"And that's just the wolves. There's other things in there you'd rather not learn about." The little man slapped him on the rump. Alexander elected not to protest the insult to his dignity. "So be a good little Prince and stay where I've left you."
Only then did the little man walk out, leaving Alexander alone again. Only now he had a full stomach, and the ability to pick a clean spot to lie down in, and when he did so, he slept the dreamless sleep of the utterly spent.
It was Alexander's fourth day of working for the little man, whom he learned he was supposed to refer to as "Master Hob," and he ached in every limb.
He had thought, when he underwent his training as a knight, that he had worked hard. He had certainly exercised until he was ready to drop, and he had certainly gone from dawn to dusk — but it was not this bad. He had thought that he had exerted himself when he had been in the military academy. And he had indeed done hours of drilling in all weathers, but that had been nothing compared to this.
They had gone out every single day at dawn and he had spent every morning hauling deadfall out of the forest. This meant that he was hitched to a tree, and had to pull and strain until he pulled it loose from the undergrowth, then had to drag it all the way back to the cottage, where the little man unhitched it at the woodpile. Then they went back after another tree.
Then, after a break for a meal, he spent every afternoon but one hauling stones to build a wall — the one he did not spend in hauling stones, he spent hitched to a cart on a trip to and from some village nearby. Relatively nearby, that is; he had never before appreciated the difference between being the one doing the riding or driving, and being the one doing the pulling.
Then, after a final meal, he spent each evening until twilight with panniers over his back, in the company of someone he was supposed to call "Mistress Lily," tramping about in the forest again, this time so that Mistress Lily could pick wild herbs and berries and bits of things he couldn't identify.
He had to admit that the little man worked just as hard as he did — he was the one hacking the brush away from the fallen trees, hitching them to the harness, and guiding them, and he walked the entire way. He was the one piling the stones into the garden cart, dumping them at the wall, and building the dry-stone wall himself. And it hadn't been Master Hob who had driven the cart to the village, it had been a second little woman whose name he did not know, for Master Hob had been busy with some other task.
If this sort of thing was easy work, he did not want to contemplate what the peasants outside of the grounds of the cottage would do with him if they caught him trying to escape.
But his memory was giving him some hints, with bits of recollection of things he hadn't paid a lot of attention to at the time. Donkeys with bundles strapped to their backs to the point where it was hard to see anything but four staggering legs and a nose. Donkeys hitched to carts that a warhorse would have been hard put to move. Donkeys so thin you could have played a tune on their ribs, their patchy hides showing raw, rubbed places and sores where flies had been feasting on them. He'd seen these poor beasts, often enough, in the streets of Eisenberg, the capital of Kohlstania, and in Polterkranz, the city where the military academy had been. He'd seen them, and his eyes had skimmed right over them. He certainly hadn't done anything about them.
He had plenty of time to think about them now; hauling things didn't take a lot of mental concentration. Why did you look right past us? said those sad, reproachful eyes in his memory. Why did you ignore us? Why didn't you help us?
But they were just donkeys, brute beasts, he tried to rationalize. They weren't men, they hadn't been men! They couldn't suffer as I am suffering!
Oh, no? replied that other, hateful voice in the back of his mind. Really? And it would force him to remember those thin bodies, those sores, those hopeless, glazed eyes.
Those thoughts, well, plagued him like the flies he'd been cursed with until another little man, this one called "Master Robin," had come out with a bottle of something that Master Hob had rubbed into his hair and hide. It smelled sharply of herbs, but whatever it was, it kept the flies away.
Nothing kept the thoughts away.
Nor was that all; it was only when he hurt the most that he thought about those donkeys. When he was resting, other thoughts swarmed him. What was his father thinking? Julian's palfrey must have gotten home by now. Riderless, with cut reins. What was the King thinking? What was he doing? Had he sent out riders to look for Julian — to ask after Octavian and Alexander? If he had, he would have found only that their trail stopped at the forest, and he could scour the forest all he liked, but he'd find no trace of any of the three of them.
Would he send to King Stancia? If he did, he'd find out that Julian, at least, was there. What was going on for Julian? Were the trials of the Glass Mountain over? Had he won the girl and the throne, or had he already started his defeated way homeward? And what would he tell their father, in either case?
The questions buzzed in his head like the flies, and tormented him. They were his last thoughts before he went to sleep at night, and his first thoughts when he awoke in the morning. There were other questions too, but they were not as urgent —
Still, when his mind wearied of going around and around in the same fruitless track, they did float to the surface. Just who — and what — was this "Fairy Godmother" person? What did she want with him? It wasn't ransom, or anything else he could understand. It wasn't some sick desire to see him suffer, because she was never around, or at least, never around him. What did she want? What did she think she would gain from keeping him in the shape of a donkey? If she was this powerful a magician, what in heaven's name was she doing in this cottage out in the middle of nowhere? Why wasn't she ruling a Kingdom herself? It made no sense!
It all made his head ache — and none of it stopped the anger inside him from building, either. He worked it out during the day by throwing himself into the tasks he'd been given, but it burned in him all the time.
Such was the state of his mind and heart when, on the morning of the seventh day of his captivity, he woke — slowly, as ever, in the thin grey light of predawn — to find that he was himself again.
And the mysterious "Godmother" was standing over him, magic wand in her hand.
Chapter 13
H e lay there, staring up at her stupidly for a moment. His vision was a bit foggy, and more than a bit distorted; he had trouble focusing until he realized that his eyes were now on the front of his head, not the sides. He shook his head, trying to make his mind wake up. Then, of all the ridiculous things to be worried about, his first reaction was of horror — that he had come back as a man and was now lying there naked in front of her, at her feet, like some sort of — of —
Naked slave boy? the voice in the back of his mind suggested slyly.
But in the next moment, relief washed over him, for no, he was exactly as he had been when he was transformed into an ass in the first place. He was still wearing the same clothing, in fact, though it was a bit worse for wear.
He blinked again, his eyes still having trouble focusing. And the feeling of having only two legs again was extremely disorienting.
"Wake up, your highness," she said, prodding him in the ribs with a toe, her tone of voice making the honorific sound very sarcastic. "I can't leave you a donkey forever, much as I would like to. If I do, you'll become more ass and less man with every passing day. Not that you weren't an ass already," she added matter-of-factly, "but it was a rather different sort of ass."
He really wasn't thinking as she was speaking; he was really still waking up, right up until the moment she finished talking to him. Then, with a jolt, his mind started working.
And he didn't exactly think. Instead he reacted in the way he had fantasized he would in the first hours of his captivity.
He leaped to his feet.
He meant to lunge at her, at this vile Witch who had ruined his life. He had done it so many times in his mind, he would throw her to
the ground and truss her up, then demand that she restore him his possessions and send him home —
But his balance was all wrong. His legs didn't work right. But after tripping and falling, he scrambled to his feet again, anyway.
He made a grab for her —
— and there was a sort of bang, and a flash of light —
— and he found himself flat on his back in the straw with a monumental headache.
"As I was saying," the woman said, calmly, but with an edge to her voice, and her blue eyes flashing with suppressed anger. "I can't leave you in the donkey-skin for more than a few days without your mind becoming more donkeylike." She looked down at him and shook her head. "Not that it would be a huge difference, apparently. So once a week or so, you'll get to be a man for a day and — "
He leaped to his feet for a third time, despite pain in his head that threatened to send him to his knees. This time he didn't make the mistake of trying to attack her; instead, he just shoved blindly past her and ran.
He blundered into the wall of the stable, but the clean, chill air braced him, and he staggered a few more paces, then broke into a real run, his steps growing more sure with every moment.
In the thin grey predawn light, he got his bearings by the cottage. He could get away; the Witch hadn't a prayer of catching him. After all, he knew the forest around here, now. He even knew how to get to the village. And while the villagers might not treat an enchanted donkey with any consideration, they couldn't ignore the demands of a Prince of Kohlstania!
He sprinted down the path to the cottage, then leaped the low stone wall around the garden and pelted for the road. In a moment, he'd be in the forest, under the trees, and she didn't have a horse to chase him on, nor did she have a hound to track him with. He —
— found himself pelting down the path to the stable.
He whirled, and reversed himself, running this time for the forest itself rather than the road. There must be some sort of spell on the road; fine, he'd get into the forest and get onto the road again later, he'd get to the village that way. That would be even better! She couldn't possibly find him in the forest and —
— he found himself running down the path to the stable.
"So, how many tries you going to make before you figure it out, boy?" asked a voice to his right. He stopped, and looked. The little woman called Lily stepped out from between two blackberry canes, her head, crowned by a flat straw hat, bobbing with suppressed laughter. "You reckon we're all as big a set of fools as you are? It's you the enchantment's on, not the path, nor the forest. You can't leave here unless the Godmother lets you."
He heard footsteps coming towards him, and saw the Witch emerging from the stable and walking towards him in a leisurely fashion, a smug smile on her face. And rage completely overcame him.
He seized a pointed stake supporting a plant and yanked it out of the ground; he hadn't intended to kill her before, but this was clearly war, and none of the laws of chivalry applied! And if he couldn't touch her, he was a prize-winner at the spear and javelin —
He pulled his arm back to impale her at the same time he caught a kind of silvery flash out of the corner of his eye.
And suddenly, he found himself looking at something very sharp, the tip of which was less than an inch from his eye.
It was the shining silver tip of a Unicorn's horn.
He clutched at his improvised spear, wondering if he could manage to duck under the threatening horn to kill it before it killed him —
There was a second flash, and a second Unicorn in his path. This one was braced to charge, and the tip of its horn was pointed somewhat lower than the first's. Very much lower.
He gulped, and his hands clenched hard on the stake.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," said the first Unicorn, its voice hard and angry.
"That's right. You aren't a virgin," the second said, in a tone of accusation. Then it snickered. "But try it, go ahead, and you'll wish you were."
His mind raced for a moment. What did being a virgin have to do with —
Oh.
Of course. Unicorns were not only held spellbound by virgins, but they were the protectors of virgins.
He remembered the things in the night-shrouded garden, the conversation he'd overheard. So — the Witch was a virgin?
Not a big surprise, he thought sullenly, if this is how she treats real men.
He dropped the stake, and the Unicorn imperiling his eyeball backed away a pace or two, without dropping its threatening posture. The Witch came up even with the second Unicorn, and placed a hand on its shoulder.
Oh, yes. The bitch is a virgin, all right.
It would have been funny, under other circumstances, to see how the Unicorn tried simultaneously to melt under the Witch's touch and maintain its threatening posture towards Alexander. She would have been attractive, under other circumstances. He wouldn't have minded tumbling her if he found her serving as pot-girl in an inn. But at the moment —
"Now, if I may continue," the woman said, one hand absently petting the Unicorn's neck, "you will be permitted to wear your shape as a man from sunrise to sunset, when you will become an ass again." He thought for a moment that she was going to make another one of those nasty comments, but she evidently restrained herself.
"But just because you're wearin' your man-shape, my lad, don't think that means you don't work," said that detestable Master Hob from behind him. "The same rules hold true whether you're a man or a beast; if you don't work, you don't eat."
The Unicorns both seemed to wake up a bit, and became all threat again. And perhaps that was because Master Hob stepped past Alexander and shoved an axe into his empty hands.
He hefted it experimentally. It was a woodman's axe, of course, and not a war-axe, but —
"Don't even think about it," Master Hob warned, and poked him hard in the ribs with the stake he'd dropped. "She's been easy on ye until now. And there's more Unicorns where these twain come from."
"Don't I even get some breakfast, first?" he said, plaintively. His voice sounded unpleasantly whiny, even to him.
The Witch raised one eyebrow. Master Hob nodded at the east. "Sun isn't up yet," he countered. "You go over to the woodpile, and you chop some wood. Your breakfast'll be ready when it's ready."
"You ought to let us poke him, Godmother," said one of the Unicorns, as the Prince slouched angrily away in the direction of the woodpile. "You ought to drop the spell and let us chase him away with holes in his hide. You don't need him here."
"Of course I don't need him here," she replied, looking after him thoughtfully. "But he needs to be here. He has lessons to learn."
"Then let him learn them in the forest," said the second, in an uncanny echo of what Master Hob had said to her just this morning before she transformed him.
"That one's all trouble, Madame Elena," he'd said, shaking his head. "Let me go down to the village and buy us a new donkey. Drive him out into the forest like his brother."
She tapped her cheek with her wand, looking after him — astonishing how like a sulky adolescent he looked from the back! — and finally shook her own head and walked briskly back up the path to the cottage.
She was of two minds about letting him inside to eat. On the one hand, she wanted to keep an eye on him to assess him; on the other, the rest of the household was divided over keeping him on, and that sort of tension would only be increased if he shared the breakfast table with the rest of them.
Lily thought he was hilarious, and so did Rose. Robin was of two minds about him. Hob thought he was trouble waiting to happen.
Randolf's reaction was predictable; to Randolf, Prince Alexander and his family were a fresh new source of entertainment.
Julian's horse had returned to its stable with the desired effect. King Henrick had frantically sent searchers on the path of the Princes, only to learn that once they entered Phaelin's Wood, they vanished. He was frantic; he had sent messengers on to King Stancia to determi
ne if any of the Princes had arrived, but the messengers were being delayed by Stancia's Sorcerer. Prince Julian had only just completed the last of the tasks — which was to play chess with the Sorcerer with impossible stakes.
Now, the Sorcerer's intention there had been something that was the talk of all of the white magicians that had heard about it. Everyone agreed that the way he set up the final task was a brilliant bit of trickery. If Julian lost, two things would happen. The Princess would be "spared" — the Sorcerer cleverly did not specify what she would be spared. The second thing was "you will meet your fate." But of course at this point, Julian was putting the worst possible interpretations on everything. He assumed that it meant that the Princess would live and he, Julian, would die.
On the other hand, if Julian won, the outcome would be just as bad, from the point of view of someone who was worried about the Princess. "You will live. The Princess will be no more — " Of course, what he didn't know was that the Princess would be no more, because her father intended to make her Queen and co-ruler, with her new husband.
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