Chapter 7

A carriage had appeared from nowhere, at least, so far as Elena was concerned. It had simply turned up at the door when Madame Bella and Elena had both been gowned and coiffed to Rose's satisfaction. There certainly wasn't a carriage, nor a carriage-horse in the tiny stable, and this wasn't the sort of equip-page you would find in any of the nearby villages. While not large, it was excessively opulent, a little mauve-and-gold jewel-box of a carriage drawn by a single, handsome grey horse, and driven by a curiously silent footman in mauve livery with a great deal of gold braid on it.

Elena, recalling all of the tales, had to wonder if this carriage was really their little farm cart, and the horse that old donkey. As for the footman, well, he could be anything; a frog, a mouse, a rabbit—even old Hob or Robin, transformed.

Their coach took them into the edge of the forest, where Madame paused to invoke the "All Forests Are One Forest" spell.

This was the first time that Elena had seen this Great Magic at work, and it was—remarkable.

Madame got out of the carriage, walked to the road just in front of the horse, and raised her staff, and it was as if she was the center of a whirlwind of the green dust motes of magic— but it was a very slowly moving whirlwind, and a soundless one. Denser and denser they became, and brighter and brighter, until Elena had to squint in order to see, and just as the light became painful, Madame thumped the end of the staff three times on the ground.

The light, the magic-motes, all vanished, and Elena got the strangest sensation, as if someone had dropped the carriage out from beneath her, at the same time thumping her in the middle of her chest.

Madame came back to the carriage and the footman handed her in, quite as if nothing whatsoever had happened. They entered the deep green depths, and no more than a mile later, emerged again. But this time, they were nowhere near the little village that should have been on that road. According to a signpost, they were in the Royal Forest of Leskamidia, very near the Palace. A mile after that, and they came out of the trees and into farm fields, the Palace clearly visible in the middle distance. Within a half hour, the footman was handing them out at the foot of the stairs, lined with guards in handsome uniforms, to join the throng of bewigged, bedecked and bejeweled guests moving into the Great Hall and the Throne Room beyond.

And difficult as it might be to believe, the Godmother was outstanding even in this group.

Once again, Madame Bella was resplendent in her full Fairy Godmother glory, with no sign of the eccentric old lady about her. This time, the color of the outfit was a pale mauve, matching the carriage and the footman's livery, which was probably why the Major-Domo who announced them kept referring to her as "Her Grace, the Lilac Fairy." Her jewels were a chain of amethysts and pearls, amethyst rings, and amethyst and pearl buckles on her mauve satin shoes. The lace of her gown was beaded with tiny faceted amethysts, and seed-pearls ornamented the bodice. She was even wearing a tiara of little flowers made of amethysts, with emerald leaves and pearls for centers on her powdered wig. Elena was grateful that, as the mere Apprentice, she didn't have to look nearly as splendid. No tiara, no powdered wig, not even powder on her natural hair; in fact, all that Rose had done with her hair was to make it curl—though apparently even Brownie magic was not sufficient to make it form into neat ringlets. Her gown was a more subdued version of Madame's, with a great deal less of lace and no gemstone-beading at all; her jewels were a simple rope of pearls and her shoe-buckles of plain silver. For the first time in her life, she was wearing satin slippers, and truth to tell, she felt quite elegant enough. She had a wand instead of a staff, though it was a much longer wand than she was used to using now, and for some reason, Robin had elected to put a gilded star on the end of it. "Otherwise, it's just a stick," he had insisted. "People will expect it. How will anyone know you're Madame's Apprentice without a wand with a star on top?"

"The gown just might give the game away," she had pointed out dryly. "It might as well be livery, seeing as we match. And that wand looks, well, silly. Like something out of a book of tales."

He'd waved his hands in frantic triumph. "That's the point! "

She knew when she was beaten. But she still thought it looked silly.

Apparently no one else did, however. People did give her a wide and wary berth, and as she moved through the gathering in Madame's wake, they actually bowed slightly to her, with deeper bows reserved for Madame, who graciously nodded her head in return. That was gratifying, since there wasn't a single one of these people who would have looked at Ella Cinders with anything other than pity and disdain, and fretted lest she somehow dirty the hems of their garments from five feet away.

The Throne Room dazzled with color and light; name a hue, and someone was wearing an elegant, jewel-embroidered suit or gown in that color. Flowers garlanded the creamy marble walls and were twined about veined marble columns; a thousand scented candles twinkled in sconces and chandeliers. The room was full of delicate scent and light.

It was, to the last detail, the sort of celebration that Elena had only read about—the sort to which not even Madame Klovis could ever have dared aspire. Not one guest here was of common blood; Elena suspected that even the servants considered themselves to be a sort of nobility. And among the dukes and counts and barons, were a sprinkling of another sort of nobility altogether—

Fair Folk. Well, some of them, anyway. The Major-Domo called them all Fairies, and identified them by the colors of their gowns, but that was probably because he didn't know any better, or perhaps, hadn't been told their true identities. Possibly the latter; better to call them all Fairies, for there were some folk who were unreasonably prejudiced against Witches and Sorcerers. Three of the guests were genuine Fair Folk indeed, Elves of the sort that Elena had already seen, gowned in rose, silver, and gold; four were quite powerful Witches, if the haze of power surrounding them was anything to judge by. One was a Sorceress.

Now, Elena only guessed at that last, but there were signs, for someone who had been reading as much of the history of the Five Hundred Kingdoms and The Tradition as she'd been.

Fairies were immediately identifiable, of course, by their eyes and ears—and two of them had mischievously elected to cause tiny butterfly-wings to sprout from their shoulders, perhaps in mockery of some of the sillier stories Elena had read about them as a child. The Witches were all in earthy colors—russet, green, wheat-straw, and grey—and their staffs and the ornaments they wore, though fashioned of silver and gems, were modeled on vines, leaves and flowers, or beasts and birds. The one that Elena reckoned to be a Sorceress wore a very dramatic gown of brilliant blue and white, and her ornaments, made of silver, diamonds, and sapphires, were not representations of natural things. She looked a bit spiky, truth to tell, very splendid and aloof—but as Madame crossed her path, she winked at both of them in a conspiratorial manner, and there was a definite twinkle in her eye.

Madame was met by a page as she glided serenely across the ballroom floor, and conducted to the King, Queen, and the new little Princess, with the crowd parting before her as if someone invisible was shoving them aside. The nearer they drew to the thrones, the more tiaras and coronets there were—

Good heavens! Elena thought, catching sight of a haughty little head with a confection of gold, velvet, and ermine atop its ornate, powdered wig. Is that a crown? It is, and there's another! There are foreign Princesses here!

Princes, too, it seemed, as Elena caught sight of another crown, this time on a male head.

Elena concentrated on Madame's back, and remembered that she was a Godmother's Apprentice, and that a Godmother's Apprentice didn't gape at the guests at someone else's party.

And then they entered the empty space around the dais, all eyes upon them, and Elena had to remind herself that she belonged here, and that someday it would be she who was the Godmother. It took a lot of reminding; her initial reaction was to want to stammer an apology and run off to the kitchen.

"Madame Bella!" said the King, rising from his throne and descending the two steps to take Madame Bella's free hand in both of his. "I cannot tell you how grateful we are—" He lowered his voice. "But are you sure nothing will go wrong? She did say she would be here, and we've done everything you said, but I just know that she'll find something to be offended by—"

Elena was utterly mystified by some of the King's words, but she had a good idea of the sort of things that Traditionally went wrong at Royal Christenings. There was usually an evil Witch or Sorceress who hadn't gotten an invitation—or if she had, she would find some great affront when she arrived. She would wait until she thought every magician there had delivered up his or her magical gift to the baby, and then descend with her own curse.

The young Queen—both the King and Queen were very young, Elena noticed; certainly no older than she herself was— leaned forward on her throne, one hand protectively on the edge of a canopied cradle spilling over with pink silk and lace coverlets. If anything, she looked more anxious than the King; perhaps he was better at hiding his feelings than she was.

"I've taken care of everything, don't worry," said Madame, soothingly. "But if you want to be sure it will work, Bertram, you and Linette have to look carefree, as if you are expecting no trouble whatsoever."

"We'll try," the King replied, and forced a smile onto his face, kissed Madame's hand, and let her go.

Madame bowed, and retreated with Elena still following like a faithful shadow. She moved off a little ways to the side of the throne, and took up what seemed to be a position, or at least, it felt that way to Elena. "I expect you're wondering what all that was about," she said in an aside to her Apprentice, as she nodded and smiled to other guests who wandered by, bowed to her, and passed on.

"Well, I know all the things that can go wrong at a Christening," Elena replied, dubiously.

"And so do Bertram and Linette; in fact, Linette is one of my Princesses, so she's doubly aware," Madame acknowledged. "Which is why, when their firstborn turned out to be a girl, they sent word begging me to take care of all of the—special arrangements—at the Christening. Not only did I make sure that all of the desirable magicians of the Kingdom got their invitations, I had Randolf spend a considerably store of his free time covering every square inch of this Kingdom, looking for the Evil Sorceress I knew had to be here. Then I made absolutely certain that her invitation was put right into her hands."

"But that's no guarantee—" Elena began, when suddenly—

She felt an inexplicable plummeting of her heart. A chill wind moved across the room, making the candles in the chandeliers flicker, and the guests shiver. Frightened silence spread from a point near the entrance, moving across the crowd like a ripple in a pond.

A shadow passed over the room. People edged away from something that was moving towards the thrones. And in the center of that moving point of silence Elena saw her first Evil Sorceress.

No great surprise, she was gowned all in black. From the shoes to her own tiara, she wore not a single hint of color. Her gown was a black velvet overdress, a black satin underdress, with faceted black crystals winking among the folds. More black crystals made up the tiara in her elaborately-styled ebony hair. Her staff was black, with a black serpent carved twining around it, and it was surmounted by a globe of black obsidian. As she drew nearer, Elena realized with a touch of reluctant admiration that even the black lace adorning her gown was very different from the swags and garlands on everyone else's garb—it had been made in the pattern of spiderwebs.

She glared about her, hostility and anger radiating from her, and it was then that Elena realized that she was, in fact, no older than the King and Queen, or even Elena herself. She exchanged a glance with Madame; hers startled, Madame's knowing. Madame nodded.

Sometimes, the ones who were "supposed" to have the happy endings go to the bad....

There was so much anger in the young woman's eyes, so much resentment, and so much pent-up pain, that Elena could not imagine how Madame was going to stop this creature from just exploding then and there, like a fermenting bottle—

Then, from out of the shadows where he had somehow been concealed behind the blue-and-white Sorceress, another figure stepped.

It was a young man; he wasn't handsome, and he clearly wasn't all that wealthy, but he had the most interesting and intense face that Elena had ever seen. He, too, wore black; a little threadbare, but not ill-kempt. Clearly, though he might be poor by the standards of the rest of the guests here, he was proud, but with the right sort of pride that will not be beaten by so small a thing as poverty, and insists on what Madame Fleur used to call "certain standards." Elena sensed that even if he had to mend and clean his clothing himself, he would be clean and mended. If he had to go without a meal, he would give no hint of it.

He moved into the Sorceress's path as if she was a lodestone, and he a needle. And when she paused in surprise, he seized his moment, and her hand, and bent nearly double to kiss it.

"Madame Arachnia, I presume?" he said, and his voice was so melodious that it made Elena yearn to actually hear him sing rather than speak. "Madame, I would never have accepted the invitation to come here this day, if it had not been that I knew that you had also been invited."

The Sorceress was taken so completely by surprise that she could only stare at him in shock.

"You—you did?" she stammered, completely taken aback. "But—"

"I had to meet you," he replied, staring into her eyes with hungry intensity. "And please—could we come away from these— ordinary people?" Now his voice dripped disdain for those around him. "I sense that we must talk."

Still in shock, the Sorceress let him lead her, all unresisting, out of one of the double doors that led to the garden.

The shadows and the chill passed from the room with them.

Elena managed to drag her eyes away from them long enough to look at her mentor.

Madame Bella was watching with every evidence of satisfaction, and when the pair had gone out the door into the garden, she smiled. "That went well," she said, and winked at Elena. "I knew I could count on Miranda."

The celebration went on—presumably, without either Madame Arachnia—that had to be an assumed name!—or the young man. There was entertainment; dancers, musicians, mountebanks.

Then, at last, came the moment to present Christening Gifts. And to Elena's horror, Madame Bella was the first of the magicians to grant hers—

"I grant her the gift of a caring heart," said Madame, and bowed over the cradle. A swirl of lilac mist rose about her, and settled over the baby; Madame smiled and retired, to make way for the Sorceress in blue and white.

"What are you doing?" Elena hissed frantically, as Madame resumed her place beside her Apprentice. "That creature is still outside! Why didn't you go hide or something, so that when she comes in and curses the baby—"

"You will be the one to turn the curse, because Arachnia has probably forgotten about you completely," Madame replied, looking completely unruffled, as the Sorceress bestowed "lips like cherries and teeth like pearls."

"Me?" squeaked Elena, "But—"

"Hush. And watch, and listen, and learn."

As Elena fidgeted and fretted, the other magicians gave their gifts, all, to her mind, singularly useless. What good was "hair as gold as sunlight," and "the voice of a lark," to someone who was probably going to die on her sixteenth birthday, unless an untrained Apprentice could figure out a way and muster the power to turn the curse of a very powerful Sorceress?

Finally the last of the Fair Folk gave her gift—"the grace of a swan on the water"—and, with utter predictability, Madame Arachnia appeared, the crowd drawing back from her, that shadow hanging over her, a cold wind coming with her.

Except that—she wasn't alone. That young man was still with her. And the shadow that surrounded her seemed thinner, the cold wind not so much icy as merely cool—and the expression on her face was one of—

Bewilderment?

The King and Queen clutched each other's hands, trying to put on a show of bravery, and failing utterly. Arachnia stood before the cradle, uncertainty in her very pose. She looked down at the baby, looked into the eyes of the King and Queen, and then—

—then looked back at the young man, who gazed at her with trust, worship and tenderness.

"On the morning of her sixteenth birthday—" Arachnia began, her voice rolling across the crowd in sepulchral tones. But then—she stopped.

"Her sixteenth birthday—" she began again, but now her voice was not so threatening. In fact, it sounded hesitant. She looked back at the young man.

He smiled. She tried to turn towards him, but something was holding her there. The struggle between Arachnia and this invisible force was palpable, visible, and it was making her angry.

She turned back towards the cradle and gathered herself together. She drew herself up. She pointed at the infant in the cradle—but when she spoke, instead of threat, the voice was full of—irritation.

The tone said, I know I have to do this; I feel The Tradition forcing me into it. I don't have a choice, but pardon me if I just go through the motions.

"On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, the Princess will awaken with her hair so knotted it will look as if birds had been nesting in it!"

There was a halfhearted little rumble of thunder. The shadow passed for a moment. Arachnia turned back to the young man with a look of triumph. He held out both hands to her; now it was she who was drawn as steel to a lodestone, and they walked away from the King and Queen and Princess and right out the door together, as if no one else existed.

But then the shadow gathered again, the cold fell heavily on the room, as The Tradition gathered all of its strength to warp that ineffectual curse into something horrible. Elena felt the potential of the curse still hanging over everything, and she knew The Tradition and what it could do—if the curse wasn't quickly countered, it would descend in some ghastly form that no one could anticipate, no matter how weak the actual curse might seem to be. She grasped her wand in a sweating hand, and stepped forward, the youngest of them all, and her mind was working frantically. How to turn the curse into a blessing? How to take all that power of The Tradition and turn it against itself? She had to be clever; had to give The Tradition what it wanted. That was not only a curse, but a reward for someone worthy.

The poor little Princess would have to endure something, and at the same time, the end of the tale had to provide something for another person that she had to "name"—

What could you do with hair that was horribly knotted and keep it from tangling around someone's throat to choke off her breath? It had to be something that would cost some pain, for The Tradition demanded pain for a curse—who could untangle something hopelessly snarled?

It came to her, and as she stepped forward towards the infant's cradle, she was carefully phrasing her counter, hoping no one noticed how her hands were shaking. She gathered all of the power she could see swirling around her in a rainbow skein of magic; prayed it was enough, and waved her wand three times over the baby's cradle. Shining motes of power followed the circling of the star on the tip of her wand, and spiraled down into the sleeping infant.

"The Princess will awaken with her hair binding her to her bed, so knotted that she cannot move."

There. That was surely enough of a curse to satisfy The Tradition.

"Scissors will be blunted, knives useless, and not any of her handmaidens will be able to loosen so much as a single knot. All will seem lost."

There was the despair that was needed.

"Nor will magic avail the day. No man's hand will free her."

That left things open for a girl, a female, anyway. The Tradition liked these little, sly loopholes.

"But a rescuer will come; noble by nature, not by birth, gifted with patience and common sense, drawn by pity and not hope of reward. With her own two hands, the rescuer will free the Princess from the prison of her own hair, and win her freedom and her friendship."

Just like the popping of a soap-bubble, the dreadful potential vanished. Elena almost wept with relief.

Now everyone sighed, some with relief that matched Elena's, some not understanding what had happened, laughing nervously at the apparently absurd "curse." Only the magicians among them moved forward to congratulate the new Apprentice on a clever counter, for only they realized that The Tradition had been poised to make the Princess strangle in her own hair, or be smothered by it, or take some other dreadful form. Now it, and all of its potential, had been bound into a harmless, yet logical form. The Princess would live, and there would be a "happily ever after" for the nameless rescuer, some humble girl somewhere who would have the patience to untangle the Gordian-hair-knot when everyone else had given up.

The celebration went on, but their work was done, and Elena felt as drained as if she had been running for a mile. The King called for the musicians to play, and Madame Bella quietly went to him to explain what was going to happen in sixteen years.

Elena found a convenient pillar and put her back against it, feeling limp and drained.

Eventually Madame Bella returned and took her gently by the elbow, and steered her into one of the little side-rooms that had been set up for the convenience of a few guests who wished to converse together. Somehow she was not at all surprised to find the other magicians there, being served with refreshments and chattering amiably among themselves.

"Miranda, my dear, you exceeded my wildest dreams!" Bella said, as they entered, and the Sorceress beamed. A seat was immediately provided for Elena, and the Witch in russet pressed a glass of wine into her hand. Elena drank it down at a gulp.

The Sorceress nodded graciously. "It was a stroke of luck finding him. Do you know he's a Prince as well as a poet?"

There was a gasp and a laugh from the Witch in green. "No! Oh, my word, that does make a great deal of sense! No wonder Arachnia gravitated straight for him!"

What? Oh— oh, of course, if she's like me, she was supposed to have a Prince and somehow didn't get one. Only she turned bitter and hard and wants to make everything around her hurt as much as she does. But The Traditional attraction is still there.

"What sort of Prince?" Bella asked, plying Elena with a slice of cake, it was far too sugary—or at least, would have been if she hadn't been so famished.

"A Frog Prince, the poor thing, and he'd been that way so long that his Kingdom had passed right into the hands of a collateral line. Decades at least; maybe more, I couldn't be sure. Kissed by a Princess, all right, but she was only six years old, and in the habit of kissing every bird and beast that crossed her path!" Sorceress Miranda shook her head with pity for the poor man's situation. Elena winced. Bad enough to have the first part of your "destiny" thwarted, worse to no longer have a home to return to, but then to have insult piled on top of injury like that—

"Oh, the poor lad!" exclaimed the Witch in grey, with sympathy warming her voice. "No Princess, no Kingdom—no prospects—"

"But a talent for brooding poetry. Well, I would be broody, if I'd gone through all of that,"

Miranda replied. "He's good enough to keep from starving, which for a poet, is a pure miracle, frankly. I found him just as you suggested, Bella, by looking for slim volumes of recently published verses full of suffering and anguish and longing for death—and a morbid fascination with the trappings of darkness, but not the substance."

"And you tracked the poet down—" Bella prompted, handing a plate of little sandwiches to Elena, who felt as if she was so starved there was a hole in the bottom of her stomach.

"Just as you said—I knew I had the right sort of fellow after watching him a while. He might speak longingly in excellent rhyme of wanting to be united with the powers of darkness and descend into the blackness of never-ending night, but in his little garret he was feeding sparrows with bread he could hardly afford to part with." Miranda smiled merrily. "I took on the semblance of a Royal Messenger, delivered the invitation, and made sure he knew that the notorious Madame Arachnia would also be there. And when he arrived, I just made sure to position him properly, and you saw the rest."

"But Bella," the Witch in green protested. "How did you know this would fall out in this way?

How did you know that Arachnia wouldn't still put a really powerful curse on the babe?"

"She didn't, not exactly," said an aged voice from the door. They all turned, and two of the Witches leaped to their feet to aid the bent and withered old woman who stood there into the room and into a chair.

"She didn't," the old woman repeated, with a cherubic smile, and a voice creaking with age. "I was to be her emergency counter, in case the curse was too dreadful for her clever little Apprentice to work out. Not," she added, "that I think it would have been. Once a truly dreadful curse has been laid, The Tradition usually makes the counter fairly easy to think of and set."

"'Not death, but sleep,'" quoted Miranda. "And no one would ever have looked for you here, Madame Veronica. I thought you never traveled anymore."

"I do not," the elderly Godmother replied. "This is my Kingdom, and I told Bella to be ready when I knew the Queen was expecting. I am one of the Royal Nurserymaids—and that was a good touch, couching the counter so that the savior is a lowborn girl, young Elena," she added. "I shall have to be sure there is someone worthy of reward and gathering Potential in that position when the time comes."

"But still, Bella, how did you know you would find a young man that would find Arachnia irresistible?" the Witch in green persisted. "I can see where you could turn her, if you could only find someone who would see her and love her, but how did you know such a fellow existed?"

Bella tilted her head to the side, and a wry smile touched her lips. "You find them in any Kingdom," she said, "if you look hard enough. Young men, and young women, too, who believe that they are in love with evil, death, and darkness, but in fact, are in love with mystery. Mind, it wouldn't have worked if Arachnia herself wasn't so young, and still able to be turned, if only one could find the key to her loneliness. I expect she'll be your charge now, Miranda."

"And happy to take her on," the Sorceress replied. "I'd go through fire and ice to turn someone with her power. And believe me, I have bound that young man with so many spells I'm surprised he can move."

"You didn't put a love spell on him!" said the Witch in grey, aghast.

"Great heavens no! I'm not that stupid!" Miranda exclaimed. "Arachnia would have spotted that in an instant, and she'd have been so angry she probably would have cursed the whole Kingdom! No, all I did was hedge him around so that he can't become the Rogue, the Betrayer, the Cad, or the Seducer, and I let his own romantic feelings do the rest."

"We can count on that," Madame Bella said, with a decided nod of her head. "I think that he may be in love with an abstract now, but it won't be long before he's in love with Arachnia herself, and she won't be able to resist him. I know; thanks to Randolf, I've had a look at her Library. A good half of it is slim little volumes of darkly romantic poetry, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that some of them are his. In no time—well, probably by tonight!—they'll be haunting the battlements of her castle together as bats flutter overhead beneath a gibbous moon."

Two of the Witches heaved sighs of relief, and Madame Veronica nodded.

"Well, that seems to have it all settled and sorted, then, and I must say, a more clever way of turning The Tradition I have never seen," the Witch in russet said with contentment, and turned to her fellows. "When shall we four meet again?"

"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 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 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 non-venomous 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—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.