Gary the gargoyle wants nothing more than to be relieved of his post so he can stop watering Xanth's rivers, but earning it means becoming human, chaperoning a five-year-old with an ever-shifting single talent, and tracking down a philter tangled up with a demon's illusions at Xanth's ruined stone circle. What starts as a chore becomes a fight to keep Xanth's magic from unraveling. The eighteenth Xanth novel gives its stone guardian a very human problem.
Summary by Loreful, from public sources