Piper smiled. “When she enters the castle she becomes a normal human woman. In fact that is where I came to know her. She is quite a girl. We had a tryst, before I was banned. That relationship has continued thereafter.”
Bryce shook his head. “I am having trouble visualizing this. She is fifty feet tall?”
“Here is another item for your background information: there exist what are called accommodation spells that enable widely-diverging creatures to indulge in romantic trysts if they wish to. Such as human beings and little elves, or dragons and damsels. Or a human man with a giantess. The effect is temporary, only an hour or so, but that normally suffices.”
“An accommodation spell,” Bryce repeated. “I will remember.”
“The storm is passing,” Piper said. “We can resume traveling. I will have to return to monster form to get us back to the surface; then we can ride the trikes.”
“Yes. I don’t know how I would get out of here on my own.”
Piper changed, Bryce loaded the trikes and got on, and they slid out and up the sheer face of the cleft to the surface. Then they changed back, and resumed riding the trikes. But the castle was some distance.
“This is too slow,” Piper said. “We need a boost.”
“A boost?”
“Granola is near. I will ask her.”
“The invisible giantess,” Bryce said.
“Hello, dear,” Piper called.
“Hello, Piper,” a female voice boomed from the sky.
“This is Bryce, from Mundania. I am conducting him from Caprice to Roogna and back. We are running late. Will you help us?”
“Of course.”
It turned out to be weird but easy. Huge invisible hands lifted their trikes with them aboard and carried them rapidly forward thirty feet above the land.
In due course they arrived at the true Castle Roogna, which looked exactly like the illusion copy, but without the goblins. The giantess set them gently down. “Thank you, dear,” Piper called.
“Welcome, Piper.”
“I will wait outside,” Piper said. “You will find me here when you emerge from your interview with the princess.”
“I’m sorry to make you wait. Won’t it be dull?”
Piper smiled. “You forget: Granola is here. We will find a private spot.”
Oh. “Thank you. I will look for you later.” Bryce raised his voice. “And thank you, giantess.”
“Welcome,” the invisible voice answered.
Bryce nerved himself and walked bravely to the castle. He came to the surrounding moat. Caprice didn’t have a moat, because it had no fixed location. This was a broad circle of water that looked serene.
Then a huge serpentine head rose out of it and oriented on Bryce. The moat monster!
He stopped. That snakelike neck could readily extend over that drawbridge and pick off anything on it.
Suddenly three pretty girls wearing little crowns appeared before him, one of whom he thought looked familiar.
“Hello, Bryce,” the first girl said. She wore a green dress and had blond/green hair and blue eyes. “I’m Princess Melody.”
“We are glad to see you,” the second said. She wore a brown dress and had brown hair and eyes. “I’m Princess Harmony.”
That was the one he had recognized. She was adorable.
“In fact we’ve been expecting you,” the third concluded. She was in a red dress, had red hair and green eyes. Apart from those features, the three were quite similar, being of even height and structure, with their hair similarly styled. “I’m Rhythm.”
“I am pleased to meet you,” Bryce said politely. “All of you. However, it is only Princess Harmony I have come to see.”
“Okay, we’ve done our little act,” Melody said. She hummed a little tune and disappeared.
“He’s yours,” Rhythm concluded. A little drum appeared, and she tapped that and vanished to its beat.
Bryce stared at the places the two had been. They hadn’t walked away, they had simply stopped being there.
“Come to my room,” Harmony said.
He focused on her. “Is that proper? I mean, shouldn’t there be a chaperone?”
She laughed. “It’s not proper, and there should be. But we’re naughty girls, and more than capable of defending ourselves. Come.” She took his hand and led him onto the drawbridge. “It’s okay, Souffle!” she called, and the moat monster’s head sank back underwater.
Bryce tried to hang back, but the love spell on him wiped out his resistance, and he allowed himself to be led. Her sweet little hand was so precious!
He was hardly aware of the details of the castle as she brought him through halls, up stairs, and to what was evidently her bedroom.
She shut the door behind them. “Now kiss me.”
“Now I know that’s not—” But he was cut off by her kiss.
Light flashed in a heart-shaped pastel blend. He felt as if he were floating toward the ceiling, drawn by her precious lips. Her slender body was against his, her delicate arms about him. He might have resisted, but his willpower was totally swamped. Yes, she was a teen girl, younger than his granddaughters. At the moment he was unable to care about any of that. It was sheer rapture.
She broke the kiss, and he dropped several inches to land on the floor. “Ugh!” she exclaimed, wiping her mouth with her hand. “I’m not the first or the second! Who kissed you before?”
Half stunned, all he could do was answer. “Princess Dawn, when she was teasing me about you. Her maidservant Mindy, to shut me up, I think.” She could tell his recent history just by kissing him?
“Well, stop it. You’re supposed to be courting me.”
“I am,” he agreed apologetically. “Inappropriate as it may be.”
“What’s inappropriate about me?” she demanded sharply.
“Nothing, Princess. It’s me. I’m really an eighty-year-old Mundane grandfather. I have no business with a girl your age or station.”
“Oh, that’s right: the Demons summoned you for their contest. But bleep! This is nothing I sought or wanted. I want to make my own decision, in my own time, not have it dictated by chance or Demon.”
“That’s understandable. I feel much the same way.”
“You do? You mean you’re not hot for my body?”
“Not by my own choice. I was brought here and dosed with a love spell. That’s hardly the same.”
“So you wouldn’t be interested if it weren’t for that love spell?”
“I’m your grandfather’s age!”
She looked at him cannily. “I don’t think you answered my question.”
She was right; he had spoken evasively. “I believe I would not be interested.”
“Even if I kissed you and begged you?”
“Are you trying to tease me?”
She laughed. “Yes.”
“Well, I know the difference between young fascination and mature love.”
She became serious. “What is the difference?”
“I would have to go into a dull personal history to clarify that. I doubt you’d be interested.”
“Tell me. I’ll stop you when I get bored.”
“I’m still not sure—”
A small harmonica appeared in her hands. She put it to her mouth and played a note. Bryce’s knees felt weak.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Pacification magic. You’re being resistive, so I’m nullifying that.”
“By playing a harmonica?”
“Yes. We triplets are general-purpose Sorceresses. Whatever we do to the sound of our music becomes real. Melody sings, Rhythm beats her drum, and I have my harmonica. Any two of us together can square our power, and all three together cube it. But for this purpose I don’t need their help.” She played a melody, and she was good at it, apart from the magic. He was enchanted in the aesthetic as well as the literal sense. He had not expected this level of skill.
She was right. He did not want to ar
gue with her, or even raise reasonable objections. He just wanted to do whatever she wanted him to. So it was magic. So was just about everything else in this fantasy land.
She paused. “Oh, please don’t stop,” he said. “I love hearing you play. You know how to use that instrument.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I do get pleasure from it. Sometimes the three of us get together and play just for the fun of it. But I do want to hear your personal history.”
Bryce shrugged. “How about a compromise? I will tell my history, while you play background music.”
“I like it!” she said, and resumed playing, not loudly.
“When I was young I loved a beautiful girl, and she loved me. We wanted to marry, but her folks did not approve of me and my folks did not approve of her. They had ways of enforcing their preferences. So I had to marry a young woman I did not love, and she did not love me. She had had her own boyfriend. We were both stuck with it, and knew it, so had to make the best of it.”
“Like me being caught up in a Demon contest.” Her harmonica had disappeared, but the background music remained, as did his desire to do her will.
“Yes, actually,” he agreed, surprised. “So we married, and we had children, and life was reasonably good, apart from that lost love. But along the way I learned something. I saw the girl I loved marry elsewhere, and have her children, and grow older. She wasn’t much of a personality apart from her beauty, and she lost much of that appeal when she got fat. She also lacked integrity, something I valued. I had not realized she lacked it when I dated her, maybe because I was blinded by fascination. Whatever passion I had had for her dissipated; in fact it was difficult to see what I had ever seen in her. Then I realized that the woman I had married was actually better for me, and not just because she aged well and was a better intellectual companion. She was honest and supportive, and really helped me in myriad little ways. We were simply more compatible. So later in life I did come to love her, and she loved me. Her prior boyfriend had turned out to be an opportunist who avoided serious work; she said she was glad she had not married him. We had true love, based on long familiarity and experience. We were both realists with few illusions left. I truly mourned her when she died. My first love was fascination, and that marriage would not have been a happy one. That’s the difference.”
Harmony smiled. She was dangerously pretty when she smiled. “I love it, and I am not bored. It’s so romantic.”
“But there was really nothing flashy or impressive about it. Neither of us was anything special. It was simply a quiet relationship that worked out well. Sometimes the small details of routine interpersonal interaction can in time become more important than the more obvious things.”
“But you couldn’t know it when you were young, could you?”
“I lacked the sense to know it. Had I been more objective, I might have seen it; the signs were there. But I was young and foolish. I am not that way anymore, I trust, thanks to considerable life experience.”
“I am young but I hope not foolish. How can I know what is best?”
Bryce spread his hands. “I don’t know. I was speaking for myself. You are a different person, in a rather different situation.”
“Well, make your best guess.”
He considered. “You are to be courted by what, half a dozen men? You are a princess whom your grandfather Trent suspects is destined someday to be queen of Human Xanth.”
“King,” she said. “It’s a long story.”
“King,” he agreed. “The suitors will be aware of that, and desire you for your position as much as for your flesh, though they will surely covet that too. They will say whatever they think will please or flatter you. If you could somehow study them each before you had to make a commitment, so as to know their real natures when they weren’t trying to impress you directly, that might help.”
“I can do that.”
“I’m not sure how.”
“Let me show you something.” She gestured to a large tapestry hanging on the wall. “This is the Xanth Tapestry, woven long ago by a marvelously talented Sorceress. It shows everything in Xanth, now and in the past. I can watch whatever I want.”
“Anything?” he asked, amazed again.
“Almost anything,” she said with another smile. “We have not been able to watch folk summoning the stork, because the Adult Conspiracy forbids. That has been most frustrating, because we have always been most curious about what is most secret. But I am now at the age where I can begin to get half a notion.”
“Then maybe you can observe the several suitors. I suggest that you do so. Someone among them may emerge as the man you could love and appreciate for the long term, regardless of the way he may impress you today. That insight could be invaluable.”
She eyed him with that canny expression. “And if it is not you? Will you be jealous?”
“You’re teasing me again, you naughty girl. Once this Demon contest is over, as I understand it, the rest of us will be relieved of our artificial love for you and thus not be jealous. Regretful that we were not chosen, perhaps, but not hurting in the manner of rejected lovers.”
“But right now, if you saw me kissing another man?”
“Right now I’d be jealous, despite understanding its foolishness. I am trying to be objective here, drawing on my perspective, and give you sensible advice. You aren’t helping.”
“You’re honest.”
“I try to be.”
“I like you.”
Bryce sighed. “And I like you, Princess. But that is to be expected, in the circumstance.”
“What is this word you used, perspective? I thought that was part of the limited magic of Mundania, where distant things race to keep up with you.”
He had to chuckle. “This is of course how you would see it. But this word has a figurative as well as a literal meaning. What I mean by it is that I have a lifetime of experience that enables me to see and allow for some of the follies of the moment, such as loving and desiring a teen princess. I know, as I did not when I was a teen, that this is a kind of fascination, not true love.”
“You think I will be dishonest and get fat?”
“No, actually. Here in Xanth people do not seem to get fat unless they choose to be. But there will surely be constraints that would similarly turn me off, in time.”
“You would not want to be a princess or queen consort?”
“It is not what I seek.”
“What do you seek?”
Bryce considered for a good two and a half moments. “I don’t actually know, given my unfamiliarity with this magic realm. Perhaps some genuinely useful employment, and the love of a good woman close to my own age, as I had before.”
“Not power, glory, notoriety?”
“Definitely not those. I’m not an adventurer.”
“Passion?”
He smiled ruefully. “That I would like. I am after all a man. When you manage to fathom the Adult Conspiracy, you may come to understand that aspect.”
“Passion. I could give you that, I think, once I learned how. I don’t really need to understand it.”
“Princess, that isn’t what I meant!”
Her clothing faded, so that she was standing nude. She was not shaped like the mischievous voluptuous Demoness Metria, but she was absolutely lovely in her modest nubility. “This isn’t enough?”
“Harmony, cover up!” he said.
“You don’t like me?”
“I love you! That’s the problem. You are freaking me out.”
“But I’m not wearing panties.”
And panties were magical, causing male freak-out, as he had discovered. “I spoke figuratively. Please.”
Her clothing reappeared. “Did I do wrong?” she asked plaintively.
“Yes. You flashed me. A proper young woman does not do that.”
“Dawn and Eve do it all the time. It’s a game with them.”
“You’re not the same as Dawn and Eve, are you?”
/>
“No,” she agreed thoughtfully. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to know if I could be passionate.”
“Passion stems from the mind more than the body. When—when you wish to be passionate, when the situation is right, your body will more than suffice.”
“Thank you.”
Bryce shook his head. “This interview isn’t going at all the way I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“I expected to find a snotty spoiled teen brat. I did not.”
“What did you find?”
“A smart, sensible, lovely, occasionally naughty but somewhat innocent girl.”
“And I expected to find a crusty old Mundane in a young body, who might give me good advice. I did.”
Bryce laughed. “So it seems we understand each other.”
“Bryce, I really appreciate your perspective, if I have the word right. It is a valuable gift. You have told me things no other man would, and given me a plan to handle this darned Demon contest I never asked for or wanted. Now I have direction I lacked before. I want to give you something in return.”
“There is no need, Princess.”
“This is not need. It is—desire.”
Her term was not quite appropriate, but he got her meaning. “As you wish, Harmony.”
“What do you need?”
Bryce laughed. “Magician Trent told me to get a sword. I am not at all sure I want to do that.”
“Castle Roogna has an armory with many swords.”
“I would hardly know what to do with a sword,” he protested. “I’m no warrior. What he meant was that I need something to buttress my second sight in case of emergency.”
“Ah yes, you have that.”
How did she know? Princess Dawn must have told her. “Yes. But it may not always be enough, at such time as I get into the adventurous hinterlands.”
“Some of the swords are magical,” she said. “So that a novice can readily wield them.”
“I suppose that would help. But really my reflexes are not of that type. I’m more the cerebral type. Luck of the draw.”
“The what?”
“It’s just a Mundane expression. It derives from mundane card games, where one is dealt or allowed to draw cards to play, and some are better than others. It’s a matter of pure luck what hand a player is dealt. I meant that I have what amounts to a hand of information and skills that apply only randomly to the challenge I face here in Xanth. Some may help me, others won’t.”
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