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go right back to their quarrels. Only this time they will be more careful of what they do.”
    “But, my prince,” Sharailan insisted, “are you sure?”
    “I am.”
    “Yes, but—”
    “I said, I am!” All at once at the edge of his patience with Sharailan and the whole tedious day, the prince sprang to his feet once more. But he couldn’t just go storming out of there, not without leaving condescending whispers in his wake. In a pretense of proper princely duty, Hauberin snatched at random the scrolls the startled sage had been holding for his signature. But then the prince glanced down at what he held, and stifled a groan. He wasn’t going to escape with anything so simple as a signature with this thing. Still, he could hardly stuff it back into Sharailan’s hands!
    “I did promise to work on this spell,” Hauberin admitted. “And so I shall. Now. Outside. Alone!”

    ###

    Hauberin, his crown sent back to the royal treasury, his cloak abandoned in this soft weather, sat out on a palace terrace in the warm afternoon light, inhaling air sweet with hay and flowers, and tried to concentrate only on the spell-scroll spread out on the small stone table before him.
    It wasn’t easy.
    Powers . . . what if he had been wrong about Lietlal and Ethenial? What if they did fight, and killed each other? Maybe Sharailan was right. Maybe he shouldn’t have acted so rashly. Maybe—
    Hauberin exhaled sharply, angry at himself. Alarming though the fact sometimes seemed, even after these six years of rule, he was the prince. While he might listen to his advisors as much as he pleased, he must not let anyone else make his decisions for him.
    Besides, I was right, Hauberin told himself. They will not duel.
    He hoped.
    Ah well, to the scroll. Hauberin studied it for a long while, frowning. And gradually he became engrossed in the problem despite himself, plotting out the steps he would need to take . . . Decided, the prince set to work.
    Some sage in ages past had inscribed a basic wheat-fertility charm on the parchment, the Powerful symbols twisting elegantly about each other. Hauberin, delicately untangling and widening the twists, was attempting to widen the charm’s narrow application by including his own magical additions.
    A few days back, he had argued that surely an older, more seasoned scholar would be a better choice for this. But the sages had all insisted the spell would have increased potency if the prince himself worked on it, citing the magical correlation between ruler and land. Hauberin wasn’t so sure about that. He was the rightful prince, no argument there, and as far as he knew, his half-human status had no effect one way or the other on his fertility. But it wasn’t as though he and actually sired a child, after all.
    Still, Hauberin had to admit that testing his abilities like this (assuming the spell worked and all this wasn’t for nothing) was fun. Besides, there was a limit to the strength or the little field-magics most farmers used, and anything that coaxed the land into greater abundance . . .
    The prince gave a dry little laugh. Whenever he turned his talents to some such less . . . fashionable subject, he bewildered his nobles. Why, they wondered, worry about something as plebeian as crops and harvests?
    Let those harvests fail, and we’ll see how quickly they learn the answer to that! There’s a limit to what magic alone can do. Without the farmers they hold in such contempt, none of us would eat or —
    “Oh, damn!”
    The moment he’d released his will from them, the stubborn spell-syllables had curled themselves back up on the page into their original form. Yet again.
    Hauberin leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. There was such a thing as being too conscientious. Maybe Alliar was right. Now that he had the fundamentals of the new spell set, he should just turn the whole thing back over to the sages.
    The prince straightened, resting his gaze on his lands. The view from here was