Eurayle, Stheno ... and FRED? (Spoilers clearly marked))
Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2012 4:19 pm
I'm reading Patricia Wrede's The Far West (the third in her "Thirteenth Child" series). In the series, it's the mid-19th Century (this one begins in 1859), and The United States of Columbia pretty well ends at the Mammoth River (we'd call it the Mississippi). Magic works. Franklin, Jefferson andother great wizards set up the Great Barrier Spell along the Mammoth River to keep the Really Nasty Critters Over There out, but settlement is slowly progressing westward, with settlements with smaller protective spells and circuit magicians who help out in clearing and protecting new land.
In the second book ([url="[i]Across the Great Barrier[/i][/url]), the narrator, Eff Rothmer (a young lady of nineteen or so at the time) has gone west with an expedition to survey and to collect new specimens for the university study center menagerie where she works as an assistant.
And they discover that Something is turning animals - and eventually people - to stone.
Spoilers for the second and third books follow
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They discover that the cause is a "medusa lizard", as they name it - about the size of a komodo dragon - that has a third eye that turns living flesh to stone. They manage to kill the two that are so far the only ones they've seen, and, using preservation spells, bring them back - one intact - for study.
In the third book it's been discovered that their intact female was a gravid female ... and that the preservation spell kept her forty-eight eggs viable. By a chain of happenstance, three of the eggs have hatched at a new menagerie/study center west of the Great Barrier Spell.
And imprinted, like baby ducks, on one of the professors. Who has named them: Eurayle, Stheno ... and Fred.
After all, he says, a medusa lizard named "Medusa" would be a bit too self-referential. And, besides, Fred is male.
In the second book ([url="[i]Across the Great Barrier[/i][/url]), the narrator, Eff Rothmer (a young lady of nineteen or so at the time) has gone west with an expedition to survey and to collect new specimens for the university study center menagerie where she works as an assistant.
And they discover that Something is turning animals - and eventually people - to stone.
Spoilers for the second and third books follow
.
.
.
.
Y
O
U
H
A
V
E
B
E
E
N
W
A
R
N
E
D
.
.
.
.
.
D
O
N
'
T
B
L
A
M
E
M
E
I
F
Y
O
U
R
E
A
D
T
H
I
S
.
.
.
.
They discover that the cause is a "medusa lizard", as they name it - about the size of a komodo dragon - that has a third eye that turns living flesh to stone. They manage to kill the two that are so far the only ones they've seen, and, using preservation spells, bring them back - one intact - for study.
In the third book it's been discovered that their intact female was a gravid female ... and that the preservation spell kept her forty-eight eggs viable. By a chain of happenstance, three of the eggs have hatched at a new menagerie/study center west of the Great Barrier Spell.
And imprinted, like baby ducks, on one of the professors. Who has named them: Eurayle, Stheno ... and Fred.
After all, he says, a medusa lizard named "Medusa" would be a bit too self-referential. And, besides, Fred is male.
