Fairy Godmother

'Well, that seems to have it all settled and sorted, then, and I must say, a more clever way of turning The Tradition I have never seen,' the Witch in russet said with contentment, and turned to her fellows. 'When shall we four meet again?'

'Thursday next would be good,' said the one in grey. 'But this time, I am supplying the cards! Your deck likes you altogether too much, Penelope!'

In the carriage on the way back to the cottage, as shafts of light penetrated the forest canopy, creating slashes of golden light across the green shadows, Elena turned to her mentor. 'Did you really arrange all of that?' she asked in wonder. 'However did you even think of it?'

'It only worked because Arachnia — that's not her real name, by the way; she changed her name when she turned to the darkness — is young, and although she is a seething mess of anger and resentment, she is also enduring a truly crushing weight of loneliness,' Madame replied, as the carriage wheels rolled over a dry stick, breaking it with a sound that made Elena jump. 'She spent all of her young life, much like you, despised and exploited. She was sent into the wilderness by her stepmother, who told her to gather berries before any such thing was ripe, and taken up by an Evil Sorceress and made into a slave.'

'Then what?' Elena wanted to know.

'Well, the Sorceress had many such 'servants,' all of whom hated her, but none of whom dared to defy her. Arachnia bore it as long as she could, but the moment came when she was both strong enough and had the opportunity, and she managed to kill her mistress. That was when she decided that she must be an Evil Sorceress, and The Tradition obliged by supplying her with some sort of tutors, as well as the workroom and library of her former mistress and all the other Evil Magicians who had lived there originally.'

'So — she studied magic and The Tradition on her own?' Elena hazarded. Bella nodded.

'That's what usually happens, actually. The dark magicians don't have a great deal of tolerance for one another.' Madame Bella glanced over at Elena, perhaps to see if she needed to elaborate on this point, but it was pretty obvious to the Apprentice. Dark magicians didn't have much tolerance for any sort of rival.

'Well, when Randolf found her for me, I began using him to watch her, but to tell the truth, it was easy to see that her heart wasn't in the business of evil for its own sake. She had the proper trappings, but it was mostly show. Her garden has as many roses as nightshade and henbane plants. She keeps only non-venomous spiders and snakes. The bats live in their very own tower, and every raven and owl that has decided to roost at her castle is so well-fed that several of them are too fat to fly.'

'But if that's true,' Elena said, her brow wrinkling, 'Why didn't you do something to help her before she killed her stepmother?'

There was a very long moment of silence.

'Because,' Madame said at last, with such deep sorrow that Elena almost regretted asking the question, 'I did not know any of this until I had Randolf go looking for the Evil Sorceress that I knew must be there. And I was lucky in Arachnia.'

'She could have been — ' Elena was not sure how to phrase it.

'She could have been truly evil. This isn't the first time that I've hoped to turn The Tradition this way, been disappointed, and had to rectify matters in the usual way. But that is why I sent Randolf looking, as I always have, hoping that I would be lucky.' Madame looked steadily into Elena's eyes. 'I knew that if just once I could find the combination I was looking for, I could turn The Tradition, not just this one time, but open a new possibility for the future. You felt it — all that potential, how it just slipped aside when your counter was cast.'

Elena nodded, warily. She thought she'd felt that, at any rate.

'The potential magic you used was just a fraction of what was available, and the rest of it went into cutting a new Traditional Path,' Madame said, with just a touch of gloating. 'Now, just you wait and see, the tale of Arachnia and her impoverished Poet Prince will become its own part of The Tradition, and perhaps that knowledge will help another Godmother turn some other Dark One in the future.'

'Or maybe it will keep one from going to the Dark at all?' Elena hazarded.

'We can only hope, my dear,' Bella replied, as the carriage came within sight of the cottage, its thatched roof gleaming like gold in the evening sunlight. 'But it is a goal worth pursuing at almost any cost.'

Elena had no difficulty whatsoever in agreeing with that.

Chapter 8

Day by day, week by week, Elena mastered the arts and skills of magic, and 'fine art' of being a Godmother. Midsummer's Day came and went, and summer drowsed towards haying time in the villages near Bella's cottage. Haying time brought a spate of women to the cottage, the wives and sweethearts of farmworkers, seeking charms against cutting and ointment for wounds; haying was dangerous work, and the men who swung the huge, razor-sharp scythes could be cut and bleed to death if the worst happened. Bella taught the making of these to Elena, and after the first few, it was she who supplied all such things to their visitors.

Some few of the farmers themselves came looking for help as well, but what they wanted was not a charm, but a prediction; hay needed five hot days to dry properly after it was cut, five days of no rain and no dew. Bella herself saw to that.

'It's easy enough,' she said with a chuckle. 'Weather moves from west to east. I simply have Randolf look west from here, and find me at least a five-day span of clear weather, then give me a notion of when it will start. At this time of year, when we have far more sun than rain, that's not so hard.'

That struck Elena as supremely clever. It didn't require trying to see into the future (which she had learned was very difficult and became more so the further ahead you tried to look). It also didn't require changing the weather, which she had been warned was something that could cause more problems than it solved. Sometimes, it seemed, the business of a Witch or a Godmother was not so much using magic as knowing when not to use it.