And then the world exploded. Her entire body spasmed, and she cried out, something between a gasp and a scream.
When it was over, she lay there panting and spent, and opened her eyes again to see him grinning like a boy who has just stolen an entire cake.
"What — exactly — did that lady tell you?" she managed to get out.
He resumed the place beside her that he had temporarily abandoned.
"She said, 'Someday, you will find yourself with another lady, an untried lady, whether your new bride or your new lover, and she will be a lady you wish to make as pleased with her first experience as you were with yours. Now, that is not possible in the conventional sense, but I will teach you the unconventional, so that she will know, truly and completely, that there is very great pleasure waiting for her, once the pain that is sadly inevitable for an untried lady is over.'"
"Oh." She thought about that for a very long moment. Plenty of kitchen-tales about "first times" flashed through her mind. The maids had seemed to take as much glee over telling them as they did over tales of childbirth that went on for days. So now she knew what she could expect once the whole painful business of "deflowering" was done with.
Furthermore, she had no doubt he'd do this again until they were good enough at the other to make it equally pleasurable for both of them.
"Is there any way I could thank her?" she asked at last.
He chuckled. "Perhaps someday. Oh, and she also said, 'the only woman who will thank you for spoiling her gown is the one you are buying a better gown for.' So — since I'm not in a position to buy you a better gown — " He tugged at her skirt, and raised his eyebrow suggestively.
"Ha. Turnabout is fair, and you've got less skin showing than I do!" she said, a spirit of mischief rising in her as she grabbed for his sleeve and pulled.
It became a rough-and-tumble game for a little while, as clothing got pulled off piecemeal, a stocking there, a shirt here — a game that got more heated when she tried some of what she recalled from her dreams and some of what she'd watched covertly when kitchen-maids trysted with stableboys, and parlor-maids with footmen.
It actually ended in his bed, where he picked her up and tossed her, surprising her with his strength. And by the time they both fell asleep in a tangle of limbs and blankets, she was almost embarrassingly grateful to that unknown lady with her uncommonly good advice.
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 Stancia....
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 con
siders 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!"
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