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You'll need to sing that anthem like a flame-bird if we're to impress his lordship. Do it well, and you'll get a gold coin. Do it badly, and you're not the only one in trouble. I'll get it in the neck for choosing the wrong poet to write the wretched thing."
    "I can't keep this up for much longer," said the wise-hoof irritably. "Carrying two people instead of one is no joke. It's getting toward dusk; are we going to stop somewhere for the night?"
    "We'll find an inn," said Pignut. "A hot tub and dinner sounds like the best idea I've heard for a long time."
    They traveled for the next half hour in silence, with just the splash-squelch of hooves for accompaniment. Then they rounded a bend in the road and saw a wooden building on stilts. The area underneath was obviously stabling for cuddyaks, and as they drew closer Felix could hear them bellowing and smell the manure.
    "Oh, great," said the wise-hoof bitterly. "I can't climb a ladder. I'm going to be in with the beasts of burden, aren't I?"
    "It's just for one night," said Pignut. "And it'll be warm and dry. The only thing that's going to suffer is your pride. Actually, Andria isn't all that far away now. We could just keep going."
    "No thanks," said the wise-hoof. "I'll settle for the stable. The company will be an improvement, anyway."
    Later, as Felix sat drinking his fertle-juice and eating his mushroom omelette, he felt alternately wildly elated at
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    being back in the other world and then worried sick about nearly everyone he cared about. The few seconds left in between were taken up with checking out how he was feeling, just in case his cure was fading away. So far, he felt OK. Which was more than his parents could say. He felt a sudden flare of hatred for Snakeweed.
    The inn was packed with traders selling everything from lickit sweets to handmade paper, for which there was now great demand. It was Felix who had brought printing to Betony's world, and he could see the evidence of his actions everywhere. Leaflets on the tables, advertising wailing courses in three-part discord. Tacky posters, promoting crystal ball parlors and giving their hygiene-rating. Advertisements on the backs of the menus, for toadstool suppliers. He'd wanted to come back so badly, but he hadn't expected what he'd found. Apparently there was a curfew and roadblocks on every street leading out of Andria. The tangle-folk had been forcibly rehoused, miles from anywhere, and the king and queen had quite simply vanished. Everyone at the inn seemed a bit edgy and quieter than might have been expected. The conversations kept to safe subjects like the weather and magic.
    And although Felix felt reasonably confident of his disguise -- he wasn't anywhere near as weedy as he'd been the previous year -- there were always the blue eyes....
    Ironclaw fluffed out his feathers, scratched out a couple of numbers on his brazzle dirt-board, and thought for a
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    moment. It was the best dirt-board on Tromm Fell, situated in a shallow depression close to the Divide and protected from the wind on three sides by a rocky outcrop. He wrote a few more numbers in the sandy soil with his talon, hopped back, and surveyed the result. Elegant, that's what it was. All the best solutions were. He'd been working on a pyramid idea for cataloging the books in the library by subject, which would make finding things less of a hit-or-miss affair. The first number would stand for the general area of interest -- animals, say. The next number would specify whether it swam, flew, wriggled, or walked. Then what? Whether it used magic or not? He ruffled his feathers again and glanced at the sky. There was a speck in the distance -- Granitelegs, maybe, dropping by with some lunch and a tricky little algebraic problem or two. He focused the magnification area of his eye on the speck. It wasn't a brazzle at all. It was a fire-breather, and it was carrying two passengers. As it got closer, it became apparent that the passengers were