When Eligio heard that, he was full of gladness, and he said, “Let us escape, then! What should prevent us from leaving this country together? When I saw the magician before, the laws of hospitality made him sacred to my sword; but now—now that I have learnt I have a right to defend your life—I defy him, and all his arts!”
“You are brave, I see; and it is well,” she replied; “but it is not so you can discard his power. By your own error you gave him power over you, and now you are his; you can only be free by his will.”
“By his will!” cried Eligio, in despair; “then shall I never be free!”
“Art must be met by art,” she continued. “His art is all round you, though you see not its meshes; and by art we must bring him to renounce his claim on you. Trust me, and I will show you how it is to be done. He would force me to learn his arts when I begged him not, and now I know many things which will serve us. I can see the threads of his toils woven all around you; you cannot escape from them till he speaks you free.”
“Tell me, then, what I must do,” said Eligio; and he mentally resolved as he spoke, that he would this time implicitly obey what she told him.
She remained thinking for a time, as if reckoning out a problem. Then she said, “For this first time I must act. On the fatal day you must present yourself according to your oath. I will take care to be with him when they tell him you are come; and when I hear your name, I will plead, as I did before, that he should not sacrifice you at once, but give you some hard trial in which, if you succeed, he shall speak you free. To silence my importunity, he will agree to this, intending to give you so hard a trial that you should not succeed. But you come to me in my bower, cooing three times like a dove, for a signal, at this same evening hour, and tell me what it is, and I will find the means in my books to carry you through the trial. So that, whatever he proposes to you, be not disconcerted, but accept and undertake it with a good heart. And now, give me my dove’s feathers quickly, for already they will be questioning why I am so long behind.” And without waiting to let him take so much as another gaze at her, she assumed her dove shape, and flew away.
The next day Eligio went, with a lighter heart than he had borne for a long time past, to give himself up to the magician. The magician, won over by the maiden’s importunity, offered him his liberty on condition of his performing successfully the difficult feat that he should impose on him.
“Any thing you please to impose on me, I am ready to perform,” replied Eligio.
The magician smiled, with a ghastly, sardonic smile, while he paused, and tried to think of the most terrible trial he could impose.
“Since you were here last,” he said, at length, “I have grown a little deaf, and I am told that the only cure there is for me is the singing of the phœnix-bird. The first thing you have to do is to find me the phœnix-bird, that its singing may heal me.”