Read Online Dragon on a Pedestal by Piers Anthony - Free Book Online Page B

away. Finally one centaur managed to hang a shoe up on the stake, whereupon he clapped his hands and the other grimaced.
    “Oh, that makes you look so sick you’ll need a new croggle-test!” the winner teased the loser.
    “Equines need regular croggle-tests,” the yak explained privately to Ivy. “To make sure they haven’t been infected by magic. It is very bad to be croggled.”
    Ivy felt a little croggled herself, though she was not an equine. Some of her best friends were magic-infected centaurs, but she knew that most centaurs rejected magic as determinedly as the Mundanes did. “What are you playing?” she called to the centaurs.
    “People-shoes, of course,” one of them responded absently, then trotted off to pick up his collection.
    The yak shrugged. “There’s no accounting for tastes,” he remarked. “Some folk like to talk, some like to throw shoes.”
    Ivy agreed it was a strange world. She walked on.
    The marvels of the Land of Xanth continued, and the little girl spent all afternoon exploring them, with the yak’s helpful commentary continuing incessantly. A passing milksnake gave her a bottle of milk to slake her thirst, and she plucked a lollypop from a pop-sickle plant. Her only bad moment came when a big B buzzed her and she stumbled off the footpath. The yak also stumbled, for it was a bumble B, causing creatures to become clumsy.
    Ivy wound up at the base of a large tree, feeling terrible. “Oooh, ugh!” she exclaimed. “What hit me?”
    The yak looked none too sanguine himself, but he peered about, seeking the answer. He found it. “The tree!” he exclaimed painfully. “It’s a torment pine! We must get away from it!”
    Ivy hobbled away, and the farther from the tree she got, the less worse she felt. Finally she got back to the footpath she had bumbled from and felt well again. She would be alert for any more B’s, so she would not stumble into any more trees.
    But night was nigh, and she was tired. Usually her mother Irene curbed her long before her explorative instincts were sated, so she got frustrated but not tired. This time it was the other way around. “I want to go to bed,” she said and paused in momentary shock, realizing she had spoken heresy. No child ever wanted to go to bed! So she qualified it. “I don’t want the monster under the bed to be lonely.”
    “Then you should go home,” the yak pointed out.
    “Home?” she asked, baffled. “What’s that?”
    The yak looked at her in perplexity. “That would be the place where your mother lives. And your father, the—” Here the yak paused to smirk. “—the King of Xanth. Where you stay when you don’t have anything better to do. Where your bed is.”
    Still her little brow furrowed. “Where?”
    The yak was puzzled. “You mean to say you don’t know? How can you remember your mother and your bed without remembering your home?”
    Ivy shook her head, confused.
    “Where did you come from before you met me?”
    She pondered. “Don’t remember.”
    “How could you forget your own home?” the yak persisted.
    “I don’t know.” She began to cry.
    The yak was disconcerted. “Here, I’ll find a bed bug. They make very nice beds.” He began to cast about, looking for a bed bug.
    There was the faintest of swirls in the air, not so much a breeze as the mere suggestion of motion. Ivy almost remembered being near something like this before, but not quite. The yak, intent on his mission, walked right through that swirl.
    He stopped, looking perplexed. “What am I doing here?” he asked, switching his tail.
    “You’re my friend,” Ivy said, her sniffles abating for the moment. “You’re looking for a—”
    “I don’t remember you!” the yak exclaimed. “I don’t remember anything! I’m lost!” Alarmed, he galloped off.
    Ivy stared after him. It seemed she had found the way to shut him up—but she was not pleased. She had lost her only immediate friend.
    She walked along the path, trying to