Fairy Godmother

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.

Chapter 14

Alexander bided his time during the next six days, working — well, like a donkey — waiting for the seventh day when he would be himself again. All right, so he couldn't escape because of that woman's spell. Very well, he would break the spell by breaking her wand. He had tried to remember as many nursery-tales about magic as he could, and every one of them said that when you broke a magician's wand, you broke all the spells that had been cast with it.

And if that didn't work, he had some other ideas.

Sure enough, at dawn on the seventh day, he woke up to find himself in his own shape again, and in his old clothes, with the woman standing over him as before. This time, though, he feigned sleep until his disorientation and dizziness passed, waiting for her to poke him with a toe again.

'Wake up, your highness' she said again, with that smirk in her voice that turned it into an insult. 'This is no holiday — '

That was when he jumped up out of the straw, seized her wand before she or Master Hob could react, and broke it over his knee.

At the least, he expected a flash of light and a peal of thunder as all of her spells fell apart.

What he got was a peal of laughter.

In fact, that woman was so convulsed with laughter that she had to hold onto the wall of his stall to keep standing up; she bent nearly double, with one hand on her stomach, tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes as she laughed. It was Master Hob who supplied the explanation, around peals of laughter of his own.

'Ye gurt fool!' he howled. 'What sort of ignoramuses are they growing in your country? Ye think a magician's power is in a puny thing like her wand?'

His face must have fallen a mile, for one look at it set Master Hob off a second time, and that woman, too. And when she picked up the pieces and fitted them back together again as if the wand had never been broken at all, that just put the icing on the cake for him.

All his energy ran out of him in a single moment, like water out of a broken jug. Utterly crestfallen, he slouched his way up to the woodpile without being ordered, eager to get away from their pitiless laughter. Thank