Crewel Lye Read Online Free Page B

purred. In a moment it opened its mouth and extruded its tongue, which was a sheet of paper.
    Humfrey tore off the paper--an act that startled Ivy--and handed it to her. “There's your copy. Now go away.”
    Naturally, Ivy got ready to argue, but realized that she wanted to go away, now that she had what she wanted, so she kept silent. Sometimes the directives of men had to be obeyed, when they chanced to be correct, annoying as that was. She scrambled down off the table and left the little Good Magician to his reading. He had become entirely distracted by the text before him, which happened to be taxidermy, while the copy-cat continued to extrude copies of the crewel lye recipe. A copy fell down before him, obscuring his text, at which he stared at the cat speculatively. “Very interesting techniques here,” Humfrey murmured. “I wonder--” but at that point the cat hastily jumped clear of the text, not having the same interest in studying, or in being a subject for, taxidermy that Humfrey had.
    The Gorgon greeted Ivy as she departed. The Gorgon was an elegant, tall, veiled woman with snake hair, the Good Magician's wife and the mother of Hugo, Ivy's friend. “Won't you stay for a cookie, dear?” she asked.
    Ivy started to decline, but the Gorgon produced the biggest, loveliest, most aromatic punwheel cookie imaginable, and Ivy was overwhelmed. She realized that the Gorgon was probably lonely for living female company, so it would be only proper to visit for a while. She decided to stay for one cookie.
    In due time, Ivy returned to Castle Roogna with the recipe, retracing her route through the gourd. No one had missed her except the ghosts--which, of course, was part of her problem. All anyone paid attention to these days was the confounded baby. She'd like to drop him into the peephole of a gourd, without the mare shoe!
    But now she could clean the tapestry and get Jordan's complete story. All she had to do was use the recipe to make the cleaner. Fortunately, the ghosts knew where all the supplies were. Ivy got a pot and some lye and some fat and stuff and cooked them together according to instructions. The lye was strong stuff that tried to burn her little hands, but the recipe told her how to be careful. Jordan's friend Renee Ghost helped Ivy to read the more difficult parts of the instructions, so that she made no mistakes. She had to say several spells along the way, to turn the lye into the crewel, but finally she had a bottle of the elixir.
    She got a sponge, soaked it with her lye mix, and wiped it across the surface of the tapestry. The result was startling. There was a swath of much brighter and clearer images. The stuff was working!
    Ivy went carefully over the entire tapestry until it fairly shone. The moving pictures looked so real she almost believed she could walk into them. “Oh, yes!” Jordan exclaimed. “I can see every detail! The memories are flooding back!”
    “Now tell me your story,” Ivy ordered him.
    She settled back before the tapestry, watching, while Jordan concentrated on the beginning of his story. With Ivy's help, because the ghost could not make the tapestry respond by himself, he got the correct sequence of pictures to form. Then, as the pictures showed the action, Jordan narrated the story as he remembered it. He skipped over the dull parts, such as sleeping, and lingered on the good parts, such as fighting monsters and kissing fair maidens and encountering strange magic. It was a genuine tale of Swords and Sorceries and Goods and Evils and Treacheries, and Ivy was entranced. She loved tales with guts. She watched and heard the caustic yarn as if she were there herself. She thrilled to the Thud and Blunder of it and suffered fervently with the revelation of the UnKind Untruth.

Xanth 8 - Crewel Lye
    Chapter 2: Pooka.
    I believe it really started when I came of age. It was the fashion in those days for a young man to prove himself by indulging in some fantastic exploit; then he