Fairy Godmother

He wasn't doing very well on his analysis of the situation that he had found himself in. Truth to tell, he'd fouled it up almost beyond recognition with his assumptions. For someone who was supposed to be trained in assessing conditions correctly and making the right decisions based on those assessments, he was doing a damned poor job of it. And to think he was supposed to become Octavian's Commander-in-Chief! If this was how he would have fared in a war, maybe the Academy hadn't trained him all that well after all.

From what he had read in the Godmother's Book of Days, he was what was known as a Quester. Or, to be more accurate, a Failed Quester. It was his brother Julian who was the real Quester; Julian had succeeded. He had passed the trials and won the Princess. Alexander and Octavian had failed the very first test put in front of them — the test of courtesy.

He had been knighted, and so had Octavian, but he knew now that they had been knights in name only. He knew it now, or rather, acknowledged it, at least to himself.

He wasn't quite ready to confess it to anyone else.

But there was something else that he was finally putting together in his mind that was beginning to make him feel a smoldering anger that was nothing like the anger he had so unthinkingly loaded onto Godmother Elena. The first book he had read had left him a little baffled, referring to something called The Tradition, but in a way that had not left him with any sort of clear definition of what was meant.

In the first chapter of the Book of Days, everything that The Tradition was had been boldly and clearly spelled out. It was that which was making him so angry.

But not at Godmother Elena. Not anymore.

It was quite clear to him now that Elena was doing quite a bit more than the average Godmother to use The Tradition against itself. She should never have brought him here, for instance. Godmothers just did not intervene personally with Failed Questers. There was no place in The Tradition for a Godmother to take the training of a Failed Quester on herself. She properly should have done to him what she'd done to Octavian; turned him loose to wander without being able to get home until he either died or learned his lessons — lessons that would make him a much better King than he would ever have been without this humiliation. And if he died, well, that was too bad — either the second Failed Quester, himself, would survive his lessoning, or Julian would inherit both Kingdoms.

And if Elena had not intervened, it was the latter that was the most likely. The Book of Days had unflinchingly given the odds of a Failed Quester surviving long enough to redeem himself, and the odds weren't at all good.

Elena had gone out of her way to get both himself and Octavian into situations where, even if they were brought down lower than the humblest commoner, they were not in any danger of dying. Except, perhaps, by being monumentally stupid.

Alexander turned over on his back and stared up into the darkness above his bed. Now that he knew about The Tradition, he had an explanation for something he had felt all of his life — a ponderous, implacable sort of weight hanging over him from the moment he'd been born. He'd often ascribed that feeling to God, the weight of the Almighty's regard upon a young Prince.

Now he knew better. It hadn't been God. It had been this faceless, formless, impersonal Force that went about shoving people down the way it wanted them to go, just because it fit a sort of well-worn path, it didn't care what they wanted. It didn't give a toss about pain or pleasure. It only wanted things to happen in a predictable way.

Oh, how he hated it!

He wondered if Robert had been aware of such a thing, for surely Robert was a victim of The Tradition in all its cruelty. On the whole, he hoped not. To live your life feeling yourself impelled towards your early death — as if your fate was a cliff that you were rushing towards, with no way to stop —

That would have been unthinkably horrible, turning what had been a tragedy into something infinitely worse.

He sighed, and the sound filled the little loft room. He became aware that outside the window, crickets sang and frogs croaked, much quieter to his human ears than to the donkey's. For the first time in too long, he was in a bed, feeling two arms, two legs, all the parts of him what they should be and where they should be, resting on a feather mattress as good as any in the Palace of Kohlstania and better than the ones at the Academy. He was himself again.

I won't backslide, he vowed fiercely to himself. I swear it. No matter how provoked I am, no matter what that damned Tradition wants and tried to make me do, I won't backslide! I will be courteous, I will be considerate, I will remember my knightly vows and I will live up to them instead of merely giving lip service to them. There was nothing, absolutely nothing he would not do to avoid feeling his body warp and change into the beast.

Which meant he would have to be careful, very careful. If The Tradition could not force him into one role (dead failed Quester) it would probably try and force him into another. He would have to read and study to find out what that role might be, and whether or not it was one that would get him out of here. He might hate The Tradition, but there was no point in pretending it did not exist, nor that it was not very, very powerful. Clearly it took knowledge and magic to beat it. He only had a chance at half of that equation.

He closed his eyes, and for the moment, felt rather disinclined to open them again.

Strange, he thought, as he felt sleep creeping up on him. Strange how things worked out. He might have discovered that he was little more than a fancy pawn on some giant chessboard — but at least now he had a better target for his hate and anger than a pretty woman....

Shortly after midnight, Elena blinked, looked down at her notes, and realized that her handwriting was just short of illegible. It was time to call a halt to all of this and go to bed, before she dropped off to sleep right here at the table. She really wasn't minded to wake up at dawn with a crick in her neck and an inkblot on her cheek.

She tidied her papers, put up the quill, corked the ink, and with a wave of her hand, extinguished the lamps. A glance out the window showed her that Alexander had already given up for the night. He was probably smarter than she was.