Chapter 19

"Blessed Saints!" coughed Alexander, reaching for the second cup Elena handed him. "I'm not sure that is worth being able to understand animals!"

"It's a Traditional power of Champions," Rose pointed out, as he drank down the entire hot cup of tea to wash away the taste of dragon's blood. It had taken Elena the better part of a month to find a dragon to trade a bit of blood for one of the jewel-studded trinkets out of the hunting-lodge. A dragon could always find food—but Elven-made treasure for its hoard was worth shedding a little blood over, apparently.

"Bosh! I'm sure you're only getting revenge on me for eating that pie you were saving,"

Alexander coughed, holding out his mug for a refill. "But if you will leave a pie in the middle of the kitchen table and then announce that dinner has been put back an hour because the goose was bigger than you thought, what's a man to do?"

Robin only smiled, and handed over a plate full of sausages and eggs to further take away the taste.

"There is only one thing that I am truly sorry for," Alexander said, after polishing off his first helping. "I've deprived you of Unicorns."

Elena burst into peals of laughter, Lily giggled, Hob and Robin chortled, and even Rose unbent enough to chuckle a little.

"Don't be," Elena told him, as he glanced from one to another of them, looking utterly bewildered. "It's a little like being deprived of fawning, brainless lapdogs or a surfeit of Turkish Delight. One is sweet, two are amusing, but after you've been inundated by them a while, you start to think uncharitably of deep ponds and burlap bags."

"And no matter how many beds of lilies and roses you put out for them, they will eat my new peas," Lily added, in such an aggrieved tone of voice that they all laughed again.

Elena was definitely of two minds about her new situation. On the one hand, she had never been so contented. Not that she and Alexander were of one accord on all matters; that would have been ridiculous, and besides, she would have immediately suspected that The Tradition was about to unleash something awful on the two of them. They were lovers, they were still friends, life was full of wonderful things. Rose was still clearly harboring some reservations, but the other three were as delighted with the new state of things as Elena herself was. Even Randolf approved. Alexander had, overnight, gotten the trick of projecting magical power into his weapons, and now needed only to perfect that skill and hone his fighting abilities to be ready for whatever challenge was put in his path as a Champion.

But on the other hand—

—she kept waiting for the Consequences of her action to occur. No Godmother, so far as she had been able to tell, in all of the Chronicles, had ever broken The Tradition as thoroughly as she had when it came to this. Oh, there had been Champions in the households of Godmothers before this, but they had all been true Fairy Godmothers, of the Great Fae, and so had their Champions been. The Chronicles were very sketchy concerning those Godmothers, which was hardly surprising, since the Fae did not particularly care to be written about. Nowhere had she found any reference to a Godmother with a lover...much less a princely lover.

It did seem terribly unfair, though. Wizards got to take lovers, so why not Godmothers?

"Madame Bella got along perfectly well without Unicorns," Robin said, gesturing emphatically with his fork. "There are plenty of other sources of magic, and Elena is very careful about how she uses the power she has."

"She's that saving, indeed she is," said Rose, bestowing an unusually benevolent gaze on Elena. "She never wasted any bit of magic on indulgences or on show. Usually by this time, a young Godmother's been caught a bit short and had to improvise, but our Madame Elena never has."

"Touch wood," Elena said, automatically.

"Well, if you're sure you don't mind—" Alexander said after a moment of silence. "But I'd thought you were really fond of them."

"I'm fond of toffee pudding, but that doesn't mean I want to eat it for every meal," she pointed out logically.

"Yes, but if you couldn't ever have it again—" he persisted.

"Oh, it isn't that she'll never have Unicorns about," Rose told him. "They'll come if she calls on them magically, or if the Great Fae sends them. She just won't be able to touch them."

He opened his mouth to say something, but no one would ever learn what it was, because at that moment, they all heard the unmistakable sound of something galloping towards the cottage, up the hard-frozen road. And there were missteps in the sound that told them all that whatever was coming was exhausted and on its last legs.

But most of all, there was the unmistakable, yet intangible, sensation of a great "weight" falling on them, as the looming wave of magic and Tradition collapsed upon them.

It completely staggered Elena.

Hob reacted first, running to the kitchen door, wrenching it open, and hurling himself out into the frozen yard. Alexander was right behind him. As Elena burst from the door behind them, the rider tumbled off into Alexander's arms. Hob had seized the horse's bridle and was doing—something. Something magical; Elena saw the blue-green motes of magic power that has been separated from the mass of undifferentiated magic and given a purpose swirling around the beast. They were no thicker than dust in a sunbeam, but whatever Hob was doing gave the horse enough strength to stumble towards the stable. The magic motes sank into the beast rapidly, as Hob's spell took effect.

She clasped her arms around herself, shivering, as she hurried to Alexander's side. The cold hammered at her, but she ignored it as best she could, for the man Alexander was supporting was trying to gasp out something.

"....Prince Julian captive," he croaked hoarsely. "The Princess locked in the East Tower.

Trolls everywhere...." and his eyes rolled up in his head as he collapsed. Without a word, Alexander hefted the man over his shoulders and hauled him bodily into the kitchen, where Rose and Lily took the stranger from him. He turned on his heel without a word, his face grim and pale, and would have run straight out again had Elena not caught him by the shoulders and forced him to stop.

"What happened?" she asked, urgently. "What happened to your brother?"

He stared at her wildly. "Julian—blessed Saints, Elena, Julian! Some wicked magician has taken Fleurberg! King Stancia is dead, Princess Kylia is imprisoned, and my brother—my brother— Julian!"

She shook his shoulders. "Alexander! Calm down! Make sense! What happened? You have to tell me so I can help you!"

It took a few minutes, and they had to go back into the cottage where Rose and Lily had revived the messenger, but eventually they learned the truth.

A stranger had come striding into King Stancia's Great Hall when the entire court was at dinner. He had not come alone; he had been accompanied by an escort of heavily, baroquely armored men and monsters (the messenger called them "trolls," but they didn't correspond to any description of a troll that Elena knew). He had not gotten past the guards on the walls, nor the walls themselves; he had simply appeared in the grounds, his creatures had swarmed the few guards that they encountered within the Palace to clear his path to the Great Hall.

He had announced—nothing. No challenge, no gloating, not a word. He had simply unleashed his escort and his magics. The messenger had been one of the few able to flee the room; he hadn't seen much, but what he had seen was terrible.

He was no knight, only a young squire, and fortunately, he was wise enough to know what he could not do. He had hidden himself and waited.

Within the hour, most of Stancia's court had been slaughtered, Stancia was dead, Julian had been thrown into the dungeons, and Kylia imprisoned in her own tower.

The only reason that Julian himself was not dead was that he had come in late to dinner, had joined with Stancia's guards in trying to repel the invader, and had been thrown, unconscious and injured, into the dungeon with the rest of the survivors. The messenger had crept out of hiding to one of the dungeon windows, where Julian had told him what had happened himself. He probably had not been recognized for who he was, but that could not last for long.

"Get help!" Julian had urged. "Go to the Glass Mountain, and if you cannot find the Sorcerer, go to my brother!"

The messenger had stolen a horse and fled to the Sorcerer who had created the Glass Mountain, only to discover that he, too, was dead. The messenger had returned to discover that the city had been sealed off, and Stancia's army was milling about, outside the walls, leaderless.

The messenger had gotten another horse, having ridden the first to foundering.

"Go to my brother—" Julian had probably meant his brother Octavian—or had he?

Alexander was the one that had always been kindest to him; Alexander was the one who had been trained at the Academy in warfare. Here was the thing about The Tradition; it often found ways of making something happen that were completely without logic.

So if Julian had been thinking about Alexander when he had said, "Go to my brother," then The Tradition putting that together with the fact that Alexander was now a Champion, very likely arranged the rest.

How had he gotten here? How had he found his way to this remote place? The messenger could not remember. Elena had a guess, though she could not be sure. The Sorcerer might have left a spell, like the "All Forests Are One" spell, that survived his own demise. He might have set something of the sort in the hope that he could escape, only to die before he could reach safety.

Certainly the Sorcerer knew that Prince Julian's brother was here, and this would be the first place to seek help for King Stan-cia....

Perhaps that had been the last spell he had cast with his dying breath—to bring whatever messenger sent for help by Stancia directly here.

Or perhaps, given a very well-worn Traditional path of sending to a Champion for aid, The Tradition itself had bent distance and magic and made it all happen. Such a thing was not unknown.

That didn't matter now, and it was neither the time nor the place to discuss such things. The messenger was of no more use, for he was unconscious now and Rose was not sanguine about his being in any shape to respond any time soon. And time was most definitely of the essence. If ever the Evil Mage could be dislodged, it had to be now. Now, before he discovered that he already had Prince Julian in his grasp, before he replenished all of the magical energy he had used in taking the Palace, and before he cemented his hold on the Kingdom of Fleurberg.

"You can't just—" Elena began.

But Alexander interrupted her. "I know," he replied, his voice hard, and his expression rigid.

"I studied military strategy. I cannot merely go haring off wildly; Champion or no Champion, if I charge straight at that Evil Mage, I have no chance at all."

Elena sighed with relief, even while she throttled down a weight of guilt that felt as heavy as the weight of magic that had washed over them all. "We need a three-pronged plan," she said, instantly. "First, I'll send a message to Arachnia and every other Godmother, Wizard, and Sorcerer I know—yes, and my friend the giant, and that dragon I traded for his blood, and even the Unicorn herd. Second, I will send a message to your father; if ever there was an act that would redeem him in Julian's eyes, it would be by sending an army to his rescue. And lastly—

now, while two people actually have a chance to accomplish something, we will go."

"Go?" he asked, baffled. "It would take days to get there."

"Less than that. First, I need to contact Arachnia—and someone else. More than anything else, we need something that can fly."

No more than two hours later, that something arrived.

Elena had contacted every magician that she could, sending out every one of the white ravens with messages that would not arrive until, at the best, nightfall. She had sent frantic messages via her own chronicles as well, but had no guarantee that anyone would read the things any time soon. More than ever, she cursed the fact that there was no good , fast way of sending messages from magician to magician. The best one could manage was the better part of a day, and often it was far longer than that.

But by noon, she had the transportation she needed.

It came galloping down out of the sky, and drew attention to itself by drumming excitedly on the rooftop before coming to land in the courtyard.

At the sound of hooves on the roof, Alexander had started up, eyes flashing wildly, but Elena had known exactly what it was and ran out again into the stable-yard, where her help was waiting for her. "Sergei!" she cried with joy, and flung her arms around the neck of the Little Humpbacked Horse.

"This is dreadful, Godmother," the horse said, somberly, in her ear. "The Sorcerer who has taken Fleurberg is one out of my countries. I do not know what he is doing here, invading your Traditions."

Elena did not say what she was thinking, but she had been fighting terrible and despair guilt from the moment that she had heard of this disaster, and Sergei's words only seemed to confirm her worst fears. That this was happening because of her. She had broken The Tradition by taking a lover, and now a Black Mage from another set of Traditional paths had taken advantage of the weakness.

She did not say it, not because she did not want to acknowledge her own guilt, but because doing so would serve no purpose, would weaken Alexander's spirit and resolve, and would only waste time, time that was already precious.

"What can we expect, Sergei?" she asked, pulling away from him and stifling the wish to simply hug his neck and wail.

"I think it is a Katschei," said Sergei in reply, while Alexander stared at them both bemusedly.

"Which will mean that his heart is not in his body, so you can only kill him by finding his heart. He is in a new land, so he probably has not yet done anything other than encase it in a diamond and place it somewhere he considers safe, which is usually somewhere near him. I would guess that it is in the throne room, under the throne. If one of you can penetrate the throne room and find the heart and return it to where it belongs, you can kill him. If you can break the diamond and smash the heart, you can kill him. Of course," he added thoughtfully, "you'll have to get past his army of creatures first."

"I'll—" Alexander began, then stopped at the look on Elena's face. "Tell me," he demanded instead.

"Whoever defeats the Katschei and rescues the Princess can't be you," she said, slowly,

"because The Tradition is very strong in Fleurberg, and Princess Kylia is going to fall in love with the man who rescues her."

Alexander looked at her for a moment, then licked his lips. "Then what use am I?" But before she could answer, his face lit up. "Wait! If I gather the remains of the army and attack the city and the Palace, the Evil Mage will be distracted!"

"And I can go in and try and find his heart," said Elena. "But I will need more than a distraction, and someone needs to occupy the Mage in a way that will keep all of his attention elsewhere." She took a deep breath, and wondered if she could keep her face from showing her pain. "Champion—"

He straightened, and his entire demeanor changed. He seemed taller, and larger somehow.

"Champion," she said, knowing that this was the right thing, the only right thing for him as well as for Fleurberg, but feeling her heart whimpering in pain all the same. "Champion, you must challenge this Evil Mage yourself."

"Ah." He took it as she had expected him to; willingly, even eagerly. "And you, meanwhile, will rescue Kylia, free Julian, and find the heart."

"Probably not quite in that order, but I think that I have a plan to do that," she agreed. "Sergei can take both of us—"

"Sergei can take you, Godmother," the little horse interrupted. "Mother and I suspected you were going to do something like this, and I brought one of my brothers."

He tossed his head up and whinnied shrilly. He was answered by a deeper whinny from up above; there was a clatter of hooves on the roof again, and a second horse leaped down onto the yard, landing as lightly as a swan on the water.

It was a coal-black stallion, as handsome as the humpback horse was homely. His mane and tail swept the ground, rippling like waterfalls of silk, and his coat gleamed like the finest satin, and he was both incredibly graceful and massively muscled. His beautifully formed head turned towards Alexander, and the Prince stepped forward, entranced. "Don't expect the kind of intelligence and cleverness that I have out of him, but he's loyal as a hound, brave as a lion, strong as a bull, and he can fly, just as I can. Mother says that every Champion needs a proper mount," said Sergei, eyes glinting with satisfaction. "So from this moment on, Nightsong is yours."

From somewhere, Hob came up with what must have been armor meant for a young Elven princeling for Elena. It fit well enough, although her breasts were squashed beneath the breastplate. Still, it was no worse than what the flattening corsets favored in Arachnia's Kingdom of Bretagne did to a woman's breasts, and Elena was not going to complain if it kept her alive—and further, that it made her look like a young man, and kept her from being recognized as a Godmother. They knew from the messenger's story where the window into the dungeon was that he had spoken to Julian through. The Princess's tower had a balcony that Sergei could land on. So there was just one more thing that needed to be arranged.

It would take a lot of magic. She hoped that there was enough still here that it would not seriously deplete her own resources.

Hob's magical game bag could actually hold just about anything put into it. The Katschei's creatures were probably things that could only be harmed by magical weapons; Sergei was not sure on that point, but he agreed that it was likely. So the House-Elves and Alexander stripped every room in the cottage and lodge of anything that was remotely weaponlike, right down to the knives and cleavers in the kitchen; Elena enchanted every one of them with just a touch of magic, enough that they could actually hit a magical creature. Then they were stuffed into the game bag.

When she was done, she had exhausted all of the ambient power that had dropped down around them when The Tradition closed its jaws on them, and every bit of power that the Brownies could spare. She hoped that what she had left was going to be enough, but she knew that she was going to have to be very, very clever with every bit of power left to her.

By sunset, they were as ready as they were ever going to be. Alexander was dancing with impatience, wanting to be off; Elena felt as if her heart was so heavy that Sergei would never be able to fly under the weight of it.

But they had no choice, neither of them. With a last, longing look at the cottage, Elena clambered into Sergei's saddle—ungracefully, for she still had never learned to ride—as Alexander vaulted lightly into his seat on Nightsong's back and accepted his lance from Hob. He looked every inch the Champion, as bold and brave as a legend, and eager to be off. She closed the visor on her helm; his was already down, and she was glad of it, for it would have been much worse if she had been able to see his face with that weight of guilt on her. It was bad enough, knowing that, with the weight of Tradition along with his own eagerness, Alexander's mind, heart, and soul that of a Champion, and if he thought of anything else, it was fleetingly.

"Ready?" he asked, his voice echoing hollowly out of the depths of the helm.

She nodded. Sergei gathered himself beneath her; she clung to the pommel of the saddle with both hands, and the two sons of the East Wind rose on their hind feet and leaped into the blood-red sky.

It was near midnight when they landed amid the dispirited mob that was what was left of Stancia's army. Alexander had made a proper show of it, too, for had anyone been alert or brave enough, it all might have ended then and there. But calling down from above, "Loyal sons of Fleurberg, we have come to aid you!" and having Elena illuminate him as he landed, meant he had no chance of being mistaken for some warrior of the Katchei's.

Now he stood on a rock, ringed by torches, as the tired old soldiers surrounded him, looking at him with expressions in which fear warred with hope. So far Alexander had said nothing to them, other than to send out word to gather together, and Elena had kept her mouth shut. This was not a Godmother's business; it was the business of a Champion. Here it was Alexander who was the master of the moment.

Finally, when no more men were coming in from the darkness, Alexander drew himself to his full height. "Hear me, men of King Julian!" The voice that rang through the night sounded like Alexander's ordinary speaking voice, but—stronger, deeper, and certainly a great deal louder.

Below him, the men started and gasped as Alexander's words told them what they had feared—that Stancia was dead. Alexander would not have named Julian King, otherwise.

"Hear me, men of King Julian," Alexander repeated. "Your old King is no more. A foul usurper has attempted to seize the throne. King Stancia fought nobly and died as a warrior, his sword in his hand—"

Now that was a complete fabrication, as Elena well knew, but it was the sort of thing that a soldier wanted to hear. No soldier wants to be told that his King was cut down before he could rise from his dinner, that he was slain as he tried to push away from the table by magic against which he had no defense. They wanted to hear that their beloved monarch was a fighter to the end, someone they could emulate, and whose memory they could honor.

"—but Julian lives, and your duty is now to him! Hear me, warriors! I am Alexander, brother of your King, and have come to help you. You must hold until our allies arrive—you must fight to enter the Palace and destroy the evil usurper—"

"How?" bleated one grizzled old man, demandingly, interrupting Alexander's stirring speech.

"How, when spears and arrows just bounce off 'em, and swords and spears won't bite?"

But Alexander simply gave the man a pitying look. "With the weapons my squire will give you," Alexander countered, not missing a beat. "Weapons enchanted by the hand of the Fairy Godmother Elena, to strike to the heart of these monsters and give you strength beyond your own!"

That's a bit much! she thought, though she was secretly pleased at being accorded such great power by Alexander. But— well, it isn't going to hurt, I suppose, to have them think that they're being given magical strength even if they aren't. If they think they are, who knows? It might actually happen. Taking that for her cue, Elena opened the game bag and began passing out whatever came to hand. There was a moment of reluctance, but then she was engulfed by men who were desperate to have something, anything that would serve them against these creatures that some were already calling "demons" rather than "trolls." They were neither, but that didn't matter, either.

There were still weapons in the bag when the last of Stancia's men, the survivors of what had been a rather pathetic little army in the first place, had each claimed a weapon. Alexander began his rallying speech at that point, and Elena stared up at the castle.

It was not a big castle, and fortunately, it was not surrounded by a moat. But the walls were stout and there were an awful lot of torches and forms moving up there.

"—a frontal assault, to occupy him and keep him from spreading out to conquer the city and the Kingdom," Alexander was saying, when she turned her attention back to him. "Do not spend yourselves needlessly; it is a holding action that we need. Help is coming from Kohlstania! My father would never permit his son to languish a prisoner! More help is coming, in the form of magical allies, brought to our aid by the Godmothers themselves!"

Your father would never permit an evil magician to set up shop in the neighboring Kingdom, you mean! she thought, with some irony. This was, in fact, King Henrick's worst nightmare come to pass, the very thing he had hoped to prevent by sending all three of his sons to the Glass Mountain. And I only hope that the other Godmothers do respond....

"And what are you doing, while we're doing this?" asked that same troublemaker, dubiously.

Alexander drew himself up, and—yes, there was no doubt of it. His armor began glowing as he took on the full aspect of a Champion. "I," he said, with great dignity, "will be fighting the Evil Mage in challenge combat. Alone."

"All right," Alexander said urgently to her, as the little army organized itself around its few surviving officers, and prepared to make that frontal assault on the gate. "Time for you to go.

Find Julian, get him out, and send him around to the front as soon as you hear the fighting start.

Then go to the aid of the Princess when you hear the trumpet sound for my challenge."

She nodded, a great lump arising in her throat, rendering her speechless. He was going through with this, and unless she could find the Evil Magician's heart—he could be killed.

"And Elena—" he paused, and his voice lost that quality of "Champion" so that it sounded like nothing more than "Alexander" "—I want to know. I have to know."

"What?" she asked, thickly, expecting some dreadful question about her own guilt in this mess. But she would answer him truthfully if he asked. She owed him nothing less than the truth.

"Will you consent to marry me?"

She felt as if something had slapped her across the helm so that her head was ringing. She heard her own voice say, joyfully, "Yes!" before her head had formulated an answer.

"Good. That's all I needed to know." He grinned at her, and closed his helm down over his face. Before she could say anything else, he had lifted her into Sergei's saddle, and the little horse was off like a shot.

She sawed at Sergei's reins, trying to bring him back around, but the little horse was having none of it. "Godmother, we have a job to do," Sergei said, acidly, the bit clamped between his teeth. "Are you going to put all of it to naught?"

She let go the reins, but her heart wanted to be back there, with him, demanding to know just what he had intended with that question—

Except, of course, he was not actually going to be there; by now he was at the forefront of the army, on Nightsong, making himself visible as the attack began, before he and Nightsong flew over the gate and into the forecourt to challenge the Sorcerer. The Evil One would have to answer; The Tradition would force him into it. Never had Elena ever heard of a Challenge going unanswered.

Sergei's night vision was better than hers was; he spotted the dungeon window in the shadows and plunged down towards it like an owl on a mouse. Stancia had been a good king, as had all of his ancestors; his dungeons might be stout, but they were not lightless nor airless. They had heavily barred windows in their walls that were just about at ground level on the outside—oh, twenty feet above the floor on the inside, of course, but still, windows. It would take magic and cunning to use them for an escape, but magic and cunning Elena had, she hoped, in abundance.

At just that moment, the attack on the front gate began.

There was a roar, and the sound of weapons and a battering-ram hitting the front gate.

Virtually every torch on the walls skittered in that direction, and there was more than enough noise to cover anything that Elena was about to do.

Elena slid from Sergei's back, and ran from dungeon window to window, whispering urgently, until she found the one letting into the great room where Stancia's guards, remaining nobles, and Julian were imprisoned. They were, thank heavens, sensible; they did not shout at her whisper, and in fact, she was able to talk to Julian himself.

"Who are you?" he called up.

"The old woman in the forest," she whispered back. "I gave you the gift to speak with animals; I advised you not to be so generous in the matter of your food, sir, if you'll recall!"

"Only that woman knew this," he replied, sounding out of breath. "I believe you, lady! Have you come to succor us?"

"I have. Are you hurt?"

"A bad slash to my shield-arm, but I am alive, and afire to get out," came the whisper up out of the darkness. That was all she needed to know.

Time for a little more magic.

"Give me but a moment, Majesty, and you will be leading your men again!"

She hitched Sergei to the bars of the grate, took out her wand, and ran a trickle of magic along the perimeter, chanting under her breath, giving the magic form and purpose. "Time erodes all that is made. Weakens iron and crumbles stone. Undermines all that is laid.

Time is lord and time alone. " This spell should have the effect of accelerating the hand of time there, and weakening both the bolts and the cement. "Pull!" she whispered to the little horse, who threw himself against the ropes.

Nothing. She ran another trickle around, repeating her incantation. Sergei pulled again, and this time the entire grate came free with a groan—

It would have landed with a clatter, but she caught it before it fell, and lowered it to the ground. She stole a quick glance up at the walls, but so no sign of movement. No one had seen them yet. Perhaps, with luck, there was no one there to watch.

She put her wand away, took the coil of knotted rope from Sergei's saddle, and tied it to the grate that had just been pulled free. She tossed it down through the empty window-frame.

"Climb up!" she cried, and the rope tightened at once. With the little horse bracing against the weight of the men clambering up the rope, the first two, least-injured, came popping out of the window. These two first pulled up anyone who was too injured to climb unaided—Julian was the first—or added their weight and strength to Sergei's. When all of them were out, she cut Sergei free and distributed her remaining magical weapons.

She didn't have to tell them what to do, for the noise of the fighting drew them as soon as they got weapons in their hands. She caught at Julian before he could lead them into the fray.

"Your brother Alexander has rallied the army—" she began.

Julian groaned. "Those poor old men? I—"

"Never mind that; they're just a distraction, but they will still fight better with their King beside them," she interrupted. "More help is on the way, from Kohlstania and other places. If a giant appears, don't attack him, he's on your side, and there may be other beasts coming who will tell you they come from me. They may get here before dawn, in fact. Princess Kylia—"

Now Julian looked about wildly. "Kylia? She didn't escape? I—"

"Majesty!" She gave him a hard shake. "Leave that to me, I'll send her to you, I swear! But I can't get to her if you don't keep up the distraction of the attack, and—" She shook her head, wondering how to tell him of everything planned without confusing it more, when he suddenly calmed, and gathered himself together.

"Never mind," he said. "Alex is in command; he went to the Academy. Whatever he planned will be the best that can be done."

She slapped him on the back; he staggered a little, for she had forgotten her armor. "Can you fight?"

"Maybe not, but I make a damned good figurehead," he replied, with a grim smile. "Good luck, lady. Send my wife safe to me."

"Good luck, Majesty." She scrambled onto Sergei's back, as the King led his men towards the thick of the fighting. In a moment, the darkness had swallowed them; a moment later, she and Sergei were in the air.

She was supposed to wait until Alexander made his single-combat challenge, but she felt as if she was better off not waiting. For one thing, the longer the attack went on, the more likely it was that extra guards would be sent to watch the Princess. For another—

For another, she wanted to get her hands on that evil magician's heart. Alexander's life would depend on it.

There were no safeguards— none—on the Princess's tower. There probably had been something winged up there to keep watch, but all the noise and the fighting must have been irresistible to them. That was one of the odd things about most magical creatures; like Nightsong, like the unicorns, the vast majority of them were not all that bright. It almost seemed as if a creature born of magic could have magical abilities and be beautiful, or strong, or intelligent—but only two of the four. Sergei and his brother were excellent examples of that. That was the reason why the wise magician did not entrust the safekeeping of anything he was concerned about to a magical creature, unless it was an extraordinary one.

Elena and Sergei landed on the balcony without incident; had Sergei been the size of his brother Nightsong, they couldn't have done it, but the balcony was just large enough for something pony-sized. She slid off, and pushed open the balcony door.

Clang!

She staggered back, reeling, from the blow to her head. Which fortunately, had been mostly absorbed by her helm but still— her ears were ringing and for a moment she had seen stars!

"Hey!" she shouted indignantly, fending off the angry, poker wielding young woman who advanced on her. "What do you think you're at, wench? Julian sent me! I'm here to rescue you!"

"What?" the poker dropped from the young woman's hands and clattered to the stone floor as she stared at Elena in shock. "You—"

Once again, Elena felt the weight of The Tradition collapsing around her and even as she seized on the opportunity to replenish her magical stores, she was pulling off her helm. The Tradition had its own path for those who rescued ladies in Durance Vile. And Princess—now Queen—Kylia had spread her arms wide to embrace her "rescuer," automatically, impelled by The Tradition. And in a moment, Kylia was going to find herself a different sort of prisoner, manipulated and pushed into falling in love—or at least, into something that felt just like love.

And she might, possibly, recall that once she had felt exactly the same thing for her husband, but at that point, it would already be too late.

"Yes," Elena said, shaking her hair loose, firing the words out as quickly as she could to warp The Tradition back to the path she wanted. "I'm Godmother Elena. Your husband, Julian, sent me—he's leading a frontal assault on the gate as a distraction in order to set you free to join him."

Kylia stopped dead in her tracks, as stunned for the moment as Elena would have been if that poker had connected with her skull instead of her helm.

"Oh," she said, in a small, uncertain voice. "A woman?"

"Julian sent me," Elena said firmly. "I am a Fairy Godmother, come at his call for aid. He's single-handedly leading an heroic assault on the front gate to act as a distraction so you can escape."

This was, of course, a lie. That didn't matter. What mattered was to deflect The Tradition from the course it was on with certain key words. It wasn't quite a spell, as such, but it had all the force of a spell. Kylia—and through her, The Tradition—heard

"Julian—single-handedly, heroic—so you can escape." The force impelling Kylia into falling in love with her rescuer (which had been the source of no end of tragedy in the past) was deflected by the clear impropriety of Kylia falling in love with a woman, and by the apparent sacrifice that Julian was making of himself. Given those key words, she was impelled right back into the love of her husband.

This was the problem with Tradition-created "love." It was manufactured. In time it would solidify into the real thing, far more often than not, but in the first year or two of marriage, the bond was fragile, easily broken, and easily reformed onto another object of affection.

The Tradition created tragedy as well as happy endings; The Tradition did not care if a story ended happily or in sorrow, so long as the tale was powerful enough. For every Sleeping Princess, there was a Fair Rosalinda. For every Mark and Yseult, the Tradition was perfectly prepared to create a Trystan....

Not in my Kingdoms.

"Julian," Kylia breathed, "he's out there, you say?"

"He is, and waiting for you." Elena took the opportunity to shove her out the door of the balcony before she had a chance to object. And before she had a chance to react to the presence of a horse on the balcony, Elena had lifted her into Sergei's saddle. Just in case, she tied off the poor child's belt to the saddle. Kylia grabbed the pommel reflexively.

"Off!" she shouted, darting back inside. "Good luck!" Sergei shouted back, and leaped from the balcony with Kylia suddenly coming to her senses and shrieking in fear at finding herself several hundred feet above the ground and plummeting towards it like a stone.

But that was not Elena's problem; that was Sergei's.

With luck, if any of the winged things were attracted back to their guard-post by Kylia's shrieks, Sergei would already be on the ground. By that time, Kylia would be silent (or even fainted, poor thing), and they would find the balcony door open and the balcony vacant and assume that, rather than become the bride of their master, she had flung herself from the tower.

And, being no fools, if not very bright—and, as were the minions of most evil creatures, believing firmly in the principle of looking out for themselves first—if they were not magically bound, they would swiftly bugger off before their master found out what had happened, rather than go looking for a body.

She dashed for the door to the room; if winged guardians did come back she wanted to be sure that she herself was not here. The door to this level wasn't locked, and she darted into the staircase, closing and locking the door behind her, creating one more reason to believe that Kylia had plunged to her death.

It occurred to her, as she began working her way down through the levels of the tower, that Kylia might not be quite the milk-and-honey princess that Elena had thought her. She had, after all, armed herself with that poker, yes, and she had been perfectly ready to attack anything coming in the balcony door with it! Well, good; good for her. That boded well for Julian, too....

Get your mind back on what you're doing, she scolded herself. The most difficult task is yet to come. And she worked her way down through the empty tower levels until, at last, she found a door that was locked.

She paused, her ear pressed to the keyhole, listening with all of her attention. Was there a guard out there? Was there some other sort of creature? She couldn't hear anything, nor could she sense any sort of magic. All she could hear were the distant echoes of the fighting. Either Alexander had not yet challenged the Sorcerer, or he had, but the fighting at the gate was continuing anyway.

That might change at any moment. It was time to take yet another chance, and hope that luck was with them all.