The Sleeping Beauty (5 page)

The potion was going to take some time to brew. Well enough, during that time she could go impersonate the Evil Stepmother impersonating the Helpful Old Woman. Right now, Rosa looked like
five miles of bad road. Under all the bruises and dirt, she still was the fairest in the land, but only The Tradition would have been able to tell that. All well and good, but to make the sleep spell easier to lift, she was going to have to
look
like the Beauty Asleep.

Lily shook her head as she selected the components for her base, and began compounding. It was a wonder that more Godmothers didn’t go mad.

However, not so bad really, because the Helpful Old Woman would be doing the work Rosa was supposed to be doing, making it possible for her to get a good bath, clean herself up, heal up all the bruises and look like a Princess again. Rosa would have to
feel
like a Princess for everything to work just right.

Hopefully the Dwarves were inclined to ignore anything that didn’t affect them.

She set up the workbench in the middle first, then the ones against the walls, with three stations on each of the wall benches, and four on the bench in the middle. The Brownies began arriving with the ingredients, and Lily started the thirteen separate components that would eventually be combined to make her slowing potion. Oh, and of course every one of those components had a cantrip or a minor spell that had to be cast on it, and you had more cantrips to cast when you combined them. And they had to be combined at the right time. And the right temperature. And it went without saying, in the right order.

She left it all simmering or chilling or bubbling away, with a Brownie team keeping an eye on it all. The first lot would be ready tomorrow.

Time for her illusion cloak.

She placed a plain cloak on the mannequin as she carefully concocted the illusion she wanted associated with this cloak. First, the general shape of the body under it—round, matronly, sturdy. Since she could see through the vast majority of illusions, she clearly saw the mannequin under what she was doing, but atop it, she also clearly
saw the shape of an old peasant woman’s body. At this stage it looked a great deal like a doll made of dough.

She tinted the dough with a healthy skin color, weathered and rosy. This was the stage at which most people began to be unnerved, because her creation was starting to look too much like a person for comfort.

Next, she added the clothing—it would be much easier not to do that, since she had so many costumes in her extensive wardrobe that it was a step she could easily skip, but she also wanted the Traditional impact of throwing off the cloak and revealing her true self. It was just another way of making The Tradition do what she wanted.

So she added another layer over the skin-colored body—a set of worn, sturdy leather shoes; heavy woolen stockings; a patched linen petticoat; the fustian skirt, also patched, over that; and a clean, crisp, embroidered apron over that. Then the clean, slightly threadbare linen blouse, the embroidered black felt vest. She walked around it, examining it from all sides. Kalinda, who had done this many times before, did the same.

“It’s very solid, Godmother,” the little Brownie said, then moved in to check closer. Lily’s vision of what was
really
there showed Kalinda reaching out and fingering air; her vision of the illusion showed her checking the weight and feel of the apron, the skirt, the blouse and the vest. You actually had to know how these fabrics felt and acted in reality to replicate them in illusion. The simplest illusions, and the easiest to break, were the ones that acted only on the eyes. The best extended to all senses. Kalinda sniffed.

“Smells just right, too, Godmother,” she said with satisfaction. “Just perfect. Like you’d washed it all and left it to dry in the sun, then put it away with some lavender.”

“Excellent. Hands now, I think.”

“Right-oh.” Kalinda held hers out as models.

Kalinda was a Brownie accustomed to hard work, and her hands
showed it. There were tiny scars, the nails were groomed but uneven and the thumb was a bit chipped. The skin was brown, there were calluses in the right places from using household implements, and the middle two knuckles of the right hand were just a little scraped. Lily replicated all of that for her illusion.

Now the head. First, gray hair, long, neatly braided, fastened up on the top of the head in a sort of crown. Over that—because in this kingdom no respectable married woman or widow went with her head uncovered—a faded red kerchief, tied under the nape. Kalinda checked those details for feel, while she went to work on the face.

She tried never to duplicate the face of someone living, but she
had
been alive for three centuries, and she had met a great many people in that time. So she considered her options, and chose an old woman who had been the nursemaid for Prince Sebastian some two hundred years ago.

She stepped back and examined the kindly face she’d created, adding a few more wrinkles, a couple of moles that hadn’t been on the original’s face, and making the forehead just a little lumpy. There. This was the point where people sometimes back uneasily out of the room, because this
looked
like a person, only one without any life.

Then Lily untied the cloak, swirled it around her shoulders, and tied it in place.

She didn’t feel any different, but when she looked down at herself, she saw the illusion like a transparent layer over her own body. She walked, bent, jumped a little, trotted back and forth, until Kalinda nodded.

“It’s solid, Godmother. Unless someone stronger comes along to dispel it, you should be all right.”

Lily breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the cloak off. “In that case,” she said, “it’s time to get to work. Back to the Palace. Queen Sable
needs to cement her hold over the Kingdom, or The Tradition will probably do something on its own.”

Siegfried von Drachenthal considered himself to be a very lucky Hero, so far. Hero, because, well, he did Heroic things: slew dragons—only the evil, plundering, destructive ones of course, and only the ones that couldn’t be reasoned with—defeated wicked knights, drove out bloodthirsty barbarians, destroyed rampaging giants and killed every manner of monstrous beast that your average village was having problems with. He hadn’t rescued any Princesses yet…but there was a reason for that. He
had
come to the aid of a prince or two, a lot of counts, one duke and assorted adventurers. But not Princesses. On the whole, he was trying to avoid Princesses, just on general principle. He could not afford to have the wrong sort of Princess fall in love with him.

At the moment, having crossed over the eastern border of a mountainous Kingdom he was hacking his way through the undergrowth of a forest that seemed to go on for an awfully long way. There were all sorts of rumors of war in this area, and war was a good way to do heroic deeds without the complications of princesses or even maidens in distress.

The first woman that young Siegfried had ever seen was one of his aunts. So was the second. And the third. And the fourth.

And, truth to tell, every other woman up to the point where he left his childhood home of Drachenthal. When your mother and father are also your aunt and uncle, things tend to be complicated that way. When both are half-godlet, and both blessed and cursed by other gods, things get even more complicated.

Such things generally lead to a life of Heroism and Doom. The Heroism part was enjoyable enough. It was the Doom part that Siegfried wasn’t too fond of. Doom was generally painful, and there was
never anything good when it was over, unless you were a religious fanatic who was really looking forward to the afterlife.

“So, this Kingdom is rich?” he asked his companion, a little, brown, nondescript bird. Heroes didn’t usually have any interest in birds, and the names and categorization of them were generally limited in a Hero’s education to “good to eat,” “not good to eat,” and “singing while I have a hangover, kill it with a rock.”

Birds don’t snort, but the bird, which he just thought of as forest bird, since that was where he had met it, made a derisive chirp. “This Kingdom is rich in the way that Eitri’s Forge is a little warm.”

“Well, that’s good,” Siegfried said with relief. “Hero work doesn’t exactly pay well. Maybe if I smite enough of whoever is on the side of evil, they’ll give me a reward.”

Now those who are destined for a life of Heroism often begin it precociously early, often as a mere baby, with little events like strangling great serpents in the cradle—the Hero’s cradle, not the serpent’s. Siegfried had been no exception to that. But from everything he’d learned since, the rate of his Heroic development had overshot all others by leaps and bounds. Where other Doomed Heroes waited until their beards had begun to sprout, their voices to descend to rich baritone or melodious tenor, and they began to manifest a distinct interest in Females before slaying their first evil, gold-hoarding dragon, Siegfried had done so much earlier.

Age ten, to be precise. The age when Girls are, Traditionally, Icky. Besides, the only Girls he knew were his aunts.

So, when he tasted the Dragon’s Blood and suddenly could understand the language of all of the birds and animals, and when the little forest bird began talking sense to him instead of merely shouting “Look! Look! Look at meeeeeee!” he paid attention rather than merely making use of it as a glorified guide.

“Oh I wouldn’t take
that,”
the bird had warned as he reached for
a particularly enticing golden ring. It was a beautiful thing. It glistened in the sunlight as if it was made of liquid, and it called to him. It whispered to him….

But it was, after all, a
ring.
Jewelry. Girlie stuff. So— “Why not?” he had asked the bird.

“Well, since you
ask,
” the bird had replied, with incredible ebullience in its voice, “I’ll tell you why!”

So he learned, well beforehand, that the ring would lead to power and glory—but also to a rather horrible death, being stabbed
in the back
of all wretched things, and worst of all…by a Girl. Not an aunt, but that didn’t make it any better.

“Now on the other hand, if you just dip your sword in that blood and have another taste, you’ll learn something worth knowing, and your sword will never break!” the bird had caroled. So he did. And he
did.
He still carried that sword; he’d been a very large boy at ten and strong for his age, as befitting a Hero, after all.

And at ten years old, Siegfried of Drachenthal learned that he had been a game piece all of his life in the metaphorical hands of The Tradition. That he was supposed to go and wake up a sleeping woman, that they would fall in love, and that this was going to lead to an awful lot of unpleasant things. And that if he didn’t somehow find a way around it, he was Doomed.

At ten, Doom didn’t seem quite as horrid a fate to try to avoid as a Girl was. But it seemed that by avoiding that one particular Girl, in those particular circumstances, who would be the first woman he had ever seen who was not an aunt, he would also avoid the Doom. So he did. He got away from Drachenthal, had the bird scout on ahead so that the first woman he ever saw was not his aunt but someone’s lively old granny, and began searching for a way to have a Happy, rather than a Tragically Heroic, ending.

At twenty, the idea of a Girl all his own seemed rather nice, but
Doom was definitely to be avoided. He had begun to think about this, rather than just merely avoiding all sleeping women in fire circles wearing armor. Other Heroes ended up with Princesses, castles, happy endings, dozens of beautiful children. Why couldn’t he?

The bird had been of the opinion that he ought to be able to, if he could trick The Tradition into confusing his fate with some other sort of Hero’s. That sounded good to Siegfried. The other thing at twenty that was starting to have appeal was the idea that he could settle down somewhere. At the moment, the height of luxury for him was a reasonably vermin-free bed in a reasonably priced inn with decent meals and a good strong ale. He would look at palaces and castles and wealthy manors and sigh; the only time he ever saw the inside of one of those was if he’d been invited to a victory celebration, a recruitment—which half the time was into the service of evil, which was right out—or by someone who intended to kill him. So, it was two chances in four that he was going to get to enjoy a sumptuous meal, and not have to fight his way out of it before he got the first bite of roast peacock.

“So, in order to hoodwink The Tradition, all I have to find is someone blond, asleep in a ring of fire and flowers, who is
not
a Shieldmaiden demigoddess, and wake her up?” he was asking the bird, as he hacked his way through the underbrush with his ever-sharp, unbreakable sword.

“That’s the basic idea,” the bird said, fluttering from branch to branch beside him. “Really, if you were desperate enough, you could just find a nice little goose-girl, ask her to lie down for a quick nap, set the turf on fire and shake her awake to see if that worked.”

“Do you really think it would?” he asked hopefully. He was getting rather tired of running from his fate. He’d had to flee at least six Kingdoms in the last year, six times he’d been wandering about a perfectly nice forest, looking for evil to conquer, and suddenly—
bang
—
there would be a clearing in front of him, with a stone slab in the middle of it, adorned with a beautiful sleeping woman dressed in armor of the gods, surrounded by rings of magic fire and flowers. He was beginning to wonder if it was the same woman every time, and The Tradition just kept moving her.

“I’d say it’s worth a try. I think the wench with the bronze bosoms is stalking you.” The bird was very cheerful about it. Then again, the bird wasn’t going to share his Doom if he accidentally woke the woman up. “And you know, you
could
always give up the heroics and be a blacksmith. You’d be quite good at it. You’ve had the best teachers.”

He had; Dwarves. They were about the best blacksmiths in the entire world, barring gods. And given what his fate was, he would really rather avoid gods. He’d forged his own sword from the remains of the one that his father had carried, in fact, the same year he slew the dragon. But—