"He was an nobleman, all right," said Lucas testily. "I don't remember his name, but he had a black beard and hazel eyes—wore a big ring. And he seemed remarkably well informed on how the school operated."
"I spent all spring at the school, and I never saw anyone who—" The words died on my lips. Standing before us, where a second ago there had been no one, was a pale green woman.
She was green all over, naked skin the color of the first leaves in spring, eyes and hair a rich jade hue. She had round, uplifted breasts, a tiny waist, and almost unbelievably long and graceful legs. Clouds of dancing lights, like tiny stars, surrounded her: almost, but not quite, keeping her decent.
"Is this one of your Little People?" I asked Vor in a low voice.
"She is not little," he said with the hint of a smile. "She's a nixie."
"Of course I'm a nixie," she said in a mellifluous voice, taking a step toward us. "And I'm delighted that four men have chosen to visit me."
Vor turned to her, smiling fully now. "I wouldn't have said we chose to visit you, Lady. But you do have a charming grove."
"And even more charming treats await you, as I'm sure you realize."
"I realize that, of course, but you must understand that this is rather startling for all of us."
"Did you bring me here?" said Lucas, glowering balefully at her. "I am leaving now."
"But you can't leave," she said with a tinkling laugh. "None of you can. Not until you've fully satisfied me. He knows what I mean," with a glance at Vor, "and the rest of you will find out quickly. But don't worry. You'll enjoy it fully as well!" She leaned down, breasts near Lucas's face, and kissed him on the top of the head.
Paul took an involuntary step backwards. His sword, forgotten in his hand, clanged against a root.
She said a quick word and it spun out of his grip. "No weapons here, or at least not weapons of steel!" she said coyly. "Come now, which of you would like to be the first?"
I shot Vor a despairing look. "It's late in the day, Lady," he said smoothly. "We've had an exhausting time, and, as you can see, one of us is injured. We wouldn't be able to satisfy you very well this evening. Perhaps if we could eat and sleep first?"
"Very well," said the nixie with the same coy smile. "Come with me!"
We followed her a short distance through the grove; Lucas, supported by Vor and Paul on either side, managed to hop. I came behind, trying to sort out magical influences. It was unexpectedly easy, and then I realized that this was because no magic now penetrated from outside the grove.
Under low-hanging branches were spread four beds, piled high with pillows. On tables next to each were bottles of wine and baskets of red and yellow fruit. She had clearly been expecting us.
"There!" said the nixie to Vor. "Is this what you wanted?"
"This will do most excellently, Lady."
"Then I shall leave you to your dreams." She kissed him quickly and slipped away through the trees.
Vor looked after her, rubbing his lips with his knuckles. "This will be a new experience. I've never been caught by a nixie before."
"A new experience for all of us," I said. I wondered briefly if the stories I had sometimes heard at the wizards' school, of witches and their mad lusts, were in fact garbled stories of nixies.
The others sat down on the beds. Lucas looked fairly subdued now. I was still furious with him, but it would have to wait. "I'm going to find out how thoroughly the nixie has us imprisoned," I said. "Paul, come with me. Vor, see if you can make Lucas's ankle more comfortable."
As we walked under the trees toward the edge of the grove, Paul asked with distaste, "So she expects us all to satisfy her before she'll let us go?"
"That's certainly what she says."
After a short pause, he continued, "Is flying always like that?"
"It's not usually that exciting. Generally I'm not trying to lift three other people at the same time."
Paul nodded, seeming reassured. "I'd gotten used to the air cart this week—or as used to it as one can get. It's like being in a boat; you know you're suspended far above the bottom of the lake or ocean, but you still feel as though your feet are solidly planted. But coming down . . . I was amazed you're willing to fly at all!" At least he didn't say that flying make him think of ascension.
"Maybe we can see the horses again once we get out of the trees," Paul added.
"What horses?" The prince seemed to think about horses at entirely inappropriate times.
"Didn't you see them, out on the plain? I spotted them just before the air cart tipped us out."
"I was too busy trying to save our lives to give anything else much attention," I said sharply.
"There was a whole herd of them," he continued, unabashed. "And they were running like the wind."
Before I could answer, my nose was abruptly flattened by something invisible. I stopped, rubbed my nose delicately, and reached out a hand. The air had become solid before us.
III
Paul put out his hand too and rapped on the invisible wall. "I was afraid of this," I said. "The air's been turned to glass "We can't get out of the grove, and no magic can pass in or out."
"Let's see if the barrier's impervious to steel," said Paul, drawing his sword. To my surprise, the blade went straight through up to the hilt, but his hand was stopped. "It's as though it's only a spell against humans," he suggested.
This was a new kind of spell to me, but I admired its ingenuity. By being specific to humans, the spell could allow wind and rain—and presumably birds and insects—to reach the grove, but would keep us firmly inside.
We continued our circuit of the grove. At one point Paul spotted the herd of horses in the distance, and I somewhat reluctantly agreed that they did indeed appear to be beautiful animals.
I wondered if I ought to take this opportunity of being alone with Paul to warn him against the nixie. His mother, I was sure, would want me to. Naked women making open invitations could not have been a common part of his experience. But if we made it back to Yurt alive, he would very shortly be my king to whom I owed respect. Even as a prince, he was old enough to make his own decisions.
I stopped to pick some leaves growing under one of the trees. "Herbal magic," I explained to Paul. "I've never seen this particular species before, but the old wizard of Yurt taught me enough of the magic of earth and growing things to be able to recognize a plant's properties. I hope it will help Lucas's ankle."
He helped me gather a double handful of it, and we walked back toward the center of the grove. Just before we reached the others, he turned with a smile and said, "You know, when you asked me to accompany you, I was afraid for a minute you were going to preach at me about nixies and morality. I have to apologize for even imagining you would—that's more something the chaplain would do!"
"Of course," I said, not looking at him.
Lucas was eating strawberries, his shirt off and his foot up. His undershirt had been ripped into bandages and firmly wrapped around his ankle. "I don't think he's broken it," said Vor, "but it's badly strained."
"I think it's broken," contradicted Lucas.
"I brought some herbs that may help," I said. I soaked them in wine, because we had no water, and slipped them into the bandages as gently as I could. He grunted as I worked, as though to remind me that it was highly painful.
"If you've got such powerful magic," he said, "why don't you just heal the broken bone?"
"Magic has never been much good at altering the cycle of sickness and health," I said, sitting on the bed across from him. "You would need supernatural power to do that. Even herbal magic isn't practiced much anymore; generations ago the wizards let the doctors take over the herbs that worked reliably."
Lucas clearly considered this a feeble excuse to mask my own inadequacies. "If you're so good at transforming things into frogs, why don't you just transform me into a prince who doesn't have a broken ankle?"
"I could transform you into a number of different creatur
es," I said as patiently as I could, "some of them rather nasty, but all of them would be wounded in some way if you were." Lucas grunted without answering and lapsed into silence.
"So the nixie really is interested in us, as men?" Paul asked Vor. "Why would she use her magic to draw in four men she'd never seen before?"
Vor gave him a sideways look and handed him an apple. "I think this is all we're getting for supper," he said. "Where did you think baby nixies came from?"
Paul thought about this. "You mean that nixies and humans can breed? It wouldn't be like trying to breed sheep and cattle to each other?"
"Of course not. Since all of them are women, they need human men. Didn't your tutor ever teach you about nixies? I thought princes were supposed to be well educated."
Vor counted himself as a human, I thought, and yet there remained something almost magical about him, as though his people were the result of generations of breeding between humans and something out of the wild land of magic. I found myself yawning hugely. In the morning, I would have to test to see if he were stopped by the invisible wall as Paul and I had been, but not now.
"Tomorrow," I told the others, "before the nixie comes back, I'm going to try to get us out of this grove. But I can't work magic when I'm this tired." I looked rather groggily toward Lucas, but he had stretched out and was already beginning to snore. I was asleep even before my head reached the pillow.
Snuggled luxuriously amidst pillows and comforters, dreaming of Theodora, I heard a bird singing. For a few moments I was able to incorporate the sound into my dream, but at last, reluctantly, I opened my eyes. A brilliant scarlet bird hung on a branch two feet above my head, pouring out a golden song to greet the morning. It flew away as I rose on one elbow and looked around. It was already full daylight, but lumps in the other three beds showed that I was by no means the last awake.
I lay down again, hoping to recapture my dream, but the realization that Theodora was three thousand miles away, and even if she was still alive and well did not want to marry me, brought me fully awake. It had been a remarkably vivid dream, in which she had had no reservations about marrying me or about anything else. The nixie, I thought, had been influencing our sleeping minds for her own purposes.
The other three also stretched and sat up, not meeting each others' eyes. "One problem with nixies," said Vor, "is that they're not very subtle."
We had fruit and wine for breakfast; the bottles and the baskets had been replenished while we slept. "Is your ankle any better?" I asked Lucas.
"It doesn't hurt with every breath the way it did last night," he admitted, "but I certainly couldn't walk on it."
"I'm going to try to break the spell that's holding us in the grove," I said. "Until I do, I'm afraid we're going to have to stay here—unless of course we decide to take up the nixie's offer."
"But Lucas is married," said Paul puritanically. "If she wants us all before she'll let any of us go, that means we're trapped here."
Lucas gave him a sour look, and I almost expected the older prince to say that, married or not, he could and would do anything he wanted. But instead he turned away to finish the strawberries.
"Come with me, Vor," I said. "I want your help."
"What should we do if the nixie comes back?" asked Paul in some alarm.
"Be polite," said Vor. "Call her Lady. Nixies like that. And don't even bother trying to explain that it's hard to feel in the right mood to respond to her charms when you've been imprisoned against your will. That's something nixies never have been able to understand."
The invisible wall at the edge of the grove once again met my outstretched hand. It was as impenetrable to Vor as to Paul and me. I tried several variations on dissolving spells, but none of them worked. Vor tried pushing other objects through the barrier and found they passed without difficulty. He was even able, by holding onto a leafy branch, to push most of his arm through. But as soon as he reached the rest of his body, not surrounded by leaves, the wall stopped him solidly.
"How about turning us into birds?" Vor suggested half-seriously. "We could fly through. The real birds are coming and going without any problem."
"I've thought of it," I said, entirely seriously. "The problem is, if I turned myself into anything non-human, I wouldn't be able to say the spell to return us all to ourselves. I'd even been thinking that I could turn the three of you into some other creatures so that you could escape, and stay here myself, but that wouldn't work either. Human magic doesn't penetrate this wall, so you would all have to remain birds."
"Could you turn us into some creature that it would be nice to be for the rest of our lives?"
I gave this suggestion more attention than it probably deserved. When I had been at the wizards' school in the City by the sea, I had often gone down to the breakwater to watch the dolphins playing in the surf. But being a dolphin would be difficult in these dry borderlands of the land of magic.
"I wish I had my books," I said. "I'm not familiar with the kind of magic that formed this barrier, and it will take me a while to work it out from first principles."
"I know what we could do," said Vor, almost playfully. I was quite sure I had never seen him being playful before. "We could all turn into nixies."
"We could what?"
"If we were nixies, the nixie of this grove wouldn't try to stop us from leaving, and we could pass right through this barrier. But we'd still be able to speak, so you could turn us back into ourselves once we were out in the plain."
"Transformations spells cannot be used frivolously," I said firmly, inwardly appalled. "Besides, the princes would never agree."
"I'm not sure I would agree either," Vor said lightly. "But at least it was an idea."
When we returned to the beds under the trees, Paul said, "The nixie came while you were gone. We called her Lady and managed to persuade her that we weren't in the right mood. She went away again, but now I'm wondering if she's poisoned the fruit."
"Poisoned the fruit!"
"Usually in the morning when I'm home I can't wait to get outside, to ride, to run. We slept better on these beds last night than we've slept the whole trip, so I should be brimful of energy. But now I don't feel like moving at all—and look at Lucas!"
The older prince rolled over and opened his eyes at the sound of his name. "I'm not asleep."
But Paul was right. The nixie was affecting more than our dreams. Making us feel languorous, making us playful, in a few days she would have us forgetting the world outside her grove.
"I don't think it's the fruit," I said. "I think it's in the air. I'd better work fast."
Lucas stretched and sat up. "Tell me, Wizard," he said in much better humor than I expected, "what real harm would come to us if we did take up the nixie's offer?"
I shot Vor a quick glance. He shook his head and said, "Complete exhaustion, but it should wear off." Paul glared at Lucas, indignant on behalf of the crown princess of Caelrhon, but the other prince ignored the look.
I took a deep breath. "The three of you can do what you like. But Paul was right that the nixie won't let us go until she's been satisfied by all of us. And as a wizard, I am bound by iron oaths." This was a prevarication, because the oaths I had taken had nothing to do with chastity. But I didn't want to explain that, in love with both Theodora and the queen, I found the nixie's advances repellant—though even that might change in a few days in this soft air.
Instead I folded my arms. "While we're all here," I said, "I want to take the opportunity to finish the discussion we were having yesterday." This at least took the rather listless half smile off Lucas's face. "I'm getting very tired of having to drag this out of you. You keep talking, Prince, about aristocrats needing to break free of their wizards. Then how do you explain waiting in the city of Caelrhon until the old bishop died, to make sure that a renegade wizard you'd hired yourself insulted his memory by attacking the cathedral?"
IV
Lucas gave me a vicious look; I was actually rath
er pleased to see that languor had not yet taken him over. But he had the sense not to try to jump me again. "I stayed in the city all summer to defend it from you!"
He seemed to mean it. "What threat could I possibly be?" I demanded indignantly.
"Why else," shifting his scowl from me to Paul, "would the wizard of Yurt spend so much time in Caelrhon unless planning an attack on my kingdom? Would you care to tell me, Prince, just what plot you have been concocting against me?"
Lucas feared an attack from Paul? Everything had made sense for a moment, but now suddenly all my suppositions were disintegrating.
I expected Paul to reply hotly but he only laughed, momentarily easing the tension. "Our wizard was in Caelrhon at the request of the cathedral, to defend the church against the monster some other wizard had already brought there—at Vor's suggestion."
Vor was about to reply, but I interrupted him. "Wait," I said. Try to sort it out one piece at a time. "You mean, Lucas, you weren't anticipating the gorgos at the bishop's funeral?"
"My father got a telephone phone call from a dark-haired girl none of us knew," Lucas growled, "saying that ‘something rather striking’ was about to happen in the cathedral city, and that if we considered that spectacular we should wait until the bishop died! I headed for the city at once, of course, but when I got there I found the gorgos had already been seen—and you had just arrived. And you wonder why I decided to wait you out?"
So the renegade wizard I couldn't find had actually sent the royal court of Caelrhon a warning two months ago, boasting obliquely of his gorgos? He must have persuaded one of the Romney girls to telephone for him; no wonder the band had left town in a hurry!
"Sengrim wanting revenge on me I could have understood," continued Lucas grimly, "for dismissing him after years as Caelrhon's royal wizard. But when magical dangers persisted even after he blew himself up, I realized that more of you school wizards must be involved in a conspiracy of vengeance. But the gorgos on the cathedral and you, Wizard, in the city made it clear that I wasn't the only target for wizardly revenge. The goal was the destruction of both the cathedral and the kingdom of Caelrhon."
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