Fairy Godmother

potential behind it. Twins, if you please, which meant that someone had to be there, not only to make sure that mother and babies survived the birth, but to figure out just what The Tradition was going to try to do with them. Karelina had the same problem with Unicorns that Elena had. She too had a Mirror-Slave, inherited from her Grandmother the previous Witch, and she had sent a message by way of Randolf this morning that she was going to be out of her Wood for a while. Well, this meant that no one would be able to meet the Questers at the crossroads and test them unless Elena took the task herself. 'Did Karelina send you?' she asked. Karelina might be away from her mirror, but she was never far from a Unicorn.

The Unicorn gave another faint moan of pleasure, but answered, sensibly enough, 'Yes. We came and told her that they had gone in, and she sent me to you. She's put the tanglefoot on their path until you can get to the crossroads.'

The 'tanglefoot' spell would make sure that all three of the Questers would travel in circles without realizing it, and without meeting each other, until Elena got into place. Small wonder that the woods that Questers entered always seemed to be much bigger than they had thought!

At least in this case, she was going to have no crisis of conscience over the quest. King Stancia of Fleurberg had only one child, a daughter, and he was old. He was understandably concerned that the husband she took be clever, intelligent, and kind, as well as strong, iron-willed, and tough, because he knew that he was probably not going to be around for very much longer to protect her from the consequences of a bad choice. He had a great many neighbors, most of whom had several sons — and he also wanted to be sure that whoever wedded his daughter would rule his Kingdom as Stancia would have wanted.

So he had obtained the services of a powerful Sorcerer, and placed her in a tower atop a mountain —

The mountain wasn't really glass, or at least, it wasn't man-made glass, and the tower was hardly a place of imprisonment. The mountain was volcanic; there were obsidian boulders and shards everywhere, and it would take a very strong man with immense stamina merely to endure the path to the top. To complicate matters further, there were many tests and trials for anyone who wanted to earn the reward of her hand and throne. As for the tower, it was the Sorcerers' own home, and the Princess was, by all reports, having a delightful time exploring it.

The King and the Sorcerer had been very careful in deciding what trials the Questers would face. Unless a man was very stupid, or exceedingly stubborn, there was no chance that anyone would actually die along the way — not unless he kept trying until he perished of exhaustion or did something monumentally foolish. Everyone understood The Tradition in this case, and making it work for them. The Sorcerer had a great many truly dreadful tests of courage, intelligence, quick-thinking, and so forth set up once the Questers set foot on his mountain.

But the first of these trials was the simplest, and it weeded out any seeker who was not kind, generous, and unselfish. There were at least a dozen magicians who were tasked to provide this particular test, and for once, it was something that Elena had no second thoughts in agreeing to, not now, and not when she had first heard of the Quest.

She gave the Unicorn one last scratch, and pushed his head out of her lap, gently. 'All right,' she said. 'The sooner I get on my way, the sooner I get this over with. And you can't lie here in my lap all day, either. Now, shoo.'

The Unicorn heaved a final, sorrowful sigh, got to his feet, cast a last, longing look at her, and slipped off into the forest.

Elena stood looking after him for a moment, shaking her head. 'Unicorns!' she said, to nobody at all. 'I'm not surprised they're easy to hunt. It's a good thing for them that the bait is so hard to find.'

Then she went back into the cottage to get her stoutest walking shoes and a staff.

Poor old Dobbin had finally dropped dead of extreme old age last February, and she still hadn't replaced him, so she was going to have to get to where she needed to go by walking.

Well — sort of.

She pulled out her wand — the simple one today, anything else would be drastically out-of-character for the old peasant woman that she was going to appear to be. She released a tiny packet of power, and sent it into the path ahead of her, concentrating on where she was now, and where she wanted to be — the crossroads in the middle of Phaelin's Wood, which would be where she would meet and test the Questers. She held up her staff. 'Shorten my way, please,' she told the path.

The glowing power circled over her head like a swarm of tiny star-bees, then dropped down and zoomed down the path, out of sight in a moment. The forest became very still for a moment.

And then she felt the path shiver beneath her feet, and braced herself. She knew what was coming. She hadn't necessarily expected this, but this was a forest that the Fair Folk as well as many other magical creatures lived in, and when that happened, even inanimate objects and bits of landscape could take on a life of their own.

The path rose up about a foot beneath her, and suddenly began to move.

She'd done this before, when Bella was still the Godmother.

She remained perfectly still, but the path was carrying her along on top of a little mound, at a pace that a horse would be hard put to equal. The last time she'd cast the Way-Shortening spell, the path hadn't moved, but every step she'd taken had covered a dozen yards. And the time before that, she'd apparently reawakened the remnants of an 'All Forests Are One' spell, because she just strolled down the path a few yards and found herself where she wanted to be.

It was a chancy thing, living in a magical forest. Things tended to get minds of their own. Not long after Bella turned over the position to Elena, one of the few true Fairy Godmothers had paid a call, and had told Elena that the cottage and the forest had once been the home of another of the original Fairy Godmothers, and had hinted that this uncanny semi-intelligence of the very forest itself was a common thing where the Fair Folk dwelled. Elena had not precisely gotten used to it, but she was no longer surprised by what happened.

She had also taken to saying 'Please' and 'Thank you' when the forest responded with something to help her. Anything that allowed her to conserve power was a fine thing, and if the forest was going to help her, she was willing to let it help her in its own way.

Bella had never stood for that sort of thing; when she'd cast a spell, she by-Heaven wanted the same spell to do the same thing, every time, and no free-will nonsense. But that took a lot more power — and perhaps because of coming from a childhood where the next meal