The Color Of Her Panties by Piers Anthony Read Free Book Online Page A

Saxifrage Goatsbeard Ganas Ogress.  Unfortunately she hadn't grown enough and was singularly small and plain for her kind.  She didn't even have any warts or fangs; her stare would never curdle milk.
    She was also embarrassingly weak; she had to use both hands to crush juice from a rock.  But her worst failure was in her mind:  she was not nearly stupid enough.  This defect had a minor compensation:  she was smart enough to hide this fault and to pretend to be only a little less stupid than the other ogre whelps.  But she could not hide it from herself, and it was her constant shame.
    Okra tended to stay close to home, so as not to be teased by her peers.
    Other ogres thought that peers were wooden structures that projected into the water of Lake OgreChobee and had no concern about them, but Okra knew better.  Peers were other ogres her age, and they were the very worst company for her.  She was content to stir the pot and scrape the dirt off the floor, and to think her frustratingly smart thoughts.
    If she ever let slip how unstupid she was, they would throw her away.
    But some events she had been unable to escape.  Her stylishly brutish parents had taken her to the monster marriage mash of Conan the Librarian and Tasmania Devil.
    Conan was said to have been able to squeeze a big dictionary into a single word, and to be able to use two heavy tomes to pound the civilization right out of any creature in short order.  Tasmania was hailed as the meanest shecanine of an ogress of her generation.  So it was a perfect match.  Alas, the marriage did not work out well.  Conan was too literate for Tasmania's taste, and she had a restless spirit.
    When the blood was on the moon she would feed him wild poison mushrooms that she ground up and mixed into his sea oat cakes.  He loved the taste of those cakes, but the poison only gave him romantic notions.  She wished he would lie down and die so that she could marry her first cousin Tasmaniac and gain status, but instead he was fired up for twice the usual amount of stork summoning, and their family grew at an ogreish rate.
    But that was irrelevant.  It was at this wedding that Okra's mother, Fem Kudzu, had gotten Okra's horrorscope cast in iron.  The ogre tribe's midwife, who helped point out the right families when the stork couldn't tell one from another, was also the diviner.  She announced that the runes, ox entrails, and stars pointed to good news and bad news.  The good news was that Okra would eventually become a significant figure in Xanth.  The bad news was that she had been cursed by a stray random accidental curse that escaped from a curse fiend without finding its proper object, and so had a magic talent.
    Kudzu had reacted to this outrage as any ogress would:  she had smashed the diviner into the lake, where she had disappeared without significant trace; only a few fragments of bones showed at the water's edge, and the chobees soon gulped those down.  She jammed the iron cast down into the ground so deeply that molten lava filled in the hole it left.  Then she hauled Okra back into the midst of the festivities-the mashing and bashing, the slam dancing, and the floor show with the drunken harpies harping-and pretended that the horrorscope had never been cast.
    But Okra knew better.  Ashamed, she slipped away from the festivities and hid in the cold, slimy, rat-infested cellar.  That was a pleasant place, but still someone might find her, so she went down the winding narrow stone steps, down, down to the main kitchen where the wedding feast had been prepared.  Pieces of chopped monsters lay scattered around; they must have fallen off the platters.  As Okra's reddened eyes grew accustomed to the smoky gloom she saw sea oat cakes, both plain and poison (tastes differed), strewn on the stone floor.  Someone had spilled a keg of wine dregs all over the kitchen table, the floor, and a drunken rat who lay in a stupor under the table.  It was a very