Stinking Beauty

by Elizabeth A Reeves

  “It would be useful if evidence just popped up out of nowhere, wouldn’t it?” I asked.

  Magic swirled around me and I nearly tripped over something it deposited at my feet.

  My hopes that the twins had missed this event was ruined when I looked up and found them staring at me yet again.

  Dallan strode over and bent to pick up the hand-sized object from the ground.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Some sort of insignia,” Dallan said, turning the object upside down and back as if it could tell him more. He handed it, past me, to his sister.

  She stared down at it. “It’s definitely a badge or insignia,” she said. “I don’t recognize the kingdom, though.”

  I cleared my throat. It was undignified to hop up and down, and that was the only chance I would have of seeing what they were looking at. Being short was so frustrating sometimes.

  “Is now a good time to mention that Magic brought it to me and it might have some sort of significance to me that it doesn’t to you? After all, wouldn’t have Magic brought it to you if it was meaningful to you?”

  Astraea sighed and handed the fabric over to me.

  It was a patch of some sort of stout material as if it had come off of a cloak or something similar, perhaps even part of a horse’s tack. It was stitched with blue and silver and white, in the shapes of a snowflake and a howling wolf.

  “Hmm,” I said. “I don’t recognize the exact kingdom, but if I remember properly it’s in the north. If I could see a map, I’m pretty sure I could point it out.”

  “She sees snowflakes and thinks north, how clever,” Dallan muttered under his breath as he turned back to the carriage.

  I stifled a laugh.

  “I have seen the crest before,” I promised. “I just get all the Northern Realm kingdom names mixed up. Some of them have way too many vowels and others have too many consonants. I was not good at geography in school.”

  “Well, you recognized it and we didn’t,” Astraea pointed out. She followed her brother back towards the carriage. “Are we even carrying a map?”

  Dallan gave us a distracted look. “No. I thought we would check out Brunhild’s house. We need to look it over anyway and I know she had an excellent library.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “Unless you object?”

  “Why would I…?” I started before I caught on. “Oh, right, because it’s supposed to be mine now. Of course, you can come to look it over. I don’t know what condition the library will be in. The Keep was ransacked the last time I looked.”

  Flit let out a smug peep and I caught an image in my head of dragons working to clean up the mess that had been left behind by intruders.

  I scratched his head. “Thanks, buddy.”

  The twins looked at me inquiringly.

  “Flit was letting me know that I had visitors that helped clean up the mess,” I said, quickly. “They were friends of Brunhild’s.”

  Keep it simple, I reminded myself. A long, involved story usually was a warning sign that someone was hiding something. I had agreed to keep the dragons secret. Unless they decided to expose themselves to the twins, I wouldn’t say a word.

  “Clever of you to make friends with a lesser dragon,” Dallan said. “They’re smarter than people realize and can be loyal to a fault.”

  Flit cheeped again, preening himself. I could feel his pride at being recognized for being special.

  I felt a grin spread across my face in response to his antics. He made a purring sound in response to my scratches and leaned against my hand harder.

  “Brunhild’s Keep isn’t that far from here, as the horse flies,” Dallan announced. “Come, on, let’s pile in here and get going.”

  I gave Flit one last scratch. “Do you want to fly ahead and warn your friends?” I murmured to him under my breath.

  In response, he spread his wings and leaped from my shoulder. With a display of aerial acrobatics, he took to the sky and disappeared.

  “Flit will join us there, he knows the way,” I said as I climbed back into the coach. Astraea, I was happy to see, was already digging into her basket for a snack.

  The weather, as the carriage took to the sky, was already shifting, though less violently than we had experienced in Gilterra. The damp, chilly wind fought against the carriage as we traveled west, towards Brunhild’s Keep.

  The ride was bumpier than usual. I worried about the winged horses pulling us, but the twins reassured me that they were protected by Magic and, if things got too troublesome, they would land if safety demanded it.

  “Magic is a useful tool if you use it appropriately,” Astraea said pointedly. “The only reason we had the horses taken to the barn in Gilterra is because, no matter how safe they are, horses don’t like seeing things flying at their heads. I’ve never met a horse who didn’t hate getting his ears wet.”

  I wondered how Freja’s winged cats handled getting rained on. If horses hated getting their ears wet, most cats hated getting wet altogether.

  We landed in front of Brunhild’s Keep. The wind buffeted the carriage as we stepped out. I pulled my cloak around me and glanced at the surrounding trees. There wasn’t a raven in sight anywhere. I hoped they had taken shelter somewhere safe.

  It was growing dark, but that might have just been the approaching storm. I hurried up to the great doors of the Keep. To my surprise, they swung open at my touch.

  “Seems the Keep recognizes you as its new master,” Astraea said, stepping inside and taking off her cloak. She set it on a bench near the doorway and wandered further into the great building. “Majestic, isn’t it? I don’t know if I’d call it cozy, though.”

  “I like it,” I said.

  “Good thing, if you are going to be living here.” Astraea chafed her gloved hands against her arms. “It is a bit chilly. Let’s find the library and get a fire started, yet?”

  I nodded in agreement, though I had no idea where the library would be. Flit appeared at that moment and chittered past my head, winging down one wide, winding hallway.

  “This way, I suppose,” I said, following him as quickly as I could.

  “Oh, yes,” Astraea marveled as we walked through the hallway, passing rows of doors, some shut, but others opening into great, arching rooms. “If you can awaken this house’s spirit, it could be such a masterpiece.”

  If waking my house’s spirit meant that I could interact with it the way the twins did with theirs, I would be happy to make an attempt. Right now, the idea of maintaining this huge old building was intimidating, to say the least.

  Flit darted back every time he disappeared from sight, making sure that he hadn’t lost us in the shadows.

  We followed him, turning from one hallway onto another. One thing was clearly different from my last visit, the mess the intruders had left behind was cleaned up so completely it appeared as if there had never been any damage. Even tapestries I’d noted as burnt had been replaced.

  I reminded myself to thank the dragons when I had the change. I would have found a way to clean everything up, but they had made that unnecessary.

  A large blue door stood at the end of the hallway Flit had led us down. The door was easily twice Dallan’s hide and made from a strange wood that appeared to be blue in the grain, not just painted that color. When I touched it, it swung open as lightly as if it had been made from a feather.

  I wondered at the craftsmanship of the house. Who had been the architect? Who had built it? I thought I could recognize dwarfish handiwork in some places, but others were styles that I did not recognize as from our world.

  Brunhild had been ancient, even by fairy standards. I wondered just how many secrets she had kept here.

  And if I was the new secret keeper.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Ah, look,” Dallan said, entering the room before I did. “A map.”

  I looked. Sure enough, there was an enormous map of our world on one wall, between two enormous shelves packed with books. The entire room
was shaped like a giant egg, with a dome in the center, and all sides filled with shelves and reaching up impossibly high, warning me that the room was much larger than it at first seemed.

  “I do believe we are underground,” Astraea said softly. “What a remarkable library. There are lifetimes stored in this place.”

  What she was voicing fell very close to my feelings about this place. It was intimidating, from sheer size and architecture, with gold glinting from the accents around us, to the sheer number of volumes on those shelves. Goosebumps rose on my skin at the thought of the sheer amount of work those books represented.

  We walked closer to the wall with the map, our feet scuffing against the musty-smelling rugs beneath our feet. As we walked, fairy lights came to life around us, illuminating the space with their haunting glow. The further we walked, the more it seemed that the library itself was waking up to greet us.

  “Majestic,” Dallan breathed, as if the words were being forced out of him.

  I was too in awe to be able to speak. I focused on the map, just to give my eyes one place to anchor on. It appeared to have been made out of powdered gemstones for the pigment, at least that’s how it appeared with the way the map glittered and sparkled in the fairy lights.

  Flit danced past the map and landed on a bar above it that appeared to have been placed there for just that purpose. He flipped his wings back onto his back and watched us curiously as we studied the map.

  “It looks like it was made centuries ago,” Astraea said, her voice soft with awe. “However, there are kingdoms marked here that I know have only appeared in the last century.”

  “I suspect it is spelled to refresh its knowledge regularly,” Dallan said. “Brunhild would have connected it to the ether of the world as a whole to keep it accurate. It’s an incredible piece of spellcraft.”

  It was funny, I had spent so much of my life fighting against being a Godparent that I hadn’t seen the possibilities that it held within it. I’d believed that I’d walked away from art and creativity, but here was one of the most remarkable pieces of both art and Magic that I had ever witnessed.

  I didn’t have to do Godparenting the way my family did it.

  It was a simple thought, but it rocked my back on my heels. I could do this job my way, without compromising everything that I’d worked so hard on being as an individual. I could be me, and be a good Godmother at the same time.

  It made the air feel fresher in my lungs. I hadn’t realized how much I resented being forced into Godparenting. Now that I could see it from a different perspective, it did seem like such a horrible way to spend my life.

  Flit turned his head towards me as if he could hear my thoughts. I could almost imagine that he was smiling at me, but that was silly. Dragons, no matter what their size, did not smile.

  “What’s that expression?” Astraea asked.

  I smiled at her. “I think I just had a midlife epiphany. Ever have one of those?”

  She laughed. “Every few centuries. They keep getting better as I go.”

  I wondered again, for a moment, just what kind of being the twins were. Fairies were used to living for practically forever, but we were only truly young the first two centuries of life, after that we aged at the rate of about one century being equal to about a decade of human life.

  But Astraea spoke of centuries far beyond what I’d experienced, and she looked no older than I did. And, if she did look my age, it was only because her eyes held such a mature expression. Both of the twins had an air of agelessness about them.

  Not me. I felt every one of my four centuries. I was a midlife fairy, whether I liked it or not.

  While Dallan studied the map, I caught Astraea staring at me.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Why didn’t you ever have a family?” she asked curiously. “You’re pretty and you’re funny.”

  “Neither one of those is a prerequisite for a successful relationship,” I pointed out. “When I first left home, I had somebody, but it didn’t work out… I guess he was more in love with the idea of my family than me. You know how it is.”

  Astraea sighed. “Hardly. No, I don’t know what that’s like. I haven’t had a date in… well, longer than you’ve been alive.”

  I stared at her.

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m a rare creature, and super powerful, Grace. I’m practically like dating a unicorn. Very few males are willing to take on all the baggage of being with a superiorly intelligent creature who could snap her fingers and incinerate his… bits.

  I choked on a laugh. “You did not just say that!”

  She grinned wickedly. “Sure, I did. Not that I ever had to. Every male I’ve met, other than my own brother, has been too intimidated to even take a risk, let alone to get to know me well enough to get angry about anything.” She shrugged.

  “Well, I’ve had no luck, either,” I pointed out. “The fairy I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with pretending to support me for the first century. Then, about fifty years ago I found out that he’s been seeing someone the whole time we were supposedly together. That’s it, the sum total of my relationship experience. You’d think Magic would make things easier, but I don’t see that we’re doing any better than the humans were supposedly watching over.

  She patted my shoulder in solidarity.

  “Here it is!” Dallan announced, winging his way back to us. I stood still for a moment in shock. I’d never seen Dallan completely without his cloak before this moment, so I had never really registered his wings. They weren’t fairy wings at all, but not feathered like my uncle, Ferdie’s either. His wings were like a dragon’s, strong and scaled. The wings were shaped like a bird’s wings, but with three sections of structure with a much finer, nearly transparent, sort of membrane between the bony sections. They were nearly black, but with an underlying shimmering sheen of color like a raven’s wings.

  Astraea laughed, “Aren’t they something? He hates them, but I think they’re majestic.”

  I raised my eyebrows, “are yours like his?”

  She shrugged back the fabric of her gown, which had hidden her wings from view even after she removed her cloak. I drew in a breath of awe. Her wings were a white and nearly transparent version of her twin’s. Where the membrane of the wings was nearly transparent, it cast rainbows in every direction.

  “Oh, I want wings like those,” I said without thinking.

  Astraea laughed, but Dallan gave me a strange look. “You don’t think they’re hideous?”

  I gaped at him. “No! What would make you say such a thing?”

  “Dallan hates his wings,” Astraea said bluntly. “He always has. They’re different, as you can see, and he’s always felt being different more than I have.”

  Dallan shot her a dark look.

  “I think they’re incredible, truly,” I told him. “They’re like a dragon’s, but so delicate and strong and… iridescent like a raven’s wings… they’re a work of art!”

  His face softened when he looked at me, but then he turned back to the map. “Do you want to hear what I’ve discovered, or are we going to talk about wings?”

  I knew he hadn’t meant to be cruel, but his words cut me cruelly. I was always aware of my wingless state. I didn’t need other people reminding me that I didn’t have wings and, at this stage of the game, unlikely to earn any.

  “Grace,” Astraea said softly.

  “Forget it,” I said, stiffening my shoulders and raising my chin. “It’s not like I haven’t heard a dig at my expense before. I’m used to it. Let’s see what the map says.”

  Dallan turned towards me, his face horrified, but I didn’t care what he might try to say. I was hurt, yes, but I was mostly mad and embarrassed. I needed a moment, but I didn’t have time to take one, not with Princess Talia missing.

  “Go on, show me what you found,” I said, my voice sounding harsh and strange in my own ears, but it was the best I could muster at the moment.

  Astra
ea muttered something about an unfeeling clod.

  “You were right that the kingdom is in one of the Northern territories,” Dallan said, his back stiff. “It’s called Nynorsk, and the badge we found matches the emblem of the royal family there.”

  “So, we need a book on Nynorsk,” I said out loud, looking out at all those shelves and wondering how I was going to ever find anything I needed in such an overabundance of knowledge.

  Thankfully, my old friend Magic was listening. A book landed with a solid thud at my feet.

  I couldn’t help but smile. “Thanks, Magic,” I said gratefully. If it had been corporeal and standing in front of me, I would have hugged it.

  I picked up the book and started flipping through it. Most of it was written in some runic language, but, a few pages in, I was able to find something I could read.

  “’ Nynorsk is outside of most typical traditions, as the climate and people don’t lend themselves well to the process,’” I read out loud. I read a little further to myself “Apparently, the closest thing they have to a tradition is a long history of Queens dying or being murdered at an extremely young age. Alarmingly, the current king is on wife five, and he’s only thirty years old.”

  I looked down at the volume in my hands respectfully. Apparently, the map wasn’t the only part of this library that updated itself regularly.

  That was a truly useful trait for a book.

  “That badge was there for a reason,” Astraea said. “But we’re going to need support from the Fairy Council if we are going to venture that far north. The kingdoms up there don’t always acknowledge the sovereignty of fairies and, well… us.”

  “Because they know it’s too cold for most people to bother,” I said. “So, what’s the next step?”

  “We take this information to the council,” Dallan said seriously. “And let them decide what the next step is.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  We ended up not being able to go to the council buildings until the next morning. By the time we left Brunhild’s Keep, it was far too late to expect any of the council members to be willing to listen to what we had to say.