The Sleeping Beauty (13 page)

“Ever at your service, Godmother.” Jimson’s face faded, and the mirror reflected the room again.

“I’d like to keep them here, Godmother,” Rosa said hesitantly. “I see more reasons to extend our hospitality than reasons to send them on their way. “

“And I agree with you.” Lily replied, and was about to say more, when someone pounded on the door to the Queen’s Chambers with a desperate urgency that made both of them jump.

“Doom!”
trilled the bird, and flew out the window.

LILY AND ROSA STARED AT ONE ANOTHER, AS THE
pounding began again. There was absolutely no doubt that whoever was out there was not merely knocking to see what he could stir up. “Your Majesty!” a tired voice shouted. “I bring urgent news of King Thurman!”

A Royal Messenger could be bringing good news—or bad. In either case, they needed to assume the roles of Evil—and possibly irritated—Stepmother and Rebellious—but cowed—Princess. Quickly Rosa composed herself and folded her hands in her lap. She watched Lily’s expression completely vanish, leaving only the emotionless mask of Queen Sable. There was no need to do anything else, for not even here had she dropped the illusion of her disguise. When Rosa nodded, and schooled her own face into an expression of sullen unhappiness, Lily rose and passed through the private audience chamber, then opened the door.

A Royal Guard messenger, tired and covered in dust, all but fell inside. The servant who had accompanied him quickly backed away and hurried down the hall out of earshot. What Royal Messengers had to say was not for the ears of mere servants. “Majesty—please,
I beg you, you must at all costs summon the Prin—” The Messenger stopped when he spotted Rosa in the other room, and nodded. “Good. You are both here.”

Rosa knew then; she knew it by the man’s white face and shaking hands. So, she expected, did Lily, who motioned her to come stand beside her. She rose from her seat and made her way slowly to the door. She did not have to manufacture an expression of dread. “Go ahead,” Lily said, her voice steady.

The messenger took a deep breath and composed himself visibly. “I bear grave news, and was directed to give it to your hands only. His Majesty, King Thurman, is no more. His physician believes the cause was natural, but he and the chief Magician of the Guard are testing to be sure. Before he died, he named you, Queen Sable, as Queen Regent until the Princess comes of an age to rule at twenty-one.” The messenger’s voice was harsh; it was impossible to tell if it was from the dust of riding so hard and so fast, or from grief. Perhaps both.

Rosa felt strangely distant, as if this was happening to someone else. It almost felt as if she were an actor in a play, with all the lines memorized and the outcome predetermined. And of course, on one level…it was. The Tradition again. The beautiful orphaned Princess, besieged by enemies…was The Tradition now trying to force her down the path of being rescued by a Hero, or down the one where she became the spoils of the victor?

And it seemed strange, when she had wept so much for her mother, that she should feel so little grief for her father. Then again…she had known her father so little. It was her mother she had known and adored, her mother who had gone counter to every bit of protocol and acted as the nursemaid and teacher to her own child.

And now she was an orphan. Exactly as The Tradition would like it. With an Evil Stepmother who had been appointed guardian over her, and who would now answer to no one if she vanished. Perhaps
The Tradition now wanted her to be bartered off to the enemy by that same Evil Stepmother, never to see her home again. Of course
that
Path was an ugly one, too. The Evil Stepmother would trade Rosa off in return for the enemy’s promise that
she
would be crowned Queen of Eltaria for as long as she lived. Which would be—probably not very long, for The Tradition dictated treachery on the part of the enemy. Then the enemy would have both Kingdoms without a struggle. And Rosa would spend the rest of her life a virtual, if not an actual, prisoner.

It was a good thing that the Evil Stepmother wasn’t what The Tradition dictated….

“What does the King’s physician believe?” she heard Lily ask, as she stood there woodenly. Lily’s voice was still steady and seemed to come from a great distance.

“That the late King perished, worn down by duties, crushed by loneliness and a broken heart,” the messenger said, in tones that implied
he
believed this, but that he did not believe that
she
would.

Why hadn’t Godmother Lily gotten some sort of warning? Or at least some knowledge that the King was dead?

But Rosa knew the answer, of course. The Tradition. This sort of thing was supposed to come as a complete surprise, even to a Godmother. Therefore, it had.

She bowed her head for a moment.

Lily, however, was still every inch Queen Sable. “We assume you have the requisite proclamations?”

“I do.” The messenger started to open his sealed dispatch case, but Lily stopped him.

“Hold your hand. We will summon the full Council and the Court so that you may present the proclamations there.” When the messenger nodded, Lily’s voice took on a tone of heavy irony. “We would not have anyone claim that we somehow substituted false or forged
papers for the ones you carry. Go to the Great Audience Chamber and await our pleasure.”

The man clicked his heels together, saluted stiffly and left, his footsteps sounding heavily on the wood of the corridor. Lily rang for the servants, and kept ringing, until she had a phalanx of them waiting just inside the door. “There is grave news. Summon all of the Councillors to the Great Audience Chamber, and all of those of the Court that you can to await our pleasure. Inform them that they must be there immediately.” With that, she dismissed them, and when they were gone, closed the door and put her back to it. She looked searchingly at Rosa. “Are you going to be all right?” she asked quietly.

Slowly Rosa nodded. The feeling of being at a distance was fading. This was real, yes. This was real. She would never see her father again. “It’s…not like it was with Mama,” she replied, feeling a distant grief, as distant as, perhaps, her father had been. “I never really knew him well.”

Nevertheless, Lily came to her and held her for a moment, and that released whatever had held back the tears. Rosa let herself cry a little on the black-clad shoulder, cry for the father who had appeared to tell her stories, the man with eyes that worshipped her mother, the man who had somehow known the few times that Rosa had wanted something very dearly, and had always seen that she got it.

“I have seen so many of you come and go,” Lily murmured, stroking Rosa’s hair. Her voice sounded terribly weary in that moment. “That is the curse of the Fae-blooded. We see our friends fade and die while we go on and on….” She sighed, and Rosa thought she heard a grief that the Godmother refused to give voice to, buried in that sigh. “I think the physician is correct. When I saw him last, Thurman was a shell of himself. Maybe, with me in place to be Regent, he felt it was safe for him to…slip away. But more likely, I think, is that all of this was too much for a human to bear, and once
he felt he had achieved a brief peace again, that grief and duty simply broke him between them, and his heart failed, in both senses.”

Still crying a little, Rosa nodded, the velvet of Lily’s bodice soft against her face. But soon enough, the tears were gone, and she lifted her head. Lily let go of her and handed her a black silk handkerchief. The Godmother searched her eyes, looking for strength, Rosa guessed. She raised her chin and determined not to give in to weakness.

“Are you ready?” Lily asked. “Really ready? This is the beginning of the worst either of us has ever faced. I’ve never served the Kingdom when things were this bad. Everything is going against us. You know that this is going to mean all those armies are eventually going to descend on us and tear us to pieces unless we do something before they find out Thurman is dead. You know The Tradition has all manner of paths it will try to force us down, and very few of them end happily for you.”

Rosa nodded, wiping her face, feeling cold fear creeping over her. “Please tell me you have an idea,” she begged.

Lily nodded. “In fact,” she replied, “I do.”

The Godmother faced the assemblage of the full Court and full Council, standing impassively while the messenger presented his news and his proclamations. She watched every member of first the latter, and then the former, stiffen and go white-faced as they realized just what Lily and Rosa already knew. This Court was full of all manner of men and women, and none of them was prepared for this. Thurman and Lily together had always saved them.

All those greedy neighbors would look at a Kingdom governed only by a woman and a girl, and they would assume that neither knew anything of warfare. They would gleefully decide that this was, at last, their chance to take the rich plum. Every leader of every enemy would think that if he just moved swiftly enough, he could take the prize uncontested. And they would descend in strength.

They’d have to. It was, after all, The Tradition.

Meanwhile it would be Eltaria that would suffer. It would be very tempting…in fact, nearly a necessity…for the Eltarian forces to withdraw to the cities to hold out while their neighbors beat each other into powder. At worst, all five of the neighbors would pounce, with armies, and proceed to fight on Eltarian land. And strategically it would make the greatest sense for the Eltarians to preserve their cities and populace, then emerge to battle the much-weakened winner.

Strategic sense, yes. And that assumed that none of the neighbors would have the same idea, which was not likely. So this could mean up to two years, maybe more, of trying to hold off enemies, besieged in the cities, and waiting for the chance to eliminate the last one.

Even if by some miracle of arms or diplomacy, they won free of this, the country would be ruined for a decade at least. The countryside certainly would be. Fields would be destroyed under the feet of battling armies, looters would take everything they could get their hands on, people would be displaced from their homes, and the destruction and chaos would leave hunger and disease in its wake. Eltaria’s wealth was in its mines, but those would go untended while armies raged across the face of the land. What would be the point of taking anything out of the earth by great effort, when as soon as you got it to the surface someone would take it away from you? The once-wealthy country would be reduced to poverty within months.

But Lily had a plan…a plan that would, with any luck, keep those armies within their own borders, and prevent armed conflict altogether.

While the Court had gathered, she had sat calmly and written a message, then magically duplicated it a hundred times. It was simple, stark and to the point, and ready to be sent out via a hundred fast messengers as soon as she got the Council to bend to her will.

And now, faced with utter disaster, the Council as one man turned
to her. No matter what they thought of her, she had established her authority in their minds as well as by the King’s final proclamation. She knew what they were thinking. That it was true that she might be an Evil Sorceress, and was at least a scheming ice-vixen who had somehow finagled the King into wedding her, and might have every intention of murdering the Princess. But she was, no doubt, also the cleverest person in this room, and they knew it, and they also knew she would do nothing about the Princess until she knew that the Kingdom itself was secure. After all, she
wanted
this Kingdom and its wealth. If she had been in league with any of these enemies, she would not now be standing before them with the Princess at her side—she would be standing before them with one of the five enemy leaders by her side, and an army surrounding the Palace. No, she wanted this kingdom for herself. For now, she needed the Princess, in order to keep someone beside her who had the popular support of the people and most of the Court, so Rosamund was safe for the duration.

As for the Councillors themselves—they were men who were used to advising on trade agreements, on internal disputes, not matters of war. Thurman, his father before him and his father before
him
had saved them from that, working with Lily, or taking the entire burden of the threat of war upon his own shoulders and those of his generals so that the Councillors could concentrate on internal matters. The balance had held until now, but this—this was enough to break it, as impulse backed by The Tradition overwhelmed and prevented any second thoughts. Anyone with military experience was with the army now. Those here were faced with something they could not cope with.

She cleared her throat, and looked decisive. The room was utterly silent, as every pair of ears was turned to hear what she might say.

“The Kingdom of Eltaria is now in the gravest danger it has ever been in its history,” she said, with icy calm. “There is no point in pre
tending otherwise. We must act, and we must act swiftly, and yet, as you know, faced with the certainty that most, if not all, of Eltaria’s enemies will descend on us at once as soon as word of Thurman’s death reaches them, it is a fact that we do not have enough men and arms to oppose them directly. But I have another plan. I have prepared a message to be sent to every ally we have, every ally we
might
have, and yes, even to the rulers of those countries who are now our enemies. Here it is.” She held up the first copy of the message and read it aloud.

She folded the paper. “Signed, et cetera. This is our only hope of keeping the wolves from the door. From this, they will not know that the two ‘candidates’ are from distant lands that have never heard of Eltaria.” She nodded at Siegfried and Leopold, who looked torn between wishing to express the proper sentiment of sadness at the death of King Thurman, and the happiness at the fact that they had actually been
named,
in public, as candidates for the Princess’s, or even the Queen’s, hand. “This is not something they would have considered, for Thurman has, for years, refused all offers for Rosamund’s hand. Thrown off balance by this, they will pause to
think rather than attack. This will only benefit us. They cannot yet have information about our guests. They will think only that one of the others has stolen a march on them by attempting to take the easier route of marriage to the riches that lie beneath our soil. And while they are pausing, the sons of the others, second, third and youngest, will be descending on us, for this is a very rich portion for a prince who is likely to otherwise have nothing. By the time our enemies gather their wits, it will be too late to attack. The Palace will be full of princes of every sort. Attacking while this throng of Royal Sons is here means that they will be at war with the kingdom of every prince endangered.” She allowed herself a thin smile. “We will have protected ourselves behind a screen of exceedingly valuable hostages, hostages who put themselves into our hands of their own free will. Eventually, we are sure, they too will add sons or nephews to the throng.”