Sleeping Beauty fhk-5 Page 8

  Rosa almost gaped with astonishment. She had never, ever heard the Godmother talk like this! Did Godmothers ever actually curse anyone? Was that allowed? Why was she so angry with them? If The Tradition had brought them here, surely that wasn't their fault... was it?

  Evidently neither man was intimidated enough to turn around and run. Either that, or for whatever reason, they had both decided that sticking with Rosa and the Godmother was very important. That probably meant that either The Tradition was beating heavily on their doors, or they saw an opportunity.

  As soon as the blond was standing, a small, brown bird landed on his shoulder and twittered at him. The man listened for a moment, then spoke in a voice still heavy with an accent Rosa didn't recognize, but at least she could understand him this time. "Aye, I agree. Maybe we had just better go find a kindly little shepherdess."

  She blinked. Had he been talking to the bird? And why would he need a shepherdess?

  Lily fixed the big blond man with a glare that made him wilt. It was rather funny, actually, to see such a big man almost cringing in the face of the wrath of such a small woman. "Follow me," she barked. "And don't dawdle." That didn't make much more sense to Rosa than the man talking to the bird. A moment ago, Lily had told them to run...

  Well they hadn't run, so perhaps Lily thought she was stuck with them.

  The Godmother stalked off into the trees, her lace-edged skirts swishing with indignation, down a path that looked as if it had only recently been beaten into the grass. Rosa followed her closely, the men at a discreet distance. She was suddenly conscious of the fact that her gown was definitely the worse for her adventure, and that the "bath" she had had was a sketchy one at best. Fortunately it seemed that the aroma of the flowers, and not something a lot less pleasant, was what was lingering around her as they passed single-file through what was a very wild forest. The trees towered above them, fifty feet in the air, at least. It was gorgeous, actually, with golden beams of light slanting down through breaks in the foliage, lighting up the peaceful, green gloom. It was hard to believe that this was the same forest that had so terrified her in the storm.

  At the end of the path was a huge wooden cart pulled by two glossy brown draft horses waiting in a primitive track, a couple of ruts in the grass that led through a kind of tunnel through the trees. The rear of the cart was full of very small men in earth-colored clothing. Rosa was extremely happy to see the cart, but she wondered just how the two strangers were going to take being told to ride in the bed with the tiny people. They didn't look like the sort who would take to that.

  "I don't suppose either of you have horses?" Godmother Lily asked wearily, as she paused beside the cart with her hands on her hips. The two men shook their heads. She fixed them with glares again, as if she somehow suspected they had come without mounts on purpose to annoy her, then held out her hand to one of the men in the cart. "Mice, please," she said.

  Mice? Rosa thought at first. Then she remembered. She grinned a little; if the men were not familiar with the Ella Cinders tales, they would have yet another surprise in store.

  The little fellow reached under the seat, and brought out a little wooden cage with several mice in it. Rosa had thought that all mice were gray, but these seemed to also be black, brown, and some even had splotches of white. The Godmother started to reach in, when the mice squeaked and the blond spoke up.

  "Excuse me, Lady Magician, but the brown one with one white foot says he would like to come out, and the fat black one says that he is up to my weight?" The man sounded very doubtful when he said this, and the Godmother looked at him, startled, then reached into the cage and let a brown and a black mouse climb up on their own into her hand. She put them on the ground, and waved her wand in a complicated pattern over the two mice. Little drifts of sparkles fell from the tip of her wand, like dust sparkling in a sunbeam. She swirled this stuff around and over them, and as she stepped back they began to grow and change.

  Rosa watched with glee; for all that she had lived her entire life in Eltaria, and knew The Tradition better than any other girl her age except a Godmother-in-training, she had not seen much magic. She had certainly never seen the spectacular things that a Godmother could do when the power of The Tradition was behind her. Now, before her very eyes, in a few moments, the mice had transformed into horses, complete with saddles and bridles. The black one was the size of a draft horse, and the brown one with one white foot pawed the ground and bent his long neck into a graceful curve.

  Their manes and tails flowed right down to the ground in silken falls of shining hair. Now, having ridden real horses, Rosa was only too well aware what a stupid idea that was — to allow a horse's mane and tail to grow that long. On a real horse, they would be full of dirt and leaves and burrs in no time at all and take hours to comb out again. But of course, these were not "real" horses. These were, more or less, the perfect idea of a horse, the most exaggerated dream of a horse that there could be.

  The two men were going to look positively shabby astride them, but, oh well. Too bad for them. She glanced over at the men; both of them had eyes as wide as an owl's. So they weren't used to magic, either. Or at least, not this sort of magic.

  "Haven't you ever seen a Fairy Godmother do her magic before? Don't stand there all day, get on!" Godmother Lily didn't quite snarl, but her expression was very close to that of someone who was about to take a head off. She tapped her wand against her side, impatiently. The eyes of both men went to the wand, and Rosa had the notion that they were wondering just what else she could do — to them — with that wand. "And don't think you can steal one. I can have it back to a mouse before you can say 'knife.'"

  The big man knuckled his eyes and looked again. When the horse was still there, he shrugged and mounted. The dark man approached gingerly, while Lily continued to tap her wand against her knee with growing impatience, he felt the horse all over as if he was making sure in his way that it was real, and then mounted. Lily helped Rosa onto the wagon seat, climbed up herself, took the reins from the little man on the wagon seat, and they were off.

  Lily cast the "All Roads Are One" spell as soon as the wagon was underway. The wagon was necessary; they had needed to pick up the mirror she had left near the Dwarves' hovel. But she was glad that they had it for another reason, because she and Rosa could easily have used the mirror to go straight back to her Castle or the Royal Palace. She wanted the time to work out what she was going to do before they appeared at the Palace in front of all the people that would be there. That was another good reason not to mirror-walk straight back there. Rosa's reappearance was going to have to be an event, not a mystery.

  So. Should she stay in the persona of Queen Sable, or not? Finally she decided to ask for a second opinion.

  "Arnott, hand me Jimson, would you?" she asked the Brownie in the back with her supplies. This was actually not so bad, really, since she'd had to send the Brownies to collect the mirror anyway. You couldn't leave a magical door like that just lying about, even if she was the only one who could use it, and she was the only one who could break the spell on it.

  Arnott got Jimson's mirror out of the padded box she'd placed it in. Rosa eyed the little bit of glass oddly; Lily decided she was going to have to ask Rosa about that, along with a few dozen other things. She gave the reins of the horses back to Kole, and took it from him. "Mirror, mirror, in my hand — " she began.

  "Still Rosamund, Godmother." Jimson's green face appeared, making Rosa jump and squeak. Jimson smiled broadly and bobbed a little, in what passed for a bow when you were only a head. "Ah, and there she is. Greetings, Princess. It is a pleasure to see you face-to-face, so to speak, and a greater one to see you safe and sound and in good health."

  "Ah...hello," Rosa stammered, looking a little confused that he recognized her. "You aren't a demon, are you?"

  "Nothing of the sort." Jimson smiled encouragingly at her. "I am a Mirror Servant, and my name is Jimson. I find out things for Godmother Lily. Many of the G
odmothers have Mirror Servants. They find us extremely useful." He turned his attention back to Lily. The two men, who had been riding behind the cart, craned their necks to see what was going on.

  "Right now, what I need is advice and an opinion," Lily told him. "We seem to have picked up a pair of stray Princes, and I am not sure what to do with them. I am also not sure if I should arrive as Queen Sable when we return to the Palace, or merely deliver Rosa as the Godmother as if I had been the one to accomplish the rescue, then drive away and vanish, and have Queen Sable appear in due course to greet her return."

  "The latter," Jimson said immediately. "The Huntsman might still approach you, hoping to strike a separate bargain. You'll lose that advantage if Queen Sable appears as a rescuer. It seems to me that it is extremely important to keep the Huntsman unaware of the fact that you are not the Princess's enemy. Nor is the Huntsman the only one that I think should be kept in the dark. If there are any more agents of treachery among the Court, either I will overhear them, or you'll smoke them out as Queen Sable. But if you become the Godmother, everyone who is aware of Mirror Servants will know to beware of reflective surfaces. And even if they don't, they will assume some other magical means of spying. You'll never learn a thing. You certainly won't learn who sent the Huntsman after Rosa."

  She nodded. It would take some rather fancy footwork, but the disguise of Old Maggie could serve once more rather neatly. "What about our two problems?" she asked. "We seem to have acquired a pair of figurative Princes, if not actual ones. I'm sure The Tradition puts them in that category."

  She held the mirror so Jimson could look back over her shoulder.

  "Hmm. The Tradition is thick around the big one, not so much around the other. I am going to hazard my professional guess that, yes, they are at least technically Princes, that the dark one is nothing more than a younger son, but not a youngest son. He looks to me as if he is rather too old to be out on his first quest. He was likely kicked out by his father to find himself a Princess, and I'd guess fancies himself as a rascal. He has probably been getting bribes from the fathers of those Princesses he had gone courting to go away, and using that to live on, and lately the bribes have been very few." Lily lowered the mirror. Jimson looked up at her. "As for the other, he's Northern, he may be Prince by blood but actually owns nothing, and I'll have to see what I can find out later. I actually don't have any advice. I have several courses of action, but no real advice. You could send them to the King to make use of, assuming they will actually be of some use. You could give both of them horses and money to go away. Or you could let them stay. Letting them stay would have the advantage of confusing The Tradition about Rosa. There aren't supposed to be two Princes, only one. They are wildly unalike, so The Tradition will be further confused about which Path to take for Rosa. On the other hand, something could turn up to force the Path, and you have been trying very hard to keep that from happening."

  Lily weighed the advantages of all of those possibilities in her mind. Here she had assumed that having yet another Path coming into conflict with Rosa's would be a disaster. But as Jimson pointed out, it could be advantageous. What won out, in the end, was the ability to further confuse The Tradition. While the dark-haired rake was negligible in that regard, with the kind of power she could now see besetting the blond on every side, having two really strong Traditional Paths clashing would only be good for Rosa. Three Paths, really; Rosa could still fit both Snowskin and Beauty Asleep. And if need be, Lily could throw in some other Traditional Path to really mire things up.

  She thanked Jimson and handed the mirror back to be put safely in the box. A few moments later, the vague forest track opened up, the tree tunnel became a lane lined with beautiful beeches and oaks and the worn ruts became a well-tended gravel road. Recognizing that the spell had worked, and they were close to the Palace, she stopped the wagon.

  She stood up on the wagon seat, held the wand over her head and made several complicated passes with it, concentrating on what she wanted to do. A kind of explosion of faint, sparkling "dust" erupted out of the tip of the wand, fountaining up, then raining down on them. She rather liked the effect, so she had never tried to tone it down; it reminded her of miniature fireworks. And as the plumes of fairy dust drifted down and touched them, the wagon, horses, Brownies, Godmother, and Princess changed.

  The wagon became a grand carriage, ridiculously elaborate, all in lily-white and gilt. In keeping with The Tradition, it was gently rounded, with metalwork done in graceful tendrils like squash vines, and metal leaves and blossoms. The horses became blinding white, with bobbing feather plumes on their foreheads, and their harness. Their manes and tails were braided up with gold and satin ribbons, the leather harness was spotlessly white, with gilded fittings. Rosa's stained and battered gown became gold-embroidered, pink satin that billowed out around her like a rose blossom in the very latest style. The Princess herself looked as if she had come fresh from the hands of her maids. Lily's own gown became heavy white silk samite, with trimmings in a deep cream, a long train and flowing white sleeves that would trail behind her on the ground when she walked. Utterly out-of-date, of course, by several hundred years, but people expected that sort of eccentricity of a Fairy Godmother.

  And the Brownies all became liveried footmen in uniforms of white and gold. Unlike Lily's gown, their uniforms were in the very latest style for such things.

  Two of them helped Rosa and Lily off the drivers box and into the carriage, which was lined in gold velvet and had luxurious cushioned scats. Lily look the opportunity to glance back at the two men, and chuckled at their expressions. Their eyes were bulging so much they looked like frogs. Very startled frogs. Like...Frog Princes?

  Then, as she sat down, she started laughing. Rosa looked at her askance, but she only shook her head. It would take too much explaining, even to Rosa, for her to understand why Lily was so convulsed because, besides everything else going on, there were two Frog Princes following them.

  Word that the strange, opulent carriage was coming sped on ahead of them; those that remembered what the Godmother's carriage looked like told everyone else. People began to appear at the side of the road, curious, excited, staring until their eyes nearly popped out of their heads. And as they passed, those same people began running along behind, so that the closer they got to the Palace, the more of a procession they were leading. By the time they arrived at the Palace Gates, everyone knew that the Kingdom's Fairy Godmother was coming, and Rosa knew that no one doubted it was because the Princess was missing.

  They expected her to solve the problem, of course. It was going to be a great surprise for them to discover the problem was solved.

  Meanwhile, in the carriage, Rosa listened carefully as her Godmother explained what she should do, and why. "Once I've driven away, go ahead and dawdle, try to give me as much time as you can. It won't be hard, your loyal supporters will be pressing on you on all sides — answer every question, even if it means repeating yourself twenty times. Wait for Queen Sable to make her appearance and then you take over the situation. The Tradition will expect you to be meek and self-effacing. Don't be. Act like your mother."

  Rosa nodded, and whatever Lily saw in her face, it made her smile. She thought for a moment. "Mother would have been gentle, but firm. Polite, but quite clear." She pondered a while longer. "Do you want the Huntsman to flee, or stay? I can lie about him, or tell the truth, but if I tell the truth, he'll probably do his best to escape."

  "Stay, if possible," Lily replied instantly. "I would like to see what he does next, and now that we know he is an enemy, and you know what I am, I can make sure you have a protector at all times."

  "Then I'll say that I was attacked and fled, but never saw the attacker's face. And that once I was on the horse, it ran away with me." She nodded decisively. "I hesitate to tell any other story because he will know I am lying and wonder why. This is close enough to the truth that he might be cautious, but assume that I am telling everything I know."<
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  Lily gave a nod of approval, and Rosa felt warm and proud. "One way I can keep you safer is to keep you with me more. I'll drop suggestions that I don't believe you, that I think you ran off on purpose as a kind of temper tantrum, and it will look as if I am keeping you from your loyal folk out of spite. To keep this from getting boring, I am going to start you on Godmother training."

  Rosa gave a gasp of surprise and delight; Lily smiled. "Now mind, I have no idea if you can ever become an actual Godmother, or if you'll be able to work any magic at all when this is over and you stop getting so much Traditional power focusing on you. But there are a number of simple spells I can teach you that you'll be able to use now, and there is a great deal of information I have that you need. If you have the native ability, which I think you do, I can also train you to see magic — that is, the power twisted into spells that are on things and people." Her smile broadened. "It won't hurt. You already know a great deal about The Tradition. And if it happens that you do become a Godmother, well, that is even better, if you ask me. It's been a long time since a Queen was also a Godmother, but if any kingdom needs two, it's this one."

  Rosa's smile was rueful; after the initial moment of excitement wore off, she realized just how much more complicated her already complicated life was about to become. "I wish I didn't agree with you so much."