“But that’s no guarantee—” Elena began, when suddenly—
She felt an inexplicable plummeting of her heart. A chill wind moved across the room, making the candles in the chandeliers flicker, and the guests shiver. Frightened silence spread from a point near the entrance, moving across the crowd like a ripple in a pond.
A shadow passed over the room. People edged away from something that was moving towards the thrones. And in the center of that moving point of silence Elena saw her first Evil Sorceress.
No great surprise, she was gowned all in black. From the shoes to her own tiara, she wore not a single hint of color.
Her gown was a black velvet overdress, a black satin underdress, with faceted black crystals winking among the folds. More black crystals made up the tiara in her elaborately-styled ebony hair. Her staff was black, with a black serpent carved twining around it, and it was surmounted by a globe of black obsidian. As she drew nearer, Elena realized 136
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with a touch of reluctant admiration that even the black lace adorning her gown was very different from the swags and garlands on everyone else’s garb—it had been made in the pattern of spiderwebs.
She glared about her, hostility and anger radiating from her, and it was then that Elena realized that she was, in fact, no older than the King and Queen, or even Elena herself. She exchanged a glance with Madame; hers startled, Madame’s knowing. Madame nodded.
Sometimes, the ones who were “supposed” to have the happy endings go to the bad…. There was so much anger in the young woman’s eyes, so much resentment, and so much pent-up pain, that Elena could not imagine how Madame was going to stop this creature from just exploding then and there, like a fermenting bottle—
Then, from out of the shadows where he had somehow been concealed behind the blue-and-white Sorceress, another figure stepped.
It was a young man; he wasn’t handsome, and he clearly wasn’t all that wealthy, but he had the most interesting and intense face that Elena had ever seen. He, too, wore black; a little threadbare, but not ill-kempt. Clearly, though he might be poor by the standards of the rest of the guests here, he was proud, but with the right sort of pride that will not be beaten by so small a thing as poverty, and insists on what Madame Fleur used to call “certain standards.” Elena sensed that even if he had to mend and clean his clothing himself, he would be clean and mended. If he had to go without a meal, he would give no hint of it.
He moved into the Sorceress’s path as if she was a lode
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stone, and he a needle. And when she paused in surprise, he seized his moment, and her hand, and bent nearly double to kiss it.
“Madame Arachnia, I presume?” he said, and his voice was so melodious that it made Elena yearn to actually hear him sing rather than speak. “Madame, I would never have accepted the invitation to come here this day, if it had not been that I knew that you had also been invited.”
The Sorceress was taken so completely by surprise that she could only stare at him in shock. “You—you did?” she stammered, completely taken aback. “But—”
“I had to meet you,” he replied, staring into her eyes with hungry intensity. “And please—could we come away from these—ordinary people?” Now his voice dripped disdain for those around him. “I sense that we must talk.”
Still in shock, the Sorceress let him lead her, all unresisting, out of one of the double doors that led to the garden.
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—
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“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—
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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 140
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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 t
he 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 gath
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ered 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 stran
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gle 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!”
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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, 144
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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.”
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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 Nursery-maids—and that was a good touch, couching the counter so that the savior is a low-born 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 i
n 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 ex
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claimed. “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?”
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