“Now listen to me. This equippage will get you there in great style. The only reason we’re going to all this trouble is to get the prince looking at you. I’ve cast a spell of glamour over you to keep him looking, and to prevent Gloriana and her sister and brothers from recognizing you. However, none of it will last past dawn. Fairy things often don’t. There’s a monastery near the prince’s dwelling, and when the monastery bell rings for Matins you must leave, or you can’t be sure to be home before the sun rises.” I was reminded of my listening for the bell when I had been wooing her father who was not really her father, Ned. Matins was supposed to be sung about midnight, but in my experience the monks were often late with it.
“The place is only two hours or so away,” she argued with me.
“If you don’t have an accident, yes. But if your coachman has to mend a wheel, it could take longer. You must leave a large margin for error.”
“I could walk home,” she shrugged, giving me one of Jaybee’s intransigent, stubborn looks.
“If you don’t want to go back tomorrow night, of course you could. It’s about eight miles. But if you want to go back tomorrow night, then be home by dawn. I have to reuse what is here.” Once things have been enchanted, it takes less effort to re-enchant them. Besides, it had taken me days to catch six lizards. I was not as agile as I had been as a child, and they do not, unfortunately, enchant until one actually has them in hand. I gave her the dress embroidered in daisies (which she examined critically before saying it would do), combed her hair for her, and told her to be on her way.
“Barefoot?” she asked me. “Fine fairy godmother you are. They’ll laugh themselves silly.”
I had not thought of shoes. I had extended myself on everything else and had not thought of shoes. There was not enough glamour left in me to create three pair. One would have to do. One to go with everything. I meant to make them white. I was tired. They came out transparent, like glass. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. In the future, the story would include a hundred false details, but the damned glass slippers were really part of it.
I hated them. Silly, plastic-looking things. Elly had never seen plastic, so she loved them. “Glass slippers,” she cried. “I almost believe you’re really a fairy!”
I had turned a toad into a coachman, had turned mice into horses, had invented coach springs several hundred years before their time, but it took glass shoes to make her believe in me! I watched silently, wearily as she departed, then put on the seven-league boots and went where she was going. All I wanted to do, I told myself, was see her have a good time. Expiation of guilt, certainly. I would have done her better service to have had a serious talk with her about reality, but who was I to speak of reality? She was one-quarter fairy, as I was half. Perhaps I could even have taught her some of the things Mama taught me.
Better not, my conscience said. Better not. My conscience sounded much like Father Raymond. Elly would not use such power wisely. Or even kindly. Not until she was older, if then.
The prince’s celebration was very minor stuff. A dozen local musicians, scraping and blowing, any one of whom would have made more tuneful sounds killing pigs. Still, there was a certain rude vitality evident which came partly from reliance upon the wine kegs, partly from letting the notes fall where they might, and partly from everyone’s determination to have a good time. The tunes they played were well known. They could not have assayed anything else. They took my added voice as the effects of intoxication and played on, rather better than before.
The prince was yellow-haired and quite good-looking, in a sweet, almost feminine way. He had a straight nose and a gentle, delicate mouth, with dark eyes and brows to lend drama. He was slightly taller than Elladine and a head or more shorter than poor Gloriana. His nickname, given him by his mama, was Charme, or “Charming,” as we would say in the twentieth, and he suited that name well enough. His mama was fat and fond and indulgent. His papa, the King or Prince or whatever, was taciturn and worried about other things. When Mama did not recall Papa to himself, he sat on his gilded chair and looked into distances I could not see. The loss of a kingdom, even a very small one, would weigh on one, I supposed.
The young prince dutifully danced with all the ladies, even the very ugly ones. Of these, Gloriana was the most, and Griselda a close second. There were three or four rather pretty girls, and the rest were what one might expect if one rounded up a sample of the countryside. Elladine arrived a couple of hours before midnight, driving directly up to the terrace beside the ballroom as I’d suggested. I’d made sure the doors were open, and no one could have missed her arrival. I had assured her that this could only add to the mystery and make her more fascinating. Not that she needed additional glamour. What I had given her was quite enough. In fact, looking back on it, what she had of her own
