Crewel Lye by Piers Anthony Page A

the bog, and I couldn't blame him. So we turned south, into dragon country after all.
    Then Pook sniffed, winding something. He wasn't afraid, just nervous, so I let him go toward it. It turned out to be a patch of blood on the forest floor, a scratchy trail, and a few feathers.
    “Some bird came down to drink from the river,” I conjectured. “And some predator attacked it. Bird got away, but injured. Happens all the time in the wilderness.”
    But still Pook sniffed, perplexed. “There's more?” I asked. “Want to track down the bird? I warn you, it won't be pretty.” I knew that few horses, ghost or otherwise, had much taste for blood.
    Pook sniffed out the trail, and I let him. He had a better nose than I had thought. Why was he so interested in this?
    Then we came in sight of the bird. It was a white stork with a broken wing--and it had a bundle.
    I double took, astonished. This stork was making a delivery! That bundle contained a baby!
    Could Bluebell--? No. As I said, there was always a delay of several months before the baby was delivered. The bureaucratic lapse differed, and tended to be longest for human beings; evidently storks didn't like human people as well as they liked mouse people or gremlin folk or whatever. Certainly the wait was more than a day for elves. Besides, the bundle was way too big to hold an elfling.
    The stork looked at me. His eyes were glazed with pain. “Friend or foe?” he asked.
    “You talk?” I asked stupidly. It was difficult to believe that such a long, hard beak could form human syllables. But it was also not easy to believe that those backward-bending knees could enable it to walk. If we disbelieved everything that was hard, we wouldn't believe in Xanth at all.
    “I talk,” he agreed. “I don't fly, at the moment. I suffered a mishap.” He craned his head about on his marvelously supple neck to eye his torn wing, from which blood still dripped. “Are you planning to help or hinder?”
    “Uh, to help, I guess,” I said awkwardly. I hadn't known that storks conversed with people like this. If they spoke our language, why did we have to make such intricate signals when ordering babies? It should be easier just to send a letter. No--immediately I realized that illiterates like me would never be able to order offspring, then; so there had to be a nonverbal or nonwritten signal. Anyway, I had never met a stork before; evidently their line of business required human communication at times, so they were trained for it. “But I don't know exactly what I can do. I'm not apt at healing others.”
    “There's a healing spring south of the--I forget what, but that's where it is,” the stork said. I realized that the bird's brain was suffering some fuzziness. “I could fly there quickly--I know right where it is--if I could fly. But that confounded little dragon caught me unawares. I pecked it on the snout and it ran home to its mother, but alas, my wing was already gone. So I'll just have to hoof it, so to speak.”
    I studied the bundle. “That looks pretty heavy,” I remarked. “Are you sure you can carry it, in your condition?”
    “I must deliver!” the stork said, folding his good wing across his breast and gazing reverently upward.
    “Uh, yes. Maybe we can give you a ride.”
    The stork looked at Pook. “That would be appreciated. But it's a fair bit, by foot. And it's to ogre country.”
    “That's where we're going,” I said. “Let me give you a hand with that.” I reached for the bundle.
    There was a growl, and a hairy hand came out and grasped my wrist with appalling strength. Startled, I jerked my hand away--and the thing came right out of the bundle, hanging onto my wrist. It was a hairy mass of glower and growl.
    “That's no baby!” I cried, shocked.
    “Yes, it is,” the stork said tiredly. “A baby ogre. Technically, an ogret. I told you where I was taking it.”
    “So you did,” I agreed. Barbarians are not too bright about some things; I had