The Charming Way (3 page)

“Oh, my,” she said. “He really is the
tyrant, isn’t he?”

Charming nodded, a bit uncomfortably. He
tried not to look at his father’s deeds—or misdeeds. Not that they were
illegal. Whatever the King did was legal; that was the law of the land. But he
didn’t have to like it.

“I prefer it here,” he said. “In the
Greater World.”

With books, books and more books being
created all the time. Not to mention movies and television and games. He was
even beginning to like Twitter novels, even though that panel this morning had
shaken him more than he wanted to admit. He didn’t want the book to die. He
wanted it to live, in its lovely hand-held form, for the rest of his
(exceptionally long) life.

“Of course you prefer it here,” she said.
“The Greater World loves you. You’re an ideal. Everyone wants to be you or have
you or marry you. You’re not considered a bitter, witchy woman past her
sell-by-date who’s jealous of younger women and can’t come to terms with her
lost potential.”

Well, they had the bitterness spot on, he
thought, but didn’t say. Still, he really didn’t care about charming her. She
had made up her mind about him on very little evidence—mostly on what
other people thought—so he knew better than to try to change her mind.

Although, he couldn’t prevent himself
from saying, “Aren’t you jealous, though? I mean, really?”

Her eyes widened. Had no one spoken to
her like this before?

“Look,” he said, holding out his hands. “You’re
the one who made the comment about me marrying a girl who was ‘thin, shapely,
and oh so young.’ That’s sounds a little bitter and jealous to me.”

“Of course it would to you,” she snapped.
“I suppose you think I tried to kill Snow White, like the fairy tales say.”

“No, I don’t,” he said. If she had tried,
she would have been imprisoned when Snow White married the other Charming. Imprisoned
or beheaded.

“People like you believe in the fairy
tales. Why shouldn’t you? You live one.” Her tone got even more strident.

He sighed. He didn’t think divorce was
part of the fairy tale, but he couldn’t get a word in. She hadn’t stopped
talking.

“People like you don’t understand people
like me. You have everything in life, and you don’t understand people who have
to fight for every scrap—”

“You’re right,” he said flatly.

She stopped, as if she was surprised at
his words. Apparently, she didn’t expect him to admit anything.

But he wasn’t going to say what he really
thought. He hated it when conversations veered in this direction. He was in a
damned if he did and damned if he didn’t situation. If he said he understood,
he’d have to prove it, with life experience that she might or might not
believe. And if he said he didn’t understand, then she’d try to convince him. So
he gave her his standard answer.

“I don’t understand people who like to
fight,” he said. “I never have. So have a good book fair, and I’ll see you
around.”

He slipped past her into the hallway,
feeling unsettled and somewhat disappointed. He had liked her at first, anyway,
and it wasn’t often that he found a woman attractive any more. Most women his
age had given up or had snared the right man and weren’t interested in meeting
anyone new.

Technically, he should marry a younger
woman and give his father the heir that his father was clamoring for, but he’d
already married a young woman, and that hadn’t gotten him anywhere. And
besides, he had children. Two lovely, intelligent daughters whom he didn’t see
enough.

And who was to say that a girl couldn’t
inherit? If his father died before Charming did, he’d make a decree that his
daughters could take over.

It was the least he could do.

The doors to the main exhibition hall
were opening as he walked past, and his heart took a small leap. He was still
unsettled—he really hadn’t expected to find someone from the kingdoms
here—but he was getting past that. And considering how big this place
was, he probably wouldn’t see her again.

Which bothered him a little bit more than
he was willing to admit.

***

Okay, so she had been unfair. She
launched into her rant without thinking about who she was talking to.

Not that she could convince a Charming
that Archetypes needed protecting. His archetype—handsome, heroic,
perfect
—was desirable.

Hers wasn’t.

Still, she leaned against the door to the
main media screening room, hoping her heart would stop pounding. She hadn’t
meant to yell at him. She’d learned over the years that no one responded well
to the whole “you don’t understand” thing, even if they didn’t understand.

But she had years—no,
decades—of unfairness trapped inside her, and it wanted to flood out. And
she wasn’t about to go into therapy. That would just be buying into another
version of the stereotype.

It took her a moment to gather herself. She
always said things she regretted later. No amount of living or practical
experience could change that about her.

And she did regret yelling at him.

Maybe if she saw him later in the
weekend, she would apologize.

Maybe.

But first, she had a group of protesters
to organize.

This hallway was big enough, and it
wasn’t roped off. It was perfect. It would give her all the media attention she
needed. She might even be able to stage an interruption on one of the panels
being held in the studios.

She ran her hands over her hair (still
naturally black, except for a Cruella de Vil white streak that she had to color
so that she wouldn’t look like her properly infamous cousin), and headed back
down the hallway.

Time to gather the troops.

She had a book unfair to interrupt—

And she was going to do it with style.

***

He was beginning to understand the
thinking behind parking close. He had already made four heavily laden trips
back to the car, and it wasn’t even noon yet. The day promised to be one of the
hottest of the year so far, and if he didn’t get some Gatorade, he might just
perish—long life or no long life.

He carefully avoided the van, even though
he saw no one around it. During one of his trips, he’d seen a motley gathering
of people—some looking a little less human than others. He was pretty
convinced he saw Rumplestiltskin there. The canny old dwarf had convinced most
people he could spin straw into gold, but really his major skill was turning
nothing into something—which wasn’t that far from Charming’s skill.

Not that Charming had ever used it.

But he wasn’t going to think about PETA. Or
anyone from the kingdoms. He had enough reading material in the car to last him
the entire trip plus some, and he still hadn’t gone through the first aisle in
the first exhibition hall.

If he felt overwhelmed by the number of
books before, he felt worse now. Booth after booth after booth, representing
publisher after publisher after publisher, filled with book after book after
book, all of them for this season’s list or next season’s. No one had back stock,
except in the catalogue, although some of the evergreen books did have backers
deeper in the pavilion—at least that was what his program said.

His program also gave him listings of
panels. He could get into all of them with his lovely purple badge.

He was torn between listening to writers
or picking up their wares. He wished he could do both. And in some cases, he
could, since some of the panels were being filmed for—well, maybe not for
posterity, but for people who hadn’t attended at all.

Even with two more days of this, he
doubted he would see much of it. Not just the panels, but the books, the
related materials, the third and fourth exhibition halls. He was actually
despairing of getting through the entire thing, even though another book
dealer, seeing his sadness, commiserated.

Don’t
worry, chum,
the other
dealer said.
I’ve been coming for twenty
years, and I’ve never once left the main exhibition area.

As if that made him feel better.
 

For the first time in his life, he wished
he had magic so that he had could explore every single one of the nooks and
crannies. But even he knew that wasn’t how magic worked. He’d have to pay some
horrible price for that wish, and he wasn’t willing to do it.

He’d already paid price enough when he
married Ella.

He was just coming back into the hall
when he saw her—that woman—Snow White’s stepmother. What was her
name? He didn’t know for sure, which wasn’t that unusual. In the kingdoms,
names had power, especially to the magical.

And if his memory was right (and he
wasn’t sure it was), she had some magical powers.

How could anyone with magic be bitter? He
wouldn’t have been. Of course, he didn’t understand how anyone with magic could
be a failure either, but a bunch of them were.

More than a bunch really. Most of them.

Still, he found her strangely compelling
and just a little sad. He actually understood her rant—a little, anyway. He’d
seen the way that his father and others had treated Ella’s stepmother, who
hadn’t been a bad woman. She had just been desperate. Her husband had died,
leaving her with a stepdaughter she hadn’t known about, a house that wasn’t
paid for, and two daughters of her own.

Sure she struggled, and yes, she had been
verbally abusive to Ella—by Greater World parlance. In the Third Kingdom,
she had been kind. She hadn’t turned Ella out of the house. She’d fed her,
clothed her (if poorly), and had given her a roof over her head, when she’d
been within her legal right to abandon her.

As a wedding present to Ella, his father
had imprisoned her stepmother, and Ella thought that just punishment. She’d
been gleeful about it, which had disturbed Charming then even though he was
besotted with her.

Now he was appalled—and a bit
suspicious. He had a hunch the fact that the stepsisters got blinded at the
reception by a pack of out-of-control birds had more to do with magic of the
paid-for variety than the bad luck everyone had attributed it to.

He shuddered. Then he shoved the
overstuffed bags in his car and headed back to the pavilion.

Halfway there, he saw one of the woman’s
PETA companions, who was—unless Charming missed the guess—a flying
monkey. Only he had stuffed his wings into a 1960s Sergeant Pepper’s coat and
put on a hat, a fake ZZ-Top beard and sunglasses. He looked human enough, until
you peered and realized that bluish fur covered not only the skin around his
eyes and his forehead, but also his hands and forearms.

He carried two signs, and Charming gasped
when he saw them:

Book
Unfair! Destroy the Lies!

As he got closer, he could smell the
scent of fresh Magic Marker. The flying monkey loped ahead of him.

“Excuse me,” Charming said. “Are you with
PETA?”

He said it the way the animal rights
group did—pee-tah—and the monkey’s mouth tightened into a little
frown.

“I’m with P.E.T.A.,” he snapped. “People
for the Ethical Treatment—”

“Of Archetypes, I know,” Charming said. “What’s
this about unfair books?”

The monkey stopped. “You read these
things?”

“Books?” Charming asked. “Of course. Why
else would I be here?”

“You’re being brainwashed,” the monkey
said. “You don’t understand the evil being perpetrated by these horrible fairy
tales.”

“Fairy tales,” Charming repeated. He knew
that “fairy tales” were how the Greater World absorbed the history of the
kingdoms. Some of the tales were wrong, and some were not quite as wrong. They
were about as accurate as the dime novels from the old Wild West, just a lot
more popular.

“That’s right,” the monkey said. “They’re
lies. Damn lies. And they’ve got to be stopped.”

“The fairy tales have to be stopped,”
Charming repeated because he didn’t entirely understand this. “Fairy tales have
been around for hundreds of years.”

“That’s hundreds of years too long,” the
monkey said. “We’ve got to put an end to this madness.”

“By protesting a book fair?” Charming
couldn’t keep the incredulousness out of his voice.

“We have to start somewhere,” the monkey
said, and loped even faster, so that he got ahead of Charming.

Charming watched him go. He was confused.
They thought they could—what? Stop the spread of fairy tales? Make
fantastic literature go away?

To what end?

He needed to go back to the exhibition
hall, but he found himself following the monkey instead.

***

Mellie ended up with fifty-one
protesters, fifty-two if she counted herself.

The problem was that they were the bottom
of the barrel. The selkie no one had heard of, a few flying monkeys,
Rumplestiltskin (who liked to be part of any kind of political action), and
Bluebeard, of all people. None of the other stepmothers, none of the witches,
none of the crones. The magical fish had sent their regrets, claiming they
would take part if she held the next protest on the Santa Monica Pier—as
if she believed that, which she didn’t.