“We are pleased to announce the second contest of the trials,” she said without any preamble. “We think it will prove something of a challenge.”
As she spoke, servants began bringing in baskets lined with white silk cloth—and curiously, they all wore silk gloves. Siegfried’s brows furrowed, as he stared at them. What on earth—why would they need to handle what was in those baskets with silk? Were the items that delicate? Was the contest to keep from breaking them?
“Our servants are going among you and handing you small, valuable objects. They are all made of gold. Please take one, and hold on to it while the rest are distributed.” There was something very odd about the gleam in the Queen’s eyes.
Sure enough, the servant that was working their table handed Leopold a strange neck-chain, and Siegfried a gold ring. And the moment he touched it, he got a familiar mixed feeling of danger and desire from it. And a tingle. It was the same sort of feeling that he had gotten from—
“Doom!” sang his bird at his shoulder. He stared at her in alarm. Oh surely, surely no one had gotten hold of that ring and brought it here! Then she trilled a chuckle. “Only, not the doom you think—”
By that point every one of the Princes had his object and was holding it, wearing varying expressions, ranging from boredom to bafflement.
“Each of you has been given a cursed object,” the Queen said with apparent relish.
I knew it! He wanted to throw the ring as far away from him as he could, but he knew it was too late now. That was why the servants had been wearing silk. Silk insulated you from magic.
“Now we assure you,” she continued, her voice strengthening to carry over the sounds of outrage and surprise. “We assure you that they are merely inconvenient curses, not fatal ones. Some of the curses will cause some discomfort, some will cause embarrassment, and some will change your behavior, which will probably also cause embarrassment. Still, you will want to get rid of these things. And that is your contest—you are to rid yourselves of these objects as quickly as possible. Only you are not to merely discard them, nor give them to whatever magician you have in your employ, nor fob them off on a Dwarf. You won’t be able to in any event. The object will return to you unchanged unless you meet the very specific condition required. No, there is only one way and one place you can go to be rid of these things.”
She smiled. Siegfried groaned. He knew what was coming, knew it instinctively. After all, what was the one thing that was almost immune to magic and loved gold more than Dwarves did?
“You must place your object in the hoard of the Dragon of Sharpstone Pass. And you must do so without harming the dragon in any way. He is useful to us. If you hurt him, you forfeit. There will be a Marshal there to make sure you abide by this.” She gazed down at the Princes. “You may persuade him, trick him, slip the object into the hoard without him knowing, bargain with him—the possibilities are endless. As long as you don’t attempt to harm him, anything is fair. Time is flying, gentlemen. Time is flying. The curses have not yet come home to you, and the dragon is a good distance away from here. And the longer you dally, the more likely it is you will find out personally just what curse your object carries.”
“You are a sadistic woman,” said Rosa, from her vantage point in the window overlooking the garden. The garden boiled with activity, like a nest of ants that a child had stirred up. Behind her, Lily chuckled.
“Don’t blame me, blame Jimson. It was his idea,” she replied. “I merely agreed that it was a good one, since we specifically wanted a task that couldn’t be helped with magic. Even Sharpstone was amused, once Gina explained things properly to him.”
“Gina?” Rosa asked, her brow wrinkling. “I don’t recall that name. Do I know anyone named Gina?” She turned to look at Lily. She realized at that moment that they were beginning to look like a mother-daughter pair—both in the black of mourning, both in garments made by the same Brownies.
The only difference was that Lily had a far more revealing bodice. The protective one that Rosa was wearing was a lot more comfortable than she had thought it would be, but the high neck had the curious effect of making her look younger than she actually was, which annoyed her once in a while. Usually when she was trying to get one or another of the Princes to see her as her, and not the prize-to-be-won.
“Not directly. She’s a dragon, specifically, a Dragon Champion. One of only two that I know of, although, who knows—” The Godmother shrugged. “I would expect that the other dragons are studying this, and there may one day be more. Dragons take a long time to decide if they are going to do something—almost as long as the Fae. At any rate, your indirect connection is that Gina is the donor for your dose of Dragon’s Blood. She and her mate are extremely friendly and helpful to the Godmothers, and I was able to contact her again through Godmother Elena. Sharpstone is not particularly friendly to humans, but I thought he might be willing to listen to our proposition if we made it through another dragon.”
“I can see that a dragon would be happy to add to his hoard, and all of those things are made of gold, so that would make them attractive to him, as well.” Rosa nodded and turned back to her perusal of the garden. Things were getting quite interesting down there, more so by the moment. “What I don’t understand is why he would be willing to have so many cursed objects near him. I would think even a dragon would need to worry about curses.”
Lily laughed as she replied. “The reason is why this entire scheme works so very well for all of us. Sharpstone won’t be any more concerned about those curses than he would be about fleas. He is one of those powerful old dragons whose very presence nullifies any magic but his own. It’s something a dragon acquires over time, just like increasingly tough scales, which is why the older a dragon is, the harder it becomes to kill even with a magic weapon.”
Rosa turned away from the window to see that Jimson was more or less looking over Lily’s shoulder at her, both of them looking, not smug, but commendably pleased with themselves. “I didn’t know that!” she exclaimed. “Is that why really old, wicked dragons need blessed weapons to kill them, rather than magic?”
“Indeed.” It was Jimson who replied. “And that is half the reason why he is willing to take in cursed articles. The curses are negligible to him. He is so powerful he could nullify a hundred times more than we’ll send him. But as you wisely pointed out, the objects themselves are gold, and there is nothing that a dragon of his sort loves better than gold.”
Lily smiled. “The other half of the sum that makes him willing to work with us is that fairly soon word will spread that his hoard is full of cursed objects, and it won’t be possible for anyone to tell which are cursed and which are not. Would you try stealing from that hoard under those circumstances?”
Rosa had to laugh at that. It would be a very, very foolish person who would take that sort of risk—first to have to face an old and powerful dragon, and then assume that you might be infected with not just one, but many curses. Unless you had someone along with you who could do a wholesale curse removal… “I don’t think so! And anyone who would—well he’d have to be so stupid he would deserve what he got. But where did you get all those cursed objects?”
Lily smiled ruefully, and shared a glance with Jimson. “Well, that comes under the day-to-day tasks that a Godmother does without really thinking about it. Things with curses on them turn up all the time, and when I find out about them, I generally take them away from the owner, because my control of Traditional magic is powerful enough to allow me to do that. Most magicians just can’t command that kind of force—it’s relatively easy to take a curse off an object before the curse has infected anyone, but it’s a lot harder to negate the magic that binds the object and the curse to a person. Because we Godmothers routinely put these sorts of minor curses on people that need a lesson, Traditionally it’s easier for us to bind and unbind curses and cursed objects.”
Rosa nodded. “Witches would be good at setting them and taking them off, too?” she hazarded.
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Lily gave her an approving glance. “Better at setting than taking them off, but yes. It’s The Tradition, again. Wizards and sorcerers of all sorts are very poor at it, followed by sorceresses. Those with the most success are witches, and if you really want to make things skewed in your favor, it’s best to make the witch look as ancient, gnarled and warty as possible.”
“That’s rather hard on pretty witches.” Rosa giggled.
“I must admit, I’m glad that particular part of The Tradition doesn’t apply to Godmothers.” Lily smoothed the hair back from the side of her ageless face with an unconscious gesture. “When I get these things away from people, I can store them in a place that’s shielded, where they can’t hurt anyone. Sometimes they’re useful to have around in case I need to teach someone a lesson, but mostly they gather dust in safe bins in the cellar of my Castle, because I either don’t know or can’t tell what it was they did. I have not only the ones that I collected down there, I have the ones that my predecessors gathered, and not all of them left careful notes.” She walked over to join Rosa at the window. “Frankly, I wasn’t going to give the Princes a choice, but I did have a modicum of pity for the adventurers. I told them what they were going to get, and that they could decline and leave. We lost a goodly swath of them, as you might imagine.”
It was easy to tell some of the curses from up here. There was one poor fellow that seemed to be cursed with clumsiness; he couldn’t pick up a glass without spilling it or an object without dropping it. People were giving him a wide berth. “What if a Prince just can’t get Sharpstone to take his wretched object?” Rosa asked after a while.
“In a week or so I’ll offer the ones who are still left the option to take their chances with Sharpstone or admit defeat and allow me—the Godmother version of me—to take their object and curse away and forfeit the trials.” She raised an eyebrow. “I’m not entirely unfair or without pity.”
They both watched the Princes below. Lily had not been trying to bluff them into hurrying their plans when she’d told them that time was fleeting. Besides the Curse of Clumsiness, several curses were already manifesting…
Boils, mostly; it seemed to be a very common curse. There were faces dotted in soothing salve, and necks and hands covered in bandages. Rosa felt very, very sorry for the poor fellows, because not only were none of these curses going to go away, until they finally decided to dare the dragon, it was only going to get worse.
Leopold and Siegfried stared glumly at one another. By nightfall, their curses had manifested. Siegfried’s was the most…obvious. “Well,” said Siegfried. “I can say this much. It’s unique. And it’s not as painful as boils.”
Two toads and a frog fell from his lips.
That is, they appeared to fall from his lips; they actually manifested two inches away from his mouth and fell. He caught them expertly—he’d had a lot of practice by now—and tossed them in a bucket.
Anytime he spoke, frogs and toads fell from his mouth. Real, live frogs and toads. He had no idea where they were coming from.
It didn’t happen when he ate, breathed or yawned, only when he spoke, and the curse didn’t seem to care if he shouted or whispered. The moment a word passed his lips, he got an amphibian. Sometimes more than one. He really did not want to approach the Princess with this happening. He didn’t think she was the kind to squeal at a frog, but it wasn’t pleasant to try to talk to someone and have slimy things raining down on your shoes.
“I’ll trade you,” Leopold replied glumly. His curse apparently had been bad luck—but only at gambling. This had him in deep despair, for gambling was not a trivial pursuit for him. “I don’t have a father feeding me great stacks of money, Siegfried! I make my living gambling! Technically this, going after the Princess, is a gamble! If I don’t get this thing off me, I won’t have a chance of winning her!” Obsessively he threw a pair of dice over and over again, and each time they came up ones.
“I’m pretty certain trading doesn’t work, Leo,” Siegfried replied, catching the toads as they fell. “Two of the others tried it and they ended up with both curses. And their original objects returned to them anyway. I think they have this tied up pretty neatly to prevent us from doing anything but face the dragon or give up.” He took the bucket to the window and turned the toads out onto the lawn, where they hopped indignantly away.
So far, only three of the Princes had left for the mountain, which was something of a surprise to him. Curses were nothing to be sneezed at, and he wanted his taken off as soon as it could happen. The irritating fact was, if Leopold hadn’t been obsessing over the loss of his gambling luck rather than figuring out what to do about the dragon, they themselves would have been halfway there by now.
He began to wonder if the bad-gambling-luck was the actual curse, or just a kind of side symptom of what was really afflicting his friend. This wasn’t like Leopold at all. He was usually overflowing with optimism, not moping.
Looking at Leopold’s tragic face, Siegfried made up his mind. This was ridiculous. He couldn’t go on like this—not because having toads and frogs raining out of him with every word was all that bad, but because if he had to listen to Leopold moaning anymore, he was going to kill the man. It was time for him to take charge of the situation.
He put down the bucket, advanced on his friend and hauled him unceremoniously to his feet. Holding him by the collar, he shook Leopold vigorously and set him down again. “Enough!” he said. “It won’t be the end of the world as long as we go do something about it!” Five more toads landed on the floor.
Leopold sagged back down onto the chair, and looked up at Siegfried in dazed shock. The Northerner stalked over to the arms rack, grabbed his sword and belt, and Leopold’s, and threw Leopold’s at him. Reflexively, Leopold caught it. With a jerk of his head and a grunt—which only produced a hapless little tree frog—he stalked out the door.
Leopold caught up with him at the door of the stables. Siegfried thankfully didn’t have to say anything when he got there; the grooms were already waiting to saddle up horses for whoever turned up. It didn’t look as if they were getting mouse-horses this time; what the grooms pulled out for the two of them were plain, sturdy brown beasts of the sort you might see pulling a farm cart. There evidently was a standard kit ready and waiting: saddlebags with provisions and a map to Sharpstone Pass. A glance at the map gave Siegfried one bit of good news; the Pass wasn’t more than two days away.
Wordlessly, they mounted up and headed down the road on the map. It was easy enough to follow, and they spent an entire day in unwonted silence. It actually wasn’t bad at first, if he didn’t look back at his friend; Siegfried was used to traveling alone, and with Leopold hunched morosely in the saddle, obstinately refusing to do anything other than sigh, he might as well have been alone.
Still, having that giant lump of gloom trailing behind him began to wear on him after a while. Siegfried managed to keep from having to say anything until they found a spot to camp for the night—which was near enough to a stream that the poor creatures he was producing would be able to get to water easily. Only then did he open his mouth.
“Are you done whining like a sulky brat?” he asked, producing a veritable flood of amphibians. It caught him by surprise; had the curse saved up an entire day’s worth of toads to spill out as soon as he spoke?
“I think it’s more than just losing my gambling luck,” Leopold finally said, sounding—well, not at all like himself. Strained, but with something more under his voice. Panic, maybe? “I have this horrible urge to write poetry and learn to play the lute….”
Siegfried stopped catching frogs and chucking them in the direction of the water to turn to stare at his friend in absolute horror. Write poetry? Learn the lute? The Queen had warned them that there might be some curses that changed you—but—this could be bad. This could be very bad. “Please don’t tell me you want to dress all in black,” he said, aghast, as a couple more frogs dropped to his feet.
Leop
old nodded, a haggard wariness coming over his expression. “Black…of course I want to dress in black. It suits the deep night of my soul. What rhymes with shadow?” he asked, then looked appalled. “I don’t believe I just said that….”
In the back of Siegfried’s mind, a tiny treacherous thought arose. It was obvious that Leopold was turning into one of those morose poet-princes, the sort that slouched around their Castles by night, slept by day and spent all their time trying to be Artistic and do what bards did, only do it half as well, if that.
If I don’t do anything, if I just leave in the morning without waking him, he’d never get there himself. He’d either go back to the Palace or just sit here moping. I’d get rid of him without ever actually doing anything to him—
Immediately, though, he stepped on that nasty thought and pounded it into submission. That was wrong; it was completely wrong. He and Leopold had promised to help each other, and he was not going back on that promise. Besides, Leopold as a poet? He wouldn’t inflict that on the world; it was too cruel.
No matter how tempting it was.
The bird was perched on a dead branch he’d driven into the ground near the fire where he could keep an eye on her. He hadn’t spoken to her since he’d started this frogs-and-toads nonsense, but if anyone would have advice, it was likely she would. She was drowsing, having eaten some cake crumbs and a few insects she’d caught. He tapped gently on her branch, and she opened one eye.
Before he could ask for advice, she was already giving it to him. “Try talking to him. The dragon, I mean,” she said, and closed her eye again, settling back into her drowse.
Try talking to him? What kind of advice is that? It’s a dragon! he thought indignantly. He was actually reaching for the branch to shake it, when he stopped himself.
Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea.
After all, the Godmother’d had to talk to the beast herself to get him to agree to this—though why a dragon would want cursed gold in its hoard—
The Sleeping Beauty Page 20
