"Kerr,.Katharine.&.Martin.H.Greenberg.-.Enchanted.Forests.V2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)

It was even easier than I'd anticipated. There was no sign of
any of the usual inflammables. All they could detect was that it
had incinerated. Well, at least that ruled out the obvious Real
World possibilities.

I returned home and handed a bit more of the ash to the Court
Sorcerer. He could tell me there was magic of some sort on the
ash, but of a level so low, he couldn't figure out what it was. He
also assured me a normal or magical fire shouldn't have been
able to enter the Enchanted Forest. He'd reinforced the spell
himself!

He thought a bit more and wondered if perhaps the fact that it
started within the old boundary had something to do with that.

I thanked him, then took my expense report-to-date to the
Treasury. I was now ten gold richer, and no closer to a solution.

What did that leave? I began to make lists. My new cottage
quickly became filled with scribbled lists, logic flowcharts, and
transcripts of interviews.

The overflowing stacks of paper reminded me of the records
my father used to keep, from his days as Head Woodcutter. He
was, if you'll pardon the expression, anal retentive. Yes, that's a
term I learned from the lectures on Psychology of the Criminal
Mind.

Father was incapable of cutting down a tree without noting its
original location, where the wood was processed, and what it
was turned into. He kept the records at the Palace, not at home,
so they should be intact.

In the ninth musty storeroom the Palace Majordomo opened,
we found the records. Being even more anal than my father, he
refused to let me remove the records, but did condescend to
letting me bring a lantern and a chair into the room.

My father had inherited a map of the original Enchanted For-
est that numbered every tree and showed it in its original loca-
tion. The map had been passed down in the family since the
Enchanted Forest was discovered, so it had everything. Each tree
bad been carefully numbered and coded with the year it was
found, since there were occasionally new trees, and the year it
was cut down.
It took days, but I copied the section of the map that covered
the meadow behind the old cottage.

Then I look the map and walked the burned meadow. I had to