The Sleeping Beauty Read online

  “When this is over, those shepherds back there are going to be able to hire more shepherds to do their work for them,” Leopold said to Siegfried, as they rode toward the finish line. “In fact, their dogs are going to be able to hire dogs!”

  “And a flock of their own to mind.” Siegfried chuckled. He was in a very good mood. He and Leopold had gotten through the first trial in good order, and now that they were on their way back to the finish line, he was extremely pleased with where they were. The mouse-horses seemed pleased, too; they loped along at an easy pace, just about a slow gallop, only a little warm and not at all winded. In fact, he and Leopold were passing the occasional rider whose mouse-horse was refusing to get above a trot, horses whose necks and flanks were spotted with dried flecks of foaming sweat. “I think they may be the ones who made out the best out of all of us.”

  “You’re probably right. Still, I have to say, this was not so bad when we used our heads. And your business with the fodder worked a treat.” Leopold grinned at the Northerner, who grinned back.

  “We could have moved twice the number of eggs with your spoon trick.” Siegfried had no trouble returning the compliment. “All things considered, we should do very well in these trials if they are all going to require us to use our heads. You and I are rather good at that.”

  The horses made a snorting, snickering sound.

  Leopold laughed. “Face it, we are geniuses.” Then he sobered. “This gave me a good chance to measure our real opponents, actually. I think I’ve pinpointed five of them that could give us some serious trouble, and I don’t mean mere honest rivals….” He shook his head. “I don’t much like them. They are clever, no doubt of it. They all thought to hire shepherds. But they went at this as if we were all on a battlefield, and I’m not entirely certain they didn’t do some bashing in the pack on the race-leg out. Grigor is as cold-blooded as a snake, and Karl looked like he was ready to kill three of the sheep and chuck the carcasses in the pen.”

  “The rules didn’t say the sheep had to be alive….” Siegfried replied, and shook his head. A chill passed over him, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud for a moment. “I get the feeling that if that one had thought of it, there’d have been mutton before you could say ‘knife,’ and never mind the shepherd. I expect to see some more trouble out of Karl. And we should watch our backs carefully anytime he is near.”

  Leopold rode on in silence for a moment; they were far enough from any other riders that the only sounds were the pounding of their own mounts’ hooves on the sod, and their rhythmic blowing as they galloped. “Themas and Peder might kill each other. Did you see the way they glared at each other? Fairly made my blood run cold.”

  “And Stenoth looked like he’d kill the lot of us if someone offered him enough to do it.” Siegfried patted his horse’s neck, more to comfort himself than anything. Karl might murder you in a conflict, but Siegfried had the impression that Stenoth would be willing to do so in the dark, when you were least expecting it, if he thought he’d profit from it. “That made my blood run cold.”

  “Desmond seems like a good chap. Look, there’s the line—” Leopold waved ahead of them, where a faint line of color against the green of the commons had resolved into a line of tiny figures.

  “Desmond seems much better than the five. Look, they’ve brought the carriages up already to the finish line.” Leopold pointed at the distant crowd at the point where they had started, and sure enough, the carriages that had brought them all here were pulling up to take them back to the palace. “Hmm. We’ll have to share with four other fellows, the way we did when we came in.” And since Leopold and Siegfried were still in the front half of the middle group—

  “There’s going to be a lot of egg-going-bad about.” Siegfried slowed his horse to a trot and looked down at its ears. “So, mice, would you be willing to take us all the way to the Palace so we don’t have to put up with that?”

  The mouse-horse he was riding flicked his ears. “As long as it’s at a walk,” the Magic Beast replied, sounding amused. “We’d have to walk back there anyway, since we aren’t going to be restored in front of everyone. That would be giving part of the game away.”

  Leopold’s mouse-horse glanced over at Siegfried with an amused glance. “I wouldn’t want to be in those carriages. How did you know we were mice?”

  “A little bird told me,” he laughed. The mouse-horses snorted. “Don’t worry. I’ve no intention of telling anyone else. The Ice-Queen is also the Godmother, isn’t she?”

  Leopold stared at him as if he had gone mad. “Where did you get the idea that the Queen is also the Godmother? That’s pre—” Then he stopped, blinked and sucked in a breath.

  “Bloody hell,” he said. “That’s clever. That is damned clever. That is astonishingly clever. It lets the Godmother run all this without anyone knowing she’s doing so. No one can cry ‘cheat.’”

  More than clever, as Siegfried well knew, and not just because it allowed the Kingdom’s Godmother to appear to be aloof from this. It might be one of the reasons why the Princess was alive. The bird had been telling him about The Tradition off and on for years, but this was the first time he’d been able to use some of the things she’d told him to sort out someone else’s situation. That was why he’d first realized that the Queen could not possibly be as evil as she seemed. If her stepmother really had been a Traditional Evil Stepmother, Rosamund would not even be there. The Queen would be the one making the choice of consort, Rosamund would probably be dead. And probably the trial would be much, much smaller, limited to the five enemy princes, and going on for quite some time as she played them against each other.

  “How did you figure that out?” Leopold asked him, his eyes narrowing. “And don’t tell me a little bird told you.”

  “I’m astonished. I think you’re getting smarter!” the bird sang from above them. She dipped her wings in salute. “I think I may be a good influence on you!”

  “Well…” Siegfried felt rather embarrassed, as not only was Leopold staring at him, the ears of both horses had swiveled to catch what he said. “Partly it was because the Princess isn’t nearly as intimidated in her presence as she should be, and partly that the Queen isn’t doing the sort of things I would expect if she really was bad. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Not…really…”

  Siegfried rubbed his eyebrows, because with the helmet on he couldn’t reach his hair to run his hand through it. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s get to the Palace, get rid of this armor and go find a good bathhouse. I’ll tell you there.” He cast a slightly nervous look at the crowd they were rapidly nearing. “You never know who’s listening.”

  13

  SIEGFRIED’S PEOPLE MIGHT HAVE BEEN barbarians by some standards, but they were quite fastidious about cleanliness. Every Clanhouse had a bathhouse attached, and bathing was not a luxury; it was needful. In the winter, the bathhouse was one place you knew you could go to get warm when you were half-frozen, and when your clothing tended to be made of wool and fur, it was a good idea to deflea and delouse them and yourself quite regularly. Bathhouses, as Siegfried knew from experience, were excellent places to have a conversation that you didn’t want overheard. The bath attendants would cheerfully put you to soak or steam, and then leave you alone, especially in summer. The walls of a bathhouse were thick to keep in the heat, and usually made of stone or entire logs, which had the effect of preventing most eavesdroppers from listening through walls.

  The bathhouse attached to The King’s Arms was no exception, with walls at least as thick as Siegfried’s arm. It had several small rooms with two tubs in them rather than one big soaking pool, but that was the only way it differed from most of the others Siegfried had seen. The idea was that you scrubbed down, the attendants doused you with buckets of water to clean off the soap, then you soaked in the hot tub. The tubs were very much like oversize barrels, and you soaked in hot water up to your neck in them.

  Siegfried would have preferred a
northern-style steam bath, but this would certainly serve to soak out the aches of riding. He knew how to ride of course; he just didn’t do it often. Drachenthal wasn’t suited to horses, so he hadn’t actually learned until he left his homeland, but even after he had learned, he preferred not to travel in the saddle. He tended to lose horses, actually. Or rather, people tended to shoot them out from under him. He would get fond of the one he had, only to have someone decide that the best way to get rid of the big blond hero was to kill the horse under him. It got disheartening after a while.

  He was just settling in for a nice quiet soak, prepared to think about nothing for a while, when he was interrupted by Leopold taking him at his word and bringing up the subject of the Godmother again. “So,” Leopold said softly, “tell me what gave you the idea that Queen Sable was the Godmother.”

  Siegfried eased himself back in the water, bracing against the side of the tub. It was hard to pinpoint exactly where his suspicions had started. “The name, maybe. It’s just a small thing, but it was what made me wonder in the first place. It was…too obvious. Too blatant. Who names their daughter ‘Sable’? The name is both the color black and a nasty little weasel that lives in the north. King Thurman was supposed to be no fool, and you would think he would see someone named Sable and avoid her at all costs. He wouldn’t marry her. And if someone was named Sable, whether she was born with that name or took it on herself, and if she wanted to marry King Thurman, you would think she would know that and use another name.”

  Leopold considered that, as the steam from the water rose up around his face. “All right. That’s got some logic to it, although I think you could be reading far too much into a name. What else?”

  Siegfried couldn’t blame him for being skeptical. Leopold wasn’t able to understand the bird, and it was likely he was having second thoughts about leaping to the same conclusion. He would have to be very careful about mustering his arguments. “It seemed strange to me in retrospect that the Godmother rescued the Princess, delivered her to the gate, then vanished, and only then did Queen Sable appear.” Time to elaborate on that statement. “I would have thought that the Godmother would have stayed to have some sort of confrontation with the Queen, warn her that the Princess was under her protection. Wouldn’t you?”

  Leopold examined his nails critically before answering. “I could think of reasons why she wouldn’t, but…they seem a bit specious, since the Godmother here seems to be pretty powerful.”

  “It seemed very odd that she just drove off,” the Northerner persisted. “And the more I thought about it, the odder it seemed that we never again saw her, even though her magic was clearly everywhere.” He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to think of examples before Leopold could challenge him. “The mouse-horses. Why would the Godmother give the Queen mouse-horses to use in the trials? That made no sense at all. The idea for the first trial was a smart one, but there was no reason for the Godmother to supply mounts for it. If the Queen was a powerful sorceress, and those were her mouse-horses, why didn’t she…do more?” He groped for more examples. “It was a great many very small things. The Godmother and the Queen are exactly the same height. I’m good at measuring those things by eye. The Godmother and the Queen have exactly the same accent, yet the Queen is supposed to be a foreigner. They have the same inflections when they are angry.”

  He glanced over at Leopold, whose long hair had gone wild in the steam, curling around his face in tendrils. He wondered if Leopold was listening to all this and thinking he was a loon. Leopold nodded.

  “Then there was the Princess. When she arrived, she wasn’t out of her rooms for two days, and when she did appear, the Queen took her off to the Royal Suite and was locked up with her when the messenger came. After that, she’s been spending most of her time at the Queen’s side. And you would think she would be terrified, being locked up with the Queen for hours at a time. The Queen is older. She has a commanding way, and a young woman like that can only stand up to a woman like the Queen for so long. You’d think she’d be cowed, getting meeker every day.” He waited for a response from Leopold.

  The Prince scratched his head thoughtfully and stared off into space for a moment. “She wasn’t. Even I could see that. She didn’t seem properly frightened, in fact, it seemed like she was—they were—”

  “Acting together.” Siegfried nodded. “It looked to me as if they were pretending they didn’t like each other, but they didn’t go any further than that, because people here already don’t like the Queen and they’ll think anything bad of her that you suggest. But the two of them, when it came to getting things done, didn’t argue. The Queen didn’t even give the Princess an insult now and again, or sneer at her. All she did was keep up the glacier facade, and even that didn’t hold up if you looked at her closely.”

  Leopold pulled a face. “You are still making sense. I didn’t even think about it, but then, why would I?”

  “Why would anybody? People see what they expect to see.” Leopold mustered his thoughts, splashing some hot water over his face to rinse off the sweat. “Then they put together the first contest. I was wondering, when they said that it didn’t matter if the contestants didn’t have a horse or armor, because they would supply them, if somehow we were going to do this thing in small groups over the course of several days. Because there just weren’t enough horses in the Palace stable for all of us, and armor doesn’t grow on trees. But no, they say it’s going to be one big race, and suddenly there’s enough horses for all of us, and matching armor out of nowhere, all the same.”

  “Magic,” said Leopold. “Could have been the Queen—”

  “But she had never done anything like that before. That’s not small magic. Transforming, creating out of nothing—that’s big. If the Queen could do things like that, what does she need with a little Kingdom like Eltaria? No, that’s Godmother magic. But where’s the Godmother? Nowhere.” Siegfried returned Leopold’s nod. “So you see. Then I realized the horses were the same ones we rode here on. Exactly the same. I’m big, and there aren’t many horses, transformed or not, that are up to my weight.”

  “Still—” Leopold looked as if he was about to agree but still had a reservation or two about Siegfried’s conclusions.

  So Siegfried drove his argument home. “But what clinched it was when I saw the Queen and the Princess at the starting line, watching, and then when we got to the middle section and sheep part, there they were again, watching. Maybe they could have gotten faster horses than ours, but we would have seen them passing us. They couldn’t have gone by horse, so they had to go by magic and the Godmothers are the only people I ever heard of that could do that.” He had to smile as Leopold accepted his clinching argument.

  “Do we tell them?” the Prince asked instead. “Do we tell them that we know what the Queen is?”

  He shook his head. “Not unless something comes up and she needs to know that we know. It gives us an advantage. I like advantages. I like—” he was about to say “the Princess,” but stopped himself in time “—the idea of knowing things no one else knows in a situation like this.”

  “The bird might tell—” Leopold began, then shrugged. “I suppose you can ask it not to.”

  “And I will.” Siegfried ducked farther down into the hot water. “Tomorrow. Right now I want to soak until all my aches are gone, and then I want to sleep past dawn.”

  Leopold rolled his eyes and laughed. “Past dawn! Shame! Civilization is making you soft!”

  Siegfried threw a handful of water at him.

  The Palace ballroom, which had many doors that opened up on the garden, had not been in much use over the past few years. Every time Celeste intended to hold a ball, it seemed, the enemies on the border decided it was time to rattle sabers again, and off King Thurman would go.

  All that had changed, and although there was no ball taking place, the ballroom was no longer closed up and dark. Tonight, as on the past several nights, it was lit with thousands of wax candle
s, and all the doors were standing open wide to a wonderful night breeze coming in from the garden. The garden itself had been illuminated with torches, their light reflecting in the water of little ornamental pools and tiny fountains.

  All of the sons-nephews-grandsons of the neighbors were still in the running, and as a consequence, the borders were still clear, and Godmother Lily had told Rosa not to worry for now. So she was trying not to; trying to actually enjoy some of this.

  The much-thinned ranks of the Princes milled about the garden and ballroom, while a single minstrel played in one corner. There was wine to drink, and there were still lovely ladies to flirt with, and none of those lovely ladies but the Princess had been present to see what fools they all had made of themselves at the sheepfolds. Princess Rosamund moved among them and her courtiers, congratulating and commiserating in turn.

  At the moment, things were not going as she had planned or hoped. She had looked in vain for Siegfried and Leopold; they were nowhere in sight, and she felt a twinge of disappointment. She told herself again that she wasn’t supposed to have favorites, but it didn’t really help.

  Then she heard her name in an unfamiliar voice. “Princess Rosamund.” Just as she was turning around on hearing a little stir from the garden, hoping she might finally catch them coming in the door, one of the crowd in front of her detached himself from the people he was talking to, moved into her path and bowed a little.

  She returned the bow with a gracious nod. It was a good thing she had early on learned the trick of pinning names to faces quickly, for she had his name on her tongue before he had straightened. “Prince Desmond. You did well out there, and I understand from all that I saw you were particularly deft in the middle stage.” She did not say that Siegfried and Leopold had been just as quick without the use of magic. That would not have been politic, and besides, this was the first time she had seen this particular young man except at a distance. He certainly was worth a closer look.