Brute. Beast. How dare he try to overpower her like that?
Did he think she was some idiot milkmaid in a bawdy song, ready to spread her legs for the first good-looking man who came her way?
Actually, that was probably exactly what he’d thought.
And The Tradition had done its best to make his thought a reality. Evidently, bawdy songs created as many paths as The Fairy Godmother
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the Traditional tales did. She would have to remember that from now on.
She’d felt it, when he kissed her; felt it hit her nearly as hard as her spell had hit him. Felt the weight of it crashing down on both of them, making her knees go weak, parting her lips for him, making her secret places feel tight and hot with a rush of longing as she—
She realized what was happening and slashed at the thought with venom.
Damn it! It was doing it again!
Furious now, she got up and splashed cold water on her hot face. No, she thought at it, summoning up images of ice and snow, of frozen rivers and chill grey skies. No, damn you!
You will not do that to me!
Half of her wanted to send him away, now, this instant.
Sending him away, perhaps to a Wizard, would be so much safer! She would never have to see him again, and surely there was someone she could trust with his education!
Half of her refused to even consider the idea of giving up.
It wasn’t only that she hated to concede that she had failed—which she hadn’t, not yet! It wasn’t only that now that she was looking into his past with Randolf, she had an idea that if she could just get past the arrogance and the assumption of superiority, there was something there that could be worked with. Well, look at Octavian! She would have been willing to bet that it was going to take until winter set in before he humbled himself to appear at Arachnia’s castle to offer himself as a kitchen-boy! But there he was, 302
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scrubbing pots, submitting himself to the insults of her cook—
“I think it was the Mirrormede,” Arachnia had said in her letter, brought by bat just last night. “He managed to find his way to the Mirrormede—you know, that naiad pool I have that shows people what they most need to see. About half the time it shows people the present, about a quarter of the time it shows them what other people think of them, and about a quarter of the time it shows them their future as it will be if they go on as they are. I don’t know what he saw in it, but whatever it was, it’s shaken him to the core.”
Whatever it was—and Elena had to wonder if it wasn’t a glimpse of the future—the image of him that Randolf showed her was a far cry from the arrogant Prince that had passed her by without a word. He was working as Arachnia’s lowest stablehand. He took the abuse that her coachman heaped on him without a word of complaint.
And he had begun to take notice of the timid little tweenie who served as the cook’s scullery-maid. If he was moved to protect her rather than abuse her himself, that would signal the moment when the ruse would be dropped and Arachnia would send him home.
So; it was clear that Julian was already a decent fellow.
It appeared that Octavian was good enough stock to have an unexpectedly swift redemption. So there was plenty of hope for Alexander.
Plenty of hope for such a handsome fellow, with such fine, broad shoulders and hard, strong body, with a face like a young god and hands that knew how to caress a—
STOP THAT!
Furious all over again, she stood up out of her chair and The Fairy Godmother
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gazed up at the ceiling. Without really thinking about it, she gathered her power around her, like storm clouds filled with the lightning of her anger. And she confronted The Tradition in her mind as if she was a Sorceress facing off against a Great Enemy of her own. “Now you can just listen to me right now,” she told The Tradition—and Anything or Anyone else that might overhear. “I will not go play the greensick goose-girl to suit your tales and your plans! You cannot seduce me with a pretty face. I am Godmother Elena, by all that’s holy, and I was Elena Klovis before that, me, myself, and no puppet to be danced about on a path you choose! I did not lie down for my stepmother to be Ella Cinders, and I will not lie down for a Prince with a handsome face! I refuse to be any man’s doxy, to be flung aside and forgotten!
I will be me, on my own terms, by my own rules, with my own plans and my own decisions!”
Everything went very still, then. Very, very still. Once again, Elena had the feeling of great power looming over her—but this time, it was waiting. Waiting for something.
Some direction, perhaps?
Whatever it was—it was certainly listening to her now.
Not even a breath of breeze stirred in the room. She realized that she could not hear anything outside the room—not the cackling of the chickens in the garden, not the House-Elves working inside or outside, not the birds in the sky nor the wind in the birches. The skin on the back of her neck prickled. Her back was to the window, but she wondered—if she dared to turn around and look, would she see the world going on as usual out there? Or would she see nothing at all?
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Something very odd, perhaps even unprecedented, was happening here. Godmother Bella had never, ever told her about anything like this—
She needed to say something. She knew that, as certain as the blood flowed in her veins. She felt it in her bones.
Something wanted—shaping.
Words are power in a magician’s mouth. Choose them carefully.
And yet—she always got her best results when she wasn’t too specific, when she let the power choose its own shape.
She took a deep breath. One by one, the words fell, carefully, from her lips. “A playfellow I’ll be, but no man’s toy.
A partner, helper, but no one’s servant nor slave. I will be captain of my fate, and commander of my destiny, though the path I may share and the course I chart be followed by others. What I have, I’ll share, but I’ll not give it over. What I am, I am, and I’ll not change it. What I will be, I will be, by my own will and no other. Now. Take that and make something of it!”
There was something like a great intaking of breath.
Something like a sigh.
Then the world gave a shake, like a dog, and dropped back to normal.
She wondered what she had bound—or what she had unleashed.
Alexander was getting used to waking up to find people standing over him, wearing unpleasant expressions. What he was not used to was finding people standing over him The Fairy Godmother
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holding a crude metal instrument in one hand that he happened to recognize.
Master Hob must have seen his eyes track immediately to that hand and what it held, because he smiled, grimly. “I assume ye know what this is, ye cream-faced loon?” he asked. “Happens I’m practiced in the use of it. Never seen any reason to keep jack or stallion around here, when a gelding’s so much steadier.”
A great shudder of horror convulsed Alexander as he stared at the hideous thing.
“And it’d be wise for ye to remember, my lad,” Master Hob continued, softly, but with great menace, “what happens to the ass happens to you.”
It felt as if a cold hand closed around his throat, and he nodded, slowly.
“Good. Now we understand each other.” Master Hob turned, but only to stow the dreadful object in the pocket of a leather apron hanging on a hook next to his stall. “She might be put out if she found I’d been altering ye, but it’d be too late by that time. She’d rather just keep you in the ass’s skin for longer; I take a more direct approach to the problem.”
He shuddered again. He had no doubt that the little man would follow through on the threat if it suited him.
“Now then, up with ye,” Master Hob continued. “And I doubt not ye’ve an aching head, and too bad. Mistress Lily needs help with her watering again.”
; So, aching head or no aching head, he got up and followed the little man back up to the cottage garden. It had been a long day; it was getting longer by the moment.
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* * *
It took two days before his fear wore itself out and his anger came back to the surface. He wanted to kill her. She had ruined his life; and that assumed he was ever going to have a life again, at least, a “life”
as he had known it.
No, he didn’t want to kill her, he wanted to humiliate her.
He wanted to see her crawl, wanted to see her humbled, wanted to see her made lower than the lowest whore in the cheapest tavern in the scummiest city in the Five Hundred Kingdoms.
And he didn’t dare touch her.
He might be many things, but “stupid” wasn’t one of them. The Unicorns never left her side anymore, two of them at a time. If he touched her, they’d kill him. If they didn’t kill him, her magic would knock him arse over end again. He didn’t care to repeat that experience.
The days were bad enough, slaving away in harness, sunup to sundown, angry thoughts buzzing around in his head like bees in a disturbed hive. The nights were worse.
He dreamed, at night. He dreamed of Julian, and nearly went mad with envy, seeing him ruling his new Kingdom, with his exquisite young bride at his side. It nearly made him sick, and yet he couldn’t hate Julian—that woman had made it quite clear that Julian had won his prize fairly, and if he was honest with himself (and in dreams, he had to be) he had to admit that given the nature of the trials, he would have lost. But bloody Hell! How it grated on him! It was only made worse when in those dreams, Julian proved himself to be a fairly good ruler. Not perfect; it was clear The Fairy Godmother
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enough from one or two of the decisions that Alexander saw that Julian had a lot to learn. But he was respected and admired by his underlings, and loved by his bride and his people.
He dreamed of Octavian, too, dreamed of him humbled as badly as Alexander was, slaving away in a stable in some grim, dark keep, eating whatever he could beg from the kitchen, cleaning filthy stalls. It shocked him, to see Octavian brought so low. It shocked him even more when he realized that (in his dreams, at least) Octavian believed that he deserved this terrible punishment.
And he dreamed of his father—seeing King Henrick as he had never seen him before; not a broken man, but a severely battered and lonely man, pale, silent, and grieving.
Two of his sons gone, the only one left being not at all the favored one. And in his way, Henrick feared to approach the only son that he knew he had left, fearing what that son would say to him, the father who had held him in scorn. No, the third son was not lost, but certainly out of reach, so far as Henrick was concerned. It cut Alexander to the heart to see his father in such a state, and in his dreams, he tried to reach out to the King, to tell him what had happened to all of his sons. But he was like a phantom; he could hear and see all, but no one could hear or see him.
He would awaken from these dreams in the middle of the night, sweating. If he had been a man, he could have wept, but he was a donkey, and beasts couldn’t cry. The best he could manage was a fit of dry, wheezing sobs that shook his bones and made him ache all over, and finally tired him out until he could sleep again.
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He hated everything at that point, including himself.
But most of all, he hated her.
He watched her as she went about her business, as she came and went from the cottage, sometimes garbed as richly as any queen, sometimes in the dress of the merely wealthy, but mostly in her peasant guise. He never knew where she was going, or what she was going to do when she got there, but at least twice she went out in a strange, colorful cart pulled by the oddest looking excuse for a horse he had ever seen. Even when she was gone, the work did not stop; her House-Elf minions acted exactly as they did when she was there to supervise them, and so, perforce, did he.
Finally, the seventh day arrived again, and he was back to being himself. For whatever good it did him. He couldn’t think of any new plans to get himself free, and the moment he was a man again, the Unicorns doubled their guard on her.
What was more, he discovered by making the attempt that the cottage wouldn’t allow him inside it. Literally. There was a barrier at the doors and windows that he not only could not cross, but could not see past. So trying to sneak in and catch her unawares (and de-unicorned) was not going to do him any good, either.
He wanted, with a physical ache, to go home.
He was reduced to throwing insults at her, but although Master Hob bristled and the Unicorns glowered, all she did was laugh. “In a contest of wit, your highness, I fear you are but half-armed,” she said, mockingly. “And you can call me whatever you like, if it makes you feel any better. Being The Fairy Godmother
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called a whore does not make me one, any more than calling Master Hob a giant makes him thirty feet tall.”
And she sailed off on some errand or other, leaving him seething and speechless.
It was almost a relief when night fell and he became a donkey again.
Another week began in anger, but something odd was happening to him as the days passed. There was nothing wrong with his physical energy, but—but he felt drained anyway. The moment he was left alone without anything to do, he found himself sinking into a dull lethargy. It took nearly three days before he realized what was wrong, and when he did, the realization of what was happening took him by surprise.
It was getting harder and harder to sustain his anger. It was as if he was blunting it against the rock of that woman’s indifference; she clearly did not care if he was angry, or in despair, or indeed, in any emotional state. She did not even care if he hated her.
For the first time in his life he was below someone’s notice. It did not matter to anyone here what he thought, of her or anything else. What his opinions were was of no more consequence to her than the price of corn in some far distant land. How could anyone sustain any emotion in the face of that?
He was never going home.
He was certain of that, now.
And no one would really miss him, either. To whom had he really endeared himself? Not to Octavian. Julian—well, perhaps, but Julian knew what had become of him, and if 310
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Julian had really cared, wouldn’t he have sent someone to come looking for him?
His father? But his father didn’t really know him; he was a cipher, the “spare,” useful if something happened to Octavian. He recalled the day he had graduated and come home, home to a room that looked like every other guest chamber in the Palace, to a father whose presents on any occasion had always been the same thing; books on military history with money tucked inside. His instructors at the Academy knew him better than his own father did. He had not had a good friend since Robert had died. In a month, he’d been given up on. In a year, people might remember him with the words, “poor Alexander.” In ten, you would not find one person in a hundred in Kohlstania who would remember he had even existed.
His bulwark of anger collapsed like a fortress of snow in the spring at that point.
Without it, he had nothing to sustain him. And he sank into a kind of insensate despair, saying nothing to Hob, doing what he was told, eating what was placed in his manger, more and more lost in a grey fog of apathy. He just could not muster the mental energy even to decide to go out in the meadow and eat grass instead of the hay that was in front of him.
When he woke as a man for the fourth time, he was still sunk in that state of despair, and even Hob noticed it when he came to fetch him for the morning’s work.
The little man looked at him sharply. For his part, Alexander just looked back at him, dully, without getting out of a sitting position.
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“What ails you?” the Brownie asked. “Sickening over some
thing?”
He shook his head. And why should you care? he thought.
Except that you would be able to go buy a beast that’s less trouble if I were to die. It occurred to him that perhaps he ought to ask that woman to leave him as a donkey from now on.
Surely getting lost in the beast would be better than this.
Hob gave him another look. “Even the lowest scut gets a half-day a month,” he said gruffly. “No working for you today.”
That penetrated his fug, and he raised his head a little.
“What?”
“Take it, ye green-goose, afore I change my mind,” the Brownie growled, and promptly turned on his heel and stomped off, leaving Alexander alone in the stable again.
No work? Then what was he supposed to do with himself?
He sat there for a long moment in the gloom—but the straw prickled him, and there were little rustlings of mice and insects that didn’t bother him as a beast, but made his skin crawl as a man. With a sigh, he got to his feet and wandered outside.
He looked around, for the first time, really looked around, at the cottage and its grounds lying quietly in the predawn.
There was a light mist lying along the ground, just at knee-height, giving the place an air of mystery. To his right lay the stone cottage, grey-walled and thickly thatched. The only signs of life were the birds twittering in the thatch around the windows. He knew from experience that it would not be until the sun actually rose that anyone would be stirring there.
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In front of him was the bare, hard dirt of the stableyard, though “yard” was a bit of a misnomer, as there was not a great deal of space there, just enough to turn a small cart around. To his left were the kitchen-gardens and beyond that, the drystone wall he had been working on.
So far, there didn’t seem to be anywhere to go.
Behind the cottage were some little sheds, the ricks of curing firewood, and the chopping block, where he would have been if Hob hadn’t ordered him to take a rest. That was no help.
In front of the cottage was a flower and herb garden, but he was hardly the sort to putter in a garden, even if it had been his.
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