Wizard at Work (3 page)

Princess Rosalie and her stepmother and her stepsister all sighed in relief.

"And as for Prince Bernard, I can help there, too. So why don't you contact Francis"—he
couldn't resist adding—"the Master Craftsman of the Wood-Carvers Guild, and tell him to come on home."

"Oh, thank you!" The mean-faced stepsister threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek, while her mother curtsied to him.

"Best of luck to both of you always," he added, as they started to leave. And if they noticed the spell-casting flip of his wrist or heard the strange, formal words that accompanied it, they didn't say.

Before the door had even clicked shut, the wizard made a big wave with his arms and said some more magic words.

The huge princess, sitting so lightly on the edge of her bed, diminished to about a quarter of her former size and sank solidly into her down mattress.

The Saint Bernard, sitting on the floor by her feet with his tongue hanging out, tipped and fell over. Before he hit the floor, he had turned back into a young man. "I say," the prince said,
scratching his head. And then again, "I say." He had a vacant, amiable look that had been more becoming when his face had been that of a dog. But the wizard figured that was Princess Rosalie's problem.

Without a word to them, he started the gesture and incantation to transport himself back home. But then he stopped, just long enough to point a warning finger at the princess. "I hope you learned your lesson," he said.

And he was already home by the time he added, very softly, "
I
certainly did."

In the pond beyond his garden, the wizard was in his rowboat, which was held together more by spells than patches—because, long as July days are, they never seemed long enough both to fix the old fishing boat and to fish. Whenever it came down to making a decision, fixing or fishing, he always leaned more toward fishing.

On the off chance that the warmth of the midsummer sun and the gentle swaying of the boat might, by coincidence, make him doze off, he had brought a pillow. He had his straw hat over
his face—strictly to prevent sunburn—and he was just thinking that the last thing he needed at this perfect moment was for a fish to actually bite on the end of his line, when he heard someone call, "Halllloooo!"

No, the wizard suddenly realized,
a visitor
was the last thing he needed.

Maybe, he thought, this was just a case of a sound carrying over the stillness of the day. Maybe whoever was calling was, in fact, calling someone else.

"Halllooo, Wizard!" the voice hailed.

Drat!
the wizard thought. He considered pretending he was asleep, but he suspected this person would not be deterred and would just keep on yelling until he became a real irritant.

Or I could pretend I haven't heard,
the wizard thought,
and row for the farther shore.
But the pond wasn't that big. If the wizard rowed to the other side, whoever this was could walk around and meet him there.

The wizard considered doing a transporting spell, but that was silly: running away from his
own home to avoid an unwanted visitor. And where would he go? And how long would he have to stay away to discourage this man into leaving?

With a sigh, the wizard sat up, placed the hat back on the top of his head, and began rowing to shore.
Maybe this won't take too long
, he told himself. He kept his own, true appearance, hoping his youthfulness would discourage the man. But his visitor was young himself, and not easily discouraged.

He tried to help the wizard out of the boat, though the wizard was perfectly capable and used to doing it on his own, so that they both ended up ankle-deep in a muddy patch on the bank.

"I'm so glad I found you at home," the man chattered at him. "I come from the village of Saint Wayne the Stutterer, and we need your help."

At least Saint Wayne the Stutterer was close by, just on the other side of the hill. The wizard dared to hope this might be quick after all.

"What's the problem?" he asked.

"Wild beasts on the rampage," the man said.

"What kind of beasts?" The wizard was
thinking,
Rabid wolves?
Diseased wolves, unlike healthy wolves, would attack people.
Wild boar?
The villagers had recently cleared a section of the forest, and maybe, with their territory destroyed, a family of boar—always aggressive animals—had turned on them.
A pack of feral dogs? Dragons? Basilisks?

The man from Saint Wayne's said, "Unicorns."

The wizard shuddered. He said, "I'll go there immediately."

The mayor of
Saint Wayne the Stutterer was a woman named Enid, who had been voted into the top position when her husband, the previous mayor, had run off with the town treasury. Enid was a large woman who was honest and forthright and had a lot of common sense—attributes her missing husband didn't share.

The wizard transported himself to the village and found Enid in her kitchen, kneading and pounding bread dough. Without a town treasury, there was no way to pay the mayor a salary, so Enid had to support herself.

"Hello, Wizard," Enid said, pausing in her work. "Thanks for coming so quickly."

"I know how unicorns can be," the wizard said. "Are these mature unicorns gone bad, or yearlings?"

"Yearlings," Enid said, picking pieces of dough off the backs of her hands, "about a half dozen of them. Adolescent males showing off for the females, tough females—the kind that wear their manes all spiked and that laugh and egg the males on. They all get drunk eating fermented fruit, then come into town, where they make faces at the little kids, chew tobacco and spit it out on the sidewalk, form crop circles with the power of their horns, kick mud on the farm horses and call them 'no-horns.' We hoped they would move on, but the trouble's been escalating: They walk all in a line, intimidating people into getting out of their way. Goosing old folks with their horns. Breaking windows, though always at night—there's never any proof. Things disappear off laundry lines. But last night..."

Enid paused and the wizard could guess what
she was going to say next. All of this was following a typical pattern.

"Last night," she continued, "they broke into Farmer Seymour's barn, grabbed one of the pigs, and had a pig roast out on the beach."

The wizard shook his head. "Unicorns that eat meat only get wilder."

"That's why we sent for you."

"Any idea where they're likely to be?" the wizard asked.

"Well, that's another thing," Enid told him. "My son, Jack, has been hanging around with them. That's another one that doesn't seem to have the sense he was born with. Don't get me started."

The wizard shook his head to indicate that getting her started was the last thing on his mind.

"I try to give Jack responsibilities, hoping to make him more mature, think things through, act like a rational person rather than like his father." She repeated, "Don't get me started."

The wizard guessed, "So ... you're saying Jack's likely to be with the unicorns?"

"Try the pool hall," Enid suggested. "That's as
good a place as any to waste away a fine summer day."

"Thank you," the wizard said, backing out of her kitchen before she got started talking about sixteen-year-old sons or missing husbands or hooligan unicorns again.

Jack was In
the pool hall, though the unicorns weren't. The wizard hadn't really thought they would be. Magical creatures or not, unicorns were at a definite disadvantage when it came to holding pool cues, and the management had a sign up saying:

Jack was sitting at one of the tables in the bar area, his head pillowed by his arms. The wizard thought maybe the unicorns weren't the only ones overdoing the fermented fruit.

The wizard knew the smartest thing would be to ignore Jack and ask around to see if anybody else knew where the unicorns might be, but the young man was so obviously depressed, the wizard felt sorry for him. He went and sat down next to him.

"My mother," Jack said, without bothering to look up, "is going to kill me."

The wizard considered this statement. "Well, it's always a possibility, I suppose. But all in all, rather unlikely."

"No," Jack insisted. "My mother is going to kill me."

"Does this have anything to do with the unicorns?" the wizard asked, thinking they might have dared or taunted him into doing something he shouldn't have.

"I don't think so." Jack sat up and looked at the wizard. "Do unicorns cheat at cards?"

"Probably not," the wizard answered. "It's hard to have an ace up your sleeve when you don't, in fact,
have
a sleeve."

Jack gave the wizard a disgusted look. "I wasn't
playing cards with the unicorns. I was playing with a bunch of guys. You're the one who brought up the unicorns. I thought you were saying the unicorns sent those guys to win all my money from me." Jack winced. "Actually, it was my mother's money. She should never have trusted me. It's all her fault. Besides, I think the guys were cheating."

"What makes you say that?" the wizard asked.

Jack got that this-wizard-is-an-idiot look again and said, "Because they won all my money."

The wizard didn't point out that maybe they were just better cardplayers. Jack seemed to be the sort who liked to blame other people for his troubles.

Jack asked, "Do you think my mother would believe me if I told her I was robbed at knifepoint?"

"As mayor," the wizard pointed out, "she'd feel responsible for protecting the village from armed bandits, so she'd have to investigate a report like that."

"How about a freak windstorm?" Jack asked.
"Freak windstorms aren't a mayor's responsibility. I could say the money was whipped out of my hand before I could put it safely away."

"You could tell the truth," the wizard suggested.

"I could," Jack mused. "Or, how about: I came across a poor, starving, diseased orphan child and I thought, 'We have so much more than he does,' so I gave the money away?"

The wizard would have left Jack to remain there feeling sorry for himself, but he hated to inflict the lad on Enid. "Maybe if you helped me find and control the unicorns, your mother would forgive you."

"What would you pay me?" Jack asked.

"Nothing," the wizard said.

"Oh, well, that's not such a wonderful deal, then," Jack said.

I definitely should have left him alone and asked somebody else,
the wizard thought, getting to his feet.

But Jack got up also. "All right, I'll help you," he said. "Maybe if I get killed, then my mother will forgive me."

The unicorns, Jack told the wizard, were probably in Farmer Seymour's north field. They liked to bother Farmer Seymour because his face turned such an interesting shade of purple when he got angry.

As the wizard and Jack approached the north field, they could smell the enticing aroma of roasting meat.

"Uh-oh," Jack said. "Smells like they got another of Farmer Seymour's pigs."

The wizard sniffed.
Not pork,
he decided.
Beef.
The unicorns were behaving worse and worse. Unstopped, they would develop a craving for dragon meat. The dragons would be understandably irritated and would wage war on the unicorns—dragon flame against unicorn magic. That would be the end of any farmland—or farmer—caught between the two factions.

And the worst unicorns eventually went after the most challenging game of all: humans.

But for the moment, these unicorns had turned their attention to Farmer Seymour's shed, which had an easy-to-climb-onto roof. The males were
taking turns daring one another to jump off it to impress the females.

As Jack and the wizard got to the pit where the unicorns were roasting their cow, all six unicorns stepped in front of the fire as though worried that the wizard would try to take their carnivore-style meal away from them. They started to whistle and jeer. "Hey, Jack," they called out, "who's your
old
friend?"

And the wizard didn't even have his old-man disguise on.

The wizard was relieved to see that Enid had been right: These were immature unicorns. They would probably settle down with age, if they didn't provoke interspecies war before then.

The wizard told them, "Why don't you go home and leave the people of this village alone? Surely your parents are missing you."

"Surely nobody's missing
you,
" one of the unicorns sneered. The other unicorns laughed as though this were incredibly clever.

If the wizard had known where the parents of
these unicorns were, he could have used his transporting spell to send them there. The parents would no doubt be able to tell exactly how much fermented fruit their offspring had been consuming, and the wizard doubted these unicorns would be allowed out unsupervised for a good long time.

But because the wizard
didn't
know where the parents were, that wouldn't work.

He could simply transport them away from the village of Saint Wayne the Stutterer, but that would just be passing the problem on to someone else.