Chapter 15

Whatever had happened to the Prince—whether it was a bit of helpful interference from one of the Fair Folk, getting sense beat into him, as Hob opined, a bout of brain-fever the way Robin suggested, Rose's suggestion that he'd managed to wear out his stupidity, or just simply that he realized that there was a reason why he'd wound up as a donkey—that day marked the turning-point.

He still got angry, insulted people, and showed his temper. But it was in short bursts, usually after a long and exhausting task, and he had even begun apologizing for it afterwards. And as the season moved into harvest-time, Elena made good on her determination to "reward virtue" by making a profound change. She allowed him to spend every fourth day as himself. Then every third. Then every other day, and told Hob to find a real donkey—"or really, whatever you think we need"—to purchase when the Horse Fair came to the village.

Hob left in the morning with a purse full of silver, and returned that evening, well before sunset, just as Alexander came up to the cottage for his supper.

The sound of hooves on the road made him look up, and brought Elena to the door. The look on his face when he saw Hob arrive riding one donkey and leading two mules was worth every silver penny that Hob had spent.

Nevertheless, he hastened to help the Brownie to unharness and put the three new animals in the stable—and put one of them into the very stall that he had been occupying since he had been brought to the cottage.

He was still enough of a Prince not to go to the subordinate for answers, though; when the work was done, as she had expected, he came straight out and looked about to see if she was anywhere in sight. Since she had been waiting for him to do just that, he didn't have far to look.

And he walked straight over to her, his demeanor a mixture of emotions and attitude that was so comical in its way that she had to fight to keep a straight face. For all that he was being scrupulously polite to her, he still deeply resented what she was doing to him. For all that he recognized what an idiot he had been, he resented that she was punishing him for it. And he was sullenly, burningly angry that he was still, in effect, her prisoner. She was, in a way, the Enemy—and now he had to come to the Enemy to find out what was in store for him now.

She watched him try to find a way to ask what her intentions were without asking the question directly. He didn't want to hope too much—yet hope was hard to keep down. Finally, he settled, and asked, harshly (probably more harshly than he intended), "Am I sharing my stable with animals, now?"

"In a manner of speaking," she replied, "since I expect you'll be using the room in the loft, now." She watched varied emotions chasing themselves across his face—no real surprise that there was some bitter disappointment there, since this might have meant, and he surely hoped it had meant, that his term of correction was over. "Unless, of course," she added, so he understood why she was not letting him go quite yet, "you backslide."

"I—" She watched the temper rise; watched him struggle to control it. And expected the outburst of anger and insults.

It never came.

"Very well, Madame," he got out, through gritted teeth, then turned on his heel and stalked back into the stable.

"Well, I like that!" Rose said indignantly from the door.

"Actually, I do like that," Elena said thoughtfully, turning to go back inside herself. "He could have done, or said, much worse. I believe we're getting somewhere, my thorny Rose."

"I'm still not buying manure-proof umbrellas," was all Rose said—but as she also turned to go back into the house, Elena caught a glimpse of a grudging smile.

Lily was already in the kitchen, setting out plates on the table. "Take him out some fresh linens and things, would you, Lily?" she asked. She wasn't going to do so herself, not because she thought herself above the task, but because she wasn't going to give The Tradition a second chance at going down the bawdy-ballad path. Oh, no. That was still the easiest road, and if she was going to keep it from happening, she had to keep her wits about her at all times.

"Already have, Godmother," Lily said with a sidelong look and a smile. "When you told Hob to go off to the Horse Fair, we knew what was toward. Saw to it this morning, while he was down clearing the nettles out."

She had to laugh at that, and she did. "You know what I'm going to do before I do, don't you?" she asked the Brownie.

"Have to, don't we?" Lily countered, with a tilt of her head.

"Been serving Godmothers a mort of years now; you'll be our ninth, I reckon. Be a sad thing if we hadn't learned a bit by now." "Nine!" That surprised her; she hadn't known that the quartet had been doing this sort of thing for so very long. "Are you weary of it yet? Have you ever wanted to—to—stop serving anyone but yourself?" There it was, the question she hadn't dared ask when she first became Godmother—did they want to be free? She didn't know what she would do without them but— Lily laughed at her, and her fears dissolved. "Bless you, no!

What's a Brownie without a home? We're the Fae of housen, Godmother, not the Wild Fae of the woods! Oh, I'll admit that now and again we wish we had a whole family to serve, instead of just the one Godmother, but you've managed to keep us on our toes enough to keep us busy.

That's why Hob brought back the extra beasts; he reckons we'll need them." "Ah." She was a bit nonplussed at that. "For what?" "Oh," Lily replied, waving her hand vaguely. "Things." Robin came in at that moment, with an empty basket that held a napkin; evidently Lily had also sent down the Prince's dinner, figuring he would not want to come to the door for it tonight. Lily took it from the other Brownie, then continued after he left. "Hadn't you noticed that some of the Witches and Hedge-Wizards of other Kingdoms have been asking you for help? We reckon you're going to get made Godmother of a couple more realms before the year is out. That means you'll be getting more people coming to you, and that means guests, and guests means a bigger house and more work. We think the house is getting ready to bud off a couple new rooms.

There's a funny feeling upstairs, off the old Apprentice rooms you used to be in, and downstairs, too. The Library'll probably bud—expand—first, and then all those books Madame Bella put in the parlor and the dining room will move themselves into the new space so we'll have proper places to receive guests."

Lily said all of this so matter-of-factly that Elena's head reeled. The house—had she said budding rooms, as if it was some sort of plant? And the books were going to move themselves?

It was, in a way, one thing to work magic herself. It was quite enough thing to hear that it was going to be working without her intervention....

And was she really going to be given the keeping of other Kingdoms? But which ones?

In the course of an hour, once again, her life was taking on a brand-new direction, and one she had never anticipated.

If only she had a way to contact Madame Bella! Right now she badly wanted advice—she wanted to talk to an older, more experienced Godmother! She needed to learn more than Madame Bella had initially taught her, and she had the feeling she needed to learn it quickly.

But wait—there was advice, advice in plenty, already written down and waiting for her. She had only to find it.

"Ah—I see," she said, carefully, and laughed a little. "I suppose you must be used to it by now."

"Oh, aye," Lily said, cheerfully, but shrewdly, and she was watching Elena's face quite narrowly. Elena remembered something that Bella had told her.

"The House-Elves might seem common as clay and without any kind of magic sometimes; don't allow yourself ever to believe that. They're Fair Folk, as truly Fae as any you've seen, through and through; they serve us because it amuses them to, and this house and everything around it is their creation. If they wished to, they could snap their fingers, and it would be gone in an instant, and them with it."

"I'll be in the library, I think," she said. Then, a little nervously, "It isn't going to do anything while I'm there, is it?"

"Bless you, no!" Lily replied. "Whatever it does, it'll be while you're asleep. It knows that budding unsettles the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, and it's sensitive about that sort of thing."

Oh my, she thought. She talks about the house as if it's alive. Then came a more comforting thought. But so is a tree alive, and I've no qualms about walking inside one of them to take tea with a dryad.

And like her house, the dryads' trees were all bigger on the inside than the outside. Perhaps that was what the cottage was; a kind of dryadic tree.

"Well, I'll be in the Library," she repeated, more confidently now. "All evening, probably."

"Very good, Godmother," Lily said, looking pleased out of all proportion to what Elena had just told her. "I'll let the others know."

Now what did I say that's made her smile so? Elena wondered, as she waved the lamps to light in the Library, and prepared a simple Seeking Spell to help her find the exact books she needed. Or— was it what I didn't say?

But she couldn't spare any more time in wondering one way or the other. She had to find out just how it was that Godmothers were assigned more responsibilities—and what it meant to the Godmother in question when it happened.

The Seeking Spell led her to book after book, until she had a pile of them, twenty deep, on the table she used as a desk. She looked at them and sighed. It was going to be a very long night.

Alexander was racked with so many conflicting emotions that he knew better than to be around anyone else, so he strode rigidly off back to the stable. That woman's casual pronouncement had left him both elated and crushed. When he'd realized that Hob had brought back other work animals he had hoped— and simultaneously told himself not to hope—that his term of punishment was at an end. To learn that it wasn't made him want to howl.

But on the other hand—

On the other hand, tonight I go to sleep as myself, and wake up as myself. In a bed! Or at least, in whatever passes for a bed in that loft....

And he realized then that he didn't even know what was up there; he had never been there, and—

— and I guess I was just taking it for granted that Master Hob slept up there. But come to think of it, I never heard any footsteps up there in all the time I've been here, so it must be empty.

He'd gone back to the stable, of course, out of habit. It was nearly dark, and he "should"

have been in "his" stall, waiting bitterly for the magic to turn him back into a beast.

Tonight, it wouldn't, and that felt—unsettling.

To shake off the feeling, he sought the ladder that led to the loft and climbed it. Might as well find out what his new domain looked like.

He pushed open the hatch at the top of the ladder, and warm, welcoming light spilled down around him. Blinking, he finished his climb, poking his head up into an odd, but quite comfortable room.

The attics at the Academy had been like this; right under the roof, so that you could only walk upright down through the center. This was a thatched building, but someone had gone to the trouble of putting in tongue-and-groove boarding lining the ceiling so that at least he wouldn't have wildlife dropping into his bed and belongings out of the thatch. There was one very tiny window at each end of the single long room, curtained, with the shutters opened wide to the night air. There was a table under each window and a brass lamp on each table. That made sense; you wouldn't want candles with open flames around so much hay and straw. The lamps looked very heavy; you'd have to work hard to tip one over.

In the center of the room was an odd box that looked like a brick stove, except there was no chimney. He couldn't imagine what it was, so he dismissed it for the moment from his mind.

His bed was on the right; somewhat to his surprise, it was a real bed. Somehow he'd expected a pallet on the floor or something similar. But no, this was a real wood-framed bed, with a dark wooden blanket-chest at the foot of it, neatly made up, faded blue linen coverlet and pillows and all, and if he wasn't mistaken, beneath the sheets and coverlet was a featherbed mattress.

To his left, the lamp shared the table with a floral-figured pottery pitcher and basin. And fitted in under the slope of the roof, down both sides, were shelves. There was clothing on those shelves, and a pair of sturdy boots he didn't recognize, along with the carefully folded and familiar pieces of his princely garb and his riding-boots.

And there were books....

Now that, he had not expected at all.

He hadn't laid his hands on single book except for that strange little history that Lily had given him since he'd arrived here. That, he had read from cover to cover, and had thought about it quite a bit. But here were more books, many more, and though he was not the bookworm that Julian was, he was still fond of reading, and he had missed it.

So the first thing he did, the first things he inspected, were the books.

Now, this was a stable, and these were (presumably) the quarters of a stablehand. He expected books about horses and mules and donkeys.

These were histories and practical books on magic.

And it didn't take very long to discover that, like the book that Lily had gotten into his hands, they were written from, and for, the very peculiar viewpoint of the Godmothers and Wizards.

The Godmother's Book of Days, read one, and that was the one he settled in with, reading propped up in his new (and oh, so comfortable) bed, after blowing out the lamp at the farther end of the room.

Elena glanced out the window of the Library after darkness fell, and frowned for a moment to see a square of light where she hadn't ever noticed a light before. Then after a moment, she realized what it must be, and smiled ruefully.

The room over the stable, of course. So the Prince was in his new quarters.

Probably nothing like what he's used to, she thought, then had to laugh at herself. Of course! Lately he was used to bedding down in straw at the clean end of his loose-box! A bed of any kind should seem like a luxury to him now.

It was certainly better than his brother Octavian's lot. Octavian got an empty stall and slept on what he could find. He hadn't sunk so low as to use dirty straw, but he wasn't allowed the new, clean stuff the horses got. No, the best he could manage was fusty stuff from last year, that had gotten a bit moldy, the thin heap of it covered over with rags. He slept under several moth-eaten blankets, arranged so that the holes at least didn't intersect.

Octavian would have regarded the clean little loft room with raw envy, and his reaction to the featherbed would have been disbelief.

She wondered what Alexander was thinking. She hoped he was grateful. She wanted him to be grateful; he hadn't been grateful for much of anything in his previous life, instead, he had accepted the good things that had come to him as his due. The more feelings of things like gratitude he could muster, the better off he would be.

Reluctantly she turned her eyes away from the window and back to her books.

Apparently there was some mechanism whereby Godmothers just got authority over Kingdoms as their experience, cleverness, and strength warranted. There was no formal announcement of the fact, it just happened. But there were unmistakable signs that one had gotten the Kingdom; the Witches and Hedge-Wizards would begin reporting information to one, and at some point, the Godmother would have the opportunity dropped in her lap to make some Grand Gesture at the Royal Court. A gesture like—

— like returning a lost Prince, a former failed Quester who has learned his lessons, to his parents—

There it was, unmistakable. And here was Arachnia's latest letter, brought by bat, lying open on the table next to her.

"— and I can't risk ruining my reputation as the Dark Lady by bringing Octavian back myself, Elena. That's the job of a Godmother. So you might want to think about how you want to do this, because I expect he'll be ready within the month, and unless he backslides, I really don't want to risk his health out there in that drafty stable in the winter. My stableman does fine, but he's a troll. No, really, a troll; a good enough fellow, but as stupid as a block of wood and as hard to hurt as a stone. The conditions he likes might kill a man. "

Elena chewed on the end of an ivory pen. Arachnia was right; she was much too useful as a stalking-horse, the faux Evil Queen who was actually in charge of a failed Quester's ordeals. She was far enough away from Kohlstania that someone would have to invoke "All Forests Are One"

to bring Octavian back. And ideally, in order to wake up Kohlstania to the fact that magic was very much alive and a force in the Kingdoms, as well as to cement King Henrick's change of heart as well as Octavian's changed ways, the return of the "lost" Prince would have to be conducted with a great deal of fanfare.

Which meant—

Which means, I fear, that Kohlstania is now mine. She wasn't certain whether to be pleased or worried. Kohlstania was certainly an orderly place. Perhaps a little too orderly.

When things were too orderly, The Tradition had the unsettling habit of stirring matters up by creating an opening for a Dark One to move in.

Well, all right; at least I'm forewarned. I'll have to have Karelina put me in touch with the Witches and Hedge- Wizards. I might be able to nip trouble early.

She made a note of that on the tablet she was filling, right underneath, Octavian? Make him my helmeted Knight-Escort until I reveal him to his father?

She glanced out the window again; the lamp was still burning over the stable. It looked as if Alexander was celebrating his first night as a man again by staying up a bit. She thought she recalled Lily asking for some of the duplicate copies of books in the Library. Had she put them up there? Well, where else would they go?

If so, she hoped he was something of a reader. The more he learned about magic and The Tradition, the sooner he would really come to understand the path that he had made for himself that had brought him here.

A bat flew in the open window and fluttered around for a few moments before catching itself on a beam and hanging upside down, staring warily at Alexander.

He had been startled when it flapped past his ear, but he wasn't the sort to think that bats were somehow evil, or to want to chase it out. The Palace gamekeeper had once had a bat with a broken wing that he'd rescued and nursed back to health before turning it loose, and he'd shown it to the two youngest Princes, explaining how bats ate all manner of insects and were very useful to have about. Alexander had found the tiny thing fascinating, with its delicate wings, soft fur, and miniature features. It was nothing at all like a flying mouse.

So Alexander watched the bat watching him without moving from his bed, and finally the bat had relaxed, dropped off the ceiling, and fluttered around the room for a bit, catching the moths that had been attracted by the lamplight.

The arrival of the bat had been a useful interruption, because at this point, Alexander's head was beginning to feel very full.

When the bat flew out again, having swept the room clean of moths, rather than returning to his reading he put the book aside, and turned over on his stomach to blow out the lamp. And when he had done so, he saw a square of light down below, and in it, the unmistakable silhouette of Elena.

He supposed that he ought to be thinking of her as "Madame" Elena, but somehow the title really didn't fit her. It was like trying to put a collar on a wild doe; you could embellish it with gems and gold filigree all you wanted, but the doe was still a wild thing and would never be a pet.

"Godmother" suited her, but only when she was becoiffed and powdered and tripping about on her silver-heeled slippers in court garb. In her ordinary clothing, she seemed, to him at least, nothing more imposing than simply "Elena."

Of course, if he dared address her that way, Hob would probably lay him out on the ground.

He wondered what she was doing; it looked as if she was writing, or reading, or perhaps both. Well, so much for thinking she was an illiterate peasant.

He wasn't doing very well on his analysis of the situation that he had found himself in. Truth to tell, he'd fouled it up almost beyond recognition with his assumptions. For someone who was supposed to be trained in assessing conditions correctly and making the right decisions based on those assessments, he was doing a damned poor job of it. And to think he was supposed to become Octavian's Commander-in-Chief! If this was how he would have fared in a war, maybe the Academy hadn't trained him all that well after all.

From what he had read in the Godmother's Book of Days, he was what was known as a Quester. Or, to be more accurate, a Failed Quester. It was his brother Julian who was the real Quester; Julian had succeeded. He had passed the trials and won the Princess. Alexander and Octavian had failed the very first test put in front of them—the test of courtesy.

He had been knighted, and so had Octavian, but he knew now that they had been knights in name only. He knew it now, or rather, acknowledged it, at least to himself.

He wasn't quite ready to confess it to anyone else.

But there was something else that he was finally putting together in his mind that was beginning to make him feel a smoldering anger that was nothing like the anger he had so unthinkingly loaded onto Godmother Elena. The first book he had read had left him a little baffled, referring to something called The Tradition, but in a way that had not left him with any sort of clear definition of what was meant.

In the first chapter of the Book of Days, everything that The Tradition was had been boldly and clearly spelled out. It was that which was making him so angry.

But not at Godmother Elena. Not anymore.

It was quite clear to him now that Elena was doing quite a bit more than the average Godmother to use The Tradition against itself. She should never have brought him here, for instance. Godmothers just did not intervene personally with Failed Questers. There was no place in The Tradition for a Godmother to take the training of a Failed Quester on herself. She properly should have done to him what she'd done to Octavian; turned him loose to wander without being able to get home until he either died or learned his lessons—lessons that would make him a much better King than he would ever have been without this humiliation. And if he died, well, that was too bad—either the second Failed Quester, himself, would survive his lessoning, or Julian would inherit both Kingdoms.

And if Elena had not intervened, it was the latter that was the most likely. The Book of Days had unflinchingly given the odds of a Failed Quester surviving long enough to redeem himself, and the odds weren't at all good.

Elena had gone out of her way to get both himself and Octavian into situations where, even if they were brought down lower than the humblest commoner, they were not in any danger of dying. Except, perhaps, by being monumentally stupid.

Alexander turned over on his back and stared up into the darkness above his bed. Now that he knew about The Tradition, he had an explanation for something he had felt all of his life— a ponderous, implacable sort of weight hanging over him from the moment he'd been born. He'd often ascribed that feeling to God, the weight of the Almighty's regard upon a young Prince.

Now he knew better. It hadn't been God. It had been this faceless, formless, impersonal Force that went about shoving people down the way it wanted them to go, just because it fit a sort of well-worn path, it didn't care what they wanted. It didn't give a toss about pain or pleasure. It only wanted things to happen in a predictable way.

Oh, how he hated it!

He wondered if Robert had been aware of such a thing, for surely Robert was a victim of The Tradition in all its cruelty. On the whole, he hoped not. To live your life feeling yourself impelled towards your early death—as if your fate was a cliff that you were rushing towards, with no way to stop—

That would have been unthinkably horrible, turning what had been a tragedy into something infinitely worse.

He sighed, and the sound filled the little loft room. He became aware that outside the window, crickets sang and frogs croaked, much quieter to his human ears than to the donkey's.

For the first time in too long, he was in a bed, feeling two arms, two legs, all the parts of him what they should be and where they should be, resting on a feather mattress as good as any in the Palace of Kohlstania and better than the ones at the Academy. He was himself again.

I won't backslide, he vowed fiercely to himself. I swear it. No matter how provoked I am, no matter what that damned Tradition wants and tried to make me do, I won't backslide! I will be courteous, I will be considerate, I will remember my knightly vows and I will live up to them instead of merely giving lip service to them. There was nothing, absolutely nothing he would not do to avoid feeling his body warp and change into the beast.

Which meant he would have to be careful, very careful. If The Tradition could not force him into one role (dead failed Quester) it would probably try and force him into another. He would have to read and study to find out what that role might be, and whether or not it was one that would get him out of here. He might hate The Tradition, but there was no point in pretending it did not exist, nor that it was not very, very powerful. Clearly it took knowledge and magic to beat it. He only had a chance at half of that equation.

He closed his eyes, and for the moment, felt rather disinclined to open them again.

Strange, he thought, as he felt sleep creeping up on him. Strange how things worked out. He might have discovered that he was little more than a fancy pawn on some giant chessboard—but at least now he had a better target for his hate and anger than a pretty woman....

Shortly after midnight, Elena blinked, looked down at her notes, and realized that her handwriting was just short of illegible. It was time to call a halt to all of this and go to bed, before she dropped off to sleep right here at the table. She really wasn't minded to wake up at dawn with a crick in her neck and an inkblot on her cheek.

She tidied her papers, put up the quill, corked the ink, and with a wave of her hand, extinguished the lamps. A glance out the window showed her that Alexander had already given up for the night. He was probably smarter than she was.

She made her way up to her room; behind his curtain, Ran-dolf was very quiet. He might not even "be" there at the moment; it was likeliest that he was off watching something or someone else. She waved the lamps in this room to darkness, and went on into her bedroom.

With a few touches, it was very much as Madame Bella had left it. By the time she had moved into it, Elena had decided that she liked it that way and saw no reason to change anything that was there. It felt—old. Very old. She had to wonder, in fact, if the furnishings in this room dated all the way back to the first human Godmother to live here.

For the furniture was, in fact, rather more antique than anything in the Klovis household had been, and far more than anything in any other room in the house except, perhaps, the kitchen.

The walls were of wood, but there were tapestries hung on all of them. The bed was huge, a whole family could have slept there comfortably; it stood on a little dais of its own, and it was curtained twice. The inner curtains were of thin gauze, the outer of heavy velvet. In the summer she closed only the inner ones, to keep insects out, so that she could leave the windows open without resorting to a spell. The rest of the furnishings, wardrobe, a sort of couch, backless chairs, chests, and her dressing table, were just as massive, and had an air of comfort about them that was rather surprising given how heavily they were built. The walls were dark oak paneling, the floor darker yet, the colors of the curtains and cushions all dark burgundy and garnet. The tapestries all around the walls were of magical creatures; the one above the fireplace showed Unicorns sans maidens. Sometimes she wondered if a Godmother had woven it herself, and why. It certainly managed to portray them accurately—beautiful, but with a certain vacuity in their eyes.

She left her clothing draped neatly over the blanket-chest at the foot of the bed for Rose to deal with in the morning and slipped into the clean nightgown that was waiting for her, left lying on the pillows. It smelled pleasantly of violets and lavender. She waved the lights out and climbed up into the bed, feeling fairly satisfied. Of course, there was no way of knowing what Alexander would actually do or think following his first night of freedom from his curse, but she had high hopes for him, given that he had managed to remain in control of his temper. And she could hardly blame him for being angry that she hadn't just freed him outright. He still hadn't, in his heart, acknowledged that he had failed some crucial tests of character.

On the other hand, if he was reading her spare histories, they might point his mind in the right direction.

It would be a bit awkward to have him around in his natural form, though. When he'd been an ass, she hadn't thought twice about acting as she always had in his presence. The more she had allowed him to be himself, the more conscious she had been of the presence of an admittedly good-looking young man about the place. And now, if he was going to be himself all of the time—

But he'll be gone soon, she told herself. By winter. I'm sure of it. Besides, he's made it quite clear that he considers me very much his inferior in birth, if our births were to be compared. So although he may begin to treat me with courtesy at last— she yawned, and closed her eyes— of course the courtesy—her thoughts began to ooze away from her— will be the kind...a Prince...gives....

She did not often dream, or at least, she did not often dream in ways that could be linked back to the real world. That was deliberate; the dreams of a Godmother had the potential to take on a life of their own, and one of the things that Bella had taught her was how to dream in pleasant nonsense. So when her dream began, and she found herself walking along a shore of purple sand by an amethyst sea beneath a silver sky with three azure moons in it, she felt quite relaxed and comfortable. So comfortable, that she did not in the least mind when she realized that Alexander was walking beside her.

They did not speak, but after a while, quite easily and naturally, her hand stretched out a little of its own accord, and encountered his reaching for hers. Their fingers entwined, and they walked on, climbing up the purple dunes, through sand as soft as powdered velvet. There they sat down together, on the top of the tallest dune, listening to the sea and watching as the moons set, one after another, like blue pearls on an invisible chain being pulled below the horizon. She leaned her head to the side, and quite naturally found that she was leaning it against his shoulder, and just as naturally his arm came around her and pulled her closer.

Then her heart started to pound, and her skin came alive, so that she was acutely aware of the brush of his fingers against it, the touch of the warm breeze on her face. She felt her stomach tighten, and when he bent his head down to hers and she lifted hers to meet his and their lips met, she felt as if lightning had jumped between them, or maybe the spark of life itself, though she could not have told if it went from her into him or the other way around.

He turned more towards her, and his free hand came to cup her breast; her nipples hardened and the soft teasing of his fingers sent jolts of pleasure through her that made the secret parts between her legs tighten and burn with anticipation. She moaned a little, and her lips parted insensibly beneath his kiss, and his tongue slipped between them, teasing and tickling her lips and teeth and playing with her tongue, until she—

— Damn it!

She came awake all at once, and in a fury. The benighted Tradition couldn't manipulate her when she was awake, so now it was trying to do so in her sleep!

"No." That was all she said into the darkness, but she put every bit of her will behind it.

Nothing answered her. There was neither an increase in pressure upon her, nor a decrease—nor was there any change in the amount of the magic she could sense swirling in potential around her.

Could it possibly be that what she had just dreamed had come, not out of what The Tradition wanted, but out of what she wanted? Or what her body wanted, anyway.

She lay there afire with wanting and not knowing, well, not really, not truly, what it was she wanted. Madame Klovis's servants hadn't bothered to hide themselves when they dallied, but her curiosity had never been enough to overcome her embarrassment and past a certain point, she'd always covered her eyes.

But she ached with frustration and need. And it took a very, very long time to get back to sleep again. And when she did, it was to toss the rest of the night as part of her tried to get back to that purple sand dune, and part of her utterly refused to go there, which left all of her so bleary-eyed when she woke at dawn that Rose took one look at her and ordered her to sleep in late for a change.