Fairy Godmother

several days went on all around him, he felt curiously detached from it all; it occurred to him that had anyone described this situation, these surroundings to him a year ago, he would have considered them to be mad. Sitting in a room in a building that was larger on the inside than the outside, in company with a magician and four Fae. And if he made one misstep, he might be spending the night as a donkey again.

'There's a new room in the cellar,' Robin was saying, in answer to some question of Lily's that he had not been paying attention to. 'Complete with barrels for the cider.'

'Ah, well, that's one problem sorted,' Lily said with satisfaction.

Elena was looking from one to the other of them with a look that was something between a smile and a grimace. 'Would any of you mind telling me just how the house does this? Gets bigger when we need space, I mean?'

'We don't know,' Rose replied, as it finally dawned on Alexander just what they had been talking about. 'It's some magic that the first Godmother to live here did. Actually I don't think that the house is actually getting bigger. I think that it is merely giving us access to parts of it we didn't have before. We've never actually seen it growing, you know, even though Robin talks about it budding.'

'Did you not say,' Alexander said, thinking quite hard about some of his recent reading, 'that the first Godmother to live here was one of the Great Fae?'

They all turned to stare at him as if they had not realized that he was there.

'Yes,' Lily said. 'So?'

'I always thought — ' he shrugged ' — children's tales in Kohlstania speak of the Elven Queens living in great palaces. Well, what if this is — and always has been — a great palace?'

'Ah!' Robin said, his wizened face lighting up. 'Yes! One of the Great Halls of Faerie! So that the house we see is — is just the entrance hall to it, so to speak!'

'It's as good an explanation as any other, I suppose,' Elena said, after a moment of thought. But she looked relieved. 'It makes sense. But why didn't any of you know this?'

'Because we weren't here, except Hob, and he was in the stable,' said Lily, matter-of-factly. 'We did not take service here until the first of the mortal Godmothers was in residence. Then, the place was as you have seen, with fewer storage rooms and workrooms. And a much smaller Library.'

Alexander shook his head. This was only contributing to his sensation of living in a dream. But the food in his belly was warm and solid, and the scent of sweet apples was still in his nostrils —

'We're all mad, you know,' Elena said aloud, looking straight at him.

'I had begun to suspect this,' he said in all seriousness.

She broke into a smile, a completely unexpected smile. She had never really smiled a great deal around him, and never at him before — or at least, she had never done so without a great deal of ironic mockery to her expression. This smile accepted the joke as being on both of them, and invited him to share in it. It hit him with an almost physical impact.He managed to return it, but not without a struggle to get his heart and breathing going again.

She's beautiful. How had he never noticed that before?

'Well, if that is the explanation — and thank you, Prince Alexander, for thinking of it — I will confess that I am much relieved,' Elena said to all of them. 'It had occurred to me that if this house was capable of growing, it might also be capable of shrinking. What would happen, for instance, if some enemy were to somehow drain away some of its magic? Would it shrink? With us in it?' She shuddered. 'But one of the Palaces of the Great Fae, slowly opening rooms as we need them — now that, I feel much more comfortable with. And on that note, I shall go back to my studies.'

That seemed to be a sort of dismissal for all of them. Elena got up and left, Robin collected the dishes, Rose left through the same door that the Godmother had used, Lily moving to help Robin. Hob stood up, and gave him a sharp look.

'We've had our dinner,' he said, with a meaningful glance towards the stable.

Alexander understood him. 'Time to feed the beasts,' he replied, and got to his feet, himself.

Hob actually fed them; it was Alexander who gave them all water and made sure they were comfortable. Then Hob left, and Alexander climbed the ladder to his loft room, taking the lantern with him. When he got there, he stripped down to his breeks, and slipped into bed, taking a book with him.

Many pages later, he felt his eyelids drooping, and put the book aside, turning to blow out the lantern. As he did so, he glanced out the window, and saw the silhouette of Elena, also bent over a book, in the window that faced the stable.

It was another long night, but at the end of it, Elena felt as if she had a better idea, not only of what would be expected of her on taking the responsibility for a new Kingdom, but what she could expect from Kohlstania. And she had a bat-delivered note from Arachnia, to the effect that Octavian had passed, not only her trials, but a few little tests that her consort had contrived. She made a few notes, based on other Restoration spectacles in the various chronicles, and her imagination began to get to work. She fell asleep with her head full of ideas.

But the next morning, she had to work hard to wrench her concentration back to her plans for restoring Octavian to his proper place, for she had had a second one of those dreams about his brother.

Wretched man! she thought, irritated beyond all reason by the fact that he had so sensuously invaded her dreams. She put off going down to breakfast until after she saw Lily taking him back down to the apple orchard again.

The sooner I get all of them off my hands, the better, she decided, feeling very glad that Lily had taken responsibility for Alexander for the day. She told Rose that she would be gone overnight, and with a sense of relief, drove the donkey-cart out into the forest and evoked the 'All Forests Are One' spell to take her to Arachnia's dark and forbidding palace.