Chapter 13

He lay there, staring up at her stupidly for a moment. His vision was a bit foggy, and more than a bit distorted; he had trouble focusing until he realized that his eyes were now on the front of his head, not the sides. He shook his head, trying to make his mind wake up. Then, of all the ridiculous things to be worried about, his first reaction was of horror—that he had come back as a man and was now lying there naked in front of her, at her feet, like some sort of—of—

Naked slave boy? the voice in the back of his mind suggested slyly.

But in the next moment, relief washed over him, for no, he was exactly as he had been when he was transformed into an ass in the first place. He was still wearing the same clothing, in fact, though it was a bit worse for wear.

He blinked again, his eyes still having trouble focusing. And the feeling of having only two legs again was extremely disorienting.

"Wake up, your highness," she said, prodding him in the ribs with a toe, her tone of voice making the honorific sound very sarcastic. "I can't leave you a donkey forever, much as I would like to. If I do, you'll become more ass and less man with every passing day. Not that you weren't an ass already," she added matter-of-factly, "but it was a rather different sort of ass."

He really wasn't thinking as she was speaking; he was really still waking up, right up until the moment she finished talking to him. Then, with a jolt, his mind started working.

And he didn't exactly think. Instead he reacted in the way he had fantasized he would in the first hours of his captivity.

He leaped to his feet.

He meant to lunge at her, at this vile Witch who had ruined his life. He had done it so many times in his mind, he would throw her to the ground and truss her up, then demand that she restore him his possessions and send him home—

But his balance was all wrong. His legs didn't work right. But after tripping and falling, he scrambled to his feet again, anyway.

He made a grab for her—

—and there was a sort of bang, and a flash of light—

—and he found himself flat on his back in the straw with a monumental headache.

"As I was saying," the woman said, calmly, but with an edge to her voice, and her blue eyes flashing with suppressed anger. "I can't leave you in the donkey-skin for more than a few days without your mind becoming more donkeylike." She looked down at him and shook her head.

"Not that it would be a huge difference, apparently. So once a week or so, you'll get to be a man for a day and—"

He leaped to his feet for a third time, despite pain in his head that threatened to send him to his knees. This time he didn't make the mistake of trying to attack her; instead, he just shoved blindly past her and ran.

He blundered into the wall of the stable, but the clean, chill air braced him, and he staggered a few more paces, then broke into a real run, his steps growing more sure with every moment.

In the thin grey predawn light, he got his bearings by the cottage. He could get away; the Witch hadn't a prayer of catching him. After all, he knew the forest around here, now. He even knew how to get to the village. And while the villagers might not treat an enchanted donkey with any consideration, they couldn't ignore the demands of a Prince of Kohlstania!

He sprinted down the path to the cottage, then leaped the low stone wall around the garden and pelted for the road. In a moment, he'd be in the forest, under the trees, and she didn't have a horse to chase him on, nor did she have a hound to track him with. He—

—found himself pelting down the path to the stable.

He whirled, and reversed himself, running this time for the forest itself rather than the road.

There must be some sort of spell on the road; fine, he'd get into the forest and get onto the road again later, he'd get to the village that way. That would be even better! She couldn't possibly find him in the forest and—

—he found himself running down the path to the stable.

"So, how many tries you going to make before you figure it out, boy?" asked a voice to his right. He stopped, and looked. The little woman called Lily stepped out from between two blackberry canes, her head, crowned by a flat straw hat, bobbing with suppressed laughter.

"You reckon we're all as big a set of fools as you are? It's you the enchantment's on, not the path, nor the forest. You can't leave here unless the Godmother lets you."

He heard footsteps coming towards him, and saw the Witch emerging from the stable and walking towards him in a leisurely fashion, a smug smile on her face. And rage completely overcame him.

He seized a pointed stake supporting a plant and yanked it out of the ground; he hadn't intended to kill her before, but this was clearly war, and none of the laws of chivalry applied!

And if he couldn't touch her, he was a prize-winner at the spear and javelin—

He pulled his arm back to impale her at the same time he caught a kind of silvery flash out of the corner of his eye.

And suddenly, he found himself looking at something very sharp, the tip of which was less than an inch from his eye.

It was the shining silver tip of a Unicorn's horn.

He clutched at his improvised spear, wondering if he could manage to duck under the threatening horn to kill it before it killed him—

There was a second flash, and a second Unicorn in his path. This one was braced to charge, and the tip of its horn was pointed somewhat lower than the first's. Very much lower.

He gulped, and his hands clenched hard on the stake.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," said the first Unicorn, its voice hard and angry.

"That's right. You aren't a virgin," the second said, in a tone of accusation. Then it snickered.

"But try it, go ahead, and you'll wish you were."

His mind raced for a moment. What did being a virgin have to do with—

Oh.

Of course. Unicorns were not only held spellbound by virgins, but they were the protectors of virgins.

He remembered the things in the night-shrouded garden, the conversation he'd overheard.

So—the Witch was a virgin?

Not a big surprise, he thought sullenly, if this is how she treats real men.

He dropped the stake, and the Unicorn imperiling his eyeball backed away a pace or two, without dropping its threatening posture. The Witch came up even with the second Unicorn, and placed a hand on its shoulder.

Oh, yes. The bitch is a virgin, all right.

It would have been funny, under other circumstances, to see how the Unicorn tried simultaneously to melt under the Witch's touch and maintain its threatening posture towards Alexander. She would have been attractive, under other circumstances. He wouldn't have minded tumbling her if he found her serving as pot-girl in an inn. But at the moment—

"Now, if I may continue," the woman said, one hand absently petting the Unicorn's neck, "you will be permitted to wear your shape as a man from sunrise to sunset, when you will become an ass again." He thought for a moment that she was going to make another one of those nasty comments, but she evidently restrained herself.

"But just because you're wearin' your man-shape, my lad, don't think that means you don't work," said that detestable Master Hob from behind him. "The same rules hold true whether you're a man or a beast; if you don't work, you don't eat."

The Unicorns both seemed to wake up a bit, and became all threat again. And perhaps that was because Master Hob stepped past Alexander and shoved an axe into his empty hands.

He hefted it experimentally. It was a woodman's axe, of course, and not a war-axe, but—

"Don't even think about it," Master Hob warned, and poked him hard in the ribs with the stake he'd dropped. "She's been easy on ye until now. And there's more Unicorns where these twain come from."

"Don't I even get some breakfast, first?" he said, plaintively. His voice sounded unpleasantly whiny, even to him.

The Witch raised one eyebrow. Master Hob nodded at the east. "Sun isn't up yet," he countered. "You go over to the woodpile, and you chop some wood. Your breakfast'll be ready when it's ready."

"You ought to let us poke him, Godmother," said one of the Unicorns, as the Prince slouched angrily away in the direction of the woodpile. "You ought to drop the spell and let us chase him away with holes in his hide. You don't need him here."

"Of course I don't need him here," she replied, looking after him thoughtfully. "But he needs to be here. He has lessons to learn."

"Then let him learn them in the forest," said the second, in an uncanny echo of what Master Hob had said to her just this morning before she transformed him.

"That one's all trouble, Madame Elena, " he'd said, shaking his head. "Let me go down to the village and buy us a new donkey. Drive him out into the forest like his brother."

She tapped her cheek with her wand, looking after him—astonishing how like a sulky adolescent he looked from the back!—and finally shook her own head and walked briskly back up the path to the cottage.

She was of two minds about letting him inside to eat. On the one hand, she wanted to keep an eye on him to assess him; on the other, the rest of the household was divided over keeping him on, and that sort of tension would only be increased if he shared the breakfast table with the rest of them.

Lily thought he was hilarious, and so did Rose. Robin was of two minds about him. Hob thought he was trouble waiting to happen.

Randolf's reaction was predictable; to Randolf, Prince Alexander and his family were a fresh new source of entertainment.

Julian's horse had returned to its stable with the desired effect. King Henrick had frantically sent searchers on the path of the Princes, only to learn that once they entered Phaelin's Wood, they vanished. He was frantic; he had sent messengers on to King Stancia to determine if any of the Princes had arrived, but the messengers were being delayed by Stancia's Sorcerer. Prince Julian had only just completed the last of the tasks—which was to play chess with the Sorcerer with impossible stakes.

Now, the Sorcerer's intention there had been something that was the talk of all of the white magicians that had heard about it. Everyone agreed that the way he set up the final task was a brilliant bit of trickery. If Julian lost, two things would happen. The Princess would be

"spared"—the Sorcerer cleverly did not specify what she would be spared. The second thing was "you will meet your fate." But of course at this point, Julian was putting the worst possible interpretations on everything. He assumed that it meant that the Princess would live and he, Julian, would die.

On the other hand, if Julian won, the outcome would be just as bad, from the point of view of someone who was worried about the Princess. "You will live. The Princess will be no more—"

Of course, what he didn't know was that the Princess would be no more, because her father intended to make her Queen and co-ruler, with her new husband.

And Julian, of course, being the gallant young fellow that he was (and probably hoping that somehow he could wiggle out of the "fate" that awaited him), threw the game. So by losing, he won, which was the whole point of the trial, not the outcome of the game itself.

At this point, of course The Tradition was in full flood, and the moment they set eyes on each other they were passionately in love. The Sorcerer was making certain that the wedding went off unhindered in order to have King Henrick's messengers arrive at the wedding-feast itself.

Beautiful timing. This put any idea of Julian returning home out of the question; he was Prince Regnant now, and had his own Kingdom to rule, King Stancia having established Julian and his daughter as co-Rulers, and intending to abdicate in a year or so. So the messengers would return home with the news that the most despised of the three had triumphed, but with only the vaguest hints of what had happened to the other two Princes.

Meanwhile, Karelina in Phaelin's Wood had passed Octavian on to Arachnia. And that was proving to be a stroke of genius. Arachnia and her consort looked the part of Evil Sorcerers, and at this point, they really enjoyed playing the part so long as they could do so without ever harming anyone. So Octavian was now wandering about in Arachnia's forest, a place perpetually shrouded in gloom, dripping with rain, thick with will-o-the-wisps and foxfire, abounding in giant frogs, enormous insects, and colossal spiders. Some of the weirder tribes of the Fair Folk liked to live in such surroundings, and they were all of the mischief-making sort. The place was tailor-made to give Octavian the sort of lesson he deserved, and eventually Arachnia herself would take over the final portion of it, as he was reduced to begging at the door of her kitchen for shelter and work. And when he proved himself worthy, he would be sent home, beautifully clothed and armed, on a finer horse than anything King Henrick had in the stables. Randolf had done some delving into the past for her, and it seemed that Octavian was less of a bully than Elena had thought; the "bullying" was Octavian's clumsy attempt to get Julian to come up to the standard that their father thought was acceptable. It wasn't done out of sadism or spite; in fact, Octavian was dimly worried for his youngest brother, afraid—

Well, what he was afraid of was the sort of thing that one didn't talk about in Kohlstania. But one single conversation that Randolf dug up explained it all. Octavian had been talking to his best friend, the Master-At-Arms of the castle. "Afraid he's turning into a—" Octavian's voice had dropped to a whisper"—a nancy-boy." Both men had shuddered, as at a fate so much worse than death it didn't bear thinking about. Octavian had straightened his shoulders. "Gotta cure him of that, by God," he'd said gruffly. "Can't have that in the family. Disgrace! Besides, Papa'd kill him." And Octavian had then gone about, making his clumsy, simpleminded best effort to turn Julian into a Real Man for his Own Good.

Alexander had missed all of this, of course, having been packed off to the military academy to get him away from Julian's possible "taint."

All of which explained a great deal about the youngest and oldest scions of the Kohlstanian Royal Family. Julian was the rebel, in his own quiet way, and had come out of it all the better man—certainly the more humane man. Octavian desperately needed some of that moral superiority shaken out of him.

But Alexander—Alexander was a different kettle of fish altogether.

He was afflicted with Octavian's sense of moral superiority; he was also afflicted with a case of class superiority. But there was one more little problem with Prince Alexander. It was what the military academy had made out of him.

She sighed. She did not understand it, and could only observe the results, which were dire.

There was no apparent connection in his mind between himself and the vast majority of mankind.

The only people that mattered were the ones of "his" class and a little below. Everyone else was chattel.

She suspected this was because the military academy to which he had been sent turned out officers that treated their men like little counters on a game-board. Fodder for the front lines, and not human at all. And it was a place reserved only for the sons of the elite of Kohlstania, which only reinforced the cadets' sense of superiority.

Whatever the reason, it would take more than wandering about as Octavian was doing to drive it home to him that he was, when all else was stripped away, no better than any other man, and quite a bit worse than a lot of them.

"I believe he'd better eat in the garden," she decided aloud, and went on to help Robin in the kitchen.

At least he had learned his first lesson as a donkey; according to Rose, who brought him his breakfast, there was quite a pile of chopped and split wood already stacked up for seasoning.

Elena had almost brought him his breakfast herself.

Except that she had realized, even as she was reaching for plates, that there was something other than her own thoughts nudging her down that particular path.

And when she realized that, she stopped, closed her eyes, and felt the unmistakable presence of The Tradition.

When Rose brought the dirty plates back, she took a moment to check again. And there was no doubt. The Tradition was trying to fit them into a tale.

At that moment, she thought she could hear Madame Bella, and her warning about what having a Prince hanging about a Godmother could mean.

She tightened her lips, and realized that it was far more important for her to keep the upper hand with him than she had realized. There was no place in The Tradition for a Godmother to be courted honorably by a Prince—therefore, The Tradition would be hunting for some other option that might fit. The most logical one was to fit him in as The Prisoner, which, in effect, he was.

And there was a precedent for good magicians holding royalty prisoner in order to facilitate their going through a set of trials. That was the path she wanted this thing to take.

The trouble was, in that case, the magician was usually old and male.

The Tradition was having some difficulty with her being neither.

So the next logical role for Alexander was that of the Seducer, and ultimately, the Betrayer.

And as for her—she remembered all too well what Bella had told her. She was supposed to have been the bride of a Prince, and hence, every unmarried Prince that crossed her path was going to be irresistibly attractive to her. She was going to have to fight that, every moment that he was not a donkey.

Hob was right. The man was trouble.

The problem was, she had taken the situation on; she was honor-bound now to see it through.

"I'm an idiot," she muttered under her breath, and went off to see the Unicorns. The stallions had agreed to let her have as much magic as she wanted—which was considerably less than she was going to take.

There was at least one bright spot in all of this. If The Tradition was going to start trying to manipulate her again, there was going to be magic accumulating around her, magic she could siphon off of herself for the first time since she had become a Godmother. There was a sort of ironic justice in it; she was going to have the magic she needed to fight the will of The Tradition from the magic The Tradition was using to try to force her to its will. And using that magic to fight The Tradition was only going to make The Tradition bring more magic to bear on her, which she could in her turn use to fight it....

It was enough to make a sane person dizzy.

At least she was getting firewood for the winter out of all of this!

Confined to the cottage and grounds as he was, Alexander got his fill of looking at the Witch early in the day. As the sun rose and the heat increased, Hob took him off cutting wood and moved him to carrying water for the Brownie, Lily, to water the garden. At several points in the proceedings, that woman sauntered past with a Unicorn following her like a faithful dog, and finally he muttered something under his breath.

The Brownie had sharper ears than he had reckoned on. "She's not a Witch," Lily said, matter-of-factly, as she carefully watered the base of each of the squash plants.

"What?" he asked.

"She's not a Witch," Lily repeated. "She's a Fairy Godmother. Except that she's mortal, not one of the Fair Folk."

He muttered something under his breath. The Brownie evidently took this to mean that he was interested, and proceeded to lecture him at length about Witches, Godmothers and Sorceresses, and how they were different from each other. He got some relief from the lecture when he had to go fetch more water, but not much, since she took it up again where she had left off the moment he returned.

And she asked him questions about what she'd told him, just as if she was one of his tutors!

If he didn't answer to her satisfaction, she went on about it until his head was full of it, and he took to paying attention just so she wouldn't natter endlessly about it so much. So by the time he got to take a break for something to eat at around noon, he knew a thousand times more about magicians than he'd ever learned in his entire life.

At least he knew enough not to call that woman a "Witch" again. Though he was damned if he'd call her "Godmother." He thought about "Mistress," with the sarcastic inflection that would turn it into an insult, but decided, on the whole, he'd better stick to what the Brownies called her.

"Madame Elena."

Arrogant bitch.

After lunch, Master Hob came and dragged him off to some other work, helping to lay the drystone wall that he had hauled stone for as a donkey. At least Hob didn't lecture.

Finally, though, when he saw that woman wander by three times in the course of what could not even have been an hour, he growled under his breath, "Oh, Godmother, is it? Base-born peasant more like! Belongs in the kitchen, she does; too stupid to recognize her betters, cleaning pots would be good enough for her. Doesn't she ever do any work?"

Hob stopped what he was doing. Stopped dead. And in a cold voice that put goose bumps on Alexander's arms, said, "Don't ever say that in my hearing again."

No threat. No punishment. Just that. And somehow, that simple sentence felt more imperiling than a cold knife-blade laid along his neck.

He coughed. Hob ignored him. Not, as in merely ignored him, but as in, "paid no attention to him because his intelligence was less than that of the village idiot." To say he resented that was an understatement, but he was also not going to push things.

Because thanks to Lily's lecture, he knew what, exactly, the four little people were. Though they might play at being servants, they were Fair Folk, and if the tales of his childhood were anything to go by, they could be powerful. He already knew that Hob was physically stronger than any two adult human men and all you had to do was look at the amount of wall he'd built today, by himself, to know that there was something quite formidable about the Brownie; Hob had magic himself, for sure, because every stone he laid (and he laid them twice as fast as a human mason) was placed perfectly and never moved or shifted. Alexander wasn't particularly anxious to see Hob perform some sort of magic on him.

He must have offended Hob more deeply than he guessed, for about dinnertime, Hob simply got up and stalked off, leaving him there beside the stone wall, wondering what to do. It was Lily who came for him a moment later.

"Come along, young fool," she said, beckoning to him. "You've gotten Hob in a temper, you have, and that takes some doing."

Alexander got up and followed her obediently, as she led the way to the kitchen yard. She pointed at the pump.

"Wash yourself up," she told him curtly. "And yes, I know what you said around Hob. Maybe your kind don't think that much of an insult, but I'm going to tell you why our kind does."

And while he stripped himself to the waist, while he washed himself in cold water and harsh soap until she was satisfied, and while he donned the clean, coarse clothing of a base-born laborer that she handed to him, she told him.

He got the main idea early on; how it was the Godmothers and the Wizards who worked tirelessly to keep things running smoothly. But as she elaborated on her theme, detailing all that Madame Elena had, herself, accomplished in the last several weeks, he found himself grudgingly impressed against his will. It wasn't so much the steering of lives into the most pleasant— or at least, the least harmful—path. It was something else; the way that the Godmothers also served as intermediaries between the world of the fully magical and the "real" world that he had (until now, at least) lived in.

Madame Elena had been doing a respectable amount of what he would call

"herding"—protecting the Fair Folk from human encroachment, and the humans from Fair Folk meddling. "Used to be, before there was a lot of Godmothers and Wizards, half the time a farmer wouldn't know when he went out to his barn of a morning whether he'd find his horses lathered up from being stolen for a Wild Hunt in the night, or whether his cows had been milked dry. And as for you so-called highborn lot, well! Used to be unless you had nursery-maids awake all night, and horseshoes over the cradle, you'd end up with a changeling in place of your firstborn! There'd be Fair Folk coming around at feast-time, and woe betide if you failed in courtesy! There's many a noble house was in ruins within a year, or still has some dreadful curse hanging over it, because the door got slammed in some Fae Queen or Elven Knight's face! And then there was what you Mortals used to do to our kind!"

Now, as it happened, this was one aspect of which Alexander himself had direct experience, and no reason to doubt.

When he had first been sent to the military academy, his best friend had been another young Prince, the only other royal scion in the place at the time, Robert of Bedroford. The instructors, and indeed, some of the other pupils, had kept their distance from the likable young lad, for no reason that Alexander had been able to see. His own valet had tried to discourage the friendship, but when he had been unable to dissuade Alexander by indirect means, had finally shrugged and said, enigmatically, "Well, perhaps it won't come, being as he isn't home."

What "it" was, no one would tell him, and Robert had seemed blissfully unaware of the existence of "it."

Then came the morning of Robert's seventeenth birthday.

The two of them had planned to spend it together, once drills and lessons were done, but Robert was missing from his bed at reveille.

Frantic searching and questioning of the servants finally uncovered a single kitchen-girl who'd seen him, just after midnight, going down to the stables, white-faced, and moving like a man in a nightmare. He'd emerged a short while later, astride a huge black, red-eyed stallion, and galloped off into the night.

Now, as Alexander himself knew, there were no stallions of any color, and no black horses, red-eyed or otherwise, in the academy stables. In point of fact, because the academy uniform was a handsome dark blue, all of the academy horses were a carefully dappled-grey, so that all of them matched. And all of them were geldings.

A search party was organized—but it had seemed to Alexander that it was a singularly dis organized party, with no sense of urgency to it. And in fact, nothing was found.

A week later, a letter had come from Bedroford, which Alexander, as Robert's friend, had been permitted to read. Prince Robert's body had been deposited "as anticipated" on the threshold of the Palace by a huge, black, red-eyed stallion at dawn on the morning of his birthday. It was the phrase "as anticipated" that had come as a shock.

Even more of a shock had been the explanation, carefully and clinically given to him. The Royal House of Bedroford, it seemed, was under a curse, incurred when the firstborn son and heir had insulted an Elven Queen and stolen her favorite stallion five hundred years before. Since that time, the firstborn son of every generation was doomed to try to ride the Elven Stallion between midnight and dawn of his seventeenth birthday. Very few of them survived the experience, as the Stallion could, and usually did, perform antics such as galloping along the bottoms of rivers and charging along the tops of mountains where the air was too thin to breathe.

And, of course, it could (and did) gallop through the Faerie Realms as well, which contained things that were not meant for mortal eyes. Of all of the firstborn Princes of Bedroford, only three had survived the ride, and of those three, only one had emerged sane.

All this Alexander had learned only after Robert's death. His family had hoped that the curse might be subverted if he was not raised at home, that when the Stallion came for him, it would look for him at Bedroford and, not finding him, give up.

Clearly, nothing of the kind had happened.

"Have you ever heard of the curse on Bedroford?" he asked, hesitantly.

She put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow. "Oh, yes. And have you ever heard our side of it?" She didn't give him a chance to answer. "Young fool makes a drunken bet, marches into the High Hall as drunk as a tinker, sits down at the Queen's Table, and treats her like his doxy. Then, if you please, he steals the Black Horse. Bad enough. Except, the Black Horse is her brother, and the bridle he bound the Horse with was made with Cold Iron. He was a year in healing, can't show his face, now, without a mask. He bears the scars and the pain of them to this day; mark one of us with Cold Iron and we suffer from it forever. And thanks to that, he'll never be made King, for our Kings must be without flaw."

Alexander thought about Robert; thought about all of the Princes before Robert who had died. Then thought about living—forever—in pain, denied the right to your own throne. It might drive you mad.

"It's thanks to the Godmothers and the Wizards that sort of thing doesn't happen nearly as often anymore. And you lot don't see any of this," Lily finished crossly, handing him a thick wooden comb to get the tangles out of his hair with. "Because that's the way it's supposed to be.

Them as don't want to be bothered with magic, doesn't have to see it. Which lets us as is magic go about our business without having to turn the likes of you into toads out of temper. And that doesn't even begin to cover what all the White Mages do, keeping the Dark Court Fae away from you, and the Black Mages in check. So don't you dare even hint that Madame Elena doesn't work."

She reclaimed the soap and her comb, snatched up his filthy clothing, and stalked off. She returned with his dinner and shoved it at him, then stalked off again.

Apparently, no one was going to invite him to the table....

He glanced around and finally elected to sit on another section of drystone wall to eat. He could hear the murmur of voices in the kitchen, and occasional laughter. He wondered if they were laughing at him.

Sunrise to sunset— He didn't have much longer as himself; he'd better enjoy it.

As the sun began to set, Elena reluctantly finished the last of her pastry and went out to look for the Prince. A bit to her surprise—because it wouldn't have been out of keeping with his attitude for him to try to make a few more attempts at escape— she found him waiting in the garden, back in his princely (now clean) clothing again. There was a stubborn set to his chin and a rebellious glare in his eyes, but she ignored both and crooked her little finger at him.

"Down to the stable, my lad," she said, leading the way. Another surprise; he followed.

He had looked quite different in the sort of loose shirt and breeches that common folks wore, with his hair all tousled and rough-combed. He wouldn't have been out of place in the village, though she had to admit, he was quite a bit handsomer than most of the village lads.

Hmm. Break hearts and promises and never give a damn, either, she reminded herself.

As the last light of sunset faded from the sky, she watched her spell take hold again, watched the despair on his face before it turned into that of a donkey. And decided, out of fairness to him, to at least tell him what had happened to his brothers.

She perched on an upturned bucket. "Your brother Julian has won King Stancia's daughter,"

she began.

"Oh, yes," the donkey grumbled. "With your help. Cheating."

"No, it wasn't," she retorted. "My test was as valid as any of the others, and for your information, twenty young men, both royal and common, passed that same test at the hands of other White Mages. Julian was the twenty-first Quester to make it that far. But he was the only one to get the help of all three wilderness spirits before he got there."

"Wilderness spirits? Was that what you were gabbling about with him?" the donkey asked reluctantly, as if the words were being pulled from him.

"The first was a fox-spirit, whose tail was caught in a tree. That one was fairly obvious. The second was a lark, whose nest was being threatened by a snake; that one, only about half of the Questers spotted. The final one was something you truly had to look for." She smiled to herself, but the donkey noticed; his ears flattened a little, sulkily. "A Queen ant on her maiden flight was caught in a spiderweb; he heard her crying and freed her."

"What good is an ant?" the donkey asked crossly.

"Now, the first task on the mountain was to get into the maze that surrounds it, by going past the lion at the obvious entrance," she continued, ignoring him. "That was where the fox came in; she could slip through a rabbit tunnel dug under the wall and trip the latch to a locked door on the other side. The second task was to thread the maze, and that was where the lark came in; she could hover above and call out the right turnings. But the third task was to separate a bushel of wheat from a bushel of oats and place the oats in one measure of a scale and the wheat in the other. Only if the scale balanced correctly, proving you'd separated them all, would the door to the Sorcerer's Tower open. It was the ants that separated the grain for Julian; the Queen he had saved called on them and got them to help him."

"Those are stupid tasks!" the donkey burst out. "What about fighting a terrible monster, or climbing a cliff? Things that would prove a Quester is a good warrior!"

"What about them?" she replied. "The Mountain itself is enough to prove whether or not you are strong and can endure. As for fighting—" She shrugged. "Any fool can fight. The wise man is one who knows when not to, and when to rely on the cleverness of others."

There was a long moment of quiet; shadows had begun to fill the stable, and she wondered if Alexander had fallen asleep.

"So what was the final task?" the donkey asked suddenly, out of the darkness.

She told him.

"Huh," he grunted. "So where's the cleverness in that?"

"He had to lose without making it look as if he was losing on purpose. Otherwise, the Sorcerer would have known he was stupid, not gallant and willing to sacrifice himself," she replied.

"Huh." Another silence. "Does my father know?"

"Yes," she told him, and left it at that. "Now, I have things to do. Good night."

"Huh," said the donkey as she rose. She waited a moment longer, but there was not even a curt "good night" coming from the shadowy corner of the stall where he stood.

Still no more manners than a donkey, she thought in disgust, and left him alone in the dark.