Fairy Godmother

own father and brother — well, he simply could not tear himself away. It was a pity that he could not hear as well as see, but Randolf was giving a fairly good precis of what was going on.

Rose, however, was speaking, not to Alexander, who probably would not have answered, but to Lily.

'Because, oh impossibly obdurate one, I told her to bring him here' replied the mirror-spirit Randolf, in a bored tone. 'And to repeat myself one more time, I told her to bring him here this morning, because I am something of a predictive Mirror-Slave, and it seemed imperative to me, and important to the lad's Redemption, that the Prince see and understand what was happening to his father and brother today. The Godmother has given me fairly broad scope for me to use my own judgment in such matters, and this is how I choose to use it.' The spirit of the mirror paused. 'You do want the boy redeemed, don't you?'

Out of the corner of his eye, Alexander saw Rose glare at the mirror, but she said nothing.

Instead of going out to work in the orchard today, directly after breakfast Lily had insisted on bringing him into the house, right up to this rather feminine chamber, where she had placed him on a hassock in front of a mirror that was not silvered, but black.

He thought he had gotten used to magic and the idea of it, but when a face appeared in the mirror that was clearly not a reflection of anyone in the room — and then, when it spoke to him! — he had nearly jumped up and gone looking for a weapon.

His self-control had the upper hand, however, and quite honestly it was impossible to listen to Randolf without being amused and forgetting that he was basically a disembodied head. And before too long, he was talking with Randolf almost as if the spirit was an ordinary person rather than something that only lived in a mirror.

Then Randolf began showing him what had taken the Godmother away from home — and that it had to do entirely with his brother Octavian.

Now, the Godmother had been keeping him fairly, if sketchily, up-to-date on the rest of his family, but it was one thing to hear about it, and quite another to see it. Octavian just astonished him; his brother had never been a weakling, but the amount of muscle that he had put on was matched only by the changed look of his face. There was thoughtfulness there, and intelligence; Octavian had once seemed a bit imitative, reflecting what others thought rather than thinking for himself.

Alexander scarcely left the mirror for anything; Lily brought him a ploughman's lunch and he ate it without even tasting it. It was not only that he was half-starved for the sight of familiar faces, and anxious to know the welfare of his father and brother. It was that, if Octavian had managed to win his freedom, how had it been done? And could he manage, as well?

At least, that was how he had begun his vigil. But as he watched his father and brother together, and heard from Ran-dolf what they were all saying, he had realized something quite profound.

They did not need him.

Oh, they wanted to know that he was all right, and when Elena had assured them, in rather vague terms, that he was, they clearly dismissed him and his current situation with some relief. But it had been Octavian who had been brought up at their father's side; it had been Octavian who was the Crown Prince. The problem that had occurred with Julian had, in a lesser fashion, been going on between Alexander and his father. He'd been raised by nurses and tutors, educated by the Academy, and although he idolized his father, he realized that before his return on graduation, he had probably spent less than a month in his father's presence, all told. Realistically he was the Spare. And with Octavian hale and hearty and as like to their father as if they'd been hatched from the same egg, there was no place at the Kohlstanian court for Alexander except as a perpetual Prince-in-Waiting. Even that promised position as Octavian's Commander-in-Chief would probably have been in name only. The Commanders of Kohlstania's army were practiced and competent, and he was unblooded. Exceptionally well-trained, but unblooded.

So, by the time that Randolf showed them Elena, in her little donkey-cart, on her way home again, the question had been significantly altered in Alexander's mind. It was no longer How can I get home, but Do I want to go home?

What would he do, when he got home again? Oh, he could take command of the Army, he supposed, but to what purpose? To watch them drill, and take them out on parades, and make some effort at keeping them sharp? The current commanders would be better at that than he was. He didn't know a great deal about anything other than military matters, and to put it bluntly, he doubted that seasoned Commanders would give more than lip service to his leadership. He had no practice, and no real experience, and they had no reason to trust his judgment. So what would he do when he got back? He had a taste of real work and real life now, and while he wouldn't miss the blisters and the sweat and the dead-stupid physical labor, the artificial surroundings of the Court did not seem particularly attractive anymore. Watching the intrigues going on, playing politics, sitting in on the Council sessions and pretending he was actually contributing to the discussions seemed an utter waste of time. And a day 'filled' with games, hunting, flirting, wenching, and the like wasn't particularly attractive, either.

Well, perhaps the wenching. But a man could only rise to the occasion so many times in a day. You couldn't actually fill a day with wenching.

As a grumbling Rose made certain that he was out of the house and heading back to the stables, he was no longer sure that he belonged in Kohlstania anymore.

He'd had more of those dreams, of purple sands and a lovely lady. He was not altogether certain of her identity, but by now, he had a shrewd guess.

Oh, yes indeed, he could guess. The strange light had given an odd color to her hair, but under proper sun, he reckoned it would be golden. And while he'd never seen Elena in quite so little clothing, well, that could just be chalked up to the fact that his imagination was very good at creating a picture from a small amount of information.

Not that he was under any illusions that the dreams meant anything, except that he had stopped thinking of Madame Elena as an enemy and someone to blame all of his troubles upon. No, he was not about to make any overtures in that direction. He had no particular wish to go back to being a donkey most of the time. Not that she wasn't a tasty little thing, and not that she wasn't exactly to his particular taste, but — no. And not that she still couldn't make his groin ache if he thought about her in that way, but — definitely no. Even if she didn't turn him back into a donkey, it wasn't worth finding himself flat on his back with that sort of headache for a second time.

It was enough that as he had become less of an ass, in both senses, she had become friendlier. If she didn't yet treat him as an equal — well, maybe he didn't yet deserve to be treated like an equal. A Godmother was both above birth-rank and apart from it —