“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 her head slightly, 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 have. Still 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, but 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 the branches.

I spent the next fifteen minutes walking through the grove, seeing all the little upwellings of water and all 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 his gentle side. He came to this grove originally, as a young hermit, because he wanted to put the city behind him. And he’s never told me he wanted to leave.”

I continued past them, following the path back down along the waterfall to where we had left the horses. They were grazing industriously, unbothered by entrepreneurs, saints, or nymphs.