Luck of the Draw (Xanth)

by Piers Anthony

  “Your brother,” Mindy said. “That’s something I don’t understand. Why didn’t he come on this Quest himself?”

  “It’s complicated,” Anna said uneasily.

  “Maybe it’s something we should understand,” Bryce said. “You have been putting your health and life in danger to win something for him to use. Why are you doing it?”

  “I support my brother. He needs this.”

  “Won’t the princess know that he didn’t earn it?” Mindy asked. “Why would she choose him?”

  I am curious too. I would like to think that the person who wins me would not pass me on to an undeserving relative.

  “Please, I’d rather not discuss it.”

  “I don’t want to cause you unnecessary distress,” Bryce said. “But I don’t want to collude in setting something up for an unworthy Suitor. I don’t see why the princess would choose a man who had to have his sister do the hard work and take the considerable risk. I think you owe us an explanation.”

  Anna broke down in tears. “You’re right. I know it. But I just can’t.”

  Something was wrong. Bryce looked at Mindy, then at the Queen Bee perched on his hand.

  There is mischief she can’t reveal. I am telepathic, so I know it is there. I can’t read it unless she brings it up specifically, but it must be resolved.

  “Queen, can we put this Challenge on hold for a while?” Bryce asked. “While we work this out?”

  Yes. This is important.

  Bryce turned to Anna. “We know something is wrong. How can we make it right?”

  “You can’t,” Anna said, weeping. “I hate it, but nothing in Xanth can make it right.”

  Bryce got a suspicion. “Queen, I realize this is premature, as we have not yet won you. But will you help in this separate matter, before we actually continue the Quest and try to win you?”

  Yes.

  So it was another anomaly: the prize working with them before being won. Anna’s nature was having effect. “Then please have your bees prevent what we discuss here from getting out. Can they do that?”

  Yes. They are telepathic too; it is how we communicate. They will set up a shell through which no outsider can fathom what’s inside.

  “Thank you. Please do it now.”

  The queen did not move, and he heard no signal, but the other bees rose up and formed a transparent globe around them. The buzzing of their wings echoed the telepathic interference they were running.

  Bryce focused on Anna. “I know something is very wrong, and that you can’t tell me directly what it is. My guess is that there is some threat to you and your family that forces you to cooperate in something you don’t want to.”

  “That’s not exactly it,” she said. “But I can’t tell you what it is.”

  That confirmed that there was something. “So I want you to answer some yes-no questions.” He paused. “Falsely.”

  She gazed at him. “I—I don’t understand.”

  “I want you to lie. To say yes instead of no, and no instead of yes. To never tell the truth, only the opposite.”

  “But I don’t want to lie. I’ve always tried to be honest.”

  “And I commend you for it. But this is an aspect of a kind of game where the rules change. It’s not really lying when you know I know you are not telling the truth. It is more like an exercise in reverse logic, tricky to do, but part of the game. You won’t be admitting anything you’re not supposed to; you’ll be denying it.”

  Anna looked at Mindy. “Does this make sense to you?”

  “I’m not sure,” Mindy said. “But I trust Bryce’s judgment. He’s been right before, and is probably right this time. I know there are tricky games where the rules are different, as he says. I don’t know why he wants to play it now, but that will surely come clear soon.”

  Anna looked at Bryce’s hand. “What about you, Queen Bee?”

  It verges on genius.

  “Genius?” Anna repeated. “Telling me to lie?”

  Trust him.

  Anna spread her hands. “Then I’ll do it, for whatever it’s worth.”

  “Is your name Anna Molly?”

  “Of course it is!” Then she caught herself. “I mean, no, it isn’t.”

  Bryce smiled. “That’s the spirit. Think before you answer, to make sure it’s not the truth.” He paused, then started the serious questions. “Did someone threaten you or your family, to make you do something you didn’t want to?”

  Anna hesitated. “Yes,” she answered slowly.

  So it really wasn’t that. That surprised him. “Did someone promise you or your family something?”

  “No.”

  “Something phenomenal, that you might get no other way?”

  “No.”

  “Great success?”

  Anna hesitated. “No.” Then she reconsidered. “Yes.”

  Bryce pondered. His device was working, but it wasn’t giving him the answers he expected. What could be interpreted either way?

  “True love?” Mindy asked.

  “No!” Anna said.

  So that was it. And it had already been paid, because Anna had found love with Piper. That was not success in the sense of winning power or riches, but a woman might well choose love over material success.

  So they were making progress. They still needed to ascertain who had done this, and why. Bryce had an idea about the first. “The one who promised you this: was it a Demon?”

  “No.”

  “And if you told, were you threatened with the loss of it?”

  “No,” Anna said uncomfortably.

  She didn’t want to lose that love, understandably. But why would a Demon prefer to have a Suitor’s sister compete instead of the Suitor? “Is there something you are supposed to do here?”

  “No.” Then again she reconsidered. “Not exactly. Or I mean, exactly.”

  Another fudgy answer.

  Is it something your mere presence accomplishes? the Queen Bee asked.

  “No!”

  And there it was. “Because you are female?” Bryce asked.

  “No.”

  This remained perplexing. “Does it relate to another Suitor?”

  “No.”

  “Me?” Because he was the only other Suitor left.

  “No.”

  Suddenly it was getting personal. “Because I would treat a woman differently than a man?”

  “No.”

  “But I try to be fair with anyone, male or female,” Bryce protested.

  “No.”

  “You’re a gentleman,” Mindy said. “You have a somewhat courtly manner with women.” She smiled obscurely. “You don’t take advantage of them.”

  “No,” Anna said, agreeing with her.

  “And if it came to a choice of who would get to try for the Object,” Mindy continued, “in this case the Queen Bee, and she wanted to, you would let her.”

  “No,” Anna said.

  “Well of course I would. But I would do the same for a man.”

  “Maybe the Demon didn’t know that,” Mindy said. “Because Anna’s Demon would not have been familiar with you. Just with early indications that you showed before the Quest formally began. So Anna is here to see that you don’t take the Bee.”

  “No,” Anna agreed.

  “But what difference does it make?” Bryce asked. “There’s another Object remaining to try for after this one. I can take that one.”

  “Yes,” Anna said.

  Bryce, Mindy, and the Queen Bee looked at her, startled.

  “You can take another,” Anna said. “You don’t have to take this one.”

  Bryce whistled. “That ups the ante. This is the last Object I have a chance of winning?”

  “No,” Anna said, smiling sadly.

  “But if I take this one, you could still take the next one,” Bryce said.

  “No.” Then Anna amplified. “If you don’t take this one, you can take the next one. You will still be in the game. The princess h
ates you. She will never choose you.”

  “Oho!” Mindy exclaimed. “The Demons figure the princess likes you, Bryce, and will choose you if she has a chance. Then all the others will lose. They are trying to see that you wash out, don’t have a gift for her, and are eliminated. This is the point where that is decided.”

  “No!” Anna agreed.

  “So it is part of the game,” Bryce said. “Not just to get good gifts for the princess, but to eliminate other competitors.”

  “No,” Anna agreed again. “I—I think you stink, and I really like the idea of making you wash out.”

  “Well, you can have the Bee,” Bryce said. “I’ll take my chances on the next Object.”

  Anna nodded, tears flowing down her face. So, oddly, did Mindy, as tearfully.

  Oh, my, the Bee thought. This session must end now.

  “I think we have it straight, at last,” Bryce agreed. “No one has told anyone anything true, and nothing is changed. We’ll proceed as before.”

  Anna ran to him and kissed him fleetingly on the cheek. Then she organized. “I will take the Bee.”

  The Queen Bee took off from Bryce’s hand and flew across the meadow. I will sit atop the Hive, her thought came back. Now the hive appeared, in the middle of the meadow. We will allow no one to approach. Any who try will not be stung to death, merely to unconsciousness, so that they lose. Good fortune.

  “Lucky is no longer with us,” Bryce said.

  “I must stay out of this,” Mindy said.

  Anna started walking toward the hive. Immediately a swarm of bees rose up and hovered between her and the hive. That was warning enough.

  “It is a challenge,” Anna said. “I know the Queen bears us no malice, but she has to do her job.”

  Indeed. If you wash out here, we could use a beekeeper for sundry chores. You would have all the honey you want, and no one would sting you.

  “Thank you,” Anna said. “I might take you up on that, as I like you and love your honey. But first I have to try to win you.”

  Of course.

  “Could I make really tight clothing, so they couldn’t get at me?” Anna asked Bryce.

  “That would be risky,” Bryce said. “They could sting through thick cloth, and crawl into any hollows. It would have to be airtight, and then you’d have trouble breathing.”

  “Could I borrow a carpet and fly over them? Dropping down suddenly from above?”

  “Not with creatures of the air like bees,” Bryce said.

  “Or tunnel under the ground to the hive?”

  “If you could get underground, so could they,” Bryce said. “Remember, they can squeeze into crevices.”

  “It’s such a simple thing,” she said, frustrated. “Yet so hard to do.”

  “Yet there has to be a way,” Bryce said. “We just have to think of it.”

  “If only Fracto Cloud could come by now, and blow them all away!”

  “They’d cling to the hive, and sting when you got there.”

  “You’re very good at objections,” she flared. “What do you recommend?”

  Bryce considered. “What are we missing? We must be thinking too much inside the box.”

  “Box?”

  “Figure of speech. We’re being conventional, and not getting anywhere. But maybe if we could come up with something anomalous…”

  “That’s my specialty,” she agreed. “The anomaly.”

  Then Bryce had an idea. “We’ve been thinking of Xanth. Maybe it should be Mundania.”

  “Mundania? That seems irrelevant.”

  “Precisely. It’s anomalous.”

  “How can that help us?”

  “I visited a bee farm in Mundania once. They used smudge pots.”

  “I don’t understand. Dirty pots?”

  He smiled. “Smudge pots. They had small fires inside of pots, that burned peat or something, making a lot of smoke. It seems the bees couldn’t handle the smoke; it messed up their senses so they couldn’t orient to sting.”

  “Smoke,” she said. “I never thought of that.”

  Bryce looked around. “Maybe we can make a smudge pot.”

  They foraged in the meadow, and found a solid old root with a hole in it. They stuffed that with dried leaves and stems. Then Bryce used his pen to sketch a lighter, animated it, and used it to ignite the packed leaves. They burned reluctantly, issuing thick smoke.

  “I think we’ve got it,” Bryce said.

  “Are you sure it will work?” Anna asked.

  “No. And that bothers me. You could get badly stung.”

  Anna was doubtful. “I could.”

  “Would you prefer that I try it?”

  “No. I want to try it, succeed or fail. Getting stung is nothing compared to what the harpies and goblins tried to do to me.”

  She was correct. “Don’t hurry. Stay within the cloud of smoke. If you get stung, retreat.”

  “I will,” she said. Then she took the smudge pot and advanced on the hive.

  The bees swarmed. They formed a larger cloud around her, but did not get through the smoke. Anna walked up to the hive and picked up the Queen Bee in her hand.

  “Just like that,” Mindy murmured. “It looks so easy when you have the key.”

  “She had to have the nerve to do it,” Bryce said.

  “She did. She earned it.”

  They walked to the hive. The bees had returned to their labors with the flowers. All was peaceful.

  “Now you can rejoin Piper,” Bryce said. “Congratulations.”

  “I owe it all to you,” Anna said. “You knew the score, knew this was your last chance, but still you gave it to me.”

  “It was the right thing to do.”

  “If you lose because you did the right thing, then the princess will lose her best prospect. I hate that.”

  Bryce shrugged. “What will be will be. You have been through more than enough.”

  “If I didn’t love Piper, I would love you,” Anna said. “Maybe I do, a little.” She paused, reconsidering. “More than a little. Hold still; I’m going to kiss you.”

  “You kissed me before. No need to—”

  She stepped in to him, put her hands to his head, held it in place, and kissed him firmly on the mouth. Bees and tiny honeycombs flew around them.

  Then Anna and the Queen Bee mounted her trike and rode off. Bryce, dazed, slowly settled back to earth. Had Anna wanted him, he realized, she could have taken him, anomalous as that might be.

  “But what about this business of that being your last chance?” Mindy asked. “What an irony if your better nature cost you that.”

  “I made mistakes in my Mundane life,” Bryce said gravely. “This time I mean to do it right. That means not letting the convenience of the moment override the honorable thing, and not letting others dictate the important decisions of my life even if it is for my own good. The princess will survive without me.”

  “I’m not sure of that. Especially if it’s true she prefers you to the others.”

  “We don’t know that’s true.” But he wondered.

  13

  MONOCLE

  “Where is the next Object?” Bryce asked.

  “You are going to try for it?” Mindy asked.

  “Of course. I am obliged to do my best, regardless of whether I expect to succeed. And I’m not at all sure I will fail. I don’t see how anyone could know that far ahead. As I understand it, the Demons set things up fairly, then don’t interfere.”

  “They do,” she agreed. “But it sounds as if someone peeked into the future.”

  “The future is mutable.”

  “Maybe it is in Mundania.”

  He nodded. “Point made. But I will make my best effort.”

  She unrolled the scroll. “The Gap Chasm,” she said, surprised. “We were there before.”

  “Not as part of the Quest.”

  “True. But I dread messing with the Gap, unless it is safely down in the bottom of it.”

&n
bsp; “At least it is not far from here.”

  “Short distances can be as challenging as long ones,” she said. “Especially when Demons have set roadblocks.”

  “So we’d best be on our way,” he said.

  They got on the trikes and followed the path on east, to intersect a northbound enchanted path.

  In an hour they reached a pleasant lake. Mindy needed to take a toilet break, and disappeared behind a bush. Bryce, thirsty, dipped out a double handful of the clear water and drank. It was amazingly refreshing.

  Mindy returned. “I meant to warn you: don’t drink that water,” she cautioned. “This is Lake Kiss Mee.”

  “Oops. I just did.”

  “Oh, bleep!” Then she changed her mind. “No, maybe it will do. You need a person to kiss.”

  “I do,” he said, surprised. In fact the urge was overwhelming.

  “So kiss me.” She stood before him, definitely thinner than she had once been.

  Bryce didn’t hesitate. He enfolded her and kissed her repeatedly. He just had to keep doing it; he couldn’t stop himself. It was the power of the water governing him, though she was also pleasant to hold. But she bore up remarkably well.

  Several minutes later he was finally kissed out. “Thank you,” he gasped. “I’m sorry to have put you through that.”

  “You forget I love you. I’m happy to have you kissing me without limit.”

  “But this wasn’t love! It was the urgency of the water.”

  “Yes. But I still enjoyed it.”

  Maybe she had. But he would be more careful hereafter. Because he had enjoyed it too, and that was dangerous.

  They found an enchanted path and rode north. In two hours they came to the village of Kiss Mee. It was getting late and they were tired, so they decided to stop. Kiss Mee was close to the Gap Chasm, and they could readily complete their trip in the morning.

  “This should be a friendly town, if they drink the local water,” Bryce said.

  “It is. They do,” Mindy said. “But they’re acclimatized to it, so they are merely friendly, not demanding. I will seek the Mare.”

  “The what?”

  “The Mare of this town. She’s the one who can approve lodging for us.”