The shadows and the chill passed from the room with them.
Elena managed to drag her eyes away from them long enough to look at her mentor.
Madame Bella was watching with every evidence of satisfaction, and when the pair had gone out the door into the garden, she smiled. "That went well," she said, and winked at Elena. "I knew I could count on Miranda."
The celebration went on — presumably, without either Madame Arachnia — that had to be an assumed name! — or the young man. There was entertainment; dancers, musicians, mountebanks. Then, at last, came the moment to present Christening Gifts. And to Elena's horror, Madame Bella was the first of the magicians to grant hers —
"I grant her the gift of a caring heart," said Madame, and bowed over the cradle. A swirl of lilac mist rose about her, and settled over the baby; Madame smiled and retired, to make way for the Sorceress in blue and white.
"What are you doing?" Elena hissed frantically, as Madame resumed her place beside her Apprentice. "That creature is still outside! Why didn't you go hide or something, so that when she comes in and curses the baby — "
"You will be the one to turn the curse, because Arachnia has probably forgotten about you completely," Madame replied, looking completely unruffled, as the Sorceress bestowed "lips like cherries and teeth like pearls."
"Me?" squeaked Elena, "But — "
"Hush. And watch, and listen, and learn."
As Elena fidgeted and fretted, the other magicians gave their gifts, all, to her mind, singularly useless. What good was "hair as gold as sunlight," and "the voice of a lark," to someone who was probably going to die on her sixteenth birthday, unless an untrained Apprentice could figure out a way and muster the power to turn the curse of a very powerful Sorceress?
Finally the last of the Fair Folk gave her gift — "the grace of a swan on the water" — and, with utter predictability, Madame Arachnia appeared, the crowd drawing back from her, that shadow hanging over her, a cold wind coming with her.
Except that — she wasn't alone. That young man was still with her. And the shadow that surrounded her seemed thinner, the cold wind not so much icy as merely cool — and the expression on her face was one of —
Bewilderment?
The King and Queen clutched each other's hands, trying to put on a show of bravery, and failing utterly. Arachnia stood before the cradle, uncertainty in her very pose. She looked down at the baby, looked into the eyes of the King and Queen, and then —
— then looked back at the young man, who gazed at her with trust, worship and tenderness.
"On the morning of her sixteenth birthday — " Arachnia began, her voice rolling across the crowd in sepulchral tones. But then — she stopped.
"Her sixteenth birthday — " she began again, but now her voice was not so threatening. In fact, it sounded hesitant. She looked back at the young man.
He smiled. She tried to turn towards him, but something was holding her there. The struggle between Arachnia and this invisible force was palpable, visible, and it was making her angry.
She turned back towards the cradle and gathered herself together. She drew herself up. She pointed at the infant in the cradle — but when she spoke, instead of threat, the voice was full of — irritation.
The tone said, I know I have to do this; I feel The Tradition forcing me into it. I don't have a choice, but pardon me if I just go through the motions.
"On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, the Princess will awaken with her hair so knotted it will look as if birds had been nesting in it!"
There was a halfhearted little rumble of thunder. The shadow passed for a moment. Arachnia turned back to the young man with a look of triumph. He held out both hands to her; now it was she who was drawn as steel to a lodestone, and they walked away from the King and Queen and Princess and right out the door together, as if no one else existed.
But then the shadow gathered again, the cold fell heavily on the room, as The Tradition gathered all of its strength to warp that ineffectual curse into something horrible. Elena felt the potential of the curse still hanging over everything, and she knew The Tradition and what it could do — if the curse wasn't quickly countered, it would descend in some ghastly form that no one could anticipate, no matter how weak the actual curse might seem to be. She grasped her wand in a sweating hand, and stepped forward, the youngest of them all, and her mind was working frantically. How to turn the curse into a blessing? How to take all that power of The Tradition and turn it against itself? She had to be clever; had to give The Tradition what it wanted. That was not only a curse, but a reward for someone worthy.
The poor little Princess would have to endure something, and at the same time, the end of the tale had to provide something for another person that she had to "name" —
What could you do with hair that was horribly knotted and keep it from tangling around someone's throat to choke off her breath? It had to be something that would cost some pain, for The Tradition demanded pain for a curse — who could untangle something hopelessly snarled?
It came to her, and as she stepped forward towards the infant's cradle, she was carefully phrasing her counter, hoping no one noticed how her hands were shaking. She gathered all of the power she could see swirling around her in a rainbow skein of magic; prayed it was enough, and waved her wand three times over the baby's cradle. Shining motes of power followed the circling of the star on the tip of her wand, and spiraled down into the sleeping infant.
"The Princess will awaken with her hair binding her to her bed, so knotted that she cannot move."
There. That was surely enough of a curse to satisfy The Tradition.
"Scissors will be blunted, knives useless, and not any of her handmaidens will be able to loosen so much as a single knot. All will seem lost."
There was the despair that was needed.
"Nor will magic avail the day. No man's hand will free her."
That left things open for a girl, a female, anyway. The Tradition liked these little, sly loopholes.
"But a rescuer will come; noble by nature, not by birth, gifted with patience and common sense, drawn by pity and not hope of reward. With her own two hands, the rescuer will free the Princess from the prison of her own hair, and win her freedom and her friendship."
Just like the popping of a soap-bubble, the dreadful potential vanished. Elena almost wept with relief.
Now everyone sighed, some with relief that matched Elena's, some not understanding what had happened, laughing nervously at the apparently absurd "curse." Only the magicians among them moved forward to congratulate the new Apprentice on a clever counter, for only they realized that The Tradition had been poised to make the Princess strangle in her own hair, or be smothered by it, or take some other dreadful form. Now it, and all of its potential, had been bound into a harmless, yet logical form. The Princess would live, and there would be a "happily ever after" for the nameless rescuer, some humble girl somewhere who would have the patience to untangle the Gordian-hair-knot when everyone else had given up.
The celebration went on, but their work was done, and Elena felt as drained as if she had been running for a mile. The King called for the musicians to play, and Madame Bella quietly went to him to explain what was going to happen in sixteen years.
Elena found a convenient pillar and put her back against it, feeling limp and drained. Eventually Madame Bella returned and took her gently by the elbow, and steered her into one of the little side-rooms that had been set up for the convenience of a few guests who wished to converse together. Somehow she was not at all surprised to find the other magicians there, being served with refreshments and chattering amiably among themselves.
"Miranda, my dear, you exceeded my wildest dreams!" Bella said, as they entered, and the Sorceress beamed. A seat was immediately provided for Elena, and the Witch in russet pressed a glass of wine into her hand. Elena drank it down at a gulp.
The Sorceress nodded graciously. "It was a stroke of luck finding
him. Do you know he's a Prince as well as a poet?"
There was a gasp and a laugh from the Witch in green. "No! Oh, my word, that does make a great deal of sense! No wonder Arachnia gravitated straight for him!"
What? Oh — oh, of course, if she's like me, she was supposed to have a Prince and somehow didn't get one. Only she turned bitter and hard and wants to make everything around her hurt as much as she does. But The Traditional attraction is still there.
"What sort of Prince?" Bella asked, plying Elena with a slice of cake, it was far too sugary — or at least, would have been if she hadn't been so famished.
"A Frog Prince, the poor thing, and he'd been that way so long that his Kingdom had passed right into the hands of a collateral line. Decades at least; maybe more, I couldn't be sure. Kissed by a Princess, all right, but she was only six years old, and in the habit of kissing every bird and beast that crossed her path!" Sorceress Miranda shook her head with pity for the poor man's situation. Elena winced. Bad enough to have the first part of your "destiny" thwarted, worse to no longer have a home to return to, but then to have insult piled on top of injury like that —
"Oh, the poor lad!" exclaimed the Witch in grey, with sympathy warming her voice. "No Princess, no Kingdom — no prospects — "
"But a talent for brooding poetry. Well, I would be broody, if I'd gone through all of that," Miranda replied. "He's good enough to keep from starving, which for a poet, is a pure miracle, frankly. I found him just as you suggested, Bella, by looking for slim volumes of recently published verses full of suffering and anguish and longing for death — and a morbid fascination with the trappings of darkness, but not the substance."
"And you tracked the poet down — " Bella prompted, handing a plate of little sandwiches to Elena, who felt as if she was so starved there was a hole in the bottom of her stomach.
"Just as you said — I knew I had the right sort of fellow after watching him a while. He might speak longingly in excellent rhyme of wanting to be united with the powers of darkness and descend into the blackness of never-ending night, but in his little garret he was feeding sparrows with bread he could hardly afford to part with." Miranda smiled merrily. "I took on the semblance of a Royal Messenger, delivered the invitation, and made sure he knew that the notorious Madame Arachnia would also be there. And when he arrived, I just made sure to position him properly, and you saw the rest."
"But Bella," the Witch in green protested. "How did you know this would fall out in this way? How did you know that Arachnia wouldn't still put a really powerful curse on the babe?"
"She didn't, not exactly," said an aged voice from the door. They all turned, and two of the Witches leaped to their feet to aid the bent and withered old woman who stood there into the room and into a chair.
"She didn't," the old woman repeated, with a cherubic smile, and a voice creaking with age. "I was to be her emergency counter, in case the curse was too dreadful for her clever little Apprentice to work out. Not," she added, "that I think it would have been. Once a truly dreadful curse has been laid, The Tradition usually makes the counter fairly easy to think of and set."
"'Not death, but sleep,'" quoted Miranda. "And no one would ever have looked for you here, Madame Veronica. I thought you never traveled anymore."
"I do not," the elderly Godmother replied. "This is my Kingdom, and I told Bella to be ready when I knew the Queen was expecting. I am one of the Royal Nurserymaids — and that was a good touch, couching the counter so that the savior is a lowborn girl, young Elena," she added. "I shall have to be sure there is someone worthy of reward and gathering Potential in that position when the time comes."
"But still, Bella, how did you know you would find a young man that would find Arachnia irresistible?" the Witch in green persisted. "I can see where you could turn her, if you could only find someone who would see her and love her, but how did you know such a fellow existed?"
Bella tilted her head to the side, and a wry smile touched her lips. "You find them in any Kingdom," she said, "if you look hard enough. Young men, and young women, too, who believe that they are in love with evil, death, and darkness, but in fact, are in love with mystery. Mind, it wouldn't have worked if Arachnia herself wasn't so young, and still able to be turned, if only one could find the key to her loneliness. I expect she'll be your charge now, Miranda."
"And happy to take her on," the Sorceress replied. "I'd go through fire and ice to turn someone with her power. And believe me, I have bound that young man with so many spells I'm surprised he can move."
"You didn't put a love spell on him!" said the Witch in grey, aghast.
"Great heavens no! I'm not that stupid!" Miranda exclaimed. "Arachnia would have spotted that in an instant, and she'd have been so angry she probably would have cursed the whole Kingdom! No, all I did was hedge him around so that he can't become the Rogue, the Betrayer, the Cad, or the Seducer, and I let his own romantic feelings do the rest."
"We can count on that," Madame Bella said, with a decided nod of her head. "I think that he may be in love with an abstract now, but it won't be long before he's in love with Arachnia herself, and she won't be able to resist him. I know; thanks to Randolf, I've had a look at her Library. A good half of it is slim little volumes of darkly romantic poetry, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that some of them are his. In no time — well, probably by tonight! — they'll be haunting the battlements of her castle together as bats flutter overhead beneath a gibbous moon."
Two of the Witches heaved sighs of relief, and Madame Veronica nodded.
"Well, that seems to have it all settled and sorted, then, and I must say, a more clever way of turning The Tradition I have never seen," the Witch in russet said with contentment, and turned to her fellows. "When shall we four meet again?"
"Thursday next would be good," said the one in grey. "But this time, I am supplying the cards! Your deck likes you altogether too much, Penelope!"
In the carriage on the way back to the cottage, as shafts of light penetrated the forest canopy, creating slashes of golden light across the green shadows, Elena turned to her mentor. "Did you really arrange all of that?" she asked in wonder. "However did you even think of it?"
"It only worked because Arachnia — that's not her real name, by the way; she changed her name when she turned to the darkness — is young, and although she is a seething mess of anger and resentment, she is also enduring a truly crushing weight of loneliness," Madame replied, as the carriage wheels rolled over a dry stick, breaking it with a sound that made Elena jump. "She spent all of her young life, much like you, despised and exploited. She was sent into the wilderness by her stepmother, who told her to gather berries before any such thing was ripe, and taken up by an Evil Sorceress and made into a slave."
"Then what?" Elena wanted to know.
"Well, the Sorceress had many such 'servants,' all of whom hated her, but none of whom dared to defy her. Arachnia bore it as long as she could, but the moment came when she was both strong enough and had the opportunity, and she managed to kill her mistress. That was when she decided that she must be an Evil Sorceress, and The Tradition obliged by supplying her with some sort of tutors, as well as the workroom and library of her former mistress and all the other Evil Magicians who had lived there originally."
"So — she studied magic and The Tradition on her own?" Elena hazarded. Bella nodded.
"That's what usually happens, actually. The dark magicians don't have a great deal of tolerance for one another." Madame Bella glanced over at Elena, perhaps to see if she needed to elaborate on this point, but it was pretty obvious to the Apprentice. Dark magicians didn't have much tolerance for any sort of rival.
"Well, when Randolf found her for me, I began using him to watch her, but to tell the truth, it was easy to see that her heart wasn't in the business of evil for its own sake. She had the proper trappings, but it was mostly show. Her garden has as many roses as nightshade and henbane plants. She keeps only non-venomous spi
ders and snakes. The bats live in their very own tower, and every raven and owl that has decided to roost at her castle is so well-fed that several of them are too fat to fly."
"But if that's true," Elena said, her brow wrinkling, "Why didn't you do something to help her before she killed her stepmother?"
There was a very long moment of silence.
"Because," Madame said at last, with such deep sorrow that Elena almost regretted asking the question, "I did not know any of this until I had Randolf go looking for the Evil Sorceress that I knew must be there. And I was lucky in Arachnia."
"She could have been — " Elena was not sure how to phrase it.
"She could have been truly evil. This isn't the first time that I've hoped to turn The Tradition this way, been disappointed, and had to rectify matters in the usual way. But that is why I sent Randolf looking, as I always have, hoping that I would be lucky." Madame looked steadily into Elena's eyes. "I knew that if just once I could find the combination I was looking for, I could turn The Tradition, not just this one time, but open a new possibility for the future. You felt it — all that potential, how it just slipped aside when your counter was cast."
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