The Fairy Godmother Read online

  “Thursday next would be good,” said the one in grey.

  “But this time, I am supplying the cards! Your deck likes you altogether too much, Penelope!”

  In the carriage on the way back to the cottage, as shafts of light penetrated the forest canopy, creating slashes of golden light across the green shadows, Elena turned to her The Fairy Godmother

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  mentor. “Did you really arrange all of that?” she asked in wonder. “However did you even think of it?”

  “It only worked because Arachnia—that’s not her real name, by the way; she changed her name when she turned to the darkness—is young, and although she is a seething mess of anger and resentment, she is also enduring a truly crushing weight of loneliness,” Madame replied, as the carriage wheels rolled over a dry stick, breaking it with a sound that made Elena jump. “She spent all of her young life, much like you, despised and exploited. She was sent into the wilderness by her stepmother, who told her to gather berries before any such thing was ripe, and taken up by an Evil Sorceress and made into a slave.”

  “Then what?” Elena wanted to know.

  “Well, the Sorceress had many such ‘servants,’ all of whom hated her, but none of whom dared to defy her.

  Arachnia bore it as long as she could, but the moment came when she was both strong enough and had the opportunity, and she managed to kill her mistress. That was when she decided that she must be an Evil Sorceress, and The Tradition obliged by supplying her with some sort of tutors, as well as the workroom and library of her former mistress and all the other Evil Magicians who had lived there originally.”

  “So—she studied magic and The Tradition on her own?”

  Elena hazarded. Bella nodded.

  “That’s what usually happens, actually. The dark magicians don’t have a great deal of tolerance for one another.”

  Madame Bella glanced over at Elena, perhaps to see if she needed to elaborate on this point, but it was pretty obvious 148

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  to the Apprentice. Dark magicians didn’t have much tolerance for any sort of rival.

  “Well, when Randolf found her for me, I began using him to watch her, but to tell the truth, it was easy to see that her heart wasn’t in the business of evil for its own sake. She had the proper trappings, but it was mostly show. Her garden has as many roses as nightshade and henbane plants. She keeps only nonvenomous spiders and snakes. The bats live in their very own tower, and every raven and owl that has decided to roost at her castle is so well-fed that several of them are too fat to fly.”

  “But if that’s true,” Elena said, her brow wrinkling,

  “Why didn’t you do something to help her before she killed her stepmother?”

  There was a very long moment of silence.

  “Because,” Madame said at last, with such deep sorrow that Elena almost regretted asking the question, “I did not know any of this until I had Randolf go looking for the Evil Sorceress that I knew must be there. And I was lucky in Arachnia.”

  “She could have been—” Elena was not sure how to phrase it.

  “She could have been truly evil. This isn’t the first time that I’ve hoped to turn The Tradition this way, been disappointed, and had to rectify matters in the usual way. But that is why I sent Randolf looking, as I always have, hoping that I would be lucky.” Madame looked steadily into Elena’s eyes.

  “I knew that if just once I could find the combination I was looking for, I could turn The Tradition, not just this one time, but open a new possibility for the future. You felt it—

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  all that potential, how it just slipped aside when your counter was cast.”

  Elena nodded, warily. She thought she’d felt that, at any rate.

  “The potential magic you used was just a fraction of what was available, and the rest of it went into cutting a new Traditional Path,” Madame said, with just a touch of gloating. “Now, just you wait and see, the tale of Arachnia and her impoverished Poet Prince will become its own part of The Tradition, and perhaps that knowledge will help another Godmother turn some other Dark One in the future.”

  “Or maybe it will keep one from going to the Dark at all?” Elena hazarded.

  “We can only hope, my dear,” Bella replied, as the carriage came within sight of the cottage, its thatched roof gleaming like gold in the evening sunlight. “But it is a goal worth pursuing at almost any cost.”

  Elena had no difficulty whatsoever in agreeing with that.

  Day by day, week by week, Elena mastered the arts and skills of magic, and “fine art” of being a Godmother. Midsummer’s Day came and went, and summer drowsed towards haying time in the villages near Bella’s cottage. Haying time brought a spate of women to the cottage, the wives and sweethearts of farmworkers, seeking charms against cutting and ointment for wounds; haying was dangerous work, and the men who swung the huge, razor-sharp scythes could be cut and bleed to death if the worst happened. Bella taught the making of these to Elena, and after the first few, it was she who supplied all such things to their visitors.

  Some few of the farmers themselves came looking for help as well, but what they wanted was not a charm, but a prediction; hay needed five hot days to dry properly after The Fairy Godmother

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  it was cut, five days of no rain and no dew. Bella herself saw to that.

  “It’s easy enough,” she said with a chuckle. “Weather moves from west to east. I simply have Randolf look west from here, and find me at least a five-day span of clear weather, then give me a notion of when it will start. At this time of year, when we have far more sun than rain, that’s not so hard.”

  That struck Elena as supremely clever. It didn’t require trying to see into the future (which she had learned was very difficult and became more so the further ahead you tried to look). It also didn’t require changing the weather, which she had been warned was something that could cause more problems than it solved. Sometimes, it seemed, the business of a Witch or a Godmother was not so much using magic as knowing when not to use it.

  Sometimes she felt as if she was learning so much so fast that her head was stuffed full of it all, and if she had to master one more thing, her skull was going to burst.

  While Witches and Hedge-Wizards tended to control and direct magic by using things, (creating complicated potions and talismans), the Sorcerers and Sorceresses controlled magic with words using a special language of words of binding and loosing, that minutely described the effects a magician wanted. But a full Wizard or a Godmother worked strictly by will and intention. Oh, that sounded so very easy! But you had to learn how to focus yourself completely, so that nothing distracted you; you had to learn how to chart an exact course and commit yourself completely to the course you had decided on. And you had to 152

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  learn to think on your feet, so that you could frame something that would steer The Tradition in the way you wanted it to go the moment that an opportunity presented itself.

  This was why Arachnia, despite her best effort, had not thwarted The Tradition with her pseudo-curse. This was why Elena, shaking with fear and effort, had been able to counter the curse in a way that satisfied The Tradition. Faced with her first crisis, she had been so focused on it that by the time her will had been imposed there was no room for The Tradition to move except in the direction she wanted it to.

  Thanks to all her reading, she had known enough of The Tradition by then to be able to give it the path of least resistance in the direction she wanted it to go.

  But the more practiced she became, the more experience she had, the more important the ability to focus would become. She would not have that fear to narrow her concentration down to the sharpest point. With familiarity came, if not contempt, certainly a loss of urgency; she had to learn how to make up for that with internal focus.

  Wizards and Fairy Godmothers did more than merely counter curses; the
y also tested and guided Questers and dispensed punishments to seekers who failed the tests.

  The little old lady in the woods, who after being treated kindly, dispensed the clues that a Quester needed to find his goal—those were Godmothers. The ferryman who had the answers to questions—also Godmothers, or Wizards. The hag at the bridge, the watcher at the door—

  And when there was more than one Quester, when, for instance, it was a Quest by several young men, only one of whom would be worthy, it was the job of the Godmothers The Fairy Godmother

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  and Wizards to test these seekers to find the one who was worthy to pass on. And, if they did not measure up, to allot a punishment or send them in another direction that would, hopefully, teach them and correct their behavior. Many a Prince who had failed the test of kindness on the way to the captive Princess later became the hero of his own story—or, at the least, became the wise and virtuous King of his own land at the death of his father.

  That was Godmother and Wizardly magic.

  Wizards were fewer than Godmothers, and usually elected to be solitary, apart from the dwellings of men, living in caves or wild forests as hermits. But because Godmothers often acted as the local White Witches, they also had to learn Witchery in order to help their communities and maintain their fictive disguises; thus, Elena had not one, but two sets of lessons to master.

  Of the two, the Witchery was the easiest; in fact, so far as she was concerned, it was something of a doddle. All you had to do was to follow the recipe to create the potion, whose purpose was determined by the ingredients. Then you infused the potion with a touch of power. Witches and Hedge-Wizards worked in subtle ways, attempting to make their influence felt, not at the crisis, but before there was any hint of a crisis. They operated at the lowest level of magic, where small changes might bring larger results. As a result, even the most powerful of Witches generally used the smallest amount of magic needed in order to bring about the desired result.

  More often than not, they did not use magic, as such, at all.

  For instance—being kind to the abused and exploited stepdaughter of a neighbor…giving her encouragement and 154

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  the odd meal, helping her to cope with a cup of tea and a word of advice. Yes, Elena’s neighbors had been Witches—

  both of them. And, among many other things, they had kept a careful eye on Elena, guiding her, keeping her spirit from being crushed. Had she ever truly wanted, with all her heart, to become ordinary, they would have called on Madame Bella to come and take the weight of all of that Traditional Potential away from her, and she probably would have managed to find either a kind husband, or a position as a maid-of-all-work, when Madame Klovis departed on her search for another wealthy victim to wed. Probably the latter, though there was no telling for certain.

  As it was, when they knew that Elena was determined to escape, no matter what it took, they had called Madame Bella to examine this potential Apprentice for herself. Those were the voices that Elena had heard that night, murmuring over the wall next door.

  For their part, Sorcerers and Sorceresses intervened when things had gone so wrong that only enormous magical effort could save the day. They accompanied heroes and heroines on the quests, and when they did, the odds were usually stacked against them. They often watched over the children who would become heroes as they were raised in hiding. They fought at the side of heroes when the armies of good and evil clashed. They could go their entire lives without ever fulfilling that particular destiny, however, so they also served another set of functions. They often assisted Godmothers; they frequently devised the trials and tests that lesser questers had to pass. And, perhaps because of their affinity for language and deep, long thought, they The Fairy Godmother

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  were frequently mystics, being sought for their wisdom as well as their magic. A Sorcerer’s life was often spent in long years of patient study and waiting, and it sometimes ended in a frenetic and peril-filled span of mere months. When there was combative magic darkening the skies, it was most often the Sorcerers and Sorceresses who were in the thick of it.

  Yet, such times were few, and it was just as well that this was so, or the landscape would have been shattered by the scope of such conflicts. Most Sorcerers and Sorceresses never once raised a wand in anger. They lived and died in their distant, lofty towers, seldom venturing out, studying the heavens and the earth in splendid isolation unless someone happened to call upon them for some trifle or other.

  Elena decided rather quickly that she would not much enjoy being a Sorceress.

  She might have enjoyed being a Witch, but—

  But could she have ever acted as her neighbors did, remaining apart from the people she served, staying out of their day-to-day quarrels, living in her town, yet apart from it? Witches and Hedge-Wizards could not take sides, could not become involved, dared to make no judgments, allowing events to judge themselves.

  She didn’t think so; she could not just stand apart from things and let them run their course without trying to set them right. She would never, for instance, have been able to stand being next door to her younger self, seeing how that self was mistreated by Madame Klovis. In fact, she probably would have marched right in one fine day after a 156

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  beating and turned Madame and her two daughters into toads.

  It was the passion to set things right that defined the Godmother and the Wizard; and this was also why they did not live among the people. To be a Godmother meant that you did become involved, and you used your strong emotions to help you focus. But Godmothers and Wizards did not remain so utterly apart from people as the Sorcerers and Sorceresses did—they needed to have some contact with people, to remain anchored in humanity and keep their own emotions alive. It was a difficult balance to maintain—but it wasn’t boring.

  In all of the magical work she was doing, Elena was constantly concerned that at some point, that store of magical power that The Tradition had surrounded her with would run dry, and finally one day during the haying, when she had made half a dozen charms against cutting (a little talisman made of tiny leaden scythe with no edge at all, a sprig of High John, and a bit of cloth with the person’s blood on it) she voiced that concern to Madame.

  Bella was out in the garden, deciding, with Lily’s help, just which herbs would be cut that night in the light of the full moon. When Elena stammered out her worry, Madame gave her a long and considering look.

  “It is true that with nearly anyone else, I would have taught you how to harvest power by now,” she said at last.

  “The reason I haven’t is that you arrived with so much you haven’t yet expended half of it. But something could happen to me—” she paused at the sight of Elena’s stricken look, and laughed “—no, no, I’m not anticipating anything!

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  No premonitions, no predictions, I assure you, just the common sense that things can happen that no one foresees. So, since those talismans and a few other things have to go to the village anyway, you might as well come along with me, and I’ll show you how it’s done.”

  “I’ll harness Dobbin,” said Lily instantly.

  “You go change your apron and get your hat,” Bella told Elena. “I’ll have Rose make up the basket.”

  So by the time Elena had changed her apron for a clean one, tied a kerchief over her hair to keep the dust out and placed her wide-brimmed, flat-crowned straw hat over that and was down the stair again, the donkey and cart were at the front gate, and Madame was already on the driver’s bench.

  Although he wasn’t nearly as fast as the Little Humpback Horse, the donkey could keep a surprisingly quick pace for one so old and small. A pleasant hour brought them to the village of Louvain, and Madame was hardly over the little stone bridge before the women who had commissioned those charms came running to meet them.

  “You’re just in time,” said the first of
them, a cheery, round-faced woman who had three happily grubby little children trailing along behind her. “Haying begins tomorrow! I don’t know what we’d have done if you hadn’t come today.”

  “Tell those dolts to be extra careful, that’s what we’d have done,” said another, thin and careworn, with a grimace. “Still, they’re men! You never can depend on them not to play the fool when there’s a lot of them together!”

  The last of the women, a sweet-faced girl with a fur

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  rowed brow, took her talisman but whispered to Madame when the others were just out of earshot, “Madame Bella, it’s—can you—”

  “That’s why I came today,” Madame whispered back.

  “Just let me leave my simples with Brother Tyne, and I’ll see you before I leave.”

  Elena had expected from the name that Brother Tyne was a priest—but in fact, he was an apothecary with a little shop on the village square, the sign of his trade—a large, round-bottomed bottle—hanging above his door. When they drew up to his shop, he came out and took the basket from Madame, handing her down afterwards as if he was a footman. “Come along, Apprentice,” Madame called over her shoulder. “You’ll be doing this eventually, so you might as well see our arrangement.”

  They didn’t stay long in the tiny shop; Brother Tyne counted what they’d brought and apparently there was a set price already for Madame’s goods, for there was no haggling. They emerged with a little purse of copper and silver and an empty basket, and a paper with the prices that the Apothecary would pay for each potion on a little slip of paper in Elena’s pocket. And on the way out of town, Madame pulled the donkey up beside the gate of a tiny, rose-covered cottage with the prettiest yard Elena had ever seen. The entire place was as cheerful as you could ask, and Elena was struck by the notion that not that long ago, she would have been happy living in such a place. “Rosalie!”