On the island in the very middle of the chain was the largest port and city, which sloped up sharply over the foothills of a verdant mountain. There, at the very edge of the city, stood an enormous castle. It mimicked the shape of the mountains behind it, with needle-sharp towers and sharp lines throughout its architecture.
The area around the castle appeared to be comprised of orchards and fields before the castle, and thick dark impenetrable woods behind.
As we approached from a direction designed to keep us unnoticed the scent of an exotic perfumed forest filled my nostrils. It was a rich, heady scent, one that whispered of secrets and Magic.
And Magic, I could feel, was heavy in this place. Like the scent of the forest, it filled the air, the islands, the water. Everything was brimming to overflowing with Magic.
It was intoxicating and a little off-putting. It made me feel off-kilter and slightly delirious. Like juice turned to wine. Or cider gone hard in the heat. For the first time in my existence, I set to blocking myself off from most of the Magic I could feel. I had to, or I would end up completely overwhelmed.
With Magic like this around me, I might ask for a spark and get an entire volcano.
There was a happy thought.
As we drew even closer, down over the fields and orchards closest to the woods and furthest from the city, I realized something else. It puzzled me.
A kingdom like this, overflowing with an abundance of Magic, should have been thriving. Magic made the land fertile, it made fruit trees overproduce, it made fields greener and healthier.
But that wasn’t the case here.
Orionis should have been flowing with milk and honeycomb. It should have been an absolute paradise.
Instead, I could see the fruit was rotting on the trees un-ripened. The trees and crops appeared thin and sunburnt. The animals I passed in the fields were slab-sided and shaggy, listlessly picking at the dreary, dry grass that was all they had to eat.
It was as if someone had blocked the Magic from nourishing the land the way we Godparents were supposed to encourage it to do. There was enough Magic in the air here to make this kingdom flourish.
Instead, it was dying.
My unease at what I saw led me to leave my winged horses in a clearing in the woods behind the castle. I helped them unhitch from my carriage and let them go free. I could use Magic to call them when I needed them again.
I used my usual disguise. With a shawl over my head and a simple glamour to disguise my blue hair and skin, I could pass as any villager from the area around the castle.
Luck, or Magic, was with me, for once I found the road, I discovered I was not the only one heading up towards the castle. It appeared that the king here kept the castle gates open each day for petitioners from anywhere in the archipelago. This, it was whispered to me by an old man leading a donkey, was because the king was having troubles with his daughters. They disappeared every night, he told me, and returned every morning with shredded dancing shoes.
Well, that was how this spell worked. I was happy to hear something was going right.
As we approached the castle, my eyes were caught by the architecture of the castle. Up close, it was a peculiar blend of ancient, grayed stone and newer stone of a brilliant white. From what I could make of what I could see, this space had been an enormous fort of some sort before the castle had been built directly on top of it. The white portions of the castle looked very new.
I asked the old man about it, but he shook his head.
“This castle has always been here,” he said, eyeing me oddly. “I don’t see anything odd about the stones, myself.”
It was possible that, as a human, he couldn’t see the difference. If there was any sort of glamour set up here, he wouldn’t be able to see through it. I, on the other hand, was a fairy. Unless a glamour was purposely set to deceive fairies, I wouldn’t notice them at all.
It was simple enough for me to join the long line of petitioners who were trailing through the grand doors, across the courtyard, and more than halfway to the outer gates. Many of those in line, I was surprised to see, were accompanied by farm animals of various sorts. These were mostly fowl, but one portly woman and her husband had three loud pigs, who were rooting at the stones around them and screaming at any person who dared come too close.
The line moved surprisingly quickly. It became apparent very quickly that those who entered with livestock left empty-handed. And, if their expressions were any indication, unhappy.
“I have a family to feed,” I heard one woman murmur to her companion.
Her friend saw me looking at them and gave me a frightened look before grabbing the first woman’s arm and rushing away.
So, the king here was not a good king. This looked like the classic situation of taxes being too high, and a king living on fat while the rest of the kingdom starved.
That was not typical of this sort of situation.
Usually, the king with twelve daughters was a slightly controlling but mostly helpless sort of king. He was usually the sort of king who loved his land, loved his daughters, and was willing to listen to soldiers or vagabonds who might wish to speak to him.
What I was seeing did not fit this sort of king.
I found the old man I had spoken to on the road. He was growing more and more worried as time went on.
“How long have the king’s daughters been ruining their slippers at night?” I asked in a low voice.
He frowned slightly. “Eight? No ten years now. I remember because the youngest princess was eight years old when it all began, and her eighteenth birthday was celebrated five months ago now.”
Ten years?
That was way too long.
Usually this sort of spell resolved within two years, rarely longer, sometimes much faster.
At this stage there must have been dozens if not hundreds of candidates to play the role of spell-breaker. Where had they all disappeared to?
When I asked the old man, he shook his head. “There’s been a few, but they all failed and just… disappeared. No one has come close to solving the riddle. We keep hoping. Maybe it would make the king….” He eyed a soldier at the door who might have been close enough to listen in to our conversation and subsided.
I followed him into the castle. About twenty minutes later, the line moved up enough so that we could step into the great hall, where the king sat on an enormous throne.
He was tall and enormously fat. His velvet doublet stretched to the breaking point across his massive belly. His legs, dressed in hose, were like tree trunks. I thought his calves might be padded, as was the fashion in some kingdoms, but on him it only made him look more swollen and grotesque.
I had seen enormous men who were handsome and jolly. This king was neither. He looked decidedly ill, with a strange sheen to his skin that suggested something chronic. His hands rested on his belly. Each beringed finger was like a pale bloated sausage.
He was extremely fair of skin. I did not think that was just the pallor of illness. His cheeks were bright red, but the rest of his complexion was milk white, if not so creamy. He looked nothing like his golden-skinned, strong-featured subjects.
I stepped to one side as the line continued on. There was an audience here, so I didn’t look out of place. I gnawed on my lips and studied the king.
He did not belong here. I didn’t know if it was my gut or Magic that screamed it, but I knew that I was right. This king was an outsider. He did not care about the wellbeing of his people, because he was not one of them. He did not love these lands and this culture. He drank their life’s blood because he had no stock in their survival.
Belatedly I realized the twelve shadows behind him, hidden in a sort of alcove, were the twelve princesses. Unlike the king, many of them had the cast and features of the locals. Perhaps their mother had been from this kingdom, and only the king was a transplant from elsewhere.
No one, I realized, looked at the princesses at all. They were too frightened to lo
ok away from the king. They bowed and scraped and pled in front of him.
Then I saw someone standing at the king’s elbow. I leaned forward, trying to get a better look at this person, who had to be an advisor of some sort.
My movement must have caught the advisor’s eye. He stared right at me for a moment. He leaned down to whisper in the king’s ear, and the king looked right at me.
I had a feeling it was time for me to go.
Chapter Seven
*Present Day*
Maybe it was because I’d followed the princesses to the ball. The princesses who were not princesses. Maybe I’d pushed my body too hard.
Whatever the reason, by the time dawn came once more, I was raging with fever. It only took an hour to go from sitting by the fire to collapsing in a shivering puddle on the hard stone floor.
I’d never been sick. I’d never had a fever before. Maybe, if I’d had one, I would have felt the warning signs of what was to come. Maybe I would have rested more. Maybe I would have drawn more attention to the increasingly sharp pain in my side and the aches all over my body.
A couple of the not-princesses tucked me back into the cot in the tiny cell-like room. With what awareness I had, I felt guilty about stealing Gilbert’s bed. I was in no condition to argue, though. I slipped quickly into a half-conscious delirium. Flashes of the dancing I’d spent the night watching seemed to pass over what I could see in the room, mixing the images together until I could not separate the past from the present or this tiny dark cubby of a room from the opulent ballroom bursting with light. My entire body hurt. It ached. My skin felt like it was being pierced by a thousand needles.
I was so cold. I kept reaching for a blanket, but hands slapped at me and kept it from my reach. Instead, icy-cool cloths pressed against my skin. They hurt. My whole body shivered until I ached all over, but still I couldn’t seem to get warm.
“This is bad,” I heard a voice say. In my confusion, I thought it was Dallan speaking. I tried to answer him, but when I opened my eyes, only two worried girls looked down at me.
“Where’s Dallan?” I asked them.
They just shook their heads.
“Who is Dallan?” I thought one of them asked, but I lost my grip on the room and the dancers swept across me again, dragging me into their bloody-footed dance. I tried to make them let me go, but they just laughed at me and spun me around until I was dizzy.
Their laughter screamed in my ears as I fell to the floor. The whole ballroom felt like it was shaking. The floor jumped out from under me, tossing me the way I’d once been tossed by the ocean.
“I need a mermaid to rescue me,” I said out loud.
Silence greeted my words.
“Is she…” someone whispered.
“It’s bad,” a grim voice responded.
I leaned over and vomited all over the floor.
“Is that… blood?” The first voice sounded frightened. “I’m going to go get Caroline. She’ll know what to do.”
I heard the door open and shut again quickly.
“Do you think you can drink some water?”
I turned my head towards the voice and managed to sip down some of the cool, clear liquid. It rinsed some of the foul taste from my mouth.
“Not too much or you’ll just be sick again,” my helper said. “How are you feeling?”
“C-c-cold,” I told her, my teeth clacking against each other like wooden practice swords.
“You’re burning up,” she told me. “We need to get your temperature down.”
I closed my eyes. I knew she was still talking to me, but I was too tired and too drained to listen. I wanted to sleep, but everything was too loud and my body would not stop shaking. I had to clench my teeth together to keep them from chattering. Even then, my jaw and head shook.
Why were they trying to freeze me to death? Was this torture? What did that expect to learn?
“This isn’t torture,” a gentle voice murmured. Icy hands touched my forehead and face. “You’re sick.”
“I can’t be sick,” I scoffed. “I’m a fairy.”
“Even fairies can get fevers if they are hurt badly enough,” Caroline told me firmly. “They might just succeed in killing you after all.”
“Who?” I asked. “Was it my parents?”
Silence greeted my words.
“Why would you ask that?” someone asked. Not Caroline. Leigh, I thought.
“I just make them so mad,” I mumbled. I reached for a blanket, but there wasn’t one there. I was so cold. So horribly cold.
The firm, icy hands prodded my side.
I screamed. “She has a knife! Don’t stab me! I’m just here to help!”
My heart seemed to be pounding too fast, too loudly. The room was dim, but it was growing dimmer around the edges. There, on the furthest edge, I thought I could see Dallan standing. He turned towards me and shook his head. “What are you doing, Grace?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. They tell me I’m sick. They keep stabbing me.”
His eyebrows dropped ominously. “They’re stabbing you? Who? Where are you?”
“I think,” I said very clearly, “I might be dying.”
Someone in the room said a very bad word.
I tried to shake my finger at them. “That word is forbidden for Godmothers,” I scolded.
Someone laughed in a choked sort of way. “I’m not a Godmother.”
“Oh.” I closed my eyes. “I guess that’s fine, then.”
“Caroline?” Leigh whispered.
“Quickly,” she answered. “We need to talk to the others. This has to be decided by all of us.”
The door closed and I was alone.
“I’m here, Godmother,” a gentle voice said.
Gabriel, I remembered. I was stealing his bed and his room. I tried to apologize.
“They’re going to fix you,” he said. “Try to hold on for a little while longer.”
I tried to ask him where, exactly, I was going to go, but another wave of profound exhaustion stole my words from him. It was harder to breathe, now. My chest felt tight. My blood felt… slow and heavy. My heart shouted through my head, making my head ring.
I drowned there in misery for what felt like an eternity. I knew I should let go, let myself sleep, but something wouldn’t let me. I couldn’t remember who or what. I just knew that I couldn’t. Let. Go.
Slowly, I slipped further and further into that darkness. I stopped shivering. My body felt heavy, strange. It felt foreign to me, like a husk I should just shake off.
Just as I was deciding to do just that, a blinding light reached out and embraced me.
Warmth flowed through my veins. Pain fled before the advance of the light. I cried out in agony and relief, both wishing to embrace the light and wanted to flee from it. It was so bright, so pure, it was just too much.
The light grabbed hold of me and dragged me back to the surface. I could feel my skin again, taste the breath passing through my lips. I drew another deep breath, just to feel the sensation again.
I opened my eyes and saw the unicorn.
In the darkness, the creature’s coat was a brilliant, glowing white, like the moon glistening in a velvet midnight. But that other sensation, that place where I communicated with Magic, was filled with even more light. This was a creature of purity, of goodness, of healing.
What was it doing here?
Healing me, it turned out.
“A unicorn can only heal a creature who is pure of heart,” someone said. “I guess she was telling the truth.”
“Yes,” Caroline agreed. “Or she would be dead right now with a horn through her heart.”
I wiggled my fingers and toes. I opened and stretched my mouth and shifted my head on my neck. I felt different. Good, but different.
“You were at death’s door,” Caroline said, stepping past the unicorn to help me sit partway up. She handed me a cup of water. Even though it had seemed icy cold before, now it was tepid.
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br /> “There’s a unicorn,” I said. I couldn’t take my eyes off the magnificent creature. I had always wanted to meet one, but I’d never had the opportunity. Unicorns were shy. They could not tolerate deception or cruelty or selfishness. Because of that, they didn’t spend much time around fairies.
The unicorn was taller than I’d expected, and more delicate. Its face was bearded and shaped somewhere between a particularly sculpted equine and an exotic type of antelope, though slightly more equine than not. It had a long, arching neck covered with a silver-white seafoam-like mane. In the middle of its forehead, a perfect white horn twisted like an ancient olive tree up to a sharp point.
The unicorn’s eyes were full of stars, deeper than the night sky, and overflowing with terrible compassion.
I wanted to weep and throw myself to the floor. It was too beautiful, too perfect, too good. I could not stand to have it look at me.
“Asclepias,” Caroline said gently. “You’re overwhelming her.”
In response, the unicorn tossed its head, but the moonglow surrounding it dimmed to a bearable level.
“Why did you heal me?” I asked. “You don’t trust me.”
Caroline snorted softly. “What’s a better test of a person’s heart than the touch of a unicorn? Would you have had us let you die?”
Dallan’s face flickered through my mind, but I shook it away. “No,” I said. “Of course not. It’s just… obviously you have secrets here. It would have been safer to let me die, I would think.”
Caroline arched a neat eyebrow at me. “If you weren’t standing in the presence of this unicorn, I would almost think you were threatening me.”
“Far from it,” I hurried to assure her. “I know the importance of secrets, and I will keep this one.”
The unicorn snorted and tossed its head again.
“Thank you for healing me,” I said, bowing to the unicorn gingerly. As I realized my pain was entirely gone, I managed a deeper bow than I’d originally attempted.
“You are completely healed,” Leigh said from the doorway, obviously stifling a laugh. I thought it might be from relief. “Unicorns purify what they touch. You’re probably healthier now than you’ve ever been.”
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