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sins and affairs of the world have much to learn from hermits whose days are spent in contemplation and prayer.”
    The hermit looked at him more closely. “You’re the Royal Chaplain, aren’t you? I thought I recognized you.”
    Joachim beckoned to me. “Let me present Daim-bert, Royal Wizard of Yurt and my close friend.”
    Molified at being caled the chaplain’s close friend, I made the hermit the ful formal bow, first the dipping of the head, then the widespread arms, finishing by dropping to both knees. I reassured myself that to
    kneel in this way to a living holy hermit, as a wizard might to a superior wizard or to his king, would not be a discredit to the position of institutionalized magic. Besides, Joachim looked pleased.
    “Have you come to see the wood nymph?” the hermit asked me. I rose and met his eyes. I had somehow expected them to be distant and dreamy, but they were surprisingly sharp under long, shaggy eyebrows.
    “That’s right,’ I said, deciding not to worry him with the horned rabbit.
    “It’s those poor souls up on the top of the cliff who are worrying you?” the hermit asked Joachim with another smile.
    “That and a letter the bishop has received.” I could hear the unease in the chaplain’s voice and realized that the hermit must not yet know that certain priests were insisting the Holy Toe be taken two hundred miles from his grove. Since I didn’t particularly want to be there when he received the news, I excused myself as they sat down on mossy stones beside the pool.
    The area around the pool itself, next to the shrine, seemed an unlikely place to find a nymph, but the grove stretched further along the bottom of the cliff. I walked slowly on spongy soil, folowing slightly drier paths marked with rows of tiny white stones. Here, there did seem to be several springs of the sort I had originaly expected, sending smaler trickles of water to join the larger stream.
    I picked my way across an especialy muddy patch of ground and looked up. A young woman stood directly before me, carefulfy trimming dead twigs from a smal tree.
    It took only the briefest glance to realize that this was not some local vilage girl.
    She turned toward me. Her face was perfectly stil, with the intense beauty of a pastoral landscape. She leaned back against the pale trunk of a beech, one arm stretched above her head, and watched me with
    no apparent expression. Her only clothes were a few strategicaly placed leaves. Her skin and her hair were dusky, the color of shadows deep within the woods, and her eyes a briliant violet. Her unbound hair, which hung to her waist, looked incredibly soft.
    “Excuse me,” I faltered. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’m the Royal Wizard of Yurt. Are you the wood nymph of this grove?” She moved ner head slighdy, neither nodding in affirmation nor denying it.
    “I’d been hoping to meet you,” I pushed on. My heart began beating rapidly and I felt much more flustered than I should nave. Stil she did not answer.
    “Have you lived here long?’ I asked inanely.
    This time, she did more than not answer. She disappeared. One second she was standing before me, and the next she was gone. It seemed as though she might have slipped quickly around the tree, out when I looked, there was no one behind it. I glanced up. Far above me, I saw for one second a motion that might have been the leaves on the tree or might have been a swift form among die branches.
    I spent the next fifteen minutes walking through the grove, seeing al the little upwelings of water and al the smooth-trunked trees, but no more sign of the nymph.
    I returned to where Joachim and the hermit were sitting. “But the saint often appears to me,” the hermit was saying to the chaplain with a pleasant smile. “I know some people have nicknamed him ‘the Cranky Saint,’ but I have always been blessed by seeing bis gentle side. He came to this grove originaly, as a young hermit, because he wanted to put trie