Well, this was interesting. Was it a Challenge? She had better understand it before touching it. Well, she had time, so she would use it. She wanted no more errors like changing a baby to an ogret. She sat down and gazed silently at the spring.

  She saw a pair of flying bugs come in for a drink. Too bad they couldn’t read, or they’d know better. The moment they touched the water, they went into frenzied activity, becoming what she recognized as lovebugs, so absorbed in their activity as to be oblivious of anything else. Well, that was the nature of a love spring. Vinia couldn’t see the detail of what they were doing, as the Conspiracy fuzzed it out, but she knew its general gist. They were signaling the stork, or whatever bugs signaled.

  But there was something nevertheless odd about it. What was it?

  Then a crested kingbird flew in, a male because of his royal crown. And a field mouse, her body in the general shape of a field. Oh-oh; evidently neither of them could read either. They sipped the liquid side by side, as neither was a predator of the other. And abruptly came together is a desperate engagement, madly making love. Vinia still couldn’t see the detail, thanks to the Conspiracy, but she saw something else: the brightly colored kingbird had become a dull-colored queenbird, a female, while the mouse became a male, marked by its little beard. Nevertheless, they were going at it in full measure, stirring up a whole cloud of fuzz.

  Now, belatedly, Vinia realized the significance of the rest of the sign: it wasn’t just a love spring, it was a forbidden love spring. Forbidden because the genders were reversed. What a complication!

  She needed to get the bleep away from here. But the brush on either side was ferociously thorny, and the leaves glistened with what was surely poison. She knew without even trying that if she attempted to walk a long way around it, the brush would simply extend, blocking her. This was a Challenge. She could not avoid the spring. She had to handle it. Somehow.

  There was the sound of footfalls. An ugly goblin man was coming down the path. She couldn’t avoid him, either. He would be after her the moment he saw her, age no inhibition; goblin females were pretty and nice, but the males were brutes. She could escape him only by splashing into the water, and he would pursue her there. Then would come a horror that would give them and the Adult Conspiracy an awful fit.

  This was no Challenge for a child! Maybe it was intended for an adult, and she had somehow blundered into it. Or maybe it was intended for Benny, the adult member of their party. In their innocence as children it had not occurred to them that some of the Challenges might be adult.

  What was she to do? Her time was running out. The goblin was almost upon her. So much for taking her time to ponder things.

  But there had to be an escape. She peered desperately at the pool. This time she saw something. There was a very small wharf or pier at the edge of the spring, just big enough for a person to stand on, and another one on the far side. Why would there be any such things at a (forbidden) love spring? There was no boat in sight to travel between them. This seemed to make no sense.

  “Ha!” the goblin said, spying her.

  Ah, but it had to make sense of some kind, or it wouldn’t be here. The docks wouldn’t be here, the pair of them. She had about five seconds, maybe four, maybe three to figure out that sense.

  Then an idea shone over Vinia’s head, so brightly that she saw the flash. The pair of docks. Pair o’ docks. Paradox! The impossible manifesting.

  She stepped on the near one, balancing precariously. “Paradox—get me across!” she cried as the goblin reached for her. Naturally it was impossible to get across simply by asking.

  Suddenly she was standing on the other dock, across the spring. The goblin, overbalanced by her sudden absence, splashed into the spring. “Yikes!” he, or rather she exclaimed, more annoyed than surprised. Then, spying Vinia across the pool, she set out to swim across and get her anyway. She could grab Vinia by the ankle and haul her in, and she would become a lustful boy.

  Vinia leaped off the dock onto the land and fled. And the scene faded. She had somehow navigated the second Challenge!

  The path led on to a walled-in garden where several young men and women were on their knees weeding. A forbidding older woman stood by its exit, and a similarly forbidding man was beside her, watching the weeders. Maybe the weeders didn’t want to be there, so these were the enforcers. Maybe they were other querents who had tried to pass on through and been caught and put to work. Which would be her own fate if she just walked straight ahead.

  But what kept them there? Why didn’t they just barge on by the woman?

  One weeder started to stand up, rubbing his back. Vinia could see the little lightning jag of pain there. It was hard bending over all the time to grab the weeds.

  The guard woman looked at him. A knife flashed from her eye and flew toward him, just missing him.

  Then Vinia got it. She was looking daggers! Literally. No one wanted to get stabbed by one of those.

  Vinia paused to look about. There were other enclosed gardens to either side, connected by closed doors. One had an odd-looking female horse pacing restlessly back and forth, nibbling on the weeds that had overgrown that location. The other contained several young birds clustered around a statue of a magnet, ignoring the seeds on the ground. Did any of this mean anything? It surely did, because this had to be the third Challenge.

  Vinia put her hands to her head as if to squeeze out some competent thought. Ion was smart, and so was Hilda, and Benny had a kind of animal common sense. They might have tackled this setting and figured it out. But Vinia was almost painfully ordinary in mind and body. Her only asset was her telekinesis, which didn’t work here in the Good Magician’s domain. She had no idea what to make of it all.

  But she had to keep trying. She had somehow made it through two Challenges: it would be a shame to mess up on the third. She certainly didn’t want to be trapped weeding, menaced by daggers.

  She focused on the birds around the big magnet. There had to be a pun there, of some sort. What could it be? They looked like young birds, almost chicks.

  The idea flashed. A chick magnet!

  So she had the pun. Now all she needed was a use for it, to get her through the Challenge. Still, it was progress.

  She looked at the other side. The odd mare became aware of her attention and gazed back at her. She had no idea what species it could be. Not a regular female horse. Not a night mare.

  Night mare. This one was too weird for that. Maybe it was a weird mare. What would a weird mare do? Maybe bring disturbing visions to people who were restless sleepers. The night mare couldn’t get at them if they didn’t properly sleep, so this one filled in. That made sense, didn’t it?

  Still, what use was it to her? How did it relate to the Challenge? Was it that if she tried to avoid the weeding garden by passing through here, she’d get a nasty vision that would haunt her despite being awake? She didn’t want to chance that. No one would.

  Vinia looked back at the weeding garden. And saw something else. The mare was starting near the wall, and the girl closest to it had paused in her weeding. A sort of dream balloon was floating just over her head. No, not a dream, because she wasn’t asleep, merely drifting mentally. She was picturing the man next to her, who was pretty handsome, standing and stepping up to her, pulling her shirt off to expose her full bosom, bending down to kiss it, the girl not at all averse. A naughty vision. Something she’d rather be doing than pulling weeds, for sure!

  Then the man standing beside the dagger woman glanced that way. He saw the vision. He nudged the dagger woman. She glared, sending a dagger right through the vision balloon. It burst, spraying bits of bosom across the yard, where they landed squishily before evaporating. One hit the handsome man on the chest. He looked, eyes widening appreciatively before it faded. He would have liked to share that vision. The girl, fully clothed, hastily focused on pulling her weeds.

  So much for letting one’s mind drift. The man was the watcher, the sincere sin-seer, cluing the woman in on the weeder’s inattention to the job. It seemed to be a mean-spirited but effective system.

  Somehow this all had to come together, if only she could figure it out. Chick magnet. Glaring daggers. Weird mare. Naughty visions.

  Come together. Well, why not? There would be chaos if those three gardens could be involuntarily integrated. And there, maybe, was the answer.

  Vinia entered the mare’s garden. The mare oriented on her warily. “Read my mind,” Vinia murmured. “I’m here to help you make a barrelful of naughty notions. Just work with me.”

  Evidently the mare understood. She made no menacing move. Vinia went to the door between gardens and worked the handle, as the mare could not. She slowly pushed the door open partway. “Don’t go through yet,” she whispered. “Wait until the clamor begins. Then push on through and do your thing. There’s a dozen people on the other side, eager for weird dreams.”

  The mare nodded.

  Vinia withdrew and walked quietly to the magnet garden. The closer she got to the magnet, the more it appealed to her. She had not thought of herself as a chick, but maybe she was: a juvenile female. Which was fine: it meshed nicely with her plan. She picked up the magnet, which fortunately was hollow, and carried it to the door between gardens. How she loved the touch of it! She paused to crank open the door, then scrambled through with the magnet. The bird chicks followed her, of course.

  She faced the guards. “Behold!” she cried. “See what I have!”

  The weeders looked. “Ooo!” the women and girls exclaimed and ran toward the magnet, being attracted because it wasn’t limited to a species or age of chick. When the men and boys saw that, they ran after the women, who were now acting quite coquettish. The clamor had begun, signaling the weird mare.

  “Hey!” the guard man cried. The guard woman oriented and glared a dagger. It flew to the magnet, crashed into it, and cracked, the pieces dropping to the ground.

  Vinia smiled. That was exactly what she had hoped for: a generalized magnet that attracted not only chicks, but metal. Why make a specialized item when a generalized one could more readily be adapted?

  Now the weird mare appeared in the garden. Naughty visions started appearing over the heads of the people. Men kissing remarkably cooperative women. Boys peeking under girls’ flaring skirts, the girls pretending not to notice. Soon these things started happening in the real life.

  A woman in a vision saw a four-legged animal walking toward her on two legs, holding something in its front paws. It was a name badge with her name, JEMIMA. This was a Badge-her! She took the badge and put it on her blouse. She was no longer anonymous. A man saw that and spoke to her: “I wanted to meet you, but I didn’t know your name. Hello, Jemima!”

  “Oh? I’m happy to answer you, but I don’t know your name.”

  Another animal hurried up with a badge. This was a Badge-him with his name badge: JIM. He took it and put it on. He smiled.

  A knife flew through the vision, popping its balloon. The vision dissipated into fragments, and the names were lost. The woman and the man looked at each other in real life. “Dam!” they said almost together, using the mundane term for obstructing a river, considered an epithet.

  But now there were so many visions that they were overwhelming the dagger lady. Her daggers were flying askew, mostly missing their targets. “Dam!” she echoed. It was worse than that; two-and-a-half-thirds of the visions were so naughty that they were being fogged out by the Conspiracy. But the adults could still see them: indeed, more than one lady was blushing as she headed zestfully for the man under the balloon.

  Vinia set down the magnet with its circle of adoring chicks. Some chicks were even admiring the daggers stuck to the magnet. She made her way to the exit and slipped through. She had passed the third Challenge!

  There was the entrance to the castle. The gate swung open to reveal an elegant hark-haired older woman. “Welcome, Vinia!” she said. “Do come in.”

  Vinia hesitated. Was this yet another Challenge? A fake castle to trap her when she thought she was safe?

  “No, it’s legitimate,” the woman said. “I’m Dara Demoness, the Designated Wife of the Month.”

  This was odd. “The who? The what?”

  “I am a small-d demoness.” She fuzzed into a dark cloud, then returned to human form, not quite the same as before. For one thing, her hair was light. “The Designated Wife of Good Magician Humfrey. Come in and I’ll explain.”

  She seemed sincere, no pun. Vinia took a flying leap of faith and decided to trust her. She followed Dara into the castle.

  Soon they were ensconced in a pleasant living room and Dara was explaining. “The Good Magician did not expect your party to make it through the Challenges, so he and his son and daughter-in-law took the afternoon off, and I am left in charge. I will be handling your case.”

  “My case?”

  “Your Answer. Your Service. But first let me clarify about the Designated Wives. To oversimplify somewhat, when Humfrey lost his wife, he didn’t just accept it, he went to Hell to reclaim her. But Hell is a nasty place, so it gave him back all five and a half of the wives he had had over the course of a century or so, preserved after their deaths of old age. They were back in the primes of their lives. That was a problem, because in Xanth a man is supposed to have only one wife at a time. So we take turns, one a month. This month is my turn.”

  Vinia was having trouble assimilating this. “How many wives?”

  “Ah. You have a problem with the half.”

  “Yes.”

  “Allow me to list them in order. As a young man Humfrey loved MareAnn, but she knew that marriage was hard on innocence, and she needed her innocence to summon unicorns, so she reluctantly turned him down. You see, her talent was summoning female equines, but she wanted the rare ones, too. I was the next, and he married me as wife number one. But I was foolishly impatient with his mortal limitations and took off. So he married the Maiden Taiwan. When she passed on, he married Rose of Roogna as number three. When she departed, he had hideous trouble keeping track of his old socks, so he married Sofia Mundane, who had no magic but was excellent at tracking and mending socks. She was number four. but she finally got fed up—Humfrey is not the easiest man to get along with—so he married the Gorgon as number five. Would you believe she traveled across Xanth all the way to the castle to ask him a Question, which was ‘Will you marry me?’ and he made her serve a year’s Service to earn her Answer?”

  “He what?” Vinia asked, unbelieving.

  “Humfrey’s ways are often confusing to ordinary folk,” Dara said. “That actually made sense. She served a year assisting him in the castle, learning all his ways and where every obscure thing was, until she knew better than he did. By the time the year was done, she had a thorough basis to decide whether she really wanted to marry him. Nine out of ten women given that education would get the bleep out of there and find some more amenable man. But she was sure and married him without illusion. And it worked out well enough.”

  “Oh.” It did make a twisted kind of sense.

  “She was the one he went to rescue, when she got trapped in Hell.” Dara smiled. “He got more than he bargained on.”

  That seemed to be the case. “But what about the half wife?”

  “Ah, yes. MareAnn had aged and gone to Hell in the normal course. She had discovered that Hell was almost as hard on innocence as marriage, so now she was ready to marry him. He had never stopped loving her, or she him, in over a century. It was a small ceremony, and rather late in their lives, so they considered it half a marriage. That was thirty-two years ago, so he has a half wife of thirty-two years.”

  Vinia shook her head. “And I thought my life was complicated!” She also suspected that there was a pun lurking, but it probably wasn’t worth pursuing.

  “Now to business,” Dara said. “You seek Humfrey’s advice on your Quest to save the six crystallized princesses.”

  “Well, really it’s Ion and Hilda’s Quest. I’m just a friend.”

  Dara laughed. “They are right. You are almost painfully generous and modest.” She turned serious. “Understand this, Wivinia: it is your Quest now. You are the protagonist. They are your companions.”

  “But—”

  “It became your Quest when you tackled the Challenges and won through, as they would not have. That was a remarkable ploy that entirely fooled the preset apparatus.”

  “We did worry that we were supposed to be balked by them.”

  “Exactly. Ion tends to think in terms of nullifying elixirs, but he couldn’t have nullified the Spring of Forbidden Love. You found the alternate route. Hilda thinks in terms of sewing magical items, but sewing would not have restored that baby. Again, you found a different way. Benny thinks in terms of accommodating other folk, but our dagger lady was proof against accommodation. You realized that the opposite was called for: chaos.”

  “I just sort of blundered through,” Vinia confessed. “Maybe I was just lucky.”

  “And maybe you have a natural feel for what a given situation requires. That may free the princesses instead of messing them up. They are confined for a reason. Incidentally, those Challenge threats were not as real as they may have seemed. Had you fallen into the spring with the goblin, you would not have changed gender and gone into a breeding frenzy, you would merely have lost the Challenge. Similar with the others; your real options were success or failure. The other participants were castle personnel playing their roles.” She smiled. “But you did have an effect. Jim and Jemima have taken an interest in each other, since she managed to show him her bosom in the vision. Men may be slow to pick up hints, but they notice bare flesh immediately.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Keep it in mind for when you come of age in the not-too-distant future. Ion loves you for your obliging telekinesis and personality. That’s fine as far as it goes. But sex appeal generates prompt compulsion, regardless of a man’s intellect or power. Use it judiciously, when.”