The Sleeping Beauty (11 page)

“What can I do for you, Godmother?” the Mirror Servant asked, his green face appearing in the glass.

“Our twin burdens have finally told me their names. He of the weighty regard of The Tradition is Prince Siegfried of Drachenthal. The one I wouldn’t trust around a susceptible chambermaid is Prince Leopold of Falkenreid.”

Jimson chuckled, as Rosa sighed and shook her head, plopped down into a chair in a most unregal manner, and seized two cakes and a glass of wine.

“I’ll discover what I can, Godmother,” the Mirror Servant replied, and vanished.

Lily helped herself to wine, and patted Rosa’s hand sympathetically as she reached for a third cake. “I’ll let you go have a real bath and get into clothing that isn’t an illusion in a little bit,” she said. “Or better yet, a nightdress. If I were in your place, I would soak until the water got cold, then wallow in the feather bed until I fell asleep. And I’ll give orders that you are to have an early supper in your rooms, and we will let the gossip wonder if I am punishing you, or if you are rebelling against me, or if you were more worn-out by your ordeal than you appeared. Then I’ll make sure your father knows that you are all right and back home.”

“Oh, thank you!” Rosa said gratefully. “I’m near famished. And I could sleep for a—” she stopped herself “—for a good night’s rest.”

Lily nodded with complete approval. Rosa was swiftly getting the knack of thinking on her feet; she had clearly remembered in time that The Tradition just might decide that with two Princes in attendance who might be able to kiss her awake, it would be a very good idea
not
to say things like “I could sleep for a year.” She was coming along nicely and her training hadn’t even begun.

Her mother would have been so proud of her….

“Then let’s just relax and enjoy our brief respite,” Lily replied. She felt The Tradition hovering over them like a thunderstorm that hadn’t yet decided when to break. “I do not think we are likely to have another anytime soon.”

“
UGH,” ROSA SAID, LOOKING AT THE VISCOUS,
dark contents of the tiny flask that Lily had handed her. “What
is
that?”

Thurman was still on the border, though it was looking as though he could return soon. Rosa would be very happy when he arrived. Privately she had vowed to do whatever she could to help him through his own grief.

They were in the Queen’s Chambers, and “Queen Sable” had shooed everyone out. She motioned Rosa to a comfortable chair and handed her the flask. The stuff in it looked black. It didn’t slosh, it oozed. She wondered what the Godmother expected her to do with it.

“Dragon’s Blood. Not the herb, the real thing. You need to drink it.” Lily turned back from the sideboard with another glass, this time of a white wine that Rosa knew from experience had a very sharp taste. She shrugged apologetically at Rosa’s appalled expression. “One of the first talents that a Godmother needs is the ability to understand the speech of animals. Tasting Dragon’s Blood allows you to do that. One taste allows you to understand Magical Animals, like unicorns or dragons, and Wise Animals, like my mice and Siegfried’s
little bird. A full drink allows you to understand the speech of all animals. And that much will also allow you, if you have the ability in your bloodline, to see magic, as I described to you.”

Rosa thought about that for a moment. “Can I just have a taste now and decide if I want a full drink later?” she asked, looking unhappily at the murky, dark liquid. Just looking at the stuff made her feel sick. The King could understand the speech of animals, and when she was very small, he had told her silly stories that had made her laugh in rare moments of peace. The “speech” of real animals, unlike that of “wise” ones, generally wasn’t all that enlightening. “I’m not sure I want to wake up every morning, listening to the doves under my window babble about nothing like a lot of silly girls gossiping.”

Lily chuckled and shook her head, taking a seat beside Rosa. “On the one hand, I sympathize, but—no. Two reasons. One, it is rather difficult to get Dragon’s Blood, since most dragons are not entirely friendly. Not that one could blame them, what with having to dodge heroes all the time, but dragons are difficult to find at the best of times, and it’s something of a nuisance to the friendly ones to keep being asked for a bit of blood, so out of courtesy we try to limit our requests. The other reason is that the blood has to be drunk relatively fresh, within a couple of days of being obtained, or it does go off, so to speak, and we’ve not found any way to preserve it. I had to call in a great favor this morning to get it, and made quite a long journey by mirror to Godmother Elena to bring it back myself. So, you might just as well get it all over with at once. Hold your nose, dear, and take your medicine.”

The liquid seemed to get darker even as she stared at it. It was about the consistency of honey, if honey could look malignant. Rosa gulped, braced herself and tried to toss it down in one fast gulp.

It was horrible. There were no words to adequately describe the sensations, which began even before the awful stuff touched her
tongue. It had all the musk-laden pungency of a dead snake and the smell filled her head even as she tipped the vial into her mouth. It was worse than anything she had ever had before. So bitter it made her tongue curl up in a vain effort to escape the taste, so fiery-hot she felt sweat explode out of her forehead, so powerful that her eyes filled with tears and she had to fight to keep from throwing it up. Everything about it made her body scream,
“No!”

Somehow she managed to swallow. It burned from her mouth all the way to her stomach, leaving her throat feeling as if someone had passed a red-hot poker down it. She gasped, and Lily put the glass of wine in her hand in the hope that the wine might cool the fire. She drank the glass as fast as she could—she couldn’t breathe anyway—and that gave her enough relief that she was finally able to pull a shuddering breath into her lungs. The wine—which after the blood was utterly tasteless, like water—managed to cut through the fire and cool it, leaving only the bitter, oily taste behind.

Lily handed her a napkin and another glass, which she drank more slowly. After the first two sips, the bitter taste began to wash away, and she was able to get a flavor of something other than the blood. Or, not a flavor, precisely, but the idea that this liquid was something sweet, sherry perhaps, though it was hard to tell with the undertone of the dragon’s blood still overwhelming her senses. She realized then that her eyes were leaking tears of pain, and that she was as damp as if she had stood in front of a furnace. She wiped her streaming eyes, finished the glass of whatever-it-was, and as she tried to clear the fog of tears by blinking furiously, Lily put a third cup into her hand. This was hot water mixed half-and-half with honey and some sort of fragrant herb cordial, and it succeeded in clearing the taste from her mouth, her nose and her throat.

Strangely enough, her stomach was not in revolt. This was possibly because every other part of her body that had come into contact with
the awful stuff
was
. Possibly because her poor stomach still didn’t realize what had been dumped into it. Or possibly because the blood had never actually gotten there, and instead had coated her throat and mouth.

She was very glad she had been sitting when she drank it. She was not entirely certain her knees wouldn’t have buckled under the onslaught. She sincerely hoped that Lily would not ask her to drink or eat anything like that, ever again. The experience was enough to make her rethink wanting to be trained as a Godmother.

But Lily must have guessed her thoughts from the expression on her face. “I promise you, that is probably the worst thing that will ever happen to you in your training,” Lily said in sympathy, patting her hand. “Eventually something will happen that you will need the gift of animal speech for, and you will be very, very glad that you have it. As for the rest, there is a great deal that you won’t have to learn, because you already know it. The very existence of The Tradition comes as a shock to most new Godmothers-in-training, and they have to study for a good deal of time before they have the depth of lore that is already at your command. I can tell you already, because I am of Fae blood, that the Fae will accept you as a Godmother, should we decide you actually need to be one. And unlike Champions, Godmothers don’t have to keep undergoing ridiculous ordeals every time one turns around. Our idea of besting a dragon is not to chop it into bits, but to get it to sit down to tea.”

Rosa laughed weakly, and finished the honey drink. As her senses cleared of the noxious stuff, she was able to relax as she had not expected to since her mother’s death.

The Queen’s Chambers had always been the most welcoming in the Palace. Only the outermost room had the air of formality one would expect from a Queen. The rest—the bedroom, sitting room, and tiny supper room where she and her mother had often played silly card games long into the night—were decorated in a very
curious but comfortable fashion. They looked
exactly
like what they were—the rooms of a country shepherdess with impeccable taste and an unlimited amount of money to spend. All the furniture was solidly built, and solidly comfortable; whitewashed oak and woven willow for the most part, with bleached muslin cushions stuffed with goose down. The white marble fireplace always had a nice fire in it. Wood-paneled walls had been whitewashed, then tinted pink, with a touch of gilding. There were sensible lamps instead of ostentatious candelabra.

Rosa had feared that Queen Sable had turned these rooms, once a haven, into a nightmare, despoiling them with expensive, spindly furniture and things too fragile to even look at lest they break, or worse, into a gloomy cave furnished in black velvet and plum satin. To discover that it was really Lily here, and that the rooms had been untouched, was a little like getting part of her mother back.

“Well.” Rosa coughed a little. “What is there for me besides a near poisoning?”

“First, what we are doing, which will certainly set some tongues wagging.” Lily smiled. “Simply being closeted together without anyone seeing what we are up to.”

Rosa had kept to her rooms for two days after returning, mostly because she discovered she was a great deal more worn-out than she had thought. She had bathed until she finally had the last of the filth out of her hair, from under her fingernails, scrubbed off her skin. She’d slept an amazing amount. And she had eaten far more than she would have thought, too; mostly fresh fruits and lovely, lovely salads, but when Lily had suggested a nice bit of roast beef she had eaten such a great slab of it that the ladies of the Court would have been scandalized had they seen it.

“I put about the truth—that you were recovering from your ordeal,” Lily added. “Of course, since I was the one who said this,
most people didn’t believe it, and thought I had locked you up. I suspect that only the fact that your servants could come and go freely stopped the rumors that I’d had you murdered in your bed.”

Rosa nodded. This morning for the first time ever she had turned up for Morning Court, and had defiantly taken her place beside Queen Sable, something she had not done since the Queen had arrived. The Queen had given her a cold stare, but then, the Queen gave everyone cold stares, and there wasn’t a particle of difference between this one and the one she bestowed on someone she
really
did not want to hear petitioning her. They sat side by side on matching smaller thrones—the larger one for the King had been removed to the back of the dais—listening to petitions. Breaking fast, of course, was done in the private apartments, so this was, officially, the first time the two of them had been together since Rosa’s return. The Lesser Audience Chamber had been so full of frozen politeness that it was amazing icicles weren’t hanging from the noses of the courtiers before it was all over.

“It was all I could do to keep from laughing during Court,” she said with a grin. “You do know I was deliberately imitating you, don’t you?”

Lily chuckled. “We believe,” she said, a deep chill in her voice, “that the petitioner should reconsider his position. But we would like to hear the opinion of the Princess Royal.”

“The Princess Royal has no opinion,” Rosa replied, with the same distant manner and chill. “Except that the Royal Consort is a stranger here, and thus, may have the analytical distance required to asses this situation.” They both laughed.

After Morning Court was the large meal of the day, dinner. This was the meal at which everyone who was anyone had to turn up, unless he or she was ill. When Rosa entered at the same time as the Queen, and the two sat side by side at the high table, it caused an
immediate stir, because again, Rosa had not sat at dinner since the Queen had been installed. Dinner was a piece of balletic extravagance that only a country as wealthy as Eltaria could afford. There were seven courses, and each course had several dishes. One was not expected to eat everything, or even to taste most of the dishes—though Siegfried had made good inroads on many of them. Rosa wished she could have been there to see the reaction of the two men the first time they had been presented with such bounty.

“What happened at the first dinner—with our tagalongs, I mean?” she asked.

“Siegfried’s eyes nearly jumped out of his head. I had put them on either side of me and he muttered something about not expecting the feast day in Vallahalia. Leopold was…impressed. But he spent most of the feast trying to impress
me
by pretending to be casual about it all.”

“At least Leopold didn’t try to pocket the knives and forks,” Rosa said drily.

After dinner—which took place in absolutely uncanny and unnatural silence, since virtually everyone was 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?”