But the doors were open, the floodgates were down, and she was quite, quite past rational thought now. All she could do was to cry—cry into the neck of her best friend in all the world, cry herself stupid and numb and finally exhausted, cry and cry and cry until she had nothing left, no tears, no energy, no feeling. And at last, she cried herself into sleep, right there, in the library, being cradled by a dragon.
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When she woke, it was with a start, in the darkness. She was surrounded by breathing, deep and murmurous. If the South Wind could breathe, it would have sounded just like this. For a moment, she was only aware that she was not in her bed, and began to panic.
But the panic quickly subsided as her sore eyes and raw throat reminded her of what had happened, and thus, where she probably was.
She felt utterly drained, too weary to move, but she put out a hand and encountered a surface smooth and covered with scales, and then she knew where she was. And that Peri, rather than disturb her, had curled up comfortingly around her.
She listened to him breathing, telling herself that she was going to get up and go back to her proper bed any moment now. Any moment. Yes, any moment now…
And she fell back to sleep, still promising.
“I never meant to upset you.” The voice came out of the darkness, from every direction and none, just like the breathing.
“I know you didn’t,” she replied. The darkness was very comforting, actually. You couldn’t see, but you also couldn’t be seen. Right this moment it was a good place to be.
“You’ll make a fine Queen. You have everything you need to be a great ruler. And besides, The Tradition probably won’t stand for anything but a monarchy anyway. We’re the Five Hundred Kingdoms, right? You One Good Knight
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can’t have a Kingdom without a King or Queen, or both, on a throne.”
“Yes, but…” She felt an aching in her chest that had nothing to do with the grief that had made her cry herself into exhaustion. “It’s the ‘both’ part that…”
The pain went from a dull ache to a stab, and she knew why. Assume that everything went beautifully and they won. She, Andie, would take the crown.
And there she would be, with her heroic Sworn Sisterhood around her, in triumph.
Except that the Sworn Sisterhood was only
“sworn” for as long as it took to put her on that throne. They would all go their separate ways—and properly, of course, because they’d had their lives interrupted and it was only fair and right that they be able to resume them.
Gina would go back to the Chapter-House of Glass Mountain. She was far too young to retire, and one small Kingdom could never hold a Champion for long.
And Peri would go, too. Adam would certainly want to return home again—wherever home was—and Peri would go with him. They were inseparable, and that was right and proper.
And there she would be.
Alone.
Oh, there were some people she could trust, of course, but—
But.
She would either wed, or not. But in either case—she would still be alone. If she wed, it would be for 354
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the sake of an alliance and an heir. It would all be very clear-cut and contractual. If she was lucky, her Prince-Consort would at least have one or two things in common with her—
But not share the enjoyment of the same sort of jokes. Not to read a passage from a book aloud because the language was so beautiful and have the other person nod and smile, agreeing with you completely…
Or she would not marry, and spend the rest of her life searching for someone with the right dynastic bloodline to put on the throne when she was gone, and do so alone.
And none of this could she, dared she, say.
“So you’ll have a contest for your hand in marriage—very Traditional, that—” the voice said, “and some handsome prince will win it, and you’ll get married and live happily ever after.”
“But I don’t want a handsome prince! I want—”
“—Andie—”
“—I want a kind, great-hearted, witty—”
“Andie!”
The urgent whisper, the hand on the shoulder shaking her—these finally hauled her up, reluctantly, into wakefulness.
Gina, of course. Bending over her, with a lamp in hand. “I saw you weren’t in your bed and I got worried,” she whispered. “First place I looked was here, since you spend all your time over here. And here you are.”
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If she noted Andie’s tear-streaked face and red eyes, she didn’t say anything about it. Just—
“Come on, Andie. If you sleep here much longer you’ll get a cramp.”
Insistent tugging on her arm—when had Gina taken her arm?—got her to rise, and they stumbled out into the dark together, leaving Peri alone.
She returned to her own cold, lonely bed, and lay there for a long time, wishing she was bold enough to go back to the library and sleep in the dragon’s embrace.
There had been no sign of the Champion, nor of the Princess, and the dragon continued to come for the virgins just as if the Champion had never appeared at all. Solon began to feel that perhaps his lie had been the truth. Not the exact truth, but the Champion and Andromeda had met their ends, and not before time, either, somewhere out in the Wyrding Lands. And it did not matter if the end had come at the jaws and talons of the dragon or the claws and teeth of some other monster, so long as it had come.
This meant that he was free to concentrate on the next phase of his plan: to eliminate the Queen. But first, he had to induce her to marry him. It was the only way he would have the legitimacy to take over the throne when she met her fate.
So it was time to research something he had never, ever attempted before.
Love spells.
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These were usually the provenance of what he referred to as the “ditch grubbers” of the magic world: the hedge-wizards, the village witches. Love spells were their bread-and-butter, their steady source of income. But most of them were not spells to make someone fall in love so much as predictive spells to tell you who would be your lover or wed you in the future. Only those of darker persuasions peddled love spells to call someone to your bed. That was coercion, and it was not the sort of thing that a
“proper” Magician did.
Of course, virtually everything Solon did violated that unwritten code anyway, so he did not precisely care. However, it took time and concentration away from everything else he was doing. He often wished that he had another self that he could send out to deal with the day-to-day nonsense that was always cropping up. A minor problem with a merchant here, a conflict between nobles there, someone demanding his ear over some issue—it never seemed to stop coming. He hated it. He hated every moment of it. In a way he was dreadfully afraid that when he finally did take the throne, there would only be more of that nonsense.
Then again, when he took Cassiopeia’s throne, there would be no Cassiopeia to deal with, so that would be one irritation out from under his skin.
Speaking of Cassiopeia…
He needed a powerful love spell—or more specifically, an infatuation spell—that did not require that One Good Knight
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she ingest, drink, wear or otherwise interact herself with the components of the spell. He didn’t think that she was nearly as cautious about what she ate and drank and so forth as he was, but now was not the time to rest on assumptions. Since virtually every spell he looked at involved making a drink or baking a cake or anointing the object of desire with something, he was beginning to get quite frustrated, when utterly by chance he came across a scroll in his own library that he had not looked at in decades. It dealt with very primitive magic invoking the Laws of Imitation and of Contact. And it dealt with the making of images.
Now he had long since gotten past such s
imple and clumsy workings; in fact, he had really not done anything of the sort since first obediently reading the scroll, proving to his teacher that he could, in fact, make the ridiculous things work, and putting the scroll away.
But working with emotions was crude. Especially the baser emotions of lust and longing. And now, with his own vastly increased knowledge, he could make this magic so much more effective than the simplistic nonsense in this scroll…
The original called for a simple cloth doll made to resemble the object of desire as closely as possible.
But the Law of Imitation was very clear that the more closely something resembled the original, the more effective the spell would be. And Solon had the means to make his “doll” very accurate indeed.
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Using magic to create a homunculus, he had made a blank wax image; then, he had imbedded hairs, collected surreptitiously from Cassiopeia over long years, one by one into the scalp of the image and swirled the result into an approximation of her upswept hairstyle. He was actually surprised at how much of her hair he had acquired; he had made it second nature to carefully check his clothing and person for stray hairs whenever he had been around her or—most especially—after he had been in her bed. They were easily distinguished from his own by the silky texture. He had more than enough for a dozen dolls, in fact.
That done, he had taken the poppet, wrapped it in spell-inscribed silk and tucked it into the corner of the secret passageway. There, over the course of the next three days, in close proximity to the Queen, it had come to look more and more like her. By the time he had retrieved it at the end of that three days, it was identical to her in every way, but in miniature.
Now it was ready for the spell. And he could use all of his knowledge and all the Laws of Magic to set it. Not just the Laws of Imitation and Contact. Now, with fuller knowledge, he could invoke the Laws of Words of Power, of True Names, of Knowledge. He knew Cassiopeia as no one else knew her. Probably better than she knew herself. He knew her True Name, which even she did not herself know. And he had command over the Words of Power, oh my, yes.
So now the doll was lying on a square of red silk, One Good Knight
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written all over with Words of Power in his own blood-ink to bind Cassiopeia to his will. And it was naked, as it should be for spells of lust and infatuation. He anointed it with rose oil and musk, named it, took a needle made of the heart of a sparrow feather (a sparrow being a notoriously lusty bird) and plunged it into the heart of the doll.
“Heart afire, loins aflame, only to my hand be tame. Wild with lust for me alone, to all others be as stone. I alone quench thy desire, I alone appease thy fire. Now I bind thee, now I blind thee, no love see, but only me.”
A wild surge of scarlet power washed over the doll, and sank into it, to be absorbed. The wax took on a rosy hue, until it looked so like living flesh, flushed with sexual desire, that one would have to touch it to know that it was wax.
He smiled, wrapped the poppet up in the scarlet silk, tucked both carefully into an aromatic box made of sandalwood and put the box on a high shelf in the corner.
Just in time.
He heard the click and faint grind of the door to the secret passageway opening into his bedroom, and hurried there before she could seek him out in his workroom.
With her cheeks flushed with lust, set off by the stark black of her mourning garments, she looked 360
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infinitely more attractive than she had in months.
Even years.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you today,” she said huskily. “I don’t know why but—we’ve drawn apart….”
“Work,” he said smoothly. “And worries. But the dragon has taken care of all of that for us, hasn’t it?
And now we can concentrate on important matters.”
“Yes,” she breathed. “Important matters.”
As she advanced on him, hips swaying, he was glad he had thought to lock the doors before he completed the spell.
“I wish I knew how you could manage to read anything at all in that,” said Alexander in fascination, as Godmother Elena bent over the scrying bowl, an enormous flat-bottomed basin of stark-white glass that normally held clear water and nothing more.
Not today. This was not just any scrying bowl.
This was a way for Elena to actually see the way that the magical energies of The Tradition were moving.
She had only just learned how to do this, taught by another of the true “Fairy” Godmothers, one of the very first to take on that mantle.
In the bottom of the bowl was a translucent image, a kind of miniature landscape map of the Kingdom of Acadia and as much of the surrounding Kingdoms as would fit on the bottom of the bowl.
Although normally one could not see the borders of a Kingdom, this time was an exception. A baleful red One Good Knight
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line, like the color of molten lava seen through a crack in the overlaying rock, delineated the entire Border of Acadia.
This was the magical energy on the boundary of the Kingdom, the spell that kept any man inclined to slay the dragon from getting inside.
The part of the landscape inside that line was obscured by something like mist. To Alexander it looked as if someone had dripped milk into the water there.
“That’s the spells that are up to keep me from scrying Acadia directly,” Elena said, as he tentatively dipped a finger into the water where the clouding was the heaviest. “Now there—” She indicated a portion of the map that appeared to be a spot on the coastline, where the milky color was now tinged a dirty, unpleasant gray, mingled with threads of an equally unpleasant scarlet. “That’s Ethanos, the capital, and that ugly dark is the magic of The Tradition saturating the area with tragedy. The red threads are something else quite powerful that’s being worked there.
I’m not at all certain what it is, but it’s quite sexual by the color. It’s probably magic—one of the major players manipulating another of the major players.”
“That’s a lot of darkness,” Alexander said, frowning at the bowl as the gray color deepened.
“Yes, it is, and I don’t mind telling you it makes me very uneasy about all of this. It means the Magician there, whoever he or she is, has a clear understanding of how The Tradition works and 362
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has put things into motion to get it on his or her side.” She frowned, too. “Now here—” she indicated a patch farther away of sunny yellow that seemed to light up the whiteness from within
“—here are our people. That’s Gina’s color, so she is directing the opposition, and she’s doing very well so far as The Tradition is concerned. Looking at the power here, there has got to be a lot of people involved. And see those tints of green, scarlet and white? Those are other major players.”
“Can you tell who they are?” Alexander asked, his handsome, dark head bent over the bowl.
She sighed and placed both elbows on the table supporting the bowl. “I can’t even tell if they’re human or not. That part of Acadia is what is called the ‘Wyrding Lands,’ which were ceded by treaty to the non-humans. I can’t even ask the Fair Folk because the Wyrding Others are not Elven in nature, so they are as much in the dark as I am.”
Alexander nodded. By now a veteran of many campaigns, he no longer was frustrated when Elena could not give him direct information. Despite her anxiety about this situation, she had to smile fondly at him for that. He had matured so much since becoming the Commander of the Glass Mountain Chapter-House…and every day, she found new reasons to be more in love with him.
He looked up, caught her smile and answered it with one of his own. For a moment, she could feel the love between them as a network of support and One Good Knight
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affirmation binding them together. And it was a tan-gible force, backed by a great deal of Traditional momentum, although it was a constant battl
e to keep The Tradition itself from trying to find ways to test and try them.
“What can you tell?” he asked, turning his gaze back to the depths of the bowl.
“Generalities. Now, since she is, in fact, not on her way back here having slain the dragon, since she is doing something involving a goodly size number of people, and is sitting right in the middle of the Wyrding Lands, we can assume that the scenario was not at all what it was made out to be.”
“Which is what we guessed was going to be the case in the first place.” Alexander nodded, as Elena tucked a stray curl of hair out of the way behind her ear. “That makes perfect sense. This business of the dragon bothers me, however. I thought we knew the location of most of the Dragons of Darkness hereabouts.”
“It’s possible that this is a new one,” Elena said carefully. “Or one from farther away than we have information or contacts. But—” She shook her head.
“I would have anticipated signs of tragic Traditional power in the bowl—not just in Ethanos, but wherever this dragon has its lair. And there is nothing.” It was her turn to frown at the bowl. “Not only that, but I would have expected Gina to be somewhere near that nexus of tragedy, and she’s not.”
She waved a hand over the bowl as some of the darkness spread out again, reaching tendrils up and 364
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down the coastline. “And look at that! It does this every so often. Something in there is creating tragedy along the coast. But it goes in both directions, so it can’t be the dragon.” She ground her teeth a little.
“Sometimes I wish I was a necromancer. At least I could ask the spirits of the dead what was going on!”
“You wouldn’t want to do that, Elena.”
She looked up and caught his eyes, and smiled.
“You’re right, of course. I wouldn’t. But this is very frustrating.” She twisted the stray bit of hair around her finger. “I would say, looking at the buildup of power, that something is going to break, and soon.
But I cannot tell what, nor when. Only that one way or another, this is going to be over before too many days are out.”
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