waiting and watching to see what Rosa and the Queen would do — the two had stood up simultaneously. The Queen announced, in a stern voice, 'Princess Rosamund will be pleased to attend us in our chambers. Alone.'
Rosa had bowed stiffly and replied, 'It pleases us to do so.' Her manner had made it very clear that she was doing so only because she felt like it. The moment that they had exited, the Dining Room had erupted with the buzz of speculation.
Once the two of them were safely behind the locked doors of the Queen's Chambers, however, they had nearly collapsed with laughter. They held each other up, giggling helplessly, and every time one of them would manage to get herself under control, she would glance at the other and go off again. Once they had wiped their eyes and settled down, though, it had been time to get down to business, and the first order of business, it seemed, was drinking that Dragon's Blood and obtaining the gift of tongues that would come with it.
'Now, about the gift of tongues — it will also help you get through strange accents and even muddle through languages you don't already know,' Lily said, as she uncovered Jimson's mirror. 'Not as clearly as with animals, but human language is much more complicated than animal language. Siegfried had a nice dose of Dragon's Blood after killing a particularly nasty one when he was just ten. That's why Siegfried can actually bumble through Eltarian without having learned it before he crossed the border.'
Rosa was a little distracted at the moment, because she was hearing two things from the birds outside in the garden, one set of information layered over the top of the other. She heard the perfectly expected birdsong from them. But she also heard a tangled jumble of other things. From the robins, 'I'm here! Here! Here!' From the larks, soaring above them all, 'Look at meeeeeee! Look! Look!' From the meadowlarks, farther out where the stables were, 'My place! Mine! Mine!' And from the starlings, squabbling over the kitchen midden, 'Gimme, gimme, gimme!'
'It's working already,' she said, and made a face.
Lily watched her, and nodded sympathetically. 'You will get used to it, and you'll soon be able to tune the nonsense and useless things out. Meanwhile allow me to introduce you to a most intelligent little source of information, the one who actually told me about Siegfried and the dragon.' She went to the window and whistled, holding out her hand. In no time at all, a little brown bird whisked off the roof and alighted on her outstretched finger. The bird tilted its head to the side and chirped. What Rosa heard, under the melodious chirping, was, 'I don't suppose you have any of that lovely cream cake, do you, Godmother?'
She nearly jumped with surprise.
'Of course I do, little friend,' Lily said fondly, and brought the bird into the sitting room, where she let it hop onto the table where a slice of crumbled cake was waiting in a white porcelain saucer. The bird happily stuffed herself — the voice that Rosa had heard had definitely been female — and Lily waited patiently.
'I tend to believe in serving my guests dinner before I interrogate them,' she said to Rosa, dryly. The bird looked up and gave a wink, before going back to the cake crumbs.
When the bird was at last full, it hopped onto the back of a chair and regarded them out of intelligent black eyes that sparkled like two beads of jet.
Rosa stared at her, fascinated. Her fingers itched to touch those tiny feathers. 'I don't suppose...you'd let me stroke you, would you?' she asked tentatively. 'I've never stroked a live bird before.'
'Have you any nasty lotions on your hands?' the bird sang. 'Or perfumes, perfumes are nasty, too. Oil is bad for my feathers.'
Rosa shook her head.
'All right then.' The bird waited for Rosa to hold out her hand, and hopped onto the finger that Rosa offered. Her claws felt very light, very delicate, like two bits of thistledown that had contracted a little to hold on, and to Rosa's surprise, they were quite warm. Carefully, she stroked the bird's head with her other index finger, just barely touching the amazingly soft, smooth feathers for a while, then growing bolder, carefully, gently scratching with index finger and thumb, as she would scratch a young kitten. The bird closed her eyes in pleasure and very nearly purred. 'Ooh, you do that very well,' she trilled. 'I like you. You're as nice as Siegfried.'
'That's a fine recommendation,' Lily chuckled. 'Now, would you be so kind as to tell us all about Siegfried's past? Where does he come from? Who are his parents? And how on earth did he get The Tradition so interested in him?'
'He comes from the Kingdom of Drachenthal, which actually has no King, just a great many Clans that are constantly fighting with one another, and a lot of foolish, quarrelsome gods. His father and mother are brother and sister, and the children of a god and a mortal,' the bird sang. 'I don't really need to weary you with all of the details. The gods of his land are rather dim, and they don't think very far ahead. They actually take pride in acting on impulse, as if that was particularly heroic. They make bargains with each other and with magical races without thinking of consequences, and The Tradition only compounds all of the difficulties that rushing about doing things impulsively causes. Well! Just as an example, the gods are always messing about and siring children on mortal women, and then become surprised when their goddesses aren't happy about this. Then the goddesses want to punish the women for violating the vows of marriage, and the gods want to protect their leman and — it just gets very, very messy.'
Lily rolled her eyes. 'Which only makes me a great deal happier that we at least are not burdened with that. Gods are best at a distance, and not meddling with mortals. Do go on.'
'Well, Traditionally, this would make him a Hero. Which he is. It would also make him just as dim as his grandfather-the-god and his father, who couldn't even recognize his own twin sister and fell in love with her and made things even messier, if you can imagine it. Actually Siegfried is not dim, not at all. He is really quite clever, so when he tasted Dragon's Blood and heard me talking, he actually stopped to listen and ask some intelligent questions. I was able to warn him about The Tradition and what his fate would be if he didn't do his best to avoid it. When he heard that, he didn't just bluster something useless about Death and Glory, he actually listened to my advice, and then took it. I'm quite fond of him, really. And he's kind. Even when all he has is a crust, he makes sure I have enough to eat.'
'Well,' Rosa said, cautiously, 'Traditionally speaking, thatis one of the marks of a true Hero. It might not all be him...'
The bird tilted her head. 'I like you. You are smarter than you look. But no, most of it is him. Traditionally the Heroes of Drachenthal are mighty of thew, small of brain, and not kind at all. Usually when one of us magical birds tries to warn them, they turn around and try to kill us with rocks.' The bird paused. 'Of course, the fact that we can only get their attention when they have hangovers might contribute to that.'
'So just what is this fate he keeps trying to escape?' asked Lily.
