She sounded as if she had rehearsed her entire speech, and what little sympathy Mendanbar had had for her vanished. She and her stepmother had probably talked the whole thing out, he decided, and come to the conclusion that the quickest and surest way for her to make a suitable marriage was to go adventuring. He was amazed that she'd actually gotten into the Enchanted Forest. Usually, the woods kept out the obviously selfish.
"At last I found myself in a great waste," the princess continued complacently.
"Then I came near giving myself up for lost, for it was dry and terrible. But I saw this wood upon the farther side, and so I gathered my last strength to cross. Fortune was with me, and I achieved my goal. Fatigued with my efforts, I sat down beneath this tree to rest, and-" '"Wait a minute," Mendanbar said, frowning. "You crossed some sort of wasteland and arrived here? That can't be right. There aren't any waste-lands bordering the Enchanted Forest."
"You insult me," the princess said with dignity. "How should I lie to such a one as you? But go and see for yourself, if you yet doubt my words."
She waved one hand gracefully at the woods behind her.
"Thank you, I will," said Mendanbar. Still frowning, he walked rapidly past the princess in the direction she had indicated.
The princess's mouth fell open in surprise as he went by. Before she could collect herself to demand that he return and explain, Mendanbar was out of sight behind a tree.
Mendanbar was still congratulating himself on his escape when the trees ended abruptly. He stopped, staring, and quit worrying about the princess entirely.
A piece of the Enchanted Forest as large as the castle lawn was missing.
No, not missing; here and there, a few dead stumps poked up out of the dry, bare ground. Something had destroyed a circular swath of trees and moss, destroyed it so completely that only stumps and a few flakes of ash remained.
The taste of dust on the wind brought Mendanbar out of his daze. He hesitated, then took a step forward into the area of devastation. As he passed from woods to waste, he felt a sudden absence and stumbled in shock. Where the unseen lines of power should have been, humming with the magical energy that was the life of the Enchanted Forest , he sensed nothing. The magic was gone.
"No wonder that princess didn't have any trouble getting into the forest," Mendanbar said numbly. Without magic, this section of forest couldn't dodge away from her; all the princess had to do to get into the woods was cross it.
Seriously annoyed, Mendanbar kicked at the ground, dislodging more ashes. He bent to touch one of the stumps. The wood crumbled to dust where his hand met it. Coughing, he sat back and saw something glittering on the ground beside the next stump. He went over and picked it up.
It was a thin, hard disk a little larger than his hand, and it was a bright, iridescent green.
"A dragon's scale? What is a dragon's scale doing here?"
There was no one near to answer his question. He inspected the scale with care, but it told him nothing more. Scowling at it, he shrugged and put it in his pocket. Then he began a methodical search of the dead area, hoping to find something that would reveal a little more.
Half an hour later, he had collected four more dragon scales in various shades of green and was feeling decidedly grim. He had thought he was on good terms with the dragons who lived to the east in the Mountains of Morning: he left them alone and they left him alone. Glancing around the burned space, he grimaced.
"This doesn't look much like 'leaving me alone," "he muttered angrily.
"What do those dragons think they are doing?" He began to wish he had not left them quite so much alone for the past three years. Right now it would be useful to know something more about dragons than that they were all large and breathed fire.
Absently, Mendanbar pocketed the dragon scales and walked back to the edge of the burned-out circle. It was a relief to be under the trees where he could feel the magic of the forest again. Frowning, he paused to look back at the ashy clearing.
"I can't just leave it like this," he said to himself. "If that princess came this way, anyone might get into the Enchanted Forest just by walking across the barren space. But how do I put magic back into an area that's been sucked dry?"
Still frowning, he circled the edge of the clearing, nudging at the threads of magic that wound through the air. None of them would move any closer to the burned section, but on the far side he found the place where the normal country outside the forest touched the clearing.
He paused. It wasn't a very wide gap.
"I wonder," he said softly. "If I could move it a little, just around the edge…"
Carefully, he reached out and gathered a handful of magic. It felt a lot like taking hold of a handful of thin cords, except that the cords were invisible, floating in the air, and made his palms tingle when he touched them. And, of course, each cord was actually a piece of solid magic that he could use to cast a spell if he wanted. In fact, he had to concentrate hard to keep from casting a spell or two with all that magic crammed together in his hands.
Pulling gently on the invisible threads, Mendanbar stepped slowly backward out of the Enchanted Forest. The brilliant green moss followed him, rippling under his feet. The trees of the forest wavered as if he were looking at them through a shimmer of hot air rising off sunbaked stone.
He took another step, and another. The threads of magic felt warm and thin and slippery. He tightened his grip and took another step. The trees flickered madly, as if he were blinking very rapidly, and the moss swelled and twitched like the back of a horse trying to get rid of an unwanted rider. A drop of sweat ran down his forehead and hung on the tip of his nose. The magic in his hands felt hot and tightly stretched. He stepped back again.
With a sudden wrench, everything snapped into place. The trees stopped flickering and the moss smoothed and lay still. The forest closed up around the burned-out clearing, circling it completely and cutting it off from the outside world. Mendanbar gave a sigh of relief.
"It worked?" he cried triumphantly. A breeze brushed past him, carrying the sharp smell of ashes, and he sobered. He hadn't repaired the damage; he had only isolated it. "Well, at least it should keep people from wandering into the Enchanted Forest by accident," he reminded himself.
"That's something."
One by one, Mendanbar let go of the threads of magic he had pulled across the gap. He felt them join the other unseen strands, merging back into the normal network of magic that crisscrossed the forest.
When he had released the last thread, he wiped his hands on his shirt, then wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve.
"Are you quite finished?" said a voice from a tree above his head.
Mendanbar looked up and saw a fat gray squirrel sitting on a branch, staring down at him with disapproval.
"I think so," Mendanbar said. "For the time being, anyway."
"For the time being?" the squirrel said indignantly. "What kind of an answer is that? Not useful, that's what I call it, not useful at all.
Finding my way across this forest is hard enough when people don't make bits of it jump around, not to mention burning pieces of it and I don't know what else. I don't know what this place is coming to, really I don't."
"Were you here when the trees were burned?" Mendanbar asked. "Did you see what happened? Or who did it?"
"Well, of course not," said the squirrel. "If I had, I'd have given him, her, or it a piece of my mind, I can tell you. Really, it's too bad. I'm going to have to work out a whole new route to get home. And as for giving directions to lost princes, well, it's hopeless, that's what it is, just hopeless. I'll get blamed for it when they come out wrong, too, see if I don't. Word always gets around. 'Don't trust the squirrel," they'll say, 'you always go wrong if you follow the squirrel's directions." They never stop to think of the difficulties involved in a job like mine, oh, no. They don't stop to say thank-you, either, not them. Ask the squirrel and go running off, that's what they do, and never so much as look back. No consideration, no gratitude.
You'd think they'd been raised in a palace for all the manners they have."
"If they're princes, they probably have been raised in palaces," Mendanbar said. "Princes usually are."
"Well, no wonder none of them have any manners, then." The squirrel sniffed. "They ought to be sent to school in a forest, where people are polite.
You don't see any of my children behaving like that, no, sir. Please and thank you and yes, sir and no, ma'am-that's how I brought them up, all twenty-three of them, and what's good enough for squirrels is good enough for princes, I say."
"I'm sure you're right," Mendanbar said. "Now, about the burned spot-" "Wicked, that's what I call it," the squirrel interrupted. "But hooligans like that don't stop to think, do they? Well, if they did, they wouldn't go around setting things on fire and making a lot of trouble and inconvenience for people. Inconsiderate, every last one of them, and they'll be sorry for it one day, you just wait and see if they aren't."
"Hooligans?" Mendanbar blinked and began to feel more cheerful.
Maybe he wasn't in trouble with the dragons after all. Maybe it had been a rogue who had burned out part of his forest. That would be bad, but at least he wouldn't have to figure out a way of dragon-proofing the whole kingdom. He frowned. "How am I going to find out for sure?" he wondered aloud.
"Ask Morwen," said the squirrel, flicking her tail.
"What?"
"I said, ask Morwen. Honestly, don't you big people know how to listen? You'd think none of you had ever talked to a squirrel before, the way most of you behave."