Once upon a time, there was an assistant librarian who
was turned into a schnauzer. However, this isn’t particularly
important at the moment. 
	Once upon some time later, there was a princess
sitting in the back row of Room 220³ (a magical accident
some years before had rearranged the architecture to the
point where a new numbering system was required), in the
Applied Enchantments building of the Enid R. Hopbottom
School for Evil Sorceress-Queens. She was extraordinarily
bored.
	The reason for her boredom wasn’t related in any
particular way to the lecture she was enduring, because it
wasn’t occupying the slightest bit of her attention. Nor was it
an effect of always choosing the seat next to the girl who
responded to points such as, “If you add more fennel to the
eye of newt mixture before your cauldron comes to a boil, the
resulting frog will be wartier,” by asking the question, “Are
you saying that if you add more fennel to the eye of newt
mixture before your cauldron comes to a boil, the resulting
frog will be wartier?” 
	The princess was bored because she had long since
discovered that it didn’t matter in the slightest whether you
added the fennel to the eye of newt mixture before or after it
came to a boil, or even whether you substituted plain
dandelions and forgot the eye of newt altogether (which she
often did, as she felt the traditional recipes were always a bit
hard on newts). Enchantment wasn’t a matter of finding the
right ingredients and saying the right words; it was all in
thinking about things the right way. The methods you used to
get there were completely irrelevant to the results you
obtained. However, no matter how hard she tried to explain
this to her instructors, they persisted in teaching the
“traditional” approach. “It’s always been done that way, and
that’s that,” they would say, as though they had made some
sort of brilliant point. The princess would grind her teeth and
toy with the notion of turning them all into crickets.
	“You there!” snapped the instructor, a hatchet-faced
old sorceress whose features were drawn and pinched after
years of trying to hide smile lines and rather pleasant dimples.
Her entire visage seemed to shrink away from her own
nearsighted glare, which was indeed all one could remember
about her upon leaving her classroom.
	The princess looked up to find the glare fixed on her.
Bother, she thought. “Yes, Miss Plender?” said the princess,
with heavy resignation.
	The glare intensified. “Perhaps you would like to
explain to the class what it was I was just talking about -
since you don’t need to bother yourself with note-taking.”
	The princess took a deep breath. “You were just
saying,” she said, “that the screaming mandrake is often
found in transformation spells because of its homuncular
properties, and is therefore a demonstration of the First Law
of Magic, which states that certain events must affect similar
events; i.e., that like influences like.” 
	The glare narrowed suspiciously. “Hmph. Well, I’m
glad you were paying attention after all.” The lecture went
on, and the princess amused herself by turning her pen into an
earthworm and back again. There wasn’t much of a trick,
really, to reading ahead in the textbook the night before.
	Finally, the class ended. The princess broke free of the
main flock of students heading off to various lunch
assignations, making for the library. She had a pleasant vision
of curling up with a book about dragons and knights and
damsels in various degrees of distress, whose lives made
sense to them no matter how many bushels of straw they
were asked to spin into gold.
	The library was a sprawling, squat building, without
any of the flying-buttresses-and-soaring-towers nonsense that
most of the other school buildings (except for the Applied
Enchantments building, which had problems of its own)
incorporated. Because it was a very large building, for all that
it had only one floor, it took the princess quite a long time to
wend her way to the very back, where all of the old, dusty
histories were kept. The princess scanned the shelves,
muttering to herself.
	“ ‘Shining armor, knights in’ . . . no, not those . . . 
‘Silver, hoarded; Swords, magical (see also Weapons,
enchanted)’ . . . probably not . . .” The princess slowly
became aware of a strange huffing noise.
	Odd noises weren’t uncommon in magical libraries.
The wands and spellbooks in storage generated enough magic
to distort reality somewhat; the princess had hunted for
volumes to the sounds of the ocean (complete with seagull
chorus), the howling of a pack of wolves, the distant
rumbling of thunder, and the subdued chatter of a cocktail
party. However, she couldn’t dismiss the huffing as ordinary
magical spillover for two reasons: because it had the gritty
edge of reality that the others lacked, and because it was very
definitely coming closer. 
	Fortunately, the princess was at no loss for something
heavy to throw.
	She snagged the massive volume dedicated to
“Damsels, distressed” and backed into a defensible corner to
await the Beast. The predatory panting drew nearer, and the
princess shifted her gaze to the space between the tops of two
shelves, where she was certain the monster would have to
appear. She waited.
	She continued waiting.
	Finally, she looked down at the floor in front of her.
	A small gray dog with an extraordinarily bushy face
looked back, panting. It wagged its tail politely. “Excuse me,
miss,” it said. “Can I help you find something?”
	The princess, for some time, was not quite sure how
to respond. The dog waited patiently. “Look,” she said. “I
just want to make it clear that I am absolutely not going to
kiss you, no matter how handsome you are or how
unbelievably huge your kingdom is.”
	The dog gave her a look. “Actually, I don’t have a
kingdom. I’m the assistant librarian. Now, were you looking
for something in particular?”
	The princess stared. She remembered the assistant
librarian as a sort of nondescript, slender man with an
expression of helpful earnestness as a permanent fixture of his
face. As far as she knew, he wasn’t the victim of a family
curse or a seventh son, and neither of his parents (an
accountant and an apothecary) had vanished under
mysterious circumstances when he was born. “Who would
turn an assistant librarian into a dog?!” she blurted.
	“Ah,” said the dog. “That. Well, you see, there’s this
sorceress who checks out the books of magic, then returns
them all stained with virgin’s blood and snake oil. And she
refuses to pay the charges on them! So when she came to
renew her library card . . .”
	“You wouldn’t do it, so she turned you into a little
ugly dog?”
	“Actually, I’m a _schnauzer_,” the dog corrected
meticulously. 
	“Sure you are,” said the princess. “Well, at least it’s
nontraditional. Frogs, absolutely; bears, why not; rabbits,
certainly; foxes, unlikely, but they happen . . . you’re the first
schnauzer I’ve heard of, though.”
	“I know,” said the schnauzer. “That’s why things are
so difficult. Whoever heard of a fairy tale that started out
‘once upon a time there was an assistant librarian who was
turned into a schnauzer’? It just doesn’t work.” He brooded.
“The worst part,” he said, “definitely the worst part is
ladders. I can’t get the hang of them. It’s terrible, really. I
can’t get anything alphabetized that’s shelved higher than Q.”
He sat down and stared gloomily at the floor. “And it’s likely
going to stay this way unless I can find a princess who’ll . . .
What is it?”
	The princess was backing away from the schnauzer.
“Oh, no. No, no, no. I told you before, I WILL NOT KISS
YOU!” she shouted. “Bad enough that I have to put up with
all this ‘double, double, toil and trouble’ nonsense. I will
_not_ be sucked into a fairy tale!” She stepped over the dog
and swept majestically between the bookshelves - a manner of
exit that she reserved for special occasions. Although she was
wearing a sensible pair of jeans, she still managed to convey
the impression of a full ballgown. The dog hurried along,
short legs working like pistons.
	“No,” huffed the dog, “you misunderstand. In order
to be changed from a dog back into a person, as I it was
explained to me, I need to get a princess to . . .” 
	The princess stopped so suddenly that the dog
careened into her. “What?” she growled. The dog cowered.	
	He told her. She laughed. He repeated it. “Oh, all
right then,” she said. “What harm can it do?” She walked
over to a nearby shelf. “Which one?”
	The dog muttered, “Any one will do.” She opened.
the book in front of the dog and sat down. He looked at her,
panted nervously, and began to read. “‘Had we but world
enough and time/ This coyness, Lady, were no crime . . .”
	Much, much later, the princess left the library. The
assistant librarian thanked her politely and went back to
cataloguing his books. 

THE END . . . well, not quite.

	Two days later, the princess was back at the library,
under cover of history research. She saw the assistant
librarian. He saw her. Later, he walked her home. 
	Many years later, the Chief Sorceress and Head
Librarian of the School of Progressive Magic were quite
astonished to find that they had, in spite of their best efforts,
managed to live happily ever after, after all.

THE END (really)


[© 1999, Erin M. Schmidt]