XANTH 26 Up in a Heaval by Piers Anthony

Author:Piers Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub

12

GROSSCLOUT

They arrived back at the little house. Now Grundy Golem was there too, standing beside his wife. “Surprise!” Rapunzel cried, her size diminishing her annoyance not half a whit. “Your hair is all mussed. What have you been up to?”

“Oops,” Surprise murmured, fetching out a comb and straightening her disarrayed tresses. “We'll have to confess.” She did not seem overly concerned.

“It's my fault,” Umlaut said gallantly.

“Nonsense,” Rapunzel said, and he realized that even at this he had messed up. She gave her daughter a stern glare. “Well?”

“Oh, Mother, he's the One,” Surprise said.

The woman's endless hair seemed to change color, though of course that couldn't happen without magic. “How can you possibly know that?”

“The Demoness Metria told me my ideal man was coming today, so I knew. And here he is.”

“And you believed her? That demoness is full of nothing but mischief.”

“Why would she bother? She doesn't care about my life,”

Ouch. Umlaut hated the need, but had to speak up. “She may be trying to stop me from delivering the letters. There have been other things.”

“Why stop the letters?” Rapunzel asked, fixing him with a stare that left figurative welts on his guilty face.

“I don't know. But the first one went to the Demon Jupiter, and it made him so mad that he threw his Red Spot at us. The Good Magician says I can find a way to stop it, if I deliver the letters. But I'm reading them first, to make sure no one else gets one to make him that mad.”

“It may not be the letter that makes folk mad,” Grundy said significantly.

Rapunzel turned to her daughter. “So you see, it may have been a setup.”

Surprise looked in turn at Umlaut. “If it was, do you take it all back?”

“Take what back?” Rapunzel demanded.

This was getting more awkward by the moment, and it hadn't been easy to begin with. He was already blushing, but he couldn't deny it. “I, uh, we, uh, that is—”

“We're in love,” Surprise said clearly.

Rapunzel's hair darkened another shade. “In one hour? I find that hard to believe.”

“Oh, I don't know,” Grundy said. “I loved you from the first, Punzel, though I didn't know it.”

She dismissed that out of hand. “Well, you're a man. Fortunately we can get to the bottom of this.” She faced the two cats. “Claire Voyant, is it true?”

The cat nodded.

Rapunzel looked as if she had smelled a stink horn. She looked icily at Umlaut, and her hair seemed to freeze in place. “Don't you have other letters to deliver?”

“Uh, yes,” he said miserably. He had been dismissed. He turned to go.

“I'll be in touch,” Surprise said.

With no magic? But how could he argue with her. “Okay.” He walked away so as not to see Rapunzel's angry stare, but he felt it boring into his back. How had he ever managed to get into so much trouble? He had never sought to set mother against daughter.

And yet it seemed to be true. In only an hour he had found a girl to truly love.

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