A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Volume 2

by Mercedes Lackey

  Aleksia smiled with a certain smug satisfaction.

  With that crisis averted, Aleksia continued to look into the Kingdoms for which she was responsible, following the flows of the power generated by The Tradition. Everywhere that there was a situation that corresponded to a tale, a myth or a legend, The Tradition accrued power to force it down that Traditional Path to The Traditional Ending. Sometimes that was just fine; Godmothers didn’t have to intervene. In fact, there was an Ella Cinders story waiting to be recreated in Eisenberg—wicked stepmother, nasty stepsisters, lovely young girl turned into a servant, all in the capitol of Konigsberg. The girl was the right age to be married to the Prince, the Prince had no particular sweethearts and the King and Queen were not at all averse to him wedding a commoner if his heart took him there. It just needed a little more time to percolate, as it were, and then all it would need was Aleksia’s timely appearance and just enough adversity thrown in their path to make the happily ever after all the more satisfying. She smiled to herself as she contemplated the poor girl scrubbing pots at the hearth. She should have been sad, but somehow she was able to take pleasure in small things. The Tradition was truly working hard on this one—if she had been any sweeter, any more self-sacrificing, any better-tempered, she would have been sickening.

  This, of course, was one of her rare ones.

  The list of her usual headaches, however, went much longer.

  There was a woman who was so much a shrew to her long-suffering husband that she was legendary to everyone around her. The Traditional force building around her was such that Aleksia judged it was time to let it take its course. But she made a mental note to keep an eye on the old man, lest her punishment overflow onto him.

  What would be best? There were a number of things in the area that she could put into the shrew’s way.

  The neighbors, she decided, finally. She wove another subtle spell and set that in motion—the idea that it would be a fine trick to play on the nag, to put her in a position where her sharp tongue dug herself a deeper and deeper hole until she found herself in real trouble. The only one with any sympathy for her then would be her long-suffering husband, who, strangely enough, still loved her, despite being mocked, ridiculed and berated without end. Well, there was no accounting for taste. He would save her or he would leave her; in either case, he would no longer be subject to her abuse.

  The Tyrant, however, was more troubling. With his punishment at least three years in the future, and with The Tradition moving now to keep him in his place, she considered that there ought to be something she could do to ease the situation of his people. At the moment, he was grinding them into poverty, and The Tradition wasn’t helping. Tyrants did not get good weather and bountiful crops. Tyrants got late Springs and early Winters, too much rain or not enough, and when their peasantry could not produce bountiful crops, Tyrants took it out on them, adding torture and murder to the hardship of semistarvation.

  This, of course, tended to produce Heroes and Champions, but it was dreadfully hard on the people themselves.

  Tapping one finger on her lips as she considered the image of the Tyrant himself, seated rigidly on his throne, Aleksia wondered what she could do to ease their lot. Interestingly, this man was no usurper; he had come to this throne legitimately.

  Well, after a fashion, anyway. The King had managed to die without an heir, and that was entirely due to the current Tyrant. Benevolent though the old king had been, he had also been weak. His nephew had had no difficulty whatsoever in persuading him to put off marriage, meanwhile ingratiating himself to the old man and all his advisors in order to be named Crown Prince over all the other claimants. A little judicious spending, a bribe here, the assurance of reward there, the creation of a small private army, and when the King died, the Crown Prince was virtually rushed onto the throne by the greedy and corrupt Court.

  Then, when the new King proved to be something other than what had been expected, it was too late. Because the new King had known very well that a man who takes one bribe will take many, and a man who seeks his own preferment over the good of his country can be counted on to turn his coat whenever anyone offers him something he wants.

  So…the problem before Aleksia was how to distract him. “Show me those upon whom he depends,” she ordered the mirror.

  There were the usual types. The Tyrant did not much care for fighting, but he was very smart about how he dealt with the need to go to battle. He had put a General in charge of his armies who lived for conquest and blood—but was not at all interested in the tedium of ruling.

  Aleksia frowned. The General was a simple sadist. He knew what he wanted—free rein to allow his men to run roughshod over the populace. He got it often enough, whenever the Tyrant saw the need for an object-lesson. No hope there; there was nothing that anyone could offer the General that he did not already have.

  The Tyrant’s advisors were all very shrewd as well as suspicious, shrewd enough to know that none of them stood a chance of deposing their Master alone, suspicious enough not to trust any of the others to help with a palace coup. That was a pity; it would have been the ideal solution.

  The Magician was content to enjoy the fruits of his Master’s success. Like the General, he had what he wanted: a luxurious life, the freedom to pursue whatever line of research in magic that he fancied, regardless of how blackly evil it was, and a steady supply of victims upon whom to experiment. Like the General, he had no interest at all in ruling a country, and his ambitions all centered on success in the Dark Arts.

  But then, as she let the viewpoint roam, the mirror showed her someone she had not expected.

  Ensconced in a tower chamber was a fellow in elaborate robes of black and purple. Surrounding him were all the trappings of a Wizard, although Aleksia knew he could not be anything of the sort, since there was not one jot of Traditional power about him, nor any other sort of magic so far as she could tell. This intrigued her enough that she issued orders not to be disturbed and had the Brownies bring her dinner in her rooms.

  Who are you, my little man? she asked him silently. The Tyrant’s Magician did not seem to consider him a threat nor a rival. She had never heard even a rumor of this fellow, who, from the crockery piled outside his door, seldom left his tower.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening watching him, and finally enough of what he did struck a chord with her that she realized she knew what he was.

  An Alchemist.

  But this was more than merely an Alchemist. He was clever enough not to call himself one, hence the Wizardly trappings, although the Magician visited him once, and it was obvious that although the Magician considered the Alchemist an inferior, he also respected the Alchemist’s abilities.

  Once again, the Tyrant had been clever enough to find someone who could be given everything that he wanted. Now, whether he was also clever enough not to waste his time in the search for the Philosopher’s Stone—which was a metaphysical concept anyway and did nothing to transmute base metals to gold—or whether he really did realize it was a metaphysical concept, he was not involving himself with crucibles and alembics and furnaces. She watched him, instead, making very useful things such as poisons and antidotes—cures for the unfortunate diseases that men who indulged themselves in certain vices were prone to—and watched with extreme interest as the Tyrant appeared for what must have been his daily dose of a concoction of at least thirty common poisons. No wonder he didn’t employ a taster! His Alchemist gave him immunity to anything but a truly exotic poison, and probably had the antidote handy for anything truly exotic. Exotic poisons tended to kill slowly, leaving plenty of time to administer an antidote. This was sheer brilliance.

  Once the Tyrant was gone again, the Alchemist turned to another pursuit entirely. Aleksia watched as he secured the door, bolting it from the inside, pulled a velvet pall off of some object and settled himself into a comfortable chair in front of it. He imbibed some sort of concoction of his own…and went int
o a trance. His head fell back so that Aleksia could see that he was staring into an enormous crystal ball.

  Now, as every Godmother knew, it was possible for perfectly ordinary people to have visions of the future, if they took the right sorts of potions. You had to be very disciplined—which this Alchemist clearly was—and you had to be good enough to know how to sort the hallucinations from the real visions. Usually these visions were not very accurate once you tried to look more than three months into the future, but for someone like the Tyrant, that would be enough.

  “Well!” Aleksia said aloud, staring into her mirror with probably the same expression that the Alchemist was wearing as he stared into his crystal ball.

  But it just so happened that anyone who did this sort of parlor trick could also be very easily deceived. And that gave Aleksia precisely the opportunity she was looking for.

  After all, the great crystal was a form of glass. She could make him see whatever she wanted him to see. In his drugged state, he would be very suggestible, and his powers of discrimination would be set aside. Besides, he would have no reason to suppose that anyone else would be sending him visions. Why should there be? There was no reason to think that anyone could, or would, interfere. No one knew about him but his Master and the Magician, and neither wanted him deceived.

  So it was that when he emerged from his drug-induced trance, it was to run straight to the Tyrant with the description of what he had seen—a conspiracy against the ruler, the meeting of the conspirators, all of whom were robed identically and masked. And just to make it all the more interesting, she had made the leader some sort of Magician, who had conjured up a demon that promised them success in their endeavor. The surroundings, as crafted by Aleksia’s imagination, were opulent, but apparently subterranean. When anyone spoke, it was with the cultured tones of the upper classes. And they made reference to the King In Waiting. It was quite the fantastic creation, but very believable, especially to someone like the Tyrant. The Tradition would be working against him in that way, making him suspicious and looking for conspiracies; the fact that he couldn’t find any would make him all the more certain that they existed.

  Now the Tyrant would be actively searching for this conspiracy, powered by a Magician. His search would concentrate on those of the upper classes. He would not be able to tell if these were his own nobles or those in exile, for she had given no clues at all as to the location. He would only know that whoever was involved had wealth, as well as occult power. He would assume that somewhere along the line he had missed a potential heir.

  This would drive him mad trying to ferret it out. And he would be so fixated on it he would leave his peasantry alone.

  Aleksia made a mental note to keep sending more false visions whenever she managed to think of some new variation.

  I should also make an attempt to put disturbing things in the palace from time to time. Perhaps an ornate dagger in the Tyrant’s bedpost, or a burned rug and the smell of brimstone in his dressing room. These things would take some arranging, but they would be worth the doing. Anything that kept him nervous and alarmed. Perhaps she could leave a hint that the apocryphal conspirators knew about his immunity to poison. Brownies could slip in anywhere, and slip out again undetected; alone of the Elven-kind, they had no difficulties with cold iron. They could easily leave daggers and burned places anywhere they chose, and one of them might find it amusing to slip some concoction into the Tyrant’s nightly draught to make him sick.

  And this would have the effect of making Valeri’s job so much easier when she and her band were ready and made the attempt to depose him. It was not wise to depend too much on The Tradition alone to take you where you wanted to go. It was always better to have so many hedges around what you wanted accomplished that The Traditional power flowed downhill in the channel you wanted like so much runoff water.

  Aleksia dismissed the image in her mirror and looked up with the realization that she had been bending over it for hours. Her shoulders and neck were stiff and sore, and her eyes felt dry. One of her Brownies was at her side as she straightened, appearing, as they often did, without needing to be summoned.

  “It is after midnight,” the little woman said, as Aleksia massaged her own shoulder carefully. Rosemary, that was her name. “Young Kay moped about the dining room, pushed food about his plate and retired to his suite when you did not put in an appearance. It seems he has decided to experiment with getting drunk tonight.” Rosemary grinned, with just a hint of malice. “He is going to have a head in the morning.”

  “Then one hopes he won’t repeat the experiment.” Aleksia smiled a little herself. If Kay was suffering from a hangover, he would not be a nuisance for some time tomorrow. “Rosemary, would you have any objections to other residents here? Not like Kay,” she amended. “Pleasant ones. And hopefully permanent ones. Peers of mine.”

  “None at all, Godmother,” the Brownie replied serenely. “The Palace can hold a small army, and if we need more help here, ‘tis easy come by.”

  “Ah, good.” That was a relief. There were times when Aleksia was not quite sure just what her privileges as a Godmother were, nor what they extended to. As a Princess of the Blood, she had taken such things as servants and where one put guests for granted. As a Godmother, who tended to both the highest and the lowest, she had learned that it was never wise to take anything for granted.

  In fact, her first apprenticeship year had been very enlightening. She would not have considered herself spoiled—but her eyes had certainly been opened to just how much work went on behind the rooms frequented by the noble and wealthy. She had learned that magic was not always the answer to a problem. She knew now, for instance, that the Palace was so remote that her Brownies changed monthly. At first, she had thought there was a never-ending stream of them, but now she knew that the little folk, who were highly social, aside from her very particular three—Tuft, Pieter and her special maid, Moth—most simply found remaining for any length of time at the Palace of Ever-Winter too much of a hardship. Aleksia did her best to learn their names in the month or so they were with her, but if she forgot one, she merely apologized, since the Brownies themselves didn’t take it amiss.

  Of course, one benefit of this was that her menu, which could have gotten very tedious with the same cook, was instead changed with the tastes and training of the Brownie in charge. This month, there were a lot of lightly spiced fish dishes, an excellent change from the cook of the previous month, who favored stews and complicated soups and meat dishes with fancy sauces. And that had been a change from the month before that, when the menu had boasted very little meat, and many varied noodle and vegetable concoctions, some of which had been so highly spiced her eyes had watered.

  “Well, Godmother Aleksia, I trust you are hungry? You have certainly been working hard enough to warrant something before you sleep.” Rosemary had the expectant look of one who is prepared to honor any request, from a single teacake to an entire baked horse.

  “Just some herb tea and one of those cheese biscuits,” Aleksia replied. “If there are any left.” Not that she would be denied; even if there hadn’t been any, she had the feeling the Brownies would produce a batch just to satisfy her. “I still need to record all this in my Occurrence Book.”

  Without being asked, Rosemary brought the latest volume of the Book. Aleksia—as had her predecessor Veroushka—recorded all her projects, whether they succeeded or failed, as well as work in progress. There were eleven other volumes so far for Aleksia; the work of the previous Godmother had filled more than seventy. Aleksia found them very useful, especially in the first year or so of her tenure as the sole Godmother here. Whenever she had been at a loss for what to do in a given situation, even if she had not found an exact answer in those books, she had at least gotten some direction.

  Sometimes, she actually sat down with a pen and ink and wrote it all out by hand, especially when the situation was vexing or puzzling. But tonight, she simply dictated what she wanted to
say, and watched as the words formed of themselves on the page.

  More magic, this of her own making. Each book was enchanted to respond to her voice when she began it; when she had filled it, she ended the enchantment. In part, that was so she was never tempted to go back and revise. A few projects had ended very badly indeed, and she felt the need of honesty there, for the sake of the Godmothers who would come after her, as well as her own sake. Living in isolation, answering to no one but herself, self-deception was an easy trap to fall into.

  When she was done, she left the book on the desk and went to her bedroom. As she had expected, a hot pot of tea and a freshly split and buttered cheese biscuit waited for her. The aroma was both heady and comforting at the same time. Her silken nightrobe was laid out on the bed—if she wanted to be dressed, she could, of course, ring for someone, but as often as not, she simply disrobed herself. It wasn’t as if most of the gowns of the Ice Fairy were complicated or difficult to get into or out of. Not like the corseted, laced, and ruffled court gowns of her birthplace. It took two servants to get a girl into the simplest of those, and three to get her out again. Sometimes Aleksia wondered how anyone managed to have children; by the time one was ready for bed, one was already exhausted.

  But the gowns of the Ice Fairy were intended to mimic the sweeping, snow-covered slopes of her mountain; for the most part they were loose, flowing and draped, with trains and sleeves that trailed behind her on the floor, and generally a diadem of quartz crystals. Depending on where she was going, the gowns were either of velvet lined with ermine, or of Sammite with embroidery of tiny crystal beads. White, of course. Except when she was in disguise, she never wore colors.

  Tonight, though, she didn’t immediately go to her fireside chair, which was a lovely warm pouf of a thing, rather like a soft nest. Nor did she go to her collection of cushions on the other side of the fireplace. Instead, she went to the window and swept back the gold-and-scarlet curtains to look out at the view.