But then again, what if she did go about squandering magic, then didn't have it to turn him from donkey back into man again? He'd supposed that he'd have felt very differently about her approach if he'd been the one feeling the "drought."
"Now, one of our Godmothers, one we served a long time ago, was like that," Lily continued thoughtfully. "Using her magic to do this and that, cleaning her rooms and appearing and vanishing where she chose and suchlike. And something bad did happen. The Kingdom of Lorendil was invaded, and a Black Sorcerer took the throne and held it for three generations. And our Godmother didn't have the power to stop him because she'd used so much of it on things we could have done, traded for, or done without."
At the name "Lorendil," Alexander found himself feeling cold. Even in Kohlstania they had heard of the Black Beast of Lorendil, a Sorcerer whose atrocities were the stuff of nightmare. "Could she have?" he asked. "I mean — she was a Godmother, but he was a Sorcerer...."
"We'll never know, will we?" Lily countered. "But Lorendil was her responsibility, and it went down on her watch, and it took a Prophecy, a Child of Prophecy, and a Sorcerer to set it all right again."
He pondered that for a moment. There was just so much he didn't know about magic —
"Well, in that case," he said, finally, licking the juice of his last apple off his fingers and wiping them clean on the napkin his luncheon had come wrapped in, "let's get back to these apples."
They filled that cart as well, and a third, before Lily decreed an end to the harvest for that day and they headed back to the cottage. And that was when something odd occurred to him.
The kitchen that he had sat in this morning was huge. It should have filled the entire ground floor of the cottage.
Except that it hadn't, for Rose had come in from what was clearly another room, and Elena had been sitting at a table that had not been in a kitchen.
"Lily," he said hesitantly, as they neared the building. "That cottage — "
"Is bigger on the inside than the outside, I know," she said nonchalantly. "No worries. You'll get used to it after a bit, and not even think about it."
"Ah," he replied. And tried not to, because the very idea made his head begin to hurt. How could a building be bigger on the inside than the outside? It sounded mad, and yet he knew that his own eyes had given him contrary evidence.
Hob came to take charge of the cart and its contents, and Alexander and Lily proceeded on to the kitchen yard, and if Alexander had thought that the aromas issuing from that chamber had been delicious this morning, they made his mouth water this evening.
But Lily drew him away from the kitchen door to one of the outbuildings. "Men's bathhouse," she laughed, pushing him at the door. "Go make use of it. And when the weather is too cold to bathe at the pump, you can come here, but you'll have to fire the stove yourself."
It was his first bath since he had left home.
He would have lingered, except that he was far too hungry. Even so, to revel in hot water was something of a revelation. Now he felt wholly human again. Hob had washed him down regularly as a donkey, and what had happened to the donkey had, of course, happened to the human. In fact, washing him as a donkey seemed to clean his clothing as well. But that was no substitute for a real hot bath.
Nor for real clean clothing, with the scent of the hot sun that had dried it still in the folds. He walked alone into the kitchen with some of the same euphoria that had buoyed him this morning.
There he found that the others were already sitting down to their dinner, the Godmother sitting at the kitchen table among them. And that surprised him a little. Ladies did not eat in the kitchen among their servants. But then, again, this was no ordinary lady, nor were these creatures strictly "servants."
Quietly he took his own seat, and held his peace while they talked of the day. The Godmother kept sending odd glances in his direction, and though he kept his mouth shut, he wondered what was going through her mind. Did she regret her decision to allow him to remain himself? But why?
Whatever the cause of her behavior, she said nothing to him. And eventually, he gave up trying to figure out what was in her mind, and just listened.
And ate, of course. The food was marvelous, and the results of today's work appeared at the end of the meal in the form of a huge apple pie.
Robin's food had always been good — it was just a great deal better eaten like a civilized man, on a table, in company with others. However strange that company might be.
Strange company, indeed. While casual talk of what must be done over the next several days went on all around him, he felt curiously detached from it all; it occurred to him that had anyone described this situation, these surroundings to him a year ago, he would have considered them to be mad. Sitting in a room in a building that was larger on the inside than the outside, in company with a magician and four Fae. And if he made one misstep, he might be spending the night as a donkey again.
"There's a new room in the cellar," Robin was saying, in answer to some question of Lily's that he had not been paying attention to. "Complete with barrels for the cider."
"Ah, well, that's one problem sorted," Lily said with satisfaction.
Elena was looking from one to the other of them with a look that was something between a smile and a grimace. "Would any of you mind telling me just how the house does this? Gets bigger when we need space, I mean?"
"We don't know," Rose replied, as it finally dawned on Alexander just what they had been talking about. "It's some magic that the first Godmother to live here did. Actually I don't think that the house is actually getting bigger. I think that it is merely giving us access to parts of it we didn't have before. We've never actually seen it growing, you know, even though Robin talks about it budding."
"Did you not say," Alexander said, thinking quite hard about some of his recent reading, "that the first Godmother to live here was one of the Great Fae?"
They all turned to stare at him as if they had not realized that he was there.
"Yes," Lily said. "So?"
"I always thought — " he shrugged " — children's tales in Kohlstania speak of the Elven Queens living in great palaces. Well, what if this is — and always has been — a great palace?"
"Ah!" Robin said, his wizened face lighting up. "Yes! One of the Great Halls of Faerie! So that the house we see is — is just the entrance hall to it, so to speak!"
"It's as good an explanation as any other, I suppose," Elena said, after a moment of thought. But she looked relieved. "It makes sense. But why didn't any of you know this?"
"Because we weren't here, except Hob, and he was in the stable," said Lily, matter-of-factly. "We did not take service here until the first of the mortal Godmothers was in residence. Then, the place was as you have seen, with fewer storage rooms and workrooms. And a much smaller Library."
Alexander shook his head. This was only contributing to his sensation of living in a dream. But the food in his belly was warm and solid, and the scent of sweet apples was still in his nostrils —
"We're all mad, you know," Elena said aloud, looking straight at him.
"I had begun to suspect this," he said in all seriousness.
She broke into a smile, a completely unexpected smile. She had never really smiled a great deal around him, and never at him before — or at least, she had never done so without a great deal of ironic mockery to her expression. This smile accepted the joke as being on both of them, and invited him to share in it. It hit him with an almost physical impact.He managed to return it, but not without a struggle to get his heart and breathing going again.
She's beautiful. How had he never noticed that before?
"Well, if that is the explanation — and thank you, Prince Alexander, for thinking of it — I will confess that I am much relieved," Elena said to all of them. "It had occurred to me that if this house was capable of growing, it might also be capable of shrinking. What would happen, for instance, if some enemy were to somehow drain away so
me of its magic? Would it shrink? With us in it?" She shuddered. "But one of the Palaces of the Great Fae, slowly opening rooms as we need them — now that, I feel much more comfortable with. And on that note, I shall go back to my studies."
That seemed to be a sort of dismissal for all of them. Elena got up and left, Robin collected the dishes, Rose left through the same door that the Godmother had used, Lily moving to help Robin. Hob stood up, and gave him a sharp look.
"We've had our dinner," he said, with a meaningful glance towards the stable.
Alexander understood him. "Time to feed the beasts," he replied, and got to his feet, himself.
Hob actually fed them; it was Alexander who gave them all water and made sure they were comfortable. Then Hob left, and Alexander climbed the ladder to his loft room, taking the lantern with him. When he got there, he stripped down to his breeks, and slipped into bed, taking a book with him.
Many pages later, he felt his eyelids drooping, and put the book aside, turning to blow out the lantern. As he did so, he glanced out the window, and saw the silhouette of Elena, also bent over a book, in the window that faced the stable.
It was another long night, but at the end of it, Elena felt as if she had a better idea, not only of what would be expected of her on taking the responsibility for a new Kingdom, but what she could expect from Kohlstania. And she had a bat-delivered note from Arachnia, to the effect that Octavian had passed, not only her trials, but a few little tests that her consort had contrived. She made a few notes, based on other Restoration spectacles in the various chronicles, and her imagination began to get to work. She fell asleep with her head full of ideas.
But the next morning, she had to work hard to wrench her concentration back to her plans for restoring Octavian to his proper place, for she had had a second one of those dreams about his brother.
Wretched man! she thought, irritated beyond all reason by the fact that he had so sensuously invaded her dreams. She put off going down to breakfast until after she saw Lily taking him back down to the apple orchard again.
The sooner I get all of them off my hands, the better, she decided, feeling very glad that Lily had taken responsibility for Alexander for the day. She told Rose that she would be gone overnight, and with a sense of relief, drove the donkey-cart out into the forest and evoked the "All Forests Are One" spell to take her to Arachnia's dark and forbidding palace.
There, she gave Octavian one last test — resuming her guise as the old woman, she came to the back entrance to beg for food. Not only did Octavian give her half of his share, but he prevented the stable-troll from running her off and he was about to give up his sleeping place to her as well, when she dropped her disguise and revealed herself to him.
That went well. Arachnia appeared right on cue, dropping her guise as the Evil Sorceress, and the two of them played out the first act of Octavian's Redemption precisely as The Tradition preferred. In fact, The Tradition unleashed a veritable flood of magic upon the scene — presumably to ensure that Acts Two and Three would take place as well. Arachnia's servants took Octavian off to be bathed and reclothed, feasted, and finally put to bed until the morrow, when they would take him back to his father.
When the hurly-burly was over, Elena and Arachnia retired to the peace and quiet in Arachnia's Library. It was nothing like her own, cozy little chamber; this was a Library, stretching up three full stories, with two balconies ringing it. Dark banners hung down from the rafters above them — banners that featured, not the arms of defeated enemies nor of ancestors, but beautifully rendered images of creatures normally associated with night — several species of owls, bats, wolves, and cats, as well as a dragon or two, the rare Ebon Unicorn, and the Nightmare. There was a fireplace in one wall of a size sufficient to make any ox placed on a spit therein look like a suckling piglet.
"Dare I ask how you got all of this — ?" Elena said, looking about her.
Arachnia laughed. She was, all in all, very much prettier than she had been when Elena had first seen her, and for all that she and her Poet-Prince preferred being semi nocturnal, much rosier. Being in love and beloved evidently suited her well indeed. "I killed the owner," she said.
Elena felt her eyes widen. "You're joking?"
"Oh, no," Arachnia assured her. "I was her servant. She had a Sleeper here — she wasn't playing by The Tradition, and after she enchanted the poor thing, she carried the girl off to here, her palace. She wanted to ensure herself of a steady diet of Failed Questers without having to work at it too hard."
"Ah." Elena nodded. She remembered Bella telling her that like those whom The Tradition was trying to set down a path not of their choosing, there was a great deal of magical power invested in the life of a Quester. When one Failed, all that magical power was available to the evil magician —
— and it was also possible to transmute life-force into magical power as well. So it was in the interest of an evil magician to attract and slay as many Questers as possible.
"She had half a dozen human servants that she had kidnapped or lured here, and easily three times that in magical servants or enslaved magical creatures. She was really dreadful to all of us, but I was the only one who dared to think about killing her." Arachnia shook her head over the cowardice of her former fellow servants. "I watched for my chance, and one day when she was gloating over murdering yet another Quester and feasting on the magic that his death had released, I pushed her out a window."
Arachnia's eyes glinted at the memory; Elena had to wonder just how bad "dreadful" had been in order to bring that look to her face.
"The Sleeper awoke and ran off with the stableboy," Arachnia continued. "In fact, everyone ran off except me and the talking statue — " She indicated a statue in the corner of the library of a very graceful, half-nude woman. The statue gave Elena a stiff little bow; Elena bowed back. " — and, of course, a few ghosts. I decided to stay, partly because I hadn't anywhere else to go, and the statue began to talk to me. She was the one who discovered that I could see magic; she pointed out that this meant that I could be a magician, and I decided that I would be the Sorceress here. I knew that the ghosts would keep everyone away until I had learned enough to be formidable." She shrugged. "Not a very exciting story, but the statue tells me that I was supposed to have been a Witch-killer except that the Spider-queen's hunters found me wandering around in the forest before I could find the evil Witch's hut. Which is probably why I could see magic in the first place."
"And why you shoved the Spider-queen out a window, I suppose," Elena said thoughtfully, as she watched the swirls and eddies of magic play about the banners overhead. It was so thick up there you could practically read by it; The Tradition really, truly wanted Octavian reunited with his father and reinstated as the Heir, and it was putting all sorts of effort to bear on the situation. Perhaps because not one, but two magicians with a habit of opposing it were sitting here with Octavian's fate in their hands. "Don't Witch-killing children usually shove the Witches into their own ovens, or down wells? I suppose shoving just was the natural thing for you to do. How old were you?"
"Seven," Arachnia said serenely. "The statue taught me how to read. There were plenty of provisions stored under preservation spells, more than enough to feed me while I learned magic. What I didn't learn from the books here, some of the ghosts taught me, but of course it was all a bit slanted."
Slanted? Considering that this has apparently been a stronghold of Evil Sorceresses for the last three hundred years? I'm surprised that she didn't go completely to the bad!
But of course, Elena didn't say that aloud.
"The ghosts are mostly very sweet," she continued thoughtfully. "They were all victims of my former mistress and her predecessors, so they were disposed to like me and wish me well. And the statue was stolen by her mistress, so she wasn't particularly upset about seeing me get rid of the Spider-queen, either. Now, what are we going to do with Octavian? Have you any ideas?"
"You do realize that whoever br
ings Octavian back is going to become Kohlstania's Godmother, don't you?" she asked instead of answering directly. It was only fair to give Arachnia the chance at having the place — it would mean another source of magic for her —
"Hellfire and damnation!" Arachnia swore with a start. "No! Elena, if you don't take him back, I swear, I will revert and curse you!"
Elena choked on a laugh. Well, that was certainly vehement enough! "I thought I ought to at least give you the option — "
"I do not want to be a Godmother! The wretched man is yours, and his Kingdom with him! Now, have you any ideas?" Two pink spots flared on Arachnia's cheeks as she calmed herself.
"I don't suppose you have any sort of transportation that flies?" said Elena.
Of all of the means of transportation Elena had used as a Godmother, this was by far the most unique. She'd had to do some quick cosmetic work on it, though, or it would have frightened three-quarters of the citizenry of Kohlstania into fits, and had the remaining quarter running for the spears and bows.
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