Chapter 9

By the time the winter snows were calf-deep on the ground, the time that Elena spent as an Apprentice was no longer so much a matter of lessons as it was of practice. Elena knew the theory, virtually everything that Madame Bella could teach; she was not comfortable in it yet, but she knew what to do. And now, unless it so happened that she would ever find herself required for some Great Work, she was as strong in magic as she would ever be. She still had the majority of her own power, and the power she had gotten from Rosalie—twice now, because things were not getting better, they were getting worse. The Tradition definitely wanted Rosalie, or her child or both. And it was not giving up.

So Madame Bella began taking her out to actually do the Godmothering herself, while Madame supervised; most of it was minor, such as taking the power from Rosalie; once she played "the old woman at the crossroads," giving the correct directions to the one young man who was polite to her, and sending the other four who were not down a long wilderness road that would leave them in the middle of nowhere. Another time, she made a point of getting a particular pot of flowers into the hands of a young woman, and once she ensured that a handsome kitten was adopted by a mill-owner with three sons. She knew what both of those were about, of course, but it would be years before either story came to fruition. What was more, neither the Black Magician nor the Ogre would be remotely aware of what was coming before it was too late. They were too busy fending off knights at the moment to even think about what a Godmother might be preparing for them.

And last of all, Madame taught her Magical Combat.

With the assistance of the Fair Folk, Elena learned all of the ways that duels could take place between Magicians—whether it was the Duel Direct where one threw powerful magical attacks at the foe, the Transformation Duel where each magician kept changing his form until one or the other was able to devour or otherwise incapacitate the opposition, or the Duel by Avatar where each magician transformed into a magical monster and physical and magical combat took place between them. And she got as much practice in dueling as was possible under the circumstances, which was not a great deal; dueling took such huge stores of energy that no one really practiced it. Instead, they did what she did; they studied the great combats of the past, and the Fair Folk were the past masters at summoning such things into blazing life.

"I have never actually gotten into combat myself," Madame told her warningly. "Quite frankly, I leave that sort of thing to Sorcerers—it's what they're supposed to do. Just remember, if you are ever in a position where combat can't be avoided, call for help. The best thing you can do is stay out of the way; if you can't, never forget that evil will cheat."

The rest of it was fairly innocuous; selling potions at a market stall, giving advice, sending one young lady on an errand that would intersect her course with a particular shepherd boy who was eminently well-suited to her. Godmothering was as much about small things as large, and about the lives of ordinary people as well as those that The Tradition was trying to steer. And sometimes The Tradition could be as implacable a foe as any twenty powerful Magicians.

"Take you, for instance," said Bella one day. "Suppose, just suppose, mind, you happened to encounter a Prince outside of your role. Because you were supposed to marry a Prince, you would be attracted to him, and if he happened to kiss you, you would feel the urge to melt into his arms and you might very well fall in love with him. But," she added darkly, "you are a Godmother, not a deserving orphan anymore. You are outside of your role, where he is concerned, and The Tradition could very likely try to put him into another role altogether. The Rake, for instance, the Cad, the Seducer, who will have his way with you, steal your heart, and abandon you. Do you recall my discussion of just how I selected Arachnia's young man? That is why I was so exceedingly careful. If I had not been, he could easily have fallen into one of those roles and made things worse, in the end."

Elena felt very uneasy. "And—what if that happened?" she asked.

Bella shrugged. "It is a bitter thing to have your heart broken. That is how Godmothers themselves sometimes go to the bad. Just remember, dear, that if you decide to step out of your role, you had better do it in such a way that you thoroughly break with The Tradition, not just try to get around it."

She didn't need to be reminded of that, for The Tradition was in ponderous motion within a few miles of the cottage.

The situation with Rosalie was clearly not going to improve.

Despite all of Madame's attempts to prevent it, the young wife when less than a month from confinement was so overcome by a craving for fresh rampion that she could stomach little else, she sent word to Madame immediately. There was little doubt in either Bella or Elena's minds that if she did not get the vegetable soon, she would sicken and perhaps die.

Snow lay a foot thick in every garden. Only magic could produce fresh rampion at this point, and Rosalie knew it. Fortunately, she was stubborn as well as intelligent, and determined that as she had escaped the fate that The Tradition had set for her, so would her child. So she hid her craving from her husband until she could convey her plight to Madame Bella.

Madame called Elena into her study, after hours closeted with Randolf.

"Rosalie must have rampion. Randolf has found an Evil Sorceress sniffing around the village.

We have little time." She looked searchingly at Elena. "I know what I would do, but what would you do in this situation?"

"First—The Tradition is going to force a magician into that village to grow the rampion to be stolen," she said, slowly. "Is there any reason why that magician cannot be me?"

There was only one possible house in the village that would suit; only one had a great stone wall all the way around it. The Tradition would demand that Rosalie's husband climb a wall or pass some other barrier to steal the rampion.

The fact that it was already occupied was a detail that needed to be taken care of. The Dark One could use trickery, or might simply dispose of the woman and take her place; not being bound by laws or decency made things a bit easier for their kind. It was a trifle more difficult for the Godmother and her Apprentice.

However, a Godmother has many resources at her disposal. Elena never learned what it was that Madame promised to the widow in order to get her to agree to vacate for a month or two, but it was evidently enough to have her packed and gone on the instant. It was only an hour or two after Madame paid the woman a visit, that Elena could move into that isolated, walled house at the end of the village, a house shrouded by tall cypress and pine, usually occupied only by the widow and her two servants. Madame whisked the widow off quietly, in a closed carriage; no one in the village would ever even guess that she had gone. Elena took her place, in disguise, as soon as the carriage was out of sight.

The disguise was made easier by Elena adopting the widow's mourning; to most folk, all black dresses look alike, and the widow held herself so aloof from the rest of the village that so long as her face looked right, it was doubtful that anyone would note a difference in height or weight.

The house was terribly silent compared to Madame Bella's. Elena hadn't really noticed it before, but there was always the sound of someone moving about the place; one of the House-Elves at some task or other, Madame bustling about the place, or even Randolf singing to himself in Madame's parlor, or speaking with her about something. The two servants here, however, had very little to do, and had been trained to do it all silently. The house was mostly cold; the only fires were in the kitchen and in the widow's bedroom. The contrast with Madame's cheerful home could not have been more dramatic.

And when Elena went up to the widow's room, she got a bit of another shock; she saw a stranger in the mirror, an older woman, statuesque, aloof, and nothing like her.

Madame had arranged this part. It was an illusion, but a very, very good one. Elena reached for the mirror, and the stranger reached back.

Feeling a little shaken by the encounter, Elena went straight to bed. But she slept lightly, and not well. Unless she was watching the house all the time—not likely—the Sorceress would not know that a substitution had been made. Shortly she would make her first attempts to take the widow's place herself. During the night, in fact, Elena woke up twice, hearing something sniffing about under the windows, and trying the doors.

She woke the third time as something rattled at a window. It could have been the wind, which had picked up, but she remained wide-eyed and awake until dawn.

As soon as there was light, she went ahead and got up to dress. No sooner had she finished, but there was a knock at the door.

One of the two servants answered it, and summoned Elena in her guise as the mistress of the house.

She had half expected the Evil Sorceress to appear herself, but instead it was a supercilious-looking manservant. He gazed at her down his long nose; she was wearing the guise of that wealthy widow, perfectly ordinary in every way, and he evidently didn't recognize her for what she was. He wore a livery so rich with gold braid that if one actually had to buy it, the clothing would probably fetch twice as much as the gown that Elena was wearing.

So, the Sorceress was taking the indirect option. That was interesting. It suggested that she might not be the sort to resort to outright murder. Or at least, not yet.

"My mistress wishes to purchase this house," he began.

"It's not for sale," she said, rudely, and slammed the door in his face. It was not in her best interest to give him—or rather, his mistress—a good look at her. A magician's disguise is seldom proof against the probing of another magician; at the least, the other would be able to tell that there was a disguise in place, if not the true identity beneath it.

The knocking began again; she ignored it and directed her servants to do the same, and eventually, from an upper window, saw him trudge away.

The Sorceress was clever, more so than the usual, because the next person she sent was the village constable. A spell on him that Elena could read from her window like one of her favorite books meant to make him think that Elena was to be evicted.

She opened her door to him, and before he got more than the word "You—" out, she struck him with the counterspell. She stood there in the doorway, while he stood stupidly in the snow, trying to remember why he had come there in the first place.

"Well, Constable?" she asked. "Have you come about that prowler the neighbors have been talking about?"

"Ah—" He actually shook himself, then brightened. "Ah, yes, mum. The prowler! Your neighbors said there was something or someone around their walls last night, and it fair gave them a turn. Did you have any sight of him yourself?"

"Not a bit of it," she lied, because of course, there had been a prowler around her walls, but if it had been another servant of the Evil One, her protections had probably kept it off. But the neighbors had evidently seen it as well, and been frightened out of their wits.

That was a stroke of luck, though it wasn't anything that she needed to count on. There was always someone in every village who saw prowlers at night, every night, and would berate the constable about them in the morning. "I have stout walls and good locks, and if there was a prowler and not something out of the bottom of a bottle, he'd know better than to try my door."

"Right enough, mum," the constable said agreeably, and turned to go about his business. As he left her gate, she saw that he was going to talk to the neighbors. Another stroke of luck; the Sorceress would not be able to get at him until he was alone again, and that might not happen for the rest of the day.

Three times was the usual number for frontal assaults, and sure enough, just after sundown, the Evil Sorceress arrived herself.

She came in full array, parading down the road from the forest in a black carriage drawn by black horses with fiery eyes; "horses" that Elena sensed were not horses at all. Where she walked up the path to the front door, the snow melted. When she struck the door with her fist, it sounded like the pounding at the gates of a tomb. It even shook Elena, and she was ready for it; she had the feeling that the neighbors were all hiding under their beds, shivering.

But now that the moment was at hand, somehow she didn't feel quite so frightened anymore.

In fact, the imperious pounding on the door just woke Elena's native stubbornness, and her anger, too, along with the weapon that Bella had given her. She gathered her courage, made sure she had the weapon in her hand, went to the front door, and flung it open.

The Sorceress's hand was raised for a second volley of knocks. Caught by surprise, Elena did not give her a chance to recover. She jabbed the needle-sharp spindle of a spinning wheel right into the upraised hand.

There was a flash of light and the smell of lightning.

The Spell of Sleep hit the Sorceress like the fist of doom, and she crumpled. It was a good spell; solid and well-turned. It should be; it had been diverted from being used on yet another Princess several years ago. Taking down one Evil Sorceress with the spell crafted by another had a certain satisfying irony about it. And anyway, Madame liked to conserve effort whenever possible. The magic had been expended for this weapon of the enemy; it only made sense to make use of it if they could.

This spell had been meant to hold a Princess for a hundred years. It would only hold an Evil Sorceress for about a month, but that was all that Elena needed.

Now, at last, Robin appeared, from where he had been waiting in the cypresses in case Elena's attack failed. He helped her drag the unconscious Sorceress into the house. Together they installed her in a spare room, arranging her on the bed—then Elena sealed the room with triple bindings to make sure the woman stayed there.

As she closed the door, she felt, and saw, the weight of magic around the house shift, and took a deep and steadying breath. The Sorceress was now in the house. The real owner was gone, and someone in her image was now mistress of the place. The first part of the tale was complete.

Elena looked out at the walled garden at the back of the building, and was not at all surprised to see the snow melting away from the raised vegetable beds, as if it was springtime, even though it lacked but three days to Christmas. That was The Tradition at work; if the Sorceress herself was not capable of enchanting the garden so that the fateful rampion could grow, The Tradition would take care of that little detail for her.

In a way, the sight was more terrifying than the Sorceress and her dreadful horses at the door. Here The Tradition revealed the power that it could exert in the Five Hundred Kingdoms; here was magic moving and working without any human medium at all. At that moment, Elena felt The Tradition looming over her like a giant wave about to crash down on her, like a silent avalanche about to overwhelm her.

Unless she could direct it. She could not control it, but if she was careful, perhaps she could make it work for her.

Elena went to bed, and in the morning, when she checked the garden again, the little plants were already sprouting from beds in which the earth was warm to the touch. Her lips tightened with anger, but she took care not to show it. What she did do was to check again to see that the Sorceress was fast asleep.

By Christmas, the rampion was half grown. By New Year's it was full grown, lush, and luscious. And on New Year's Day, Rosalie's husband came over the wall in the early morning, to steal the verdantly green plants for his wife. The roots were at their most perfect, crisp and sweet, about the size of prize carrots, but with a white flesh. Peasant food, which made it all the more ironic, for this peasant food would nourish a peasant child who would, one day, marry a prince.

But only after royal blood had soaked the earth beneath her tower.

Once he came, pulling up a handful of roots before fleeing. Twice, a bit more boldly this time, when no one appeared to stop him. And the third time, in the dusk, Elena was waiting for him, as the Sorceress would have been.

He bent to rip up a plant, hastily, but without a lot of fear. He should have been afraid; it should have occurred to him that nothing natural could have produced these plants in the heart of winter. Nothing like this had ever happened in the widow's garden before. He should have realized that there was something very, very wrong.

He was thinking only of his wife, his beloved, the mother of his child-to-be. The widow who lived in this house might be angry at him for stealing her property, but the worst that would happen would be that she would summon the village constable, and the constable was a man with a family himself. There might be a punishment, the stocks perhaps, but everyone in the village knew about pregnant women and their cravings, and the punishment wouldn't be harsh—

—surely—

The Tradition demanded a dramatic entrance, and Elena obliged.

"So!" she cried in a cold voice, stepping out of the darkness in a flash of greenish light.

"Thief!"

While she wore the widow's face, she also wore the sweeping black gown and winglike cape that the Sorceress had worn, the cape streaming out behind her in a self-created wind. Rosalie's husband dropped to his knees, his face transfixed with terror, the plants falling from his hands.

He might not have been very clever, but he was brave.

He might have blamed Rosalie, but the explanation he babbled out held no touch of accusation for his wife. In fact, he begged only for mercy because Rosalie was with child and would need him; he said nothing of her craving for the magical rampion.

There was no doubt in Elena's mind at that moment why Rosalie loved this man, who would willingly sacrifice himself to save her. But The Tradition had a certain momentum of its own, and it demanded the child. She felt it impelling her on.

Well, she already knew what she would do about this—The Tradition demanded that this child become a part of one of its tales. Very well. She would give it a tale.

A different tale. Not Ladderlocks.

"You will take me to your wife," she decreed, sternly. "You have stolen my property; there must be restitution, and there must be punishment. I know that your wife's hunger for my plants brought you here. She must pay, as well as you."

He, no less than she, was impelled by the weight of The Tradition. He could not have disobeyed her if he had been possessed of a stronger will and more wits than he actually owned.

As if he was sleepwalking, he rose. His face a mask of despair, he led her to his little home, the lovely garden now shrouded in snow, the lights of their home streaming out into the darkness from the open door. Rosalie, now heavily pregnant, stood in the doorway; she was expecting this, and praying that the woman who followed her too-loving husband was Elena, not a stranger.

Still The Tradition demanded this child, and in that, it was too strong even for a Godmother like Bella to withstand. So, the child would be Elena's to do with as she pleased. In that much, The Tradition would be obeyed.

The man stopped, and Elena pushed past him, imperious, and unstoppable. "Come," she said coldly, and head hanging, he obeyed.

One month later, Elena stood again in Rosalie's cottage, this time to look down into the face of a tiny baby. Elena had seen her share of newborns over the years, and most infants looked like wizened, red-faced old men with sour dispositions. This child was enchanting, with a perfect little pink rosebud of a face, and wide blue eyes that stared blankly up at the Apprentice.

This only made her feel terribly guilty about what she was going to do next.

"I'm sorry," she murmured, then took a hard, dried pea, jamming it with her thumb into one of the baby's tender little buttocks, whispering a spell that she knew was going to bring pain, until the infant's face crumpled and the mouth opened in a wail of discomfort.

Elena instantly left off torturing the poor little mite, and after making certain that the offending pea was going to leave a satisfactorily livid bruise, handed the baby back to her mother.

And she felt the power shift again. The pea in her hand became oddly heavy, and when she dropped it into the little silver casket she had brought, it nestled into the velvet like a jewel. The Tradition felt what she had done, and had begun to alter its impetus. And even as Elena stood there, she could see the glowing drifts of power leaving Rosalie and beginning a slow, circling spiral towards the baby.

"That's all?" Rosalie whispered, bouncing the baby and hushing her with kisses and petting.

"That's all," Elena replied, then added, as she had to. "For now. You'll lose her when she turns sixteen, of course—" It was, almost as cruel a fate, in a way, but—

Rosalie sighed, and bent her head over the baby. She probably thought that Elena couldn't see that she had wiped a tear away, surreptitiously. "It could be so much worse. And we would lose her to a husband anyway, eventually...."

But it was clear that Rosalie was only waiting for Elena to leave to break down weeping.

Who could blame her? Hearing that you will lose your child after only sixteen short years is never easy.

But it could have been so much worse. She could have had Clarissa snatched out of her arms to be locked away from her forever.

Elena left, quickly. She could not bear to be here a moment longer; there was relief in this little cottage, but there was pain as well. When little Clarissa turned sixteen, something would happen to her that would mean that her parents could never see her again, except at a distance, and that was a hard thing for a mother to learn.

Besides, she had another journey to make, and she had borrowed the help of Sergei, the Little Humpback Horse; she wouldn't keep him standing about waiting any longer than she had to.

He stood in the traces of the gaily painted cart, shaking his head sadly. He knew what she had been forced to do in order to avert the greater tragedy of the birth of a Ladderlocks child.

"This is a sad thing," he said, and Elena's dragon's-blood gift of the Speech of Animals allowed her to understand him, as she had not been able to the last time she had seen him. "To have your child for only sixteen years—"

"Or to know that she is the cause of many deaths?" Elena replied, climbing into the cart. "Do you know how many young men died to save the last Ladderlocks?"

"It is hard to weigh sorrow against sorrow, and I fear you have made the only possible choice," the Horse agreed. "But I cannot like it. Her grief pulls at my heart. Come. Let us be gone from this place." He looked back over his shoulder at the cottage, and his skin shivered all over. "It is better not to linger."

He took off at a trot; once beyond sight of the village, he rose into the air, taking the cart, and Elena, with him. Now she was prepared for the ascent—

Well, as prepared as anyone could be. She clutched the wood of the seat as her heart jumped right into her throat. She clenched her eyes tight shut, but then decided that she had to face this some time, and opened them again.

The ground was not very far away. The Horse was just skimming the tops of the trees this time, in fact, he was using the trees to hide their progress from below.

"You ought to put the disguise on," he called over his shoulder. "No one will be surprised to see a Godmother flying in a magical sleigh."

She blinked; Bella was right, the Horse was exceedingly clever. She summoned power from within her and pulling her wand from the pocket of her gown, pulled the power into a shape. It drifted just above them, a glowing cloud that only she and the Horse could see. With a shudder of effort, she pulled it down to cover both of them; it settled over the Horse, the cart, and her, and obscured them for just a moment.

Then as he ran on across the treetops, he became a snow-white stallion and the cart transmuted into a silver sleigh overflowing with furs.

"Ha!" said the Horse. "Now that's more like it!"

He didn't rise much more than a foot or so higher, though, which made Elena feel very much better. This, she could cope with. She'd climbed all manner of things as a child, before Madame Klovis arrived to blight her life—trees, clock towers, up onto the roof of the house. This wasn't much higher than that. This, she could cope with.

The Tradition demanded a tale; it demanded a tale that had at least a modicum of tragedy about it, and it demanded a tale in which the ending made a Princess of a peasant. There was only one Path that Elena had been able to think of that matched those demands. She was on her way now to meet Madame Bella to establish the second half of the tale's beginnings.

She was, in fact, on the way to a place she had not really expected to ever see again—the Royal Palace of Otraria, where King Colin and Queen Sophia were meeting with the Godmother who had brought them together. Bella was the only possible person to explain all this to them; they trusted her as they did not yet trust her Apprentice, and no wonder. If it had not been for Bella, the Princess (now the Queen) would still be pining away in her room, unable even to smile.

And Colin would still be a goose-boy.

Elena was already dressed for the occasion, and not merely as Bella's Apprentice this time, but in the full formal garb of a Godmother when visiting royalty. From the tiara of rosebuds carved from pink crystal in her powdered wig, to the same crystal rosebuds set into the silver buckles of her high-heeled, pink satin slippers, she was garbed as Madame's equal and counterpart, in a pink that favored her coloring, rather than the lilac that favored Madame's.

Wrapped in an ermine mantel, her hands in a matching muff, she had probably been an odd sight, sitting on the bench-seat of that little painted cart. Rosalie had been too overcome with emotion to really pay any attention to what the Apprentice was wearing, or perhaps she would have been more than a bit overawed.

They landed well outside the city, and the Horse paused on the road for just a moment. He looked over his shoulder again while she caught her breath and added a little more power to the spell, making the changes real, solid, tangible. She very much wanted tangible; she wanted those furs tucked in around her. in this state, she drove to the Palace, and had the rare privilege of seeing people she knew, both well and only slightly, gaping at her with a total lack of recognition.

No one saw Ella Cinders in the fancifully arrayed Godmother—but it was clear from the startled gazes and the sudden deference that the people she passed knew exactly what she was.

In a way, she enjoyed it—and in a way, it was rather sad. For the first time, she felt the widening gulf between her, and the people she had grown up among. She had always been lonely, but now she felt alone.

The sleigh glided past the Klovis house, which was still unoccupied, and Elena had the melancholy satisfaction of seeing that someone—perhaps the creditors—had actually begun the process of dismantling it. The slate roof was half gone, and the stone wall down to no more than knee high. She suspected that the elegant paneling had been stripped away by now, and any of the built-in furnishings taken out first of all.

When Madame Klovis reappeared, she would have a great deal more to worry about than her missing stepdaughter....

What did they think those people who were taking the house apart, bit by bit? Did they ever wonder what had become of the missing Elena? Or had she dropped out of their minds, relegated to some unimportant corner of their memories? "Oh, Elena Klovis—Ella Cinders, you mean? Dunno. Went to the Mop Fair after Madame did the runner, never saw her again.

Suppose she must've hired out after all."

The Horse brought the sleigh neatly to the steps of the Palace; a footman hurried to help her alight, and she descended from the sleigh in a swirl of pink silk and white fur. She climbed the steps, the silver-heeled slippers she wore clicking with every pace. Two footmen sprang to hold the brass-bound door open for her. As soon as she was inside, her mantel was taken by another servant stationed just inside the door, and she was conducted immediately by a fourth footman to a small, gold-and-white audience chamber where, as she had expected, Madame was waiting with the King and Queen.

What she had not expected was that the Queen would immediately throw herself at Elena's feet and seize her hand, covering it with grateful kisses and tears.

"Queen Sophia, please!" Elena cried, trying to raise the weeping woman to her feet. "What in heaven's name—"

"Our Godmother decided to do a divination on what would have happened if we'd played unwitting host to the Ladderlocks child in Otraria," said King Colin, white-faced. "It seems that our son would have been the first to die at the hands of the Sorceress who held her captive."

For a moment, Elena really did not understand what had just been told to her. Then, when the meaning struck home, she looked to Madame Bella, who nodded slightly.

"Blessed saints," she whispered, feeling as if she had been hit with a deluge of cold water. "I had no idea—it only occurred to me that the Prince was the right age to be the baby's suitor when she turned sixteen—and that he was near enough to encounter her by chance, perhaps when out hunting—"

Except that the "chance" would not have been "chance" at all. The Tradition would impel the boy—who would be a handsome young man by then—towards the girl as steel was drawn towards a lodestone. The moment she turned sixteen, it would be inevitable. In fact, in either scenario, the Ladderlocks or the Tender Princess, that attraction would have taken place.

But the Ladderlocks would have killed him, it seemed. "When she turned sixteen, even if she was a Ladderlocks—" She faltered.

"But she would not have been rescued until she was eighteen," Madame Bella said quietly.

"And before then, the Sorceress would have battened on the potential power of—well, far too many young men who died trying to bring the girl away." For The Tradition did that; throwing Questers at the Quest, even if they died of it, until one of them achieved it. The power it invested in them would go to the nearest magician who was ruthless enough to take it. That was why the Dark Ones went along with The Tradition; they could batten on the power inherent in those who failed, for as long as they could keep the task so difficult that there would be plenty of failures.

"And our dear son would have been the first." The Queen had risen gracefully to her feet, at last, and dabbed at her tear-streaked face with a dainty, lace-edged bit of linen. "If you had not had the wit and the will to turn the infant's tale from one course to another—"

And at that reminder, Elena hastily brought out the tiny silver casket, in which resided the perfectly ordinary looking dried pea. She pressed it into the Queen's hands—

And there it was; that strange feeling of something looming, then as suddenly settling, turning away. As if a mountain had silently rotated to face a new direction, or an avalanche "decided"

that it would fall some other day.

The path was altered.

"There you are," Elena said, seeing from Bella's expression that she, too, had felt the change.

"Keep it safe. And when, in sixteen years, your son brings home a beauteous young woman, and your courtiers demand proof that she is worthy to become their next Queen, place this beneath a pile of twenty mattresses and announce that this will be the test to prove that she is of royal blood—for only a Princess born would be tender enough to feel a pea beneath so much padding."

"We will," Colin pledged, taking possession of the casket. "And until then, it will reside in the Treasury."

Elena felt a little dizzy now with the effort she had expended in resetting the course of the tale, and let Madame do all of the talking after that. Not that there was much of it; even Kings and Queens did not engage in idle chat with one Godmother, much less two. It had occurred to Elena, and more than once, that people were happy to see a Godmother when there was trouble brewing, but as soon as the trouble had been sorted, they were just as happy to see the Godmother go. She wondered if that was the case with all magicians.

Perhaps it is even the case with heroes....

Nevertheless, though King Colin and Queen Sophia were far too polite to make it obvious that Bella and Elena made them uncomfortable, the uncomfortable pauses began to stretch into uncomfortable silences, and at that point, Madame very gracefully stood up and took her leave.

Very shortly after that, Elena and Bella were bundled up together in the sleigh, and the sleigh itself was soaring over the treetops, on the way home.

"Oh, heavens," Elena said, then inexplicably felt herself bursting into tears.

Bella gathered her against her shoulder. "There, now," she soothed. "It's all over. You've given Rosalie a daughter to raise, you've saved Colin's son from death, you've eliminated a Ladderlocks, and—well, I've done something a bit naughty. While you were dealing with Rosalie, I had Arachnia discharge some of her misgotten power by further enchanting our Sorceress, and locking her up asleep inside a ring of fire in a cave. It will take a hero to get past the fire and wake her, and there is quite a warning carved into the rock bed she is lying on.

Maybe if she sleeps for a hundred years or so, she'll wake up in a better frame of mind."

"And if she doesn't?" asked Elena, through her tears.

Bella shrugged; Elena felt her shoulder move. "She won't be our problem anymore, she'll be the hero's."

Her ironic tone of voice startled a shaky laugh out of Elena, who pulled a handkerchief of her own out of a pocket, and wiped her face with it. "This is horrible, though—we're taking one woman's daughter away once she's sixteen, which I think is too young to marry—we're turning a poor bewildered peasant girl who will barely have seen a knife, fork, and spoon at place settings together, and imprisoning her in that golden cage of Manners. And The Tradition is going to make her wed a man she won't ever have seen before!"

"Rosalie will have her daughter for as long as most women do," Bella pointed out reasonably, as the Horse increased his pace and the height they were flying at. "The girl would probably have married as young as fifteen otherwise; most peasant girls wed early. Colin knows very well what it is like to be a peasant in a King's Court, and he will see to it that no one is unkind to her while he has teachers show her how to behave. And last of all, even if she remained with Rosalie, she still could have wound up in an arranged marriage with someone she didn't know!"

Elena blotted her eyes, and had to admit the justice of Madame Bella's words. Most of them, anyway.

"But marrying a man she doesn't know?"

"The Tradition will ensure that she falls in love with him directly when she sees him," Bella replied, patting her hand soothingly, as the Horse tossed his head and whickered agreement.

"Colin and Sophia are raising a well-grounded boy; I believe that Clarissa will remain as much in love with her Prince as Colin and Sophia have with each other. Eleven years between their ages is no worse than most royal marriages, and a great deal better than many."

"Maybe, but—" Elena began.

"So what have we possibly done that is wrong?" Madame asked.

"I don't know—but we did the best we could." On that point, at least, Elena was sure. She looked out over the head of the Horse, and saw that they were approaching the cottage. She had never been so glad to see a place in her life. She could talk this over with Randolf; he would understand. She could have a good meal, and Rose and Lily could talk of small things, and she could forget the cruel fates that The Tradition forced on people.

The sleigh touched down with a bump on the snow, and drew up to the front door. Madame patted her hand. "And there you are. That is all we can do, we magicians. The best we can. I think you're ready now."

She was halfway out of the sleigh before she realized what Madame had said. Ready?

Ready? Good heavens, surely not—

But both her feet were already on the ground; before she could clamber back in, the Horse tossed his head and the sleigh moved off.

"Madame!" she cried, desperately, panic overwhelming her. "Madame Bella! Please! Come back! You can't! I'm not—"

"You are as ready as I was," Madame called over her shoulder, and the sleigh rose into the sky, over the treetops, and vanished among the clouds, leaving her standing on what was now her doorstep, now the Godmother of some Seven Kingdoms.

And she had never felt more alone, or been more terrified in her life.