It was enough to make a sane person dizzy.

At least she was getting firewood for the winter out of all of this!

Confined to the cottage and grounds as he was, Alexander got his fill of looking at the Witch early in the day. As the sun rose and the heat increased, Hob took him off cutting wood and moved him to carrying water for the Brownie, Lily, to water the garden. At several points in the proceedings, that woman sauntered past with a Unicorn following her like a faithful dog, and finally he muttered something under his breath.

The Brownie had sharper ears than he had reckoned on. 'She's not a Witch,' Lily said, matter-of-factly, as she carefully watered the base of each of the squash plants.

'What?' he asked.

'She's not a Witch,' Lily repeated. 'She's a Fairy Godmother. Except that she's mortal, not one of the Fair Folk.'

He muttered something under his breath. The Brownie evidently took this to mean that he was interested, and proceeded to lecture him at length about Witches, Godmothers and Sorceresses, and how they were different from each other. He got some relief from the lecture when he had to go fetch more water, but not much, since she took it up again where she had left off the moment he returned.

And she asked him questions about what she'd told him, just as if she was one of his tutors! If he didn't answer to her satisfaction, she went on about it until his head was full of it, and he took to paying attention just so she wouldn't natter endlessly about it so much. So by the time he got to take a break for something to eat at around noon, he knew a thousand times more about magicians than he'd ever learned in his entire life.

At least he knew enough not to call that woman a 'Witch' again. Though he was damned if he'd call her 'Godmother.' He thought about 'Mistress,' with the sarcastic inflection that would turn it into an insult, but decided, on the whole, he'd better stick to what the Brownies called her. 'Madame Elena.'

Arrogant bitch.

After lunch, Master Hob came and dragged him off to some other work, helping to lay the drystone wall that he had hauled stone for as a donkey. At least Hob didn't lecture.

Finally, though, when he saw that woman wander by three times in the course of what could not even have been an hour, he growled under his breath, 'Oh, Godmother, is it? Base-born peasant more like! Belongs in the kitchen, she does; too stupid to recognize her betters, cleaning pots would be good enough for her. Doesn't she ever do any work?'

Hob stopped what he was doing. Stopped dead. And in a cold voice that put goose bumps on Alexander's arms, said, 'Don't ever say that in my hearing again.'

No threat. No punishment. Just that. And somehow, that simple sentence felt more imperiling than a cold knife-blade laid along his neck.

He coughed. Hob ignored him. Not, as in merely ignored him, but as in, 'paid no attention to him because his intelligence was less than that of the village idiot.' To say he resented that was an understatement, but he was also not going to push things.

Because thanks to Lily's lecture, he knew what, exactly, the four little people were. Though they might play at being servants, they were Fair Folk, and if the tales of his childhood were anything to go by, they could be powerful. He already knew that Hob was physically stronger than any two adult human men and all you had to do was look at the amount of wall he'd built today, by himself, to know that there was something quite formidable about the Brownie; Hob had magic himself, for sure, because every stone he laid (and he laid them twice as fast as a human mason) was placed perfectly and never moved or shifted. Alexander wasn't particularly anxious to see Hob perform some sort of magic on him.

He must have offended Hob more deeply than he guessed, for about dinnertime, Hob simply got up and stalked off, leaving him there beside the stone wall, wondering what to do. It was Lily who came for him a moment later.

'Come along, young fool,' she said, beckoning to him. 'You've gotten Hob in a temper, you have, and that takes some doing.'

Alexander got up and followed her obediently, as she led the way to the kitchen yard. She pointed at the pump.

'Wash yourself up,' she told him curtly. 'And yes, I know what you said around Hob. Maybe your kind don't think that much of an insult, but I'm going to tell you why our kind does.'

And while he stripped himself to the waist, while he washed himself in cold water and harsh soap until she was satisfied, and while he donned the clean, coarse clothing of a base-born laborer that she handed to him, she told him.

He got the main idea early on; how it was the Godmothers and the Wizards who worked tirelessly to keep things running smoothly. But as she elaborated on her theme, detailing all that Madame Elena had, herself, accomplished in the last several weeks, he found himself grudgingly impressed against his will. It wasn't so much the steering of lives into the most pleasant — or at least, the least harmful — path. It was something else; the way that the Godmothers also served as intermediaries between the world of the fully magical and the 'real' world that he had (until now, at least) lived in.

Madame Elena had been doing a respectable amount of what he would call 'herding' — protecting the Fair Folk from human encroachment, and the humans from Fair Folk meddling. 'Used to be, before there was a lot of Godmothers and Wizards, half the time a farmer wouldn't know when he went out to his barn of a morning whether he'd find his horses lathered up from being stolen for a Wild Hunt in the night, or whether his cows had been milked dry. And as for you so-called highborn lot, well! Used to be unless you had nursery-maids awake all night, and horseshoes over the cradle, you'd end up with a changeling in place of your firstborn! There'd be Fair Folk coming around at feast-time, and woe betide if you failed in courtesy! There's many a noble house was in ruins within a year, or still has some dreadful curse hanging over it, because the door got slammed in some Fae Queen or Elven Knight's face! And then there was what you Mortals used to do to our kind!'

Now, as it happened, this was one aspect of which Alexander himself had direct experience, and no reason to doubt.

When he had first been sent to the military academy, his best friend had been another young Prince, the

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