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Excerpt from
Beginner's Luck

None of his colleagues in Demonology would have voted Anders Regan most likely to become a god, but what did they know?

They wouldn’t have thought him a likely mascot for the New Herbalists, either, but it happened. Not because Anders was a New Herbalist – he stood staunchly in the Old Guard of the International Society for the Study of Arcane Botany – but the way he stood was so easy to imitate! His mop of white curls was so available in a cheap wig, his thin figure and pot belly so easy for a slim young botanist with a pillow to counterfeit, and his nose so distinctive, its tip dented in until it was almost branched, that no New Herbalist could resist.

The first time he appeared in a skit at the ISSAB banquet, Anders was taken aback. Manners forbade open reproach; he applauded, smiled, and let people take photographs of him with his imitator, and next year they did it again. By the third year, when the Anders Regan mouse pad appeared as a door prize, it wasn't an insult any more. The year of the Anders Regan peekaboo screen saver, the president of ISSAB took him aside.

"Thank you for being a good sport about this," she said. "It's about the only thing holding the New Herbalists and the traditionalists together, at this point."

Anders flushed and fidgeted with his ring. "Oh well, they don't mean any harm," he mumbled.

"Not everybody would take it that well," said the president, glancing at the tattooed, earringed New Herbalists in their jeans and leather. "You're one of the good ones, Anders."

Anders looked down and twisted his tie-tack, but he was pleased enough to spend some time with the New Herbalists, ignoring what they said and how they said it. Next year he was rewarded with the Anders Regan fan club tee shirt, and instead of trying not to look displeased, he had to work at not looking inappropriately gratified.

He had been ISSAB’s treasurer and chairman of the Plant Use Committee for twenty years, after all, with no recognition but the polite applause that greeted business reports. Now his colleagues were retiring or dying in harness, and every year Anders noticed how little they were missed. Would he, too, disappear without a trace? No, for he would leave at least a screen saver, a tee shirt. Sometimes he sat at his desk, back at the Royal Academy of the Arcane Arts and Sciences in Osyth, and wished he had the peekaboo screen saver on his own computer.

Hardly anyone came into Anders’ lab. He supervised field students, Sorcery students based in the teaching hospital, and practical herbology students, who shared an office in the fourth-floor greenhouses; though he disguised his lab’s emptiness by subdividing it with bookcases, he wasn't displeased to have someone knock on the door, even someone in the kind of suit worn by textbook salespeople.

"Yes?" he said. The man with the suit took one step in.

"Are you Magister Anders Regan?" he asked, in an accent Anders couldn't place.

"Yes. Can I help you?"

"I am Inspector Liskin," the man said, proffering a badge. "Macoma Central Bureau of Investigations."

"Macoma! Has something happened to Claudia?" The man's gaze was blank. "My graduate student. Claudia Rines. She's at the Macoma Mountains Field Station …"

"No," said Inspector Liskin, "This regards something else. Can you tell me anything of a man named Joachim Sors?"

"Sors?" Anders remembered an earring and leather jacket. "Oh! Yes, he's one of the people I see at herbology conferences. Works in – Selanto, I think. Why?"

"We are investigating a plant pornography ring," said the Inspector. "Sors was our best lead, until he was killed last week."

Anders' jaw didn't drop, but he felt his eyes getting big. "Killed? Plant pornography?" he asked – stupidly, because of course it was obvious, to anyone who worked with dryads.



© 2010 Patricia S. Bowne