The Sleeping Beauty

by Mercedes Lackey

  Meanwhile Jimson was searching for every reflective surface he could find near her, trying one after another so they could get a better idea of what was going on there. It was beginning to look as if they were not going to find anything useful, until—

  “Ha,” Jimson said quietly, and suddenly a crystal clear—if somewhat warped, as if it was being viewed through a bubble—image of what was the filthiest kitchen Lily had ever seen appeared in the mirror she was holding. “Fly’s eye,” Jimson said. “Best we’re going to get.”

  Well, the little brutes were definitely Dwarves, probably digging an illegal mine. The Tradition was definitely at work here, however badly twisted, for there were seven of them; seven was the right number for a Snowskin Princess. The fact that Rosa’s looks didn’t match the Snowskin Path didn’t seem to matter this time—a Snowskin had “cheeks white as snow, lips red as blood and hair black as ebony,” and Rosa was much more in the line of a Princess Dawn with her rosy cheeks and golden hair. Well they would have been rosy if they hadn’t been smudged with dirt and tears, and it was getting hard to tell she had “locks of gold” what with all the bits of forest snarled in them. Lily’s wince turned into a cringe; the poor child was definitely the worse for wear. A Princess, even one with Rosa’s unorthodox schooling, was ill-suited to being a servant and cook. She was indeed bruised, dirty and looked exhausted. And behind her trailed a long chain, binding her to the hearth.

  “Find me where that cottage is,” Lily said grimly. “I want to get to her before the Huntsman tracks her down.”

  If this was the Snowskin Path there was a logical approach that would compel The Tradition to throw a lot of power on Lily’s side to make this right again—what was more, when Lily broke her disguise, it could be as herself and not as the evil Queen Sable. That should make it possible for her to get the girl safely away before revealing that she was also the Evil Stepmother. It was pretty obvious now that The Tradition was moving in such force that Lily needed Rosa to understand the deception that she had been perpetrating as Queen Sable. She had only met Rosa a handful of times, all on formal occasions, in order to keep herself as the mysterious Rescuer just in case such a thing would be needed, and to make sure Rosa never felt she could depend on Lily to save her at any point, but a Fairy Godmother was the sort of person who made a lasting impression.

  “Have you seen enough for now, Godmother?” Jimson asked.

  She stood up. “I have,” she said. The reflection disappeared, and one after another, more glimpses flashed across the mirror’s surface. Jimson was tracing a path back to the Palace, from reflection to reflection. When he finished, he would have a clear way to the Dwarves’ cottage that he would read to her. She in her turn could transfer it to a map.

  Meanwhile she had preparations of her own to make. A second transformative spell—probably best to make it part of a cloak—something that might break that chain…and something to use if she couldn’t break it. Whatever path The Tradition was trying to force, it didn’t much matter. Both ended in a spell of sleep. It was a great pity there weren’t any Princes lying idly about for this moment, but she would manage. Without a Prince and a kiss, the thing was harder to break, much harder, but not impossible.

  She stepped through the mirror to her own castle, where she had everything she could possibly need, taking Jimson’s mirror with her.

  As soon as she stepped across the frame, the castle resounded with a beautiful bell tone, announcing her arrival. She hadn’t gotten more than both feet on the carpet of the Hall of Mirrors when she was swarmed by her Brownies, all of them in their typical earth colors.

  Brownies were, traditionally and Traditionally both, the servants and helpers of the Godmothers. Being half-Fae, Lily got more than her share of would-be aides and companions. This time she was glad of it, for the ingredients she would need for the sleeping potion were best when gathered fresh.

  Brownies were smaller than Dwarves, of a similar build, but less muscular. They tended to look quite pleasant, jolly even, with round little faces and cheerful expressions. So when her crowd of helpers swarmed her, Lily was still more than tall enough to see over the heads of all of them, and direct who to fetch which component.

  When they were all gone, leaving her alone for the moment, she pressed one hand to her forehead, trying to concentrate. “Plans,” she said, half to Jimson. “We need plans. We can’t just keep solving one crisis after another. We have to anticipate what might happen—”

  For once, the Mirror Servant’s voice was not bored, nor heavy with irony. “My dear Godmother,” he said fondly, “you and I have worked together for many years. Centuries, in fact. If you can do without my services while you make your potions, I will try to anticipate all the paths that might be walked, and uncover as many possible solutions for each as I can.”

  Lily held up the mirror and gazed with astonishment at Jimson’s disembodied face. “You would do that for me? After all the abuse I’ve heaped on you lately?”

  Jimson laughed. “When one is trapped in mirrors for so many centuries, one learns which reflections are the true ones. You are the kindest Godmother I have ever served, as well as the one with the most difficult and trying Kingdom to keep stable, and I can tell when it is frustration speaking. Just put me down here, where I won’t be distracted, and make your potions and disguises.” The corners of his eyes crinkled a little as he smiled. “If you will trust me with this, it will be a pleasure to act as an advisor instead of a mere—reflection.”

  Lily sighed with relief. She had long known that Jimson was far more than an “ordinary” Mirror Servant; for one thing, she had inherited him, rather than creating him, and he was much, much older than she was. But now, it seemed, he was showing yet another side of himself that she had not expected. “I’d kiss you if you weren’t on the other side of the glass,” she declared. “I promise never to threaten to smash you again.”

  Jimson chuckled. “Now there is a reward indeed!”

  There was another row of mirrors here, each reflecting a different interior. These did not have to be left covered, since no one but herself and her staff would ever see them. It was a pity they were all one-way, but having that many mirror-passages concentrating their magic within the walls of a single building was dangerous enough without making them work in both directions. She stepped through the one that deposited her just outside her workroom and put Jimson’s mirror on a table just outside the door.

  Just as the workroom of a worker of darkness stank, the workroom of a Fairy Godmother generally was awash with heavenly scents, and Lily’s was no exception. Because each Godmother was a little different, each used a different “signature” base for her potions, and each worked her magic in different ways, you could often identify one of them merely by the scent of her room. Not necessarily the potions themselves, because by the time you got done concocting, the potion was often odorless and tasteless, but definitely the scent of the room.

  In Lily’s case, the main note was the cool sweetness of April Lilies. Beneath that was mint, just enough to keep the lily scent from being cloying; lavender to cut it further; and a hint of Elflock, which only grew in the Fae realms. Most of her potions used that formula for a base. For Lily, the scent was always that of home, her own comfortable and secure castle.

  She stepped inside the room, which was actually two rooms divided by a wall, both heavily warded and shielded against interference of any kind, and against what went on within them. Neither room had windows, and both were lit by an enchantment on the ceiling itself. The Potions Room looked like the still-room in any noble house, save only that there was a great deal more of the apparatus than was ever in such a room—glass vessels, small ovens, crucibles, alembics, beakers, glass pipes, funnels, little charcoal braziers over which a single item could be simmered…. Walls and floor were stone, impervious to just about anything that could end up tossed against them. Sometimes there were accidents; a bit of miscalculation, and the next thing you knew, you were
looking for a broom. Sometimes…well, sometimes Lily’s temper got the better of her, and when things had gone wrong repeatedly, as they sometimes did…a broom was definitely in order.

  The other room, entered through a door in the Potions room, was also stone-walled and stone-floored, and completely bare, except for the three magical circles inlaid in the floor. The outer one was gold, the middle, silver, the innermost one, electrum. They were not complete; there were bridge-pieces that could be placed in the empty groove in the floor to complete and seal them. This was a great deal more certain than drawing your circles out in chalk and hoping you didn’t scuff them—because there could be something you would contain in there that you really would not want to get out. Or something outside the circles that you really did not want to get in. Lily had not been in either case very often—only a handful of times in three hundred years—but those times had been more than enough to cause her to be happy for such sturdy precautions.

  In the right corner was a mannequin, in the left was a cupboard that contained the items Lily needed for spell-casting, and that was all that was in this room.

  Now a sleeping potion was one of the easiest to concoct. It was also one of the most common. Virtually any common village witch could make one, and make a good one. There were perfectly good reasons to administer one to someone, if they were unable to sleep.

  Of course, that was usually not why someone wanted one. Spouses wanted to be able to sneak out on their mates. Thieves wanted to make their jobs easier. Courtesans wanted to render their customers unconscious to rob them. The list of good reasons was shorter than the list of bad ones, so most of the trade in such things was confined to the…less than scrupulous. Nevertheless, it was something that was in Lily’s arsenal, too.

  Be that as it may, it was not a sleeping potion, as such, that was wanted here, not this time. At this point, it looked as if the easiest path to manage was the Snowskin Path, rather than the Beauty Sleeping Path. Therefore, what she needed was a potion to simulate death. And that was a far, far more difficult thing to manage.

  In the Snowskin tale, the heroine was rendered insensible by a poison of some sort, and it was only the intervention of The Tradition that kept it from actually being fatal. It took a lot of magic to do that, more magic than even Lily had at her disposal. So she was going to have to simulate what was wanted, the hard way.

  You had to slow breathing and heartbeat to almost nothing. Which was fine, a perfectly reasonable and not terribly difficult thing to do. Except that you had to do it without damaging the person you’d given the potion to. The human body—or most any body for that matter—does not like trying to exist on very little air or without the blood flowing at the right pace in the veins. Terrible things can happen when a magician does that without thinking; the poor victim ends up, once revived, with damage everywhere. Mostly, damage to the mind. You not only had to slow the breathing and heartbeat, you had to slow everything else down, so that the body no longer needed that much to live on.

  So, strictly speaking, you weren’t making a sleeping potion, or even a “this looks like death” potion. You were making a slowing potion.

  And that was very, very difficult indeed. You would think with so much magic about such things would be easier! But more often than not, magic only complicated an already-knotted situation.

  This was why most of the time, when these things were applied as curses, they were done so as spells rather than potions, with a trigger and a possibility of a release. The “Beauty Dreaming” for instance—that was a simple sleeping spell, no need to feign death there. Touch a finger to the object, draw blood—that triggers the spell, instant sleep. There it was, simple. And because, by the way that The Tradition worked, if a release had not been built in, The Tradition would put one in there. The Tradition did not like absolute curses with no way out. The more powerful the curse, the more likely it was that The Tradition would arrange the commonest release, that the Prince passes all the trials, and kisses the Beauty, and all is well.

  The potion was going to take some time to brew. Well enough, during that time she could go impersonate the Evil Stepmother impersonating the Helpful Old Woman. Right now, Rosa looked like five miles of bad road. Under all the bruises and dirt, she still was the fairest in the land, but only The Tradition would have been able to tell that. All well and good, but to make the sleep spell easier to lift, she was going to have to look like the Beauty Asleep.

  Lily shook her head as she selected the components for her base, and began compounding. It was a wonder that more Godmothers didn’t go mad.

  However, not so bad really, because the Helpful Old Woman would be doing the work Rosa was supposed to be doing, making it possible for her to get a good bath, clean herself up, heal up all the bruises and look like a Princess again. Rosa would have to feel like a Princess for everything to work just right.

  Hopefully the Dwarves were inclined to ignore anything that didn’t affect them.

  She set up the workbench in the middle first, then the ones against the walls, with three stations on each of the wall benches, and four on the bench in the middle. The Brownies began arriving with the ingredients, and Lily started the thirteen separate components that would eventually be combined to make her slowing potion. Oh, and of course every one of those components had a cantrip or a minor spell that had to be cast on it, and you had more cantrips to cast when you combined them. And they had to be combined at the right time. And the right temperature. And it went without saying, in the right order.

  She left it all simmering or chilling or bubbling away, with a Brownie team keeping an eye on it all. The first lot would be ready tomorrow.

  Time for her illusion cloak.

  She placed a plain cloak on the mannequin as she carefully concocted the illusion she wanted associated with this cloak. First, the general shape of the body under it—round, matronly, sturdy. Since she could see through the vast majority of illusions, she clearly saw the mannequin under what she was doing, but atop it, she also clearly saw the shape of an old peasant woman’s body. At this stage it looked a great deal like a doll made of dough.

  She tinted the dough with a healthy skin color, weathered and rosy. This was the stage at which most people began to be unnerved, because her creation was starting to look too much like a person for comfort.

  Next, she added the clothing—it would be much easier not to do that, since she had so many costumes in her extensive wardrobe that it was a step she could easily skip, but she also wanted the Traditional impact of throwing off the cloak and revealing her true self. It was just another way of making The Tradition do what she wanted.

  So she added another layer over the skin-colored body—a set of worn, sturdy leather shoes; heavy woolen stockings; a patched linen petticoat; the fustian skirt, also patched, over that; and a clean, crisp, embroidered apron over that. Then the clean, slightly threadbare linen blouse, the embroidered black felt vest. She walked around it, examining it from all sides. Kalinda, who had done this many times before, did the same.

  “It’s very solid, Godmother,” the little Brownie said, then moved in to check closer. Lily’s vision of what was really there showed Kalinda reaching out and fingering air; her vision of the illusion showed her checking the weight and feel of the apron, the skirt, the blouse and the vest. You actually had to know how these fabrics felt and acted in reality to replicate them in illusion. The simplest illusions, and the easiest to break, were the ones that acted only on the eyes. The best extended to all senses. Kalinda sniffed.

  “Smells just right, too, Godmother,” she said with satisfaction. “Just perfect. Like you’d washed it all and left it to dry in the sun, then put it away with some lavender.”

  “Excellent. Hands now, I think.”

  “Right-oh.” Kalinda held hers out as models.

  Kalinda was a Brownie accustomed to hard work, and her hands showed it. There were tiny scars, the nails were groomed but uneven and the thumb was a bit chipped.
The skin was brown, there were calluses in the right places from using household implements, and the middle two knuckles of the right hand were just a little scraped. Lily replicated all of that for her illusion.

  Now the head. First, gray hair, long, neatly braided, fastened up on the top of the head in a sort of crown. Over that—because in this kingdom no respectable married woman or widow went with her head uncovered—a faded red kerchief, tied under the nape. Kalinda checked those details for feel, while she went to work on the face.

  She tried never to duplicate the face of someone living, but she had been alive for three centuries, and she had met a great many people in that time. So she considered her options, and chose an old woman who had been the nursemaid for Prince Sebastian some two hundred years ago.

  She stepped back and examined the kindly face she’d created, adding a few more wrinkles, a couple of moles that hadn’t been on the original’s face, and making the forehead just a little lumpy. There. This was the point where people sometimes back uneasily out of the room, because this looked like a person, only one without any life.

  Then Lily untied the cloak, swirled it around her shoulders, and tied it in place.

  She didn’t feel any different, but when she looked down at herself, she saw the illusion like a transparent layer over her own body. She walked, bent, jumped a little, trotted back and forth, until Kalinda nodded.

  “It’s solid, Godmother. Unless someone stronger comes along to dispel it, you should be all right.”

  Lily breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the cloak off. “In that case,” she said, “it’s time to get to work. Back to the Palace. Queen Sable needs to cement her hold over the Kingdom, or The Tradition will probably do something on its own.”