Since I had told Evrard I really would turn him into a frog if he brought up the old wizard and his monster again, I expected dinner to be more quiet than lunch. Once again, Dominic seated Diana next to him, and I ended up next to Nimrod.
The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that she must have known the huntsman earlier. For that matter, from his polished language and behavior he himself must be other than what he at first seemed. It might explain a lot, even her surprising lack of ease when they first met, if she had last met him, say, in a very different context. I tried again to question him when dinner was almost over.
“So I understand the duchess is enjoying catching horned rabbits,” I said casually. “Tell me, have you tried to track them down in the valley of Saint Eusebius? The valley seems to have strong powers of attraction for creatures of magic. I’m planning to go there tomorrow, to explore its magical properties more thoroughly, and I was wondering …”
But I never got a chance to say more. At that point, Dominic rose to his feet. He looked pale, unusual in someone usually rather ruddy, and highly determined. He started to speak, got as far as “My lords and ladies-” and his voice cracked. Evrard smiled, but no one else dared.
Dominic tried again. “My lords and ladies of Yurt! I would like your attention. I have a special announcement to make. As you know, I have served King Haimeric of Yurt, my uncle, for most of my life, at present as his regent. But recently I have been thinking of doing something rather different.”
There was a murmur of surprise. Dominic was as much a fixture of the castle as the king’s rose garden.
“In fact, once the king and queen return and release me from my regency, I think I shall leave Yurt. I have not yet decided where I shall go.”
My first startled thought-the thought of a city merchant’s son-was to wonder what he would live on. He had all a prince could want as long as he was in Yurt, but his wealth was based on the revenues from the castle’s own lands-really nothing more than a glorified allowance from the king.
The silence was broken by Hugo, the youth who had been training in knighthood under Dominic’s direction. “You can come back to the City with me at the end of the summer if you like,” he said. “Mother and Father won’t mind.”
Dominic smiled, almost affectionately. “I’ll consider it,” he said, then became determined again. “Before I go, there is something very important I want to settle.”
He turned toward the duchess, on whom a horrible realization seemed to be dawning, and went down on one knee before her on the flagstones.
If I had determined to propose marriage to a woman I had already decided six years ago I didn’t want to marry, then I would have done it in private. But that apparently wouldn’t do for the royal regent.
He took a ring out of his pocket. From where I was sitting I could see the firelight glint on the diamond. It was an enormous stone. We had in the castle treasury the jewelry that had once belonged to Dominic’s mother, and this must be from the collection.
Diana looked, for once in her life, completely nonplussed. I had the sickening feeling one sometimes has when seeing a bad accident about to happen, that everything is taking place very slowly but one is too paralyzed to do anything about it.
“My lady, I offer you this ring as a token,” said the regent gravely. “A token of my love for you, which I dare to hope you may return. A token of my wish that you and I should become man and wife.”
This had gone far beyond paying court to a woman to keep her from making a spectacle of herself with somebody else. Dominic, I thought, had simply lost his mind.
Diana took a deep breath. “Prince Dominic,” she said in a high, clear voice, “you have set my maidenly heart aflutter.” She did not take the ring held out to her.
I glanced toward Nimrod beside me and found his face stiff with tension.
“While I fully appreciate your sentiments,” the duchess continued, “your proposal is so sudden that I will need at least a week to give you my answer.” She gave a sudden, saucy smile. “After all, I’ve been single nearly as long as you have-that is, all my life-and it’s hard to contemplate such a complete change so suddenly.”
“Of course,” said Dominic, watching her face as though searching for a hidden meaning.
I caught the chaplain’s eye across the table. If he said, “I told you so,” I would deserve it.
Diana rose to her feet with a swirl of the skirt she had put on for dinner. “Right now, I still need to concentrate on catching the last of those great horned rabbits. If you don’t mind, Prince, I shall go to my room and plan tomorrow’s hunt.” Dominic nodded shortly.
As the duchess moved toward the door, she stopped as though she had just thought of something and turned back. “Since I’m planning a hunt, I need my chief huntsman. Nimrod, could you join me?”
Nimrod smiled like the sun coming up and jumped to his feet so suddenly that his chair crashed over. He strode across the hall, and he and the duchess left together. The rest of us retreated rapidly, almost in panic, not daring to look at the regent.
“We’d better stay out of Dominic’s way for a while,” I told Evrard that evening. “And it sounds as though the duchess won’t want your help hunting the horned rabbits. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the Holy Grove of Saint Eusebius so you can meet the wood nymph.”
The next morning, I sent Evrard to the stables to supervise the saddling of our mares while I went to find the regent. If I could sort out the magical problems associated with the Holy Grove in the next day or two, and if the duchess would just start behaving herself, then I could turn my full attention to the old wizard and his creature. Maybe by then I’d even have some ideas.
I would have liked to leave the castle without telling Dominic we were going, but he was, after all, regent. I squared my shoulders and hoped that by now he would be calm enough that I could talk to him coherently.
I expected to find the royal nephew in his chambers having breakfast, or already seated on the throne in the great hall. But I could not find him. When I returned to the stables, wondering uneasily where he could be, I noticed a number of horses were missing.
“That’s right,” said the stable boy I asked. “It seems like everyone has already gone somewhere this morning. The chaplain, Prince Dominic, a lot of the knights, the duchess and her new huntsman, they’ve all left.”
“So what do you think?” asked Evrard, who seemed to find the situation hilarious. “Have the duchess and Nimrod eloped, and Dominic gone after them?”
As we rode out across the drawbridge, the clear sky promised another day of perfect weather. I asked myself how normally rational adults could act like this. And where could Joachim have possibly gone? I had enough to do solving magical problems in the kingdom without being responsible for everyone’s emotional crises. For Dominic abruptly to decide to get married after all these years, for Diana to hire a wizard, commission horned rabbits, and flirt outrageously with a huntsman-
“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?”