unsaddled our mares again as the others rode up the steep road out of the valley. Dominic seemed badly shaken. I wasn’t even sure if he would insist, now, on the duchess marrying him immediately.

  But I didn’t have time to worry about that. The spells of three wizards had so far proved useless in catching the monster. Only brute force, Prince Ascelin’s size and strength, had had any effect at all, and even that had been pitifully slight. I had known all along that catching the creature would be difficult. Now I was faced with the very real possibility that, even with the old wizard’s help, it might be impossible.

  For the sake of the priests’ safety, I wished they had gone too, but I was almost ashamedly glad that Joachim was staying. I needed all the support I could get; I felt that I would even welcome a discussion of sinful mortals or of complex moral dilemmas.

  “You must be very grateful to have another young wizard here to help you,” said Joachim. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how wrong he was.

  The knights, their horses, and the monster had torn up the ground both above and below the waterfall and had broken branches from trees at the edge of the grove. I had just turned away from watching the duchess’s party disappear when a branch creaked and dipped just above me. The wood nymph sprang lightly down, with a swirl of long soft hair, and began to attend to the broken branches.

  The priests stared. They had clearly not expected to see a dusky-skinned girl dressed in nothing but leaves in their saint’s grove. Evrard started to speak, but I motioned him to silence.

  Not even seeming to notice us, the nymph worked quickly and efficiently on the broken branches. Although I could not see quite how she did it, and she certainly had no pruning shears, she trimmed off dangling twigs quickly and evenly, passed her hand over the wounds so that they stopped dripping sap, and whistled to the birds until they came down from the tree tops and perched again near her. She was in constant motion, moving from branch to branch, springing lightly to higher ones with a flash of graceful legs, dropping to lower ones with no more than a dip and a swish of leaves.

  Her violet eyes passed across us as though we were no more substantial than a bit of mist. But as she leaped up to a high branch, seemingly finished repairing the damage to her trees, she suddenly stopped. Her face changed as I had seen it change the first time she had heard my spell, but neither Evrard nor I had said any spells.

  And she was not looking at us. She was looking at Joachim.

  She swung down again, and hung by one hand from a branch so that her face was at the same level as his. “Are you a hermit?” she asked with a delighted smile.

  The three priests of Saint Eusebius seemed shocked beyond the ability to speak, but Joachim answered her calmly. “No, I am a priest. But like a hermit, I serve the will of God.”

  She dropped to the ground and looked at him as though puzzled. The rest of us might as well have not been there. “Are you a wizard?”

  “No,” said the chaplain. For one second, he caught my eye over her head. “Wizards work with the earth’s natural powers, but I deal with the supernatural.”

  The wood nymph thought this over. Evrard frowned at me, and I wondered if he was jealous.

  “Would you like to come back to my tree with me?” she asked. “I would like to learn more about priests.”

  Now Evrard was definitely jealous.

  “I don’t think I had better, my daughter,” said Joachim. No one who didn’t know him as well as I did would have realized he was smiling.

  “But I have strawberries and the sweetest honey,” she
said, looking at him with dancing violet eyes. Soon, I thought, the round priest would explode, which would leave only two priests trying to appropriate Saint Eusebius’s relics. “We could eat my berries and drink spring water while you explained the supernatural to me. Only humans, out of all of nature, have access to eternity, but only a few of you know very much about it.”

  “A visit with you sounds delightful, but I still must refuse. Thank you very much for an offer I am sure you have extended to few men.”

  “Isn’t it only hermits who will refuse an invitation to a nymph’s tree?”

  “Priests too, my daughter,” said Joachim gently.

  “And you aren’t even in love with anyone,” she said thoughtfully.

  “I have taken an oath to forsake all sins of the flesh.”

  Her eyes danced again. “But Saint Eusebius explained that to me! Because I am not human, I have not fallen, and therefore cannot sin any more than I can be saved.”

  It sounded to me as though she had a point. But the chaplain did not hesitate.

  “You cannot sin, but I can.” She nodded slowly but looked puzzled again. Joachim paused and then asked what I would have asked the nymph myself if there had been the slightest indication she would listen to anyone but him. “Is there a way you can help us catch the inhuman monster that is now in the valley?”

  She shook her head so hard her hair swung in an arc behind her. “The magical creature that broke these branches? No! Trees I know, and hermits, and wizards, and now priests. But I do not know inhuman monsters.” She leaped up and caught a branch. But just before she swung up and out of sight, she leaned forward, kissed Joachim lightly on the forehead, then was gone.

  I watched the three priests fighting back a number of things they might have said. Disconcerting as they clearly found the bishop’s representative, they just as clearly did not dare irritate him.

  “Shall we join the hermit up at the shrine?” he said to them, perfectly soberly.

  If they had business at the shrine, I thought, squaring my shoulders, I had business with an inhuman monster which the wood nymph might not know but my predecessor knew all too well.

  The old wizard was still standing by the cave entrance. “Was your creature drawn here by the magic forces of the valley, Master?” I asked. I didn’t tell him he had just missed the wood nymph, not wanting him as well as Evrard jealous of a priest with no interest in what she offered.

  “There certainly are magical forces here, as I thought you knew,” he said grumpily. “In most of the western kingdoms the forces that created the world in the first place are not very evident, unless wielded by a wizard. But in a few places they’re still very strong: the northern land of wild magic especially, but also in a few pockets like this valley. That’s why the wood nymph is here. And that’s why I thought I’d better come here when my creature got loose.”

  Or you turned it loose, I thought. Aloud I said, “I know all about the magical forces here. They’ve kept me here for two days.”

  “Don’t blame it on ‘magical forces,’” said the old wizard with a snort. “A wizard may find the raw power of magic appealing or seductive, but this valley couldn’t hold you against your will. You were just having too much fun with the wood nymph.

  “The magical forces of the valley may make my creature a little harder to catch,” he went on. “Did you see how fast it could run? Even my magic wouldn’t give it that kind of speed anywhere else,” he added regretfully.

  This, I thought gloomily, is exactly what I needed to hear: first my predecessor had made a creature almost too powerful for his own magic, and certainly much stronger than either Evrard’s or mine, and now its strength was increased dramatically.

  “I’d better go see if I can find some herbs,” said the old wizard. “I’ll need them for my binding spell. You and the duchess’s wizard could try putting some kind of barricade across the opening to the cave. I don’t believe my creature will try to come out again during the day, after we all frightened it, but it might after dark. I’d ask you to help me, but you wouldn’t recognize the right herbs.”

  His chief concern, I thought as I watched him stump off, was that we might have “frightened” his creature! This left it all up to Evrard and me—which meant, I was afraid, me.

  Although I called the old wizard Master, he was not my real master. If I thought of anyone in the paternal role in which Joachim put his bishop, it was the Master of the wizards’ school, who had been willing to take on—and even keep—a young man who must have been a very unpromising wizardry student. Since my own parents had died when I was young, the white-haired Master of the school had been the closest I had had to a father.

  Yet in the two years I had been in Yurt, I had come to admire my predecessor, in spite of his crankiness. And I had certainly learned a tremendous amount from him, not just the herbal magic they did not teach at the school, but, partly out of shame at his example, a lot of the school magic I had not learned properly the first time.

  And now something had happened to him, whether he had been pushed into unwise new experiments by Evrard’s creature, overcome by pride, or (quite unaccountably) made jealous of me. Even aside from catching up to his creature, I knew I had to catch him.

  Meanwhile I’d better make sure of my only other ally. “When you and my predecessor followed the monster into the cave,” I asked Evrard, “how far back did you pursue it?”

  “Not far. He made a light on the end of his staff. It wasn’t very bright, but better than I could do and enough for us to see. We got back to where the cave widened, the room that Nimrod mentioned—or, rather, Prince Ascelin. It’s an enormous room, and a lot of tunnels open off it. The monster must have taken one of them. I’m afraid, like the prince, we fell into the river on the way back out.”

  “I don’t trust the old wizard,” I said, “not his motivations, not even his magic. Catching this monster is going to be up to you and me.”

  “Oh, please, Daimbert!” cried Evrard. “Let me catch it myself! Don’t you see, it’s my last chance to impress the duchess, before she gets fed up with me and sends me back to the City in exchange for a different wizard. And since the monster tried to carry her off, it’s my responsibility as ducal wizard to avenge her.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, feeling that Evrard was more like ten years younger than me rather than two. “Neither one of us could possibly capture it alone. Our only chance is to do it together.”

  “I guess you’re right,” said Evrard, but not as though convinced.

  He would become convinced soon enough. “First,” I said, “it would help if we knew what the monster is made out of. Since this creature is no illusion, it has to be made of something. And it’s not sticks this time. Human bones, maybe?” In spite of keeping my voice remarkably calm, I could feel a thin trickle of sweat working its way down my back.

  Evrard had clearly never thought about this. Now his eyes grew so wide that white showed all the way around the iris. “But where would he have gotten human bones?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” I said grimly. “We’ve been worrying about the creature killing a person, now that we know it’s killed some chickens. But has the old wizard himself already killed someone?”

  We both looked involuntarily down the valley where the wizard had gone. I thought I could see him a half mile away, where the valley started to curve, poking about on the river bank.

  Evrard hugged himself as though standing in a bitterly cold wind. “But even the wizards trained under the old apprentice system must have taken the oath to help and guide mankind.”

  “Exactly. And that’s why I can’t let you even try to go after the monster by yourself.”

  Evrard shivered again and nodded. His desire to impress the duchess seemed greatly diminished. But then he looked at me with his head cocked to one side, his eyes almost back to normal. “I know what I can do,” he said. “Your predecessor had a good idea when he suggested we barricade the ca
ve. I can practice my lifting spells by lifting some rocks to block the opening. Once I have them in place, I’ll put a binding spell on them, so that even a monster won’t be able to push them aside.”

  “Good plan,” I told him enthusiastically, though I didn’t think this would work for long, and there might be other exits to the cave. But it would keep him busy and give me a chance to walk and to think. Anything was better than waiting here, either for inspiration—which seemed increasingly unlikely—or for the old wizard to come back.

  V

  I jumped up abruptly and started down the valley. It was late afternoon, and a soft white mist had begun to rise. It hung over the river and sent long arms out over the water’s grassy verges. As I walked downstream, I went into patches of fog so dense I could barely see ten feet in front of me, and then out again under a clear sky. The limestone formations on the valley walls looked even more like the ruins of old castles than usual.

  The old wizard had still not told me why he had made such a creature in the first place, and maybe he didn’t know himself. I wished I could get word to the wizards’ school, but with the creature actually here I didn’t dare leave the valley myself, and even Evrard’s spells would be some help if the monster broke out.

  I stopped in the middle of a patch of mist and looked around. I had not paid much attention to how far I had walked, but it was hard to tell distances with no landmarks. The only solid points in a white world were the road under my feet and the rushing river to my right. But where was the old wizard?

  I came out of the mist again and saw him, standing under a tree, staring off down the valley. Heavy drops of moisture hung from the leaves above his head. He gave a start as I came up beside him. He looked as old as I had ever seen him, his full two hundred and fifty years, and much too weak ever to kill anybody.