"What on earth do that Northlander and the scoundrel have tied to their saddles?" asked Lily, shading her eyes with her hand and peering as they all vanished into the distance. "Some great shaggy bundle of green. I couldn't make out any details."
Rosa could only shrug; she had seen whatever it was, too, and had been just as puzzled by it. "It looked like bushes. I can't imagine why they would have bushes with them, but I'm sure they have a plan."
"I would be surprised if they didn't," Lily replied matter-of-factly. "Well, time to go to the next stage. I confess, I am looking forward to this." She turned around and went into a small pavilion that had been set up with a guard to mind it. Inside was nothing but one of her mirrors, but no one would know that but the two of them. She set the spell, and led Rosa through the mirror.
They came out of a second one in another small pavilion set up at the middle stage.
The race was going to be long enough that overeager riders would exhaust even mouse-horses, which only had the stamina of real horses — but the mouse-horses had more sense than a real horse and could not be goaded into overextending themselves no matter what you did. So if the mouse-horses pulled up here tired, they would be trotting, or at best cantering, the return route. At this end of the course, there was an enormous sheepfold made of stakes with thornbushes impaled on them — in it, the flock of sheep drifted from one side of the fold to the other, baaing and bleating. There was more than a hint of pungent wool on the breeze.
These were white-face sheep, although Eltaria supported flocks of both black and whitefaces. Far enough away from the full sheepfold to make it a challenge were the small pens, attached to another, empty sheepfold. These were the pens that the candidates were supposed to get their sheep into, and once they did, gates would be opened in the back of the pens to let the sheep into the other fold. Along the back of the space between the two folds were the baskets of eggs for the egg-challenge. In theory it didn't matter which you did first, but the smart ones would see how crowded and chaotic the sheep situation was before they decided.
They stood now on a bit of a hill set out with the shade-pavilion; in the back of it was the mirror behind a dividing curtain. The front of it held a pair of chairs and a table that provided a viewing stand for Rosa and Lily. There were already servants here — Brownies disguised as ordinary human servants — with cold water and fruit. "I would willingly have killed someone for all this when I was in the forest," Rosa said, looking down at the food, the comfortable chairs, being careful not to mention the renegade Dwarves.
"We have to look the part, dear," Lily replied, taking a fan from the servant and fanning herself with it. "Appearances are important. You don't know who is watching. We must show that we are vitally interested in the outcome of this trial."
Rosa took that as the cue and warning that it was, and nodded. There truly was no telling who might be listening. Unless Lily took magical precautions, which in and of themselves would betray that she was, in fact, a magician, it was very easy for another magician to eavesdrop on everything they said and did here. Some would be friendly, some merely opportunistic, and some unfriendly.
When the first riders came over the hills, their horses were, predictably, tired — not quite stumbling with exhaustion, but not far from it. The mouse-horses were not going to put up with that sort of abuse on the return leg, and all the speed that the riders had gotten on the outward leg would be lost as their mounts took their time getting back.
And now came the part that Rosa had been looking forward to. She had not really laughed much since her mother died. She and her mother had shared so many things, and laughter was high on the list of the things she missed. And — all right, she knew she was going to be laughing at those hapless Princes, and that was not kind — she needed laughter desperately.
As she had known it would be, as the trial unfolded before them, it was not just funny, it was hilarious. Three of the first men to arrive had brought shepherds with them, the lightest of the lot, two girls and a boy and their relatively small dogs. The shepherds jumped off the rumps of the horses without being told; the little dogs looked eager to get to work. The shepherds at the big sheepfold released about two dozen sheep, which looked bewildered at suddenly finding themselves without the fence around them; the dogs went to work, each of them cutting out three sheep and driving them expertly toward the little pens, while the Princes went straight for the eggs.
But although they had thought through the sheep problem, they had not thought about the eggs, nor the difficulty of handling them in heavy metal gauntlets. Very shortly all three of them were cursing and covered in bits of shell and spattered egg. Their return trip was going to be quite...fragrant...as the raw eggs aged ungracefully in the heat.
Rosa only hoped they weren't getting egg inside the armor. That would be rather nasty. Meanwhile more riders were appearing with every moment, and more sheep being released, and the ensuing chaos as riders left their horses at a run, only to be confronted with a sea of swirling sheep, was hilarious. It was a giant white wooly whirlpool, in which every sheep had only one urge — not to get away from the flank of its neighbor.
Some just stood and stared. One very large man had evidently decided that the only way to deal with the problem was to tackle it as he would another unarmed warrior. Which was to say, he was tackling the poor sheep.
Or to be more precise, he was trying to. Sheep, it appeared, were able to evade tackles fairly well, and he ended up facedown on the turf time and time again as the flock swirled away from him. When he finally did manage to seize one, he caught it firmly around the middle and hauled it up off the ground — except that the poor thing was upside down, bleating pathetically while he tried to ignore the fact that he had a smelly sheep's rump right in his face. Doggedly, he hauled the bleating, struggling, unhappy animal to the pen, dumped it in and went after another.
Another fellow had the idea that he was going to toss a loop of rope over each sheep's head and lead it to the pen one at a time. This was, in theory, a good idea. The problem was the sheep were not cooperating. He'd get the rope almost over the beast's head, and it would toss it off again. He kept trying to get closer and closer to it, talking coaxingly, but what he was cooing to them were the vilest, funniest epithets Rosa had ever heard. Evidently the sheep's father, mother and grandparents for the last hundred years had gotten up to some interesting assignations if you believed the incredible words emerging from this man's mouth....It was a wonder this beast still looked like a sheep.
"You really shouldn't be listening to that," Lily murmured, her eyes sparkling with suppressed laughter.
Other men were just attempting what the big man was doing, and the herd swirled faster, in further confusion, sheep leaping over each other in alarm as armored men lunged at them. Finally some of the men realized that once the designated three sheep had been herded up for those who had the foresight to hire shepherds, those shepherds no longer had a job to do. In other words, there were an increasing number of shepherds standing around laughing at them.