Luck of the Draw (Xanth) (3 page)

“I’m a toy of a supernatural spirit?”

“Yes, in essence.”

“But I don’t believe in the supernatural,” he protested.

Both Dawn and Picka laughed. “You’ll get over that soon enough,” the skeleton said.

Indeed, if this was not a dream, there was plenty of evidence for the supernatural, beginning with the animated talking skeleton. “I just realized that it probably was not the yellow box with the three items that changed me,” Bryce said, working it out. “The instructions were merely labels, a protocol signaling my readiness to participate. The youthening, magic talent, and love for Princess Harmony were all done by the Demon when I spoke the magic words. Because Rachel happened to be in the vicinity at that moment, she was affected too, entering Xanth with me, getting youthened to a lesser degree, and getting the magic talent of being able to speak the words she knew.”

“Exactly,” Dawn said.

“So assuming that I must participate, regardless of my choice in the matter, what is my best course of action?”

“You are sensible,” Dawn said. “You both should take a few days to familiarize yourself with Xanth and its local customs, as well as learning to use your talent effectively. Then you should go to see the Good Magician Humfrey, who will advise you how to proceed. I suspect he won’t charge his usual exorbitant fee, considering that this must be a Demon incident.”

“What exorbitant fee?” Bryce asked warily.

“He normally charges a year’s service, or the equivalent,” Picka said.

“A year’s service! I just want to go home!”

“Do you?” Dawn asked gently.

And Bryce realized that he had nothing to return to except old age, illness, loneliness, and death. “No. I don’t know what I really want.” He looked at Rachel. “Do you?”

She wagged her tail. “No.”

“You want to relive your life, this time making better decisions,” Dawn said. “This is your chance.”

“I suppose it is,” Bryce agreed, amazed. “Crazy as it seems.”

“And to do that, you need to remain here in Xanth and perform your Demon-inspired task.”

Bryce sighed. “This is the kind of channeling I would prefer to avoid. Throughout my mundane life, others made key choices for me: my mediocre residence, my indifferent schooling, my dull job, even really my wife. Oh, she was a good woman, and I loved her, I’m not complaining about that, but I really did not choose her myself. My family thought she’d be good for me and guided me rather forcefully toward her. They were right, but it would have been better if I had been able to make my own decision. Now some Demon is channeling me similarly, and some Good Magician, and some teenaged princess. Who knows, I might have loved her on my own, if I could ever get over the immense disparity in our ages and stations, but I wasn’t given the chance. I was potioned or magicked into artificial love. Where are my choices? What is the point, as far as my personal life is concerned?”

“He’s got a point,” Picka said. In that moment Bryce found himself liking the skeleton.

Dawn frowned as if addressing a willful child. “In Mundania, even if you had been granted complete free will, your choices would have been severely limited. You would have had to choose a residence similar to the one you had, and get an education similar to the one you did, and labor at a job similar to the one you got, and you would have had to marry a woman who might not have been as good as the one your family found for you. So if you could live your Mundane life over, what would you do, really?”

Bryce looked at her. “You don’t come across like the starlet model you resemble. You are making uncomfortable sense.”

“I have had my own struggles with realism,” she said with a wan smile. “I did manage to break the mold that my royalty and appearance set for me, to a degree. I married for love rather than status, unlike my sister Eve. That’s why I wed Picka.”

They were married? Oh yes, she had said so before. “If I may ask, is it usual for a princess and a skeleton to marry?”

“No. And that is the point. The constraints on a princess are considerable, but I managed to find a way to express myself regardless. You can do the same.”

“I can?”

“You are faced with a new situation, with new rules. Learn the rules, then discover how you can forge your own way despite them. Isn’t that what real choice is?”

He nodded. “I suspect it is. And if I understand correctly, the first rule is that I must win the Princess Harmony if I want to remain here in Xanth for any length of time. If I fail, my Demon sponsor will have no further use for me.”

“There are worse fates than marrying a pretty princess. Once that chore is accomplished, you should be able to choose the rest of your life more freely. Harmony is not a domineering girl, though she can be mischievous. And if you fail, having tried your best, chances are your Demon sponsor will simply leave you where you are, here in Xanth, and forget about you. Then you will truly be able to live your life over. But if you deliberately fail, you could face the wrath of an angry Demon.” She shuddered evocatively.

It was a persuasive case. “And most of my choices will be more subtle personal ones, such as how I treat others. I am beginning to like this game.”

“However, Xanth has its darknesses,” she cautioned him. “Do not take anything here for granted until you understand it. You will need guidance.”

“I surely will,” he agreed. “But I’m not sure who will relish the task of guiding me.”

“Woofer and Tweeter will show you around,” Dawn said.

“Who?”

A large dark mongrel dog entered the room, with a brownish parakeet perched on his head. “Woof!” he said.

“Tweet,” the bird added.

Introduction enough. “Hello Woofer, Tweeter. I am Bryce, from Mundania, and this is Rachel.”

Woofer eyed Rachel. “Woof!”

Bryce could have sworn that Rachel blushed, and a little heart-shaped dog bone sailed out from her head, though that was of course impossible. Or was it? Woofer must be the dog she had been spelled into love with.

“They are from Mundania too,” Dawn said.

“Oh?”

“They came with a Mundane family, which returned to Mundania. But later they rejoined us here in Xanth. They are among my closest friends.”

“You will get to understand their speech before long,” Picka said. “They are nice folk. You can trust them.”

So he was being handed off to animals. But if this was one of the rules of this realm, he could handle it. “I shall. What’s next?”

“Woof.” The dog turned and dog-trotted out of the chamber, still carrying the bird.

Bemused, Bryce and Rachel followed. Evidently Rachel had no better notion how to handle her magic love than Bryce did. She was being appropriately diffident. The animals led them to an upstairs chamber where a bed was laid out. Beside it was a plush dog blanket. “Is this for us?” Bryce asked, surprised. Dawn had said he could be a guest here, but he hadn’t thought it would be in the castle proper.

“Tweet.” It sounded like yes. Was it his imagination?

“Picka said I would come to understand your speech. Did he mean that literally?”

“Woof.” That was definitely a yes.

“And it is evident that you understand me. So where do we go from here?”

“Tweet.” And this time it sounded like “First shower and change.”

So he did. Rachel waited, not needing to do those things. There was a very nice bathroom, complete with a well-appointed shower. He stripped and used it, feeling invigorated. When he emerged and toweled himself dry he paused to gaze at himself in the full-length mirror.

He was a supremely healthy young man, more fit and muscular than he had ever been in real life. But would it last? He decided to take the best possible care of this new body. It did look like him, as he remembered, but better. The Demon had given him an excellent start.

His old clothing was gone. In its place was a clean bright shirt and trousers, together with shoes. He put them on, and they fit perfectly, including the shoes, which were the most comfortable he could remember in ages. “It must be magic,” he said.

“Woof.”

He hadn’t realized that the castle dog was right there. But why not? It wasn’t as if he was desperate for privacy. Woofer must have been communing with Rachel.

He combed his hair, admiring his youthful features in the mirror. “A man could get to like being young,” he murmured.

“Tweet.”

“What, you two are youthened too?”

It turned out that they had indeed grown old in Mundania, but were returned to their young primes when they came back to Xanth. They did understand.

Woofer conducted him to a banquet hall where an impressive meal was laid out. “I really don’t need anything half this fancy,” Bryce protested. Then he saw the strange man. “Uh, have we met? I’m Bryce from Mundania.”

The man smiled. “We have met. I am Picka Bone, your host.”

“But Picka is a walking skeleton!”

“One of the conveniences of Caprice Castle is that we are able to alternate forms when we choose. Ah, here is Dawn.”

Bryce turned to meet her—and discovered a female skeleton. “Uh—nice bones,” he said uncertainly.

“Yes, I am Dawn,” she said, possibly smiling. It was hard to tell with her barefaced skull. “And these are our children.” She indicated a baby carriage containing an infant human baby and a similarly sized skeleton, side by side.

“My son Piton,” Picka said proudly. “A chip off the old block, as it were.”

“And my daughter Data,” Dawn said. “A calculating female.”

Then as Bryce watched, the skeleton boy became fleshly, and the fleshly girl became skeletal.

“They are learning early,” Picka said.

So it seemed.

A very nice repast was invisibly served, the new platters appearing and the used dishes disappearing. Bryce tried to catch it happening, but somehow the changes were always just when he wasn’t looking. Another convenience of the castle. Woofer and Tweeter had dishes of their own, similarly replenished. So did Rachel. Bryce could see that she was trying to mask it, but she loved being near Woofer.

“You said I would learn to understand Woofer and Tweeter soon,” Bryce said. “I believe it is already happening, unless I am imagining it. They woof and tweet, and I understand whole sentences.”

“It is true,” Dawn agreed. She wasn’t eating, as it seemed skeletons did not need to, but was tending to the babies. They were assuming human form for a gulp of milk from a bottle, then turning skeletal while the other took the bottle. They seemed to have the system worked out well. “When you feel fully conversant, you can go out punning with them, as practice in Xanth.”

“Punning?”

“Collecting puns,” Picka explained. “This is what we do here at Caprice Castle. Xanth has entirely too many puns, so it is our job to fetch them in and store them safely so they can’t escape and infest more terrain. It’s a challenge.”

What next? “I will do my best,” he said bravely, and Rachel wagged her tail. And wondered what other surprises awaited him in this odd new land. Very little seemed to be as he might have expected.

“That will surely be good enough,” Dawn said.

Bryce hoped so.

2

P
UNFEST

I
n the morning after breakfast Bryce and Rachel reported for duty. “We have no idea how to proceed,” he admitted.

“A couple of weeks of pun duty should have you more than ready to visit the Good Magician Humfrey,” Dawn said brightly. She was in flesh again, radiantly beautiful, which seemed to be her normal state. Picka Bone stood nearby in his skeletal mode.

“I am not clear on this. Exactly why do I need to see this magician?”

“He will enable you to define your Heroic Quest,” Dawn explained patiently.

Bryce smiled. “I’m no hero.” He was distracted by a vision of her doing something he didn’t understand. It was his left-eye future vision. So he closed that eye.

“You don’t have to be,” she was saying. “You simply have to tackle the Quest, so as to become worthy of the hand and heart of Princess Harmony.”

“Oh, that,” he agreed. “The teen girl. I think I should simply leave her to a more worthy suitor.”

An expression hovered in the vicinity of Dawn’s face that was deceptively similar to mischief. “You do not wish to pursue her?”

“Apart from the magic love spell, which I assume will wear off in due course, no. She’s younger than my youngest granddaughter.”

Dawn took his hand in hers. Hers was like a caress of an angel, wondrously cool and delicate. “If she holds your hand like this, and beseeches you to reconsider?”

“No. It simply makes no, if you’ll excuse the term, mundane sense.”

“And if she embraces you like this,” Dawn asked, putting her arms around him, “will you still deny her?”

He was abruptly conscious of her formidable feminine appeal. Never in his life had he held a woman as lovely as this. “Common sense says I must.” His unbelievable left-eye vision was coming true. He determinedly tuned it out, but he couldn’t stop the following reality.

“And if she kisses you like this?” She kissed him on the mouth. Pastel-colored light shone and music sounded. He seemed to be floating, conscious mainly of her divine lips on his.

It took him two and a half moments—it seemed that such things could be quantified in this magic realm—to recover his physical footing and his emotional equilibrium. He realized that he had not imagined the music; the skeleton had removed his clavicles and was using them to play the “Wedding March” on his ribs. These folk kept surprising him! “I will politely explain why it would not be fair to either of us.”

Her features seemed to shift, coming to resemble those of the princess he had seen in the mirror, complete with big brown eyes, lustrous brown hair, and a cute little crown. It was of course another illusion, but an effective one. “Please, Bryce dear, marry me.”

He steeled himself, playing the role. He felt he had to, to make his point. “Princess, I can’t do that.”

Big tears ran down her cheeks. “But I love you!”

The love spell smote him. He felt himself melting. He wanted to hold her, reassure her, agree to anything she wanted. That would doom his resolve. Only the fact that he knew this was an act, and that it wasn’t really Harmony, prevented him from capitulating. “But she’s unlikely to choose me,” he said somewhat lamely.