Fairy Godmother

The celebration went on, but their work was done, and Elena felt as drained as if she had been running for a mile. The King called for the musicians to play, and Madame Bella quietly went to him to explain what was going to happen in sixteen years.

Elena found a convenient pillar and put her back against it, feeling limp and drained. Eventually Madame Bella returned and took her gently by the elbow, and steered her into one of the little side-rooms that had been set up for the convenience of a few guests who wished to converse together. Somehow she was not at all surprised to find the other magicians there, being served with refreshments and chattering amiably among themselves.

'Miranda, my dear, you exceeded my wildest dreams!' Bella said, as they entered, and the Sorceress beamed. A seat was immediately provided for Elena, and the Witch in russet pressed a glass of wine into her hand. Elena drank it down at a gulp.

The Sorceress nodded graciously. 'It was a stroke of luck finding him. Do you know he's a Prince as well as a poet?'

There was a gasp and a laugh from the Witch in green. 'No! Oh, my word, that does make a great deal of sense! No wonder Arachnia gravitated straight for him!'

What? Oh — oh, of course, if she's like me, she was supposed to have a Prince and somehow didn't get one. Only she turned bitter and hard and wants to make everything around her hurt as much as she does. But The Traditional attraction is still there.

'What sort of Prince?' Bella asked, plying Elena with a slice of cake, it was far too sugary — or at least, would have been if she hadn't been so famished.

'A Frog Prince, the poor thing, and he'd been that way so long that his Kingdom had passed right into the hands of a collateral line. Decades at least; maybe more, I couldn't be sure. Kissed by a Princess, all right, but she was only six years old, and in the habit of kissing every bird and beast that crossed her path!' Sorceress Miranda shook her head with pity for the poor man's situation. Elena winced. Bad enough to have the first part of your 'destiny' thwarted, worse to no longer have a home to return to, but then to have insult piled on top of injury like that —

'Oh, the poor lad!' exclaimed the Witch in grey, with sympathy warming her voice. 'No Princess, no Kingdom — no prospects — '

'But a talent for brooding poetry. Well, I would be broody, if I'd gone through all of that,' Miranda replied. 'He's good enough to keep from starving, which for a poet, is a pure miracle, frankly. I found him just as you suggested, Bella, by looking for slim volumes of recently published verses full of suffering and anguish and longing for death — and a morbid fascination with the trappings of darkness, but not the substance.'

'And you tracked the poet down — ' Bella prompted, handing a plate of little sandwiches to Elena, who felt as if she was so starved there was a hole in the bottom of her stomach.

'Just as you said — I knew I had the right sort of fellow after watching him a while. He might speak longingly in excellent rhyme of wanting to be united with the powers of darkness and descend into the blackness of never-ending night, but in his little garret he was feeding sparrows with bread he could hardly afford to part with.' Miranda smiled merrily. 'I took on the semblance of a Royal Messenger, delivered the invitation, and made sure he knew that the notorious Madame Arachnia would also be there. And when he arrived, I just made sure to position him properly, and you saw the rest.'

'But Bella,' the Witch in green protested. 'How did you know this would fall out in this way? How did you know that Arachnia wouldn't still put a really powerful curse on the babe?'

'She didn't, not exactly,' said an aged voice from the door. They all turned, and two of the Witches leaped to their feet to aid the bent and withered old woman who stood there into the room and into a chair.

'She didn't,' the old woman repeated, with a cherubic smile, and a voice creaking with age. 'I was to be her emergency counter, in case the curse was too dreadful for her clever little Apprentice to work out. Not,' she added, 'that I think it would have been. Once a truly dreadful curse has been laid, The Tradition usually makes the counter fairly easy to think of and set.'

''Not death, but sleep,'' quoted Miranda. 'And no one would ever have looked for you here, Madame Veronica. I thought you never traveled anymore.'

'I do not,' the elderly Godmother replied. 'This is my Kingdom, and I told Bella to be ready when I knew the Queen was expecting. I am one of the Royal Nurserymaids — and that was a good touch, couching the counter so that the savior is a lowborn girl, young Elena,' she added. 'I shall have to be sure there is someone worthy of reward and gathering Potential in that position when the time comes.'

'But still, Bella, how did you know you would find a young man that would find Arachnia irresistible?' the Witch in green persisted. 'I can see where you could turn her, if you could only find someone who would see her and love her, but how did you know such a fellow existed?'

Bella tilted her head to the side, and a wry smile touched her lips. 'You find them in any Kingdom,' she said, 'if you look hard enough. Young men, and young women, too, who believe that they are in love with evil, death, and darkness, but in fact, are in love with mystery. Mind, it wouldn't have worked if Arachnia herself wasn't so young, and still able to be turned, if only one could find the key to her loneliness. I expect she'll be your charge now, Miranda.'

'And happy to take her on,' the Sorceress replied. 'I'd go through fire and ice to turn someone with her power. And believe me, I have bound that young man with so many spells I'm surprised he can move.'

'You didn't put a love spell on him!' said the Witch in grey, aghast.

'Great heavens no! I'm not that stupid!' Miranda exclaimed. 'Arachnia would have spotted that in an instant, and she'd have been so angry she probably would have cursed the whole Kingdom! No, all I did was hedge him around so that he can't become the Rogue, the Betrayer, the Cad, or the Seducer, and I let his own romantic feelings do the rest.'

'We can count on that,' Madame Bella said, with a decided nod of her head. 'I think that he may be in love with an abstract now, but it won't be long before he's in love with Arachnia herself, and she won't be able to resist him. I know; thanks to Randolf, I've had a look at her Library. A good half of it is slim little volumes of darkly romantic poetry, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that some of them are his. In no time — well, probably by tonight! — they'll be haunting the battlements of her castle together as bats flutter overhead beneath a gibbous moon.'

Two of the Witches heaved sighs of relief, and Madame Veronica nodded.