“We don’t need to wait for Bert,” said Shrub, almost as if he could tell what Anya was thinking. “I know all the paths and roads around here. All of ’em! For leagues and leagues. Where do you want to go?”
“Bert said something else,” said Anya. It had all been noise and confusion in the darkness, but she remembered. “She’d meet us here, but if delayed—”
“Go to the Good Wizard,” Ardent barked happily.
“Yes,” said Anya thoughtfully. Tanitha had suggested a Good Wizard would be a useful ally. A wizard might also have some of the ingredients she needed. Though she wasn’t sure whether wizards used ingredients or not. She smiled wryly at the sudden thought that the best place she could have got all the ingredients in one go was from a sorcerer, and the most powerful and most likely to have everything was Duke Rikard himself.
Her smile faded as she considered her probable fate if she had tried to sneak into his secret storeroom. She would be on her way to a distant school now, or more likely dead at Rikard’s agents’ hands, just far enough far away from Trallonia for her friends not to know about it and cause trouble.
Anya took a deep breath and forced all her troubled thoughts about the Bill of Rights and Wrongs aside. As Tanitha had said, she had to eat the food in front of her first. That meant concentrating on getting the ingredients for the lip balm.
She wished she hadn’t thought about food again.
“Do you know where the Good Wizard’s demesne is from here, Shrub?” asked Anya. “I know it’s somewhere on the downs, or nearby.”
“Oh sure!” said the newt. “That’s easy.”
“Have you ever been there?” asked Anya suspiciously. Shrub had led them well through the forest, but she doubted he would know anything farther afield very well. Even if he had been “a wanderer ever since he was six,” as his uncle Hedric had said.
“No,” admitted Shrub. “Seen the ‘Keep Out’ signs, though, when I went to New Yarrow to steal the Only Stone. It’s about halfway there. In fact, if we go to the Good Wizard’s, we might as well keep going to the city and steal the Stone—”
“We’re not stealing the Only Stone!” snapped Anya. “What do you mean ‘Keep Out’ signs?”
“Big signs that say ‘Keep Out, Visitors to the Good Wizard by Appointment Only’ and also ‘Beware of the Giant.’ ”
“How do you make an appointment?”
Shrub’s shoulders moved in the disturbing amphibian way that meant he was shrugging.
“I don’t know. Don’t know anything about the Good Wizard. Only from here we’d cross the downs, join the road about a league outside Rolanstown, take it towards New Yarrow, and then the path where the ‘Keep Out’ signs are.”
“What do you know about the Good Wizard?” asked Anya.
She hardly knew anything about Good Wizards in general and nothing about the nearby one in particular. They cropped up in stories from time to time, and were wise and so on, but the stories were generally vague and just said things like “The Good Wizard also proved helpful in their quest” or “After taking counsel with the Good Wizard, the path became clearer.”
She supposed that by their very nature, Good Wizards would be required to help questers like herself. Otherwise they’d be Bad Wizards. Unless, of course, the reference was to their skill at wizardry. Then a Good Wizard would be a skilled wizard, and their ethics and behavior would be up to them, and a Bad Wizard would just be incompetent, but could be quite nice.
She hoped good in this case meant kind, wise, and helpful.
“We need water and food,” said Anya. “How long will it take to walk to the Good Wizard’s demesne?”
“Rest of the day,” said Shrub. “Easy peasy.”
“There could be weaselfolk closing in on us already,” said Ardent professionally. He stretched up and looked back the way they had come, ears up, his head slowly moving from side to side as he sniffed, the very model of a dog on guard.
“Is there somewhere on the downs or along the road we could buy food?” asked Anya. She probably could walk all day without anything to eat, but it would be very difficult. As a princess, she had never skipped a single meal before.
“We might run into a shepherd, buy some bread and cheese,” said Shrub. “There’s nothing on the road between Rolanstown and the ‘Keep Out’ signs. Except robbers and such.”
“Bert’s robbers?”
“Nah. The other kind. The ones that rob from everyone and keep it to themselves.”
“We don’t want to encounter any of them,” said Anya. “And what are ‘and such’?”
“The usual,” said Shrub vaguely.
“What’s the ‘usual’?”
“I dunno. It’s all right by day, most of the time. I heard stories about monsters at night. Maybe wolves, or a troll—that kind of thing. A cockatrice, maybe.”
“A cockatrice?” asked Anya. “I need some cockatrice feathers … but they have to be fresh pulled, so I was thinking of getting them last, when everything else is ready.”
“Not easy to pull a cockatrice’s tail,” said Shrub. “I wouldn’t try it meself.”
Anya reflected on this. She had read a little about cockatrices in Sir Garnet Bester’s Bestest Beasts and How to Best Them, but there wasn’t a lot of detail in that book. Cockatrices were basically poor cousins of dragons, with a giant rooster’s head and a rather stunted dragon’s body. They had weak wings, and could only flap about near the surface, not soar majestically like a real dragon. Their one real advantage was their cockatrician stare. According to Sir Garnet, they fixed their beady eyes on their prey, who would become disoriented and wobble about on the spot going “um, um, um” until the cockatrice got close enough to give them a lethal peck. So it was bestest to avert your eyes or use a mirror when stalking cockatrices.
(Sir Garnet had also mentioned the usefulness of an extra-heavy crossbow, which Anya was sadly lacking.)
“There was something else about cockatrices,” mused Anya. She cast her mind back to her reading, trying to visualize the page from Bestest Beasts. It was a lovely book, beautifully illuminated in the margins.