Fairy Godmother

The Elven Queen smiled, coolly. 'So you do remember. It is well. Mortal woman, stand before me, and see. These are the foes you will contend with, mortal and immortal.'

The Queen extended the slender willow-wand in her hand until it touched Elena's forehead.

And in a single moment, it seemed, a torrent of images poured into her mind. None were pleasant, and many were terrifying.

It was one thing to be warned about the evil magicians, and to remember all of the things she had read and heard. It was quite another to see them at work, in rapid succession. And some — were horrors.

Some of the horrors were blatant — entire countries laid waste, the inhabitants made into hopeless slaves, afraid to do anything but obey because of the cost of disobedience. Some of the evil ones were precisely as she might have expected, gloating despots squatting on thrones they had no right to, torture and exploitation the hallmarks of their reigns.

But some were subtle, and once Elena realized what she was seeing, the implications were chilling. Often the evil one was not on the throne itself, but was the power behind it, whispering into the monarch's ear. The effect was insidious; rather than creating despair for all, the dark one created factions, pitting the privileged, wealthy, and titled against those beneath them, placing the effort of exploitation one layer below the monarch. This kept despair from being total, for there was always the hope — 'But when the King learns of this....' — even though the hope was destined never to be fulfilled. These spiders spun a cunning web, beginning as they always did by eroding conditions gradually, with rights converted to privilege, then the privilege revoked on one pretense or another, always for an excellent reason, always on a 'temporary' basis, until the next 'privilege' was taken and the previous grievance forgotten. Then as one hand took away, the other, the King's, would give — something trivial, but pleasurable. Games perhaps, or entertainments. Nothing controversial, of course. A competition that would elevate the winner into the ranks of the wealthy and prominent — so that the illusion was maintained that this was possible for everyone. It was as if wholesome bread was being taken, and a tastier bread made with sawdust used to replace it.

Or, perhaps the one behind the throne would start a war on some trumped-up cause — a little war, of course, against a weak but convenient enemy, one that would be difficult to lose, that would stir up patriotic fervor, one that would, of course, entail 'sacrifices for the good of all and the security of the realm' under cover of which more 'privileges' could be 'temporarily' taken.

Clever and insidious, and damnably difficult to counter. And all the while, the spider spun his web, battening on the misery and depression, growing fat and ever more powerful, and in the darkness behind the throne, indulging himself in secret cruelties against the 'enemies of the state.'

These, more than the others, were the ones that were the most dangerous to the Godmothers, the White Wizards, the Good Wizards. The first class were brutal, but seldom thought past the moment. The second planned ahead, months, years, decades — anticipated opposition, and moved to counter it well in advance. These were the ones who swiftly cleansed their countries of resident magicians, either directly murdering them or instigating the local peasantry against them, and then ensured that no one else would move in by creating intense hostility against 'foreigners' and 'outsiders,' cleverly engineering their rhetoric so that the blame for anything that was bad would be laid to the door of 'outsiders.' Since that effectively made isolationism a certainty, it protected the evil ones further, for anything outside the borders became suspect, even hated, and there would be no chance for anyone to learn that things might be better, elsewhere.

Elena saw, in detail, what was happening to the 'outsiders' in several of the infected Kingdoms...imprisonment was the least of it. In rapid succession, she saw Faerie Folk being driven into grim encampments hedged around with cold iron and salt and spells, there to wither and die, or suffer torture at the hands of sadistic guards. She saw a Godmother dragged to the center of a town and burned alive, a White Wizard buried in the rubble of his own tower, a coven of Good Witches torn to pieces by a pack of savage hounds.

It all played out with dreadful immediacy in front of her eyes, and sent her heart into her throat.

But more than that, it made her angry. This was what her stepmother had done to her, writ large on the face of the world. She had been powerless to stop it then, but she would not be powerless now, and she would not stand idly by when there was something she could do.

So that when, after it all was shown to her and the Faerie Queen took the wand from her forehead, she emerged from the nightmare fueled with rage and determination.

It must have shown on her face, for the Faerie Queen gave her a penetrating look, then a nod of satisfaction.

'Good,' she said. 'You are made of stern materials. You are an iron bar, lady. We will give you the tools to be transformed to a sword.'

She beckoned, and an ethereal creature, outwardly sexless, winged like a dragonfly and garbed mostly in its own flowing hair, drifted forward, handing her what appeared to be a rose petal. 'Eat it,' the Faerie Queen commanded, and wary of what had happened the last time she had followed a similar command, but obedient to Bella's nod, she did so.

It tasted like nothing — but a moment later, she was seeing things — ribbons and auras of intense blue, surrounding and drifting between the Faerie Folk for the most part, but also around Bella, more faintly running everywhere she looked. And also, very strongly, around herself.

A second creature, another Brownie, came forward with what appeared to be a small stone. Again she ate it, and now, added to the ribbons of blue were ribbons of gold. A shining bird dropped what appeared to be a hot coal in her hand, which gave her ribbons of fiery red, and last of all, a girl clothed in water-weeds with a water-lily in her hair dripped a single drop of clear water into her hand, which granted her emerald-green ribbons and auras.

'Now you see the magic around you, of air and earth, fire and water,' the Faerie Queen told her. 'What you see, you can use. Use this gift wisely.'

That seemed to be a dismissal, for the assemblage of Faerie creatures formed up around their monarchs, and the King and Queen descended from their thrones. An arch of vines at the far side of the clearing that Elena had taken for an accidental arrangement of wild plants over a natural pathway began to glow, faintly, with soft moonlike light, and fill with mist. The mist glowed, too, and there were hints of figures moving in it. The unearthly Court formed up in a rough line and began to file through it.

The King and Queen were the last to depart; the Queen passed through the arch without a moment of hesitation, but the King stopped for a moment, and looked deeply into Elena's eyes. She could not have looked away if she had wanted to — but she did not really want to. Although his narrow, high-cheekboned face, with its winglike