we do not dare do anything that will attract attention to Duke Sebastian or his condition, and relocating him most certainly would have. We face a dreadful unknown here, one with potentially devastating implications. Sebastian was not changed by any means that I, nor any other Godmother, have ever heard of.”
“Wait — what?” Bella replied. Sebastian had already told her this, of course, but she hadn’t altogether believed him. He might be a sorcerer, but he wasn’t all that old, and he seemed to be pretty much self-taught. He could scarcely be expected to know as much as, say, a Godmother. But for the Godmother to admit that there was some sort of magic at work that she didn’t recognize —
Well, that meant that there was something operating here that she couldn’t predict. And when the Godmother couldn’t predict something, it meant everyone was potentially in danger.
“It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate his magic from the signs of someone or something else working magic on him,” Elena continued. “I will simply describe it as holding a lit candle between yourself and the sun, and trying to separate the light of the candle from the sunlight. So without knowing who or what the other worker of magic is, we cannot work out what was done to him. All we can do is eliminate things.”
“Such as?” Bella asked, uncertainly.
“He was never bitten by another were, which is the commonest form of the change. And contrary to popular belief, it is the easiest to cure, provided one has the sympathy of a Godmother. The bite of a were leaves a permanent scar, and one that is easy to recognize. Sebastian has no such scar.”
“But — ” Bella began.
“I assure you, we did not simply leave it at that,” the Godmother continued. “It was possible he could have been infected by a very minor wound, and one that would leave so small a scar we wouldn’t recognize it. One of us even suggested a number of other implausible means of infection, so we assumed nothing. But despite vigorous searching, we never found another were, nor signs of one anywhere in the Redbuck Forest, nor within even the most pessimistic distance of the Redbuck Forest.”
“Oh…” she said, and bit her lip. I really should know better than to question a Godmother…
“That left us with two other common options. The first is that he was a terribly wicked person who died as a result of a specific curse on the part of one of his victims, was buried and returned as a were. Mind you, while I call this ‘common,’ it’s not, and has never been heard of in any of my Kingdoms, but it is known in others, and had to be considered. However, since he is not wicked, did not encounter the sort of shaman who would make that kind of curse and obviously did not die, that could not be the case.” The Godmother turned her head slightly, and looked at Bella again. Seeing her reaction? Probably. She seemed satisfied by it.
“The second possibility was more likely than the first, since we already knew that he is a sorcerer. There is a specific spell which requires a belt of wolf skin that allows someone of sufficiently depraved character to physically become a wolf. I say ‘depraved,’ because part of the spell requires that the person first eat human flesh. As it happens, since we found no such belt, and he has transformed without any such belt, this also is obviously not the case.” Elena finished transplanting the seedlings, and dusted off her hands before looking back at Bella.
“Haven’t I heard — I mean, I thought — Are there other ways?” she said, flailing a little, mentally.
Elena nodded. “But all of them are less common than those three, and all of them were easily disproved. He didn’t drink water from a wolf footprint, he wasn’t born on the last moment of the winter solstice, he never ate the flesh or brain of a wild wolf, there is no magic pool that causes Transformation closer than a thousand leagues, he didn’t even know how to make the Transformation potions or salves, and he certainly never swore a pact with infernal forces in exchange for revenge. And none of those causes of Transformation has ever been known to occur within my Kingdoms. There is no explanation for what happened to Sebastian. He was a perfectly normal young man until one full moon he suddenly became a werewolf.”
“I’m not sure what all this means,” Bella replied, feeling bewildered. Elena was getting at something, but what was it? She felt as if she must be missing something.
Fortunately, Elena didn’t take this amiss, and seemed to be perfectly happy to explain. “This means either he was cursed by someone untrained, but extremely powerful, someone we have not been able to find, or there is another way to make someone into a were-beast, one that none of us have been able to determine. It is also a means that can be worked, without detection, on someone who was relatively closely watched because he was the heir to a noble household. Now, can you see where that places us?”
Bella’s mind went blank for a moment, then began racing. She had always had a particularly good imagination; that was one way in which she ensured against problems cropping up — or rather, was prepared for them when they did. And once the Godmother had pointed out the circumstances surrounding this —
“If it can be done to Sebastian — it could be done to anyone,” she said, slowly, a feeling of slow horror dawning on her. “Anyone at all. The King — the Prince — ”
“Any King, any Prince, any General commanding an army in war. Any influential priest or other man regarded as holy. It might have taken a magician to create the means, but we are fairly certain it did not take a magician to place whatever brought the change about, which tells us that any ordinary agent could be used. And just imagine how devastating that could be,” the Godmother said gravely. “From your reputation and what your father has said of you, Isabella, you know history, and you are very good at making deductions. The potential for disaster is immense. Right now, we honestly don’t know if this is the result of a single disgruntled magician with a grudge against Sebastian’s family, a magical accident that can never be repeated again, a magical accident that will strike again, some sort of magical plague or someone trying out his new weapon. Until we know — well, we are trying to keep all the variables to a minimum and we have to assume this was the work of someone, or several someones, whose motives we do not know. And if this was the work of an outsider, we would rather that he didn’t know he was successful. Thus we are keeping it secret.”
Bella digested all of this. It was hard to keep her own thoughts coherent, when they were running off in all directions, with all sorts of possible scenarios, but one emerged above all the others. “This is a lot bigger than just one Kingdom.”
Elena nodded gravely. “Every Godmother in the Five Hundred Kingdoms knows about this and has been keeping in touch with me about it since Sebastian changed. So far there have been no other instances of werewolf change that could not be ascribed to the three common causes, or to circumstances peculiar to that particular Kingdom. But I have to add that we know of. It is possible that there is another like Sebastian running wild in some remote area who is smart enough to hide his condition and remote enough that he hasn’t drawn attention to himself with killing sprees. Since it has been five years since Sebastian was infected, the situation has become less urgent, but is still no less dangerous.”
“What does that mean for me?” she asked in a small voice.
“It means that the odds of you being infected are lower than they might otherwise be,” the Godmother told
