Mollified at being called the chaplain’s close friend, I made the hermit the full formal bow, first the dipping of the head, then the wide-spread 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 that 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, following slightly drier paths marked with rows of tiny white stones. Here there did seem to be several springs of the sort I had originally expected, sending smaller trickles of water to join the larger stream.

I picked my way across an especially muddy patch of ground and looked up. A young woman stood directly before me, carefully trimming dead twigs from a small tree.

It took only the briefest glance to realize that this was not some local village girl.

She turned toward me, but her face was perfectly still, 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 strategically placed leaves. Both her skin and her hair were dusky, the color of shadows deep within the woods, and her eyes a brilliant violet. Her unbound hair, which hung to her waist, looked incredibly soft.