Once he came, pulling up a handful of roots before fleeing. Twice, a bit more boldly this time, when no one appeared to stop him. And the third time, in the dusk, Elena was waiting for him, as the Sorceress would have been.
He bent to rip up a plant, hastily, but without a lot of fear. He should have been afraid; it should have occurred to him that nothing natural could have produced these plants in the heart of winter. Nothing like this had ever happened in the widow's garden before. He should have realized that there was something very, very wrong.
He was thinking only of his wife, his beloved, the mother of his child-to-be. The widow who lived in this house might be angry at him for stealing her property, but the worst that would happen would be that she would summon the village constable, and the constable was a man with a family himself. There might be a punishment, the stocks perhaps, but everyone in the village knew about pregnant women and their cravings, and the punishment wouldn't be harsh —
— surely —
The Tradition demanded a dramatic entrance, and Elena obliged.
"So!" she cried in a cold voice, stepping out of the darkness in a flash of greenish light. "Thief!"
While she wore the widow's face, she also wore the sweeping black gown and winglike cape that the Sorceress had worn, the cape streaming out behind her in a self-created wind. Rosalie's husband dropped to his knees, his face transfixed with terror, the plants falling from his hands.
He might not have been very clever, but he was brave.
He might have blamed Rosalie, but the explanation he babbled out held no touch of accusation for his wife. In fact, he begged only for mercy because Rosalie was with child and would need him; he said nothing of her craving for the magical rampion.
There was no doubt in Elena's mind at that moment why Rosalie loved this man, who would willingly sacrifice himself to save her. But The Tradition had a certain momentum of its own, and it demanded the child. She felt it impelling her on.
Well, she already knew what she would do about this — The Tradition demanded that this child become a part of one of its tales. Very well. She would give it a tale.
A different tale. Not Ladderlocks.
"You will take me to your wife," she decreed, sternly. "You have stolen my property; there must be restitution, and there must be punishment. I know that your wife's hunger for my plants brought you here. She must pay, as well as you."
He, no less than she, was impelled by the weight of The Tradition. He could not have disobeyed her if he had been possessed of a stronger will and more wits than he actually owned. As if he was sleepwalking, he rose. His face a mask of despair, he led her to his little home, the lovely garden now shrouded in snow, the lights of their home streaming out into the darkness from the open door. Rosalie, now heavily pregnant, stood in the doorway; she was expecting this, and praying that the woman who followed her too-loving husband was Elena, not a stranger.
Still The Tradition demanded this child, and in that, it was too strong even for a Godmother like Bella to withstand. So, the child would be Elena's to do with as she pleased. In that much, The Tradition would be obeyed.
The man stopped, and Elena pushed past him, imperious, and unstoppable. "Come," she said coldly, and head hanging, he obeyed.
One month later, Elena stood again in Rosalie's cottage, this time to look down into the face of a tiny baby. Elena had seen her share of newborns over the years, and most infants looked like wizened, red-faced old men with sour dispositions. This child was enchanting, with a perfect little pink rosebud of a face, and wide blue eyes that stared blankly up at the Apprentice.
This only made her feel terribly guilty about what she was going to do next.
"I'm sorry," she murmured, then took a hard, dried pea, jamming it with her thumb into one of the baby's tender little buttocks, whispering a spell that she knew was going to bring pain, until the infant's face crumpled and the mouth opened in a wail of discomfort.
Elena instantly left off torturing the poor little mite, and after making certain that the offending pea was going to leave a satisfactorily livid bruise, handed the baby back to her mother.
And she felt the power shift again. The pea in her hand became oddly heavy, and when she dropped it into the little silver casket she had brought, it nestled into the velvet like a jewel. The Tradition felt what she had done, and had begun to alter its impetus. And even as Elena stood there, she could see the glowing drifts of power leaving Rosalie and beginning a slow, circling spiral towards the baby.
"That's all?" Rosalie whispered, bouncing the baby and hushing her with kisses and petting.
"That's all," Elena replied, then added, as she had to. "For now. You'll lose her when she turns sixteen, of course — " It was, almost as cruel a fate, in a way, but —
Rosalie sighed, and bent her head over the baby. She probably thought that Elena couldn't see that she had wiped a tear away, surreptitiously. "It could be so much worse. And we would lose her to a husband anyway, eventually...."
But it was clear that Rosalie was only waiting for Elena to leave to break down weeping. Who could blame her? Hearing that you will lose your child after only sixteen short years is never easy.
But it could have been so much worse. She could have had Clarissa snatched out of her arms to be locked away from her forever.
Elena left, quickly. She could not bear to be here a moment longer; there was relief in this little cottage, but there was pain as well. When little Clarissa turned sixteen, something would happen to her that would mean that her parents could never see her again, except at a distance, and that was a hard thing for a mother to learn.
Besides, she had another journey to make, and she had borrowed the help of Sergei, the Little Humpback Horse; she wouldn't keep him standing about waiting any longer than she had to.
He stood in the traces of the gaily painted cart, shaking his head sadly. He knew what she had been forced to do in order to avert the greater tragedy of the birth of a Ladderlocks child.
"This is a sad thing," he said, and Elena's dragon's-blood gift of the Speech of Animals allowed her to understand him, as she had not been able to the last time she had seen him. "To have your child for only sixteen years — "
"Or to know that she is the cause of many deaths?" Elena replied, climbing into the cart. "Do you know how many young men died to save the last Ladderlocks?"
"It is hard to weigh sorrow against sorrow, and I fear you have made the only possible choice," the Horse agreed. "But I cannot like it. Her grief pulls at my heart. Come. Let us be gone from this place." He looked back over his shoulder at the cottage, and his skin shivered all over. "It is better not to linger."
He took off at a trot; once beyond sight of the village, he rose into the air, taking the cart, and Elena, with him. Now she was prepared for the ascent —
Well, as prepared as anyone could be. She clutched the wood of the seat as her heart jumped right into her throat. She clenched her eyes tight shut, but then decided that she had to face this some time, and opened them again.
The ground was not very far away. The Horse was just skimming the tops of the trees this time, in fact, he was using the trees to hide their progress from below.
"You ought to put the disguise on," he called over his shoulder. "No one will be surprised to see a Godmother flying in a magical sleigh."
She blinked; Bella was right, the Horse was exceedingly clever. She summoned power from within her and pulling her wand from the pocket of her gown, pulled the power into a shape. It drifted just above them, a glowing cloud that only she and the Horse could see. With a shudder of effort, she pulled it down to cover both of them; it settled over the Horse, the cart, and her, and obscured them for just a moment.
Then as he ran on across the treetops, he became a snow-white stallion and the cart transmuted into a silver sleigh overflowing with furs.
"Ha!" said the Horse. "Now that's more like it!"
He didn't rise much more than a foot or so
higher, though, which made Elena feel very much better. This, she could cope with. She'd climbed all manner of things as a child, before Madame Klovis arrived to blight her life — trees, clock towers, up onto the roof of the house. This wasn't much higher than that. This, she could cope with.
The Tradition demanded a tale; it demanded a tale that had at least a modicum of tragedy about it, and it demanded a tale in which the ending made a Princess of a peasant. There was only one Path that Elena had been able to think of that matched those demands. She was on her way now to meet Madame Bella to establish the second half of the tale's beginnings.
She was, in fact, on the way to a place she had not really expected to ever see again — the Royal Palace of Otraria, where King Colin and Queen Sophia were meeting with the Godmother who had brought them together. Bella was the only possible person to explain all this to them; they trusted her as they did not yet trust her Apprentice, and no wonder. If it had not been for Bella, the Princess (now the Queen) would still be pining away in her room, unable even to smile. And Colin would still be a goose-boy.
Elena was already dressed for the occasion, and not merely as Bella's Apprentice this time, but in the full formal garb of a Godmother when visiting royalty. From the tiara of rosebuds carved from pink crystal in her powdered wig, to the same crystal rosebuds set into the silver buckles of her high-heeled, pink satin slippers, she was garbed as Madame's equal and counterpart, in a pink that favored her coloring, rather than the lilac that favored Madame's. Wrapped in an ermine mantel, her hands in a matching muff, she had probably been an odd sight, sitting on the bench-seat of that little painted cart. Rosalie had been too overcome with emotion to really pay any attention to what the Apprentice was wearing, or perhaps she would have been more than a bit overawed.
They landed well outside the city, and the Horse paused on the road for just a moment. He looked over his shoulder again while she caught her breath and added a little more power to the spell, making the changes real, solid, tangible. She very much wanted tangible; she wanted those furs tucked in around her. in this state, she drove to the Palace, and had the rare privilege of seeing people she knew, both well and only slightly, gaping at her with a total lack of recognition.
No one saw Ella Cinders in the fancifully arrayed Godmother — but it was clear from the startled gazes and the sudden deference that the people she passed knew exactly what she was. In a way, she enjoyed it — and in a way, it was rather sad. For the first time, she felt the widening gulf between her, and the people she had grown up among. She had always been lonely, but now she felt alone.
The sleigh glided past the Klovis house, which was still unoccupied, and Elena had the melancholy satisfaction of seeing that someone — perhaps the creditors — had actually begun the process of dismantling it. The slate roof was half gone, and the stone wall down to no more than knee high. She suspected that the elegant paneling had been stripped away by now, and any of the built-in furnishings taken out first of all.
When Madame Klovis reappeared, she would have a great deal more to worry about than her missing stepdaughter....
What did they think those people who were taking the house apart, bit by bit? Did they ever wonder what had become of the missing Elena? Or had she dropped out of their minds, relegated to some unimportant corner of their memories? "Oh, Elena Klovis — Ella Cinders, you mean? Dunno. Went to the Mop Fair after Madame did the runner, never saw her again. Suppose she must've hired out after all."
The Horse brought the sleigh neatly to the steps of the Palace; a footman hurried to help her alight, and she descended from the sleigh in a swirl of pink silk and white fur. She climbed the steps, the silver-heeled slippers she wore clicking with every pace. Two footmen sprang to hold the brass-bound door open for her. As soon as she was inside, her mantel was taken by another servant stationed just inside the door, and she was conducted immediately by a fourth footman to a small, gold-and-white audience chamber where, as she had expected, Madame was waiting with the King and Queen.
What she had not expected was that the Queen would immediately throw herself at Elena's feet and seize her hand, covering it with grateful kisses and tears.
"Queen Sophia, please!" Elena cried, trying to raise the weeping woman to her feet. "What in heaven's name — "
"Our Godmother decided to do a divination on what would have happened if we'd played unwitting host to the Ladderlocks child in Otraria," said King Colin, white-faced. "It seems that our son would have been the first to die at the hands of the Sorceress who held her captive."
For a moment, Elena really did not understand what had just been told to her. Then, when the meaning struck home, she looked to Madame Bella, who nodded slightly.
"Blessed saints," she whispered, feeling as if she had been hit with a deluge of cold water. "I had no idea — it only occurred to me that the Prince was the right age to be the baby's suitor when she turned sixteen — and that he was near enough to encounter her by chance, perhaps when out hunting — "
Except that the "chance" would not have been "chance" at all. The Tradition would impel the boy — who would be a handsome young man by then — towards the girl as steel was drawn towards a lodestone. The moment she turned sixteen, it would be inevitable. In fact, in either scenario, the Ladderlocks or the Tender Princess, that attraction would have taken place.
But the Ladderlocks would have killed him, it seemed. "When she turned sixteen, even if she was a Ladderlocks — " She faltered.
"But she would not have been rescued until she was eighteen," Madame Bella said quietly. "And before then, the Sorceress would have battened on the potential power of — well, far too many young men who died trying to bring the girl away." For The Tradition did that; throwing Questers at the Quest, even if they died of it, until one of them achieved it. The power it invested in them would go to the nearest magician who was ruthless enough to take it. That was why the Dark Ones went along with The Tradition; they could batten on the power inherent in those who failed, for as long as they could keep the task so difficult that there would be plenty of failures.
"And our dear son would have been the first." The Queen had risen gracefully to her feet, at last, and dabbed at her tear-streaked face with a dainty, lace-edged bit of linen. "If you had not had the wit and the will to turn the infant's tale from one course to another — "
And at that reminder, Elena hastily brought out the tiny silver casket, in which resided the perfectly ordinary looking dried pea. She pressed it into the Queen's hands —
And there it was; that strange feeling of something looming, then as suddenly settling, turning away. As if a mountain had silently rotated to face a new direction, or an avalanche "decided" that it would fall some other day.
The path was altered.
"There you are," Elena said, seeing from Bella's expression that she, too, had felt the change. "Keep it safe. And when, in sixteen years, your son brings home a beauteous young woman, and your courtiers demand proof that she is worthy to become their next Queen, place this beneath a pile of twenty mattresses and announce that this will be the test to prove that she is of royal blood — for only a Princess born would be tender enough to feel a pea beneath so much padding."
"We will," Colin pledged, taking possession of the casket. "And until then, it will reside in the Treasury."
Elena felt a little dizzy now with the effort she had expended in resetting the course of the tale, and let Madame do all of the talking after that. Not that there was much of it; even Kings and Queens did not engage in idle chat with one Godmother, much less two. It had occurred to Elena, and more than once, that people were happy to see a Godmother when there was trouble brewing, but as soon as the trouble had been sorted, they were just as happy to see the Godmother go. She wondered if that was the case with all magicians.
Perhaps it is even the case with heroes....
Nevertheless, though King Colin and Queen Sophia were far too polite to make it obvious that Bella and Elena mad
e them uncomfortable, the uncomfortable pauses began to stretch into uncomfortable silences, and at that point, Madame very gracefully stood up and took her leave.
Very shortly after that, Elena and Bella were bundled up together in the sleigh, and the sleigh itself was soaring over the treetops, on the way home.
"Oh, heavens," Elena said, then inexplicably felt herself bursting into tears.
Bella gathered her against her shoulder. "There, now," she soothed. "It's all over. You've given Rosalie a daughter to raise, you've saved Colin's son from death, you've eliminated a Ladderlocks, and — well, I've done something a bit naughty. While you were dealing with Rosalie, I had Arachnia discharge some of her misgotten power by further enchanting our Sorceress, and locking her up asleep inside a ring of fire in a cave. It will take a hero to get past the fire and wake her, and there is quite a warning carved into the rock bed she is lying on. Maybe if she sleeps for a hundred years or so, she'll wake up in a better frame of mind."
"And if she doesn't?" asked Elena, through her tears.
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