That evening, as I’d hoped, the telephone call came from the castle, halfway to the great City, where the queen’s parents lived, telling us that the royal party had arrived safely. Dominic himself spoke to the king, but standing at his side I could see the king with the queen and the baby prince behind him, tiny figures in the base of the glass telephone.
“Yes, we’re all well,” said the king. “Any problems yet you can’t handle, Dominic?”
The royal nephew and regent took this comment entirely seriously. “Nothing I can’t handle, sire.”
I thought that, on the contrary, there was a great deal happening in Yurt over which Dominic had no control. I wondered if it could be pure coincidence that Nimrod and the great horned rabbits had both appeared in the kingdom at the very time the king left. I even wondered for a moment if Dominic himself might be responsible, if he had arranged for the kingdom to be invaded by magic creatures in the king’s absence to demonstrate his ability to deal with them.
But this seemed a little far-fetched. There was no question, however, that Dominic was throwing himself into the role of royal regent. When we had reached home the day before, we had found him sitting on the throne in the great hall, gripping the arms and staring grimly at nothing in particular.
Hearing from the king made everyone more cheerful, except for Joachim, who was still waiting to hear from the bishop. He had hoped that an answer to his message of the preceding day would be here when we reached the royal castle yesterday, but no pigeons had arrived. The cathedral had never put in a telephone, probably afraid that to do so would be a concession to the forces of institutionalized wizardry, and Joachim could do nothing but mutter about pigeons being lost or caught by hawks-all of which was quite possible-before going up to bed early.
Perhaps the most cheerful person in the castle was Gwen, the assistant cook. She and I had been friends since I first arrived in Yurt, when she was still a kitchen-maid. Not only was she glad the royal family was safe, she was also pleased that they were at least temporarily out of the way. She and her husband, who played in the castle’s brass choir, were the only people in Yurt who did not consider the baby prince the most important person in the kingdom. That honor they gave to their own baby daughter.
“I think she’s going to start crawling soon,” Gwen said to me. Her daughter was lying on a rug on the flagstone floor of the great hall. “Look at her kicking!”
The little girl, four months younger than the royal prince, was indeed kicking with great enthusiasm and pride of accomplishment.
I sat down on the floor next to her and patted her on her diapered bottom. She gave me a wide, toothless smile. “I like baby girls,” I said to Gwen. “She’s so full of energy; are you sure she isn’t going to get into trouble once she starts moving around?”
Little Gwennie grabbed the hem of my trouser leg and tried to pull it toward her mouth. Gwen disengaged her. “There is a lot she could crawl into in the kitchens-they’re much more dangerous than anything the little prince is likely to get into,” she added pointedly.
We were interrupted at this point by Dominic coming toward us. I frequently had the uncomfortable feeling that, despite his silence and apparent slowness, he saw and recognized every one of my inadequacies-and probably a lot of inadequacies I didn’t even have. But he was also capable of surprising me by speaking to me on occasion as though he had no doubts of my competence.
“It sounds as if the count and the duchess are having a great deal of trouble in their neighborhood these days,” he said as I scrambled to my feet, “what with great horned rabbits and a troublesome nymph.” I had of course given him a sketch of our trip as soon as we returned. From the stony look I had received then I was rather surprised how much of it he’d understood, even though he didn’t now mention the people trying to restrict access to the holy relics. “Do you think it would help if I rode over to that side of the kingdom tomorrow with a few knights?”
“Not for several days, anyway,” I said. “Brute force won’t be any good against the nymph. If any of our knights are good trackers, however, I’m sure the duchess would appreciate their help tracking the horned rabbits.”
Dominic considered, as though wondering again why his uncle the king had even taken me on in the first place. “And are you doing anything about these strange events?”
“I’m checking what my books of magic have to say about such things,” I said with dignity. Since I had been meaning to get to my books very soon, I didn’t feel this was too great a prevarication.
Unexpectedly, Dominic’s frown turned into a smile. “It was good to hear the royal family is well,” he said, “especially the little prince.”
I agreed wholeheartedly, although somewhat surprised, since Joachim had felt Dominic might be jealous.
“His hair is so light blond it’s almost white,” continued Dominic with a sentimental smile. “They tell me mine was just the same color when I was his age. Tell me, Wizard,” with a sudden sharp look, “have you ever thought of getting married?”
“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.