Fibonacci series and had solved the same afternoon she entered it. There was what she privately thought of as the Pleasure Garden, after the gardens mentioned in the poem 'Kubla Khan' by Coleridge. This was a place of nooks and bowers, artificial grottoes and other places suitable for romantic tete-a-tetes, all planted around with bushes of fragrant leaves or flowering vines, all planned in such a way that each was invisible to the next or the one behind.
There was a Water Garden, a series of ponds graced with waterfalls and fountains, planted with lilies and other water-loving plants, and stocked with enormous, gracefully-moving fish of gold, white, and black.
A Kitchen Garden clearly supplied the estate with herbs and salads, and there was even a small orchard. But by far the largest part of the grounds had been sculpted into a clever imitation of a wild forest, complete with an artful 'ruined tower,' rustic swings, pretty little 'forest huts' for shelter, and sculpted seats beneath the branches of some quite magnificent trees. A masterful hand had been at work here, keeping the best of the wilderness that had been here intact, leaving pockets of completely wild brush to preserve the illusion of absolute wild, while taming the rest so that it was inspiring rather than intimidating.
Cameron had walls around the gardens, but they were decorative rather than functional. At the extreme of his property, he had a single wire strung as a token fence. It was not even barbed wire-he had no near neighbors, and there were supposedly no dangerous animals about, so all that this 'fence' did was to define his property line. Once she got this far-if she had to flee-she could make her way down to the coastline and follow it to San Francisco, or follow the fence-line in the other direction to the rail-spur and follow it to the main line. It would be a long and grueling walk; it might well take two or even three days. But she had no doubt that she could make it, provided she could avoid pursuit.
Perhaps it was foolish to think about a need to escape from this place-
But it would have seemed ridiculous to think that Jason Cameron was a magician, two days ago, she reminded herself, as she made her way back to the mansion itself. I believe in the next day or so I will try to find where the rail-spur crosses the property line.
And if nothing else, this was certainly ensuring that she got her exercise!
'Do you try again this afternoon?' the Salamander asked, watching Cameron lay out the lines of a magickal diagram in specially enchanted chalk on the floor of his workroom. He had stuck the chalk itself through a potato so that he could manipulate it, for otherwise his paws did not have fine enough control to hold something the size of a stick of chalk.
'Yes,' he replied in a grunt that betrayed his pain; his body was poorly suited to bending over, and the position was causing him more difficulty than usual. At the same time, he dared not take any narcotic for the pain; he could not afford to make a mistake in this diagram.
'Are you certain this is a good idea?' the Salamander continued. 'You have not found out anything new in what the girl has read to you.'
'Nevertheless-I think-I have-a new-insight,' he grunted. Perusal of his notes this afternoon had given him a slightly different perspective into the spell-or rather, the counter-spell-that was supposed to have reversed his condition. He thought, perhaps, he might have deduced a piece that had been deliberately left out of the original manuscript. If he was right, he should be able to enact the altered spell and return to human form.
The main question in his mind now was if the spell would be effective on his hybrid form. It was possible that the only way to make the reversal would be to transform all the way to wolf first, then return to his human state. If that was true, his task was doubly difficult, for he would first have to find out what had gone wrong with the transformation to wolf, then make corresponding changes in the reversal-spell, then perform both.
I must have been insane. The medieval spell of the loup-garou appeared often in tales, but in only one real grimoire that he had ever discovered. That alone should have made him extremely cautious. He knew that most medieval Masters held things back from their written records, kept key points secret in order to maintain their power over their Apprentices. He should have assumed that this grimoire would have been no exception.
And he should never have trusted the grimoire of an Earth Master who created such a thing as a lycanthrope spell. What use was it, except to terrify or spy upon one's neighbors? If one wished to experience life as a wolf, there were many spells to place one as an observer within the mind of a real wolf. Earth Masters in general were the mildest of creatures, much taken up with the health and fertility of the regions in which they lived, with studying the flora and fauna, and tended to be very conservative in their Magicks. The Master who had written the grimoire must, therefore, have been something of a 'maverick,' unusual in his interests and in his approach to Earth Magick. Cameron knew now that he should have taken warning from this.
Instead, he had felt a cocky kinship with the long-dead Master, and confidence in his own ability to be as much of an innovator as the man who had penned the spells in this grimoire.
Stupid, foolish, over-confident ... all those described Cameron, and well he knew it. After all, overconfidence was what had led him to accept Paul du Mond as an Apprentice, so certain he had been that he could make a silk purse out of that particular sow's ear. But up until now, he had never gotten himself into a difficulty he could not manage to get himself out of with a profit.
