Fairy Godmother

The spell was a simple enough one, but she saw by the frown of concentration on Madame's face that the effort to make it work was intense. And before all of the power had been absorbed, she stopped.

Rosalie's head shot up. 'You aren't done!' she cried, accusingly. 'I can feel it — '

Madame held up her hand. 'Hush, dear. We'll take the burden from you, no fear — but I want my Apprentice to take a hand and finish the job.'

Rosalie looked at Elena doubtfully, but did not voice those doubts, perhaps because she was too polite to do so. Elena took Madame's place, her wand outstretched. 'Rosalie,' she said, carefully, 'do you surrender your power to me, freely, and of your own will? Do you renounce this power, not only for yourself, but for the sake of your unborn child?'

The power had begun to wrap Rosalie in its coils again when Madame had released it; now, as Rosalie repeated what she had said to Madame, it relaxed again.

'Then I assume it,' Elena said, 'for the pledge I have made, for the sake of those who will need it, and my duty to those who will call upon me.' And as she circled Rosalie's head with the tip of her own wand, she concentrated, fiercely, on doing the opposite of what she had learned to do so far — not to dispense power, but to take it in.

ft was a great deal more difficult than she would have guessed. Not only was she fighting against the training she'd had so far, but she could feel the whole weight of The Tradition bearing down on her in a kind of sullen resistance. The Tradition wanted this young woman for something. It bent its power towards making her into that something. It was like an enormous, blind, insensate beast, pushing her towards that end, and it did not want to let her go down some other path.

But Rosalie did not want to go there. She was happy with her little cottage, her gentle, simple husband, happy to be ordinary and fit in with the rest of the village as a pea fits among its neighbors in a pod. The more The Tradition pushed her, the more she pushed back, and that was what made it painless for her to give up the power that was collecting around her.

Given the amount of it, Elena had a good idea of why she had seemed so distressed. She knew that sort of distant-storm tenseness that the coiled-up power around you made you feel; the sense that there was something, somewhere, you urgently had to do. It was not unlike feeling that a dreadful headache was poised, waiting to strike you the moment you dropped your guard. It wore on you, until all you could think about was this weight on you, the feeling of nerves stretched thin. Slowly, reluctantly, the power let go of Rosalie and passed to Elena —

Where, exactly, it went, she couldn't really tell. But she could feel a sort of weight to it, and felt it join her power, as if she was a vessel, and it was water flowing in from some outside source.

Finally the last of the power was gone. There was no more magic sparkling and glowing around Rosalie than there was around any of her perfectly ordinary neighbors.

Rosalie might not have been able to see the difference, but she certainly sensed it. Her shoulders straightened, as did her back; she opened her eyes and smiled, and her brow was no longer furrowed.

'Well, Apprentice!' she said, her voice bright with pleasure. 'I expect you'll not be an Apprentice much longer!'

Elena flushed. 'I still have a lot to learn,' she murmured, embarrassed, as Madame chuckled.

'We'll be off, then,' was all Madame said. 'Now that you're sorted. But remember, any craving, and you send to me! That may not sound like much, but believe me, it's important!'

'I will,' Rosalie promised.

'All right,' Elena said, once they were well out of the village, 'what was all that about?'

'Rosalie is a rare one,' Madame replied. 'In fact, you won't find a girl like her in a hundred years. She's a doubler — when she was younger, before she married her sweetheart, The Tradition was trying to make her into a Fair Rosalinda.'

'Oh good heavens — ' Elena said, her hand going to her lips in consternation.

The Tradition was not all happy endings. 'Fair Rosalinda' was one of the uglier directions that The Tradition could go into — the beautiful peasant orphan girl who is seduced by a King, set up in her own secluded bower, and murdered by his Queen when she discovers his philandering.

'Oh, yes,' Madame said grimly. 'A fine romantic tragedy, if it were to happen to someone else, long ago and far away...not such a fine thing if it was supposed to happen to you.'

Elena had read of several 'Fair Rosalindas' already; magic entered the picture only after the poor thing was dead — poisoned or strangled and the body buried somewhere hidden —

But usually, the Fair Rosalinda was drowned. Then a musician would enter the tale. Sometimes he would make a pipe or some other instrument of the reeds or the tree growing from her hidden grave — in the most macabre and disturbing versions, he would make a harp from her bones and string it with her golden hair. And then he would go before the King, who was grieving for his lost love, and when he played, the instrument would have but one song —

'The Queen hath murdered me,' Elena murmured.

'I will not have one of those in my Kingdoms,' Madame said fiercely. 'I found her before the King did, before her breasts began to bud — she, in her turn, had already begun to feel the coils of the power around her and when I had explained something of what was going to happen, begged me to take it from her. Which I've been doing, and I had hoped that when she wedded, The Tradition would give over and let her go. But it hasn't; I had some suspicions as to why, and I think they've just been confirmed now that I know she's with child. Failing to make her a Rosalinda, The Tradition now wants to make her child a Ladderlocks.'

'Oh, please!' Elena said, as much in disgust as anything else. 'What has the poor thing done to be so put-upon?'