“You’re not like any Fairy Godmother I ever heard of,” young Kay said, sullenly, his voice echoing in the enormous, and otherwise empty, throne-room. He broke the silence and in doing so, created a reminder of how empty the room was. If Kay had taken the time to think—which he did not, because at the moment, the only thing he ever thought about was himself—he might have wondered why such a room existed here in the Palace of Ever-Winter at all. Alexia did not hold audiences, nor have a Court. So far as he knew there were only two living things in this palace, himself, and her. So why would she need a huge throne room? Why would she need a throne room at all?
Such thoughts had not once crossed his self-involved little mind; at least, not yet.
He did not shout; he was not the type to shout, and certainly there was no need to shout in a room so quiet that even the faintest movement sounded as loud as a deliberate footfall. But his voice, midway between a tenor and a bass, was layered with frustration and anger, and had the distinct edge of a whine to it. It grated on Aleksia’s nerves. Kay grated on Aleksia’s nerves.
The Throne Room was austere magnificence itself, as was all of the Palace. Walls that perfectly imitated snow were, in fact, the most pristine of white quartz. Floors that looked like clouded ice were marble. It was an enormous space, exactly like the interior of a pure white egg. It was full of light, and when she was not keeping the temperature artificially low for the “benefit” of her guests, it was warm and welcoming.
There were benches all around the circumference, also white, also of marble. Normally, they were softened with cushions of palest blue velvet, but of course, not when Kay was around. It was her purpose to keep Kay as physically uncomfortable as possible while creating an illusion of comfort.
It was hard to ignore him; his presence itself shouted even if he had not spoken at all. His black velvet clothing and sable furs made an inky intrusion in the otherwise pure white room, a very solid and substantial blot in the midst of light.
Black did not suit him, not even the lush black of velvet and fur that looked so soft it made the hand yearn to touch it; the lack of color, and the contrast of the very pure white of the surroundings, brought out the sallow tones of his skin, and made him look as if he had been sculpted out of raw piecrust. He was the one who insisted on wearing black, though. Presumably he thought it made him look serious and to be reckoned with. He probably thought it made him look older. Most of her visitors did the same; it was as if there was a kind of unacknowledged uniform for the non-conformist.
She shifted a little, a very little, in her throne. The heavy, buttery silk of her gown, impregnated with warming spells, shifted with her, sliding like cream over her arm. She did not immediately reply, letting silence speak for her and make him uneasy.
Since Aleksia did not need to look at his expression to read his mood, she did not turn her attention away from the five-foot-tall mirror that she was watching with all the intensity of a hawk watching a quivering bush that hides a rabbit.
The mirror was an incredible piece of work, both in terms of its craftsmanship and in what it was made of. This was a single flat sheet of ice nearly two inches thick, normally as clear as a pane of glass except when she wanted it to become reflective. It was held by a four inch thick, cloud-colored frame that was also made of ice, severe and plain, the surface so smooth that it seemed to deflect the curious finger. At the moment the mirror was, indeed, reflecting something, but the reflection there was not of herself, nor of Kay, but of another scene entirely. In the crystalline depths of the mirror, a tired-looking young girl was plodding through a forest.
She was, perhaps, sixteen or seventeen—a woman grown by most standards, though not by Aleksia’s. She was blond and blue-eyed, with long golden plaits wrapped over her head like a kind of crown, and just showing under the rabbit fur cap tied under her chin. Her face was round, but not dumpy—she had a sweet expression, large blue eyes, a pert nose and a mouth of the sort that made young men want to kiss it, full lipped, and soft and inviting. She was dressed as the more prosperous sort of village-dweller would dress, in a sturdy woolen dirndl-skirt in a cheerful red, that belled out around her ankles, little white apron that had never seen the inside of a kitchen, a matching cloak in a darker red with a hood that could be pulled up over the cap. On her feet were stout leather boots, also red, lined with rabbit fur, and mittens of rabbit fur that matched her cap.. Nothing more could be seen of her clothing beneath the cloak, but it could reasonably be assumed it was of equally good quality. She was burdened with a pack, and used a polished wooden staff to help her along the path. And she looked entirely out-of-place there. It did not seem possible that such a person could be out in the middle of a forest; she belonged in a village square, buying embroidery yarn, and gossiping with friends. Her cheeks should have been pink with exertion, but they were pale; her eyes scanned the forest nervously, and her face showed her fear all too clearly.
The forest through which she was trudging was not the sort inclined to raise the spirits. “Gloomy” was probably the most flattering thing that could be said about it. There was no undergrowth, for the trees that crowded each other on either side of the dirt road she was following blocked out the sun. Those trees were, for the most part, black pine, whose dark branches dripped water, and occasionally sap, and dropped needles that carpeted the floor of the forest. Overhead their branches formed a canopy so thick that not even a scrap of sky was visible. If there were birds, they were high up in the boughs and certainly not visible from the girl’s point of view. There were no animals visible down on the forest floor, but one could easily imagine wolves or bears lurking in the distance, suitably obscured by the closely-crowded tree-trunks. Even on the hottest of summer days, this forest would be dank and chill. Now, in the autumn, with sunset drawing near, it would be bitter under those trees. It would be so damp that the cold would penetrate even the warmest of cloaks. Small wonder she was bundled up as she was.
There was no sound, though Aleksia could easily call up the sound if she chose. Right now, though, she knew that all she would hear was oppressive silence, overlaid perhaps with the dropping of water onto a thick layer of dead needles, and the girl’s soft footsteps, and perhaps the far-off call of a crow or some other bird of ill-omen. Hardly worth the trouble.
Kay, of course, could see none of this. All he saw was Aleksia staring into a mirror that cast no reflection, and ignoring him. He did not in the least appreciate being treated in this way. Aleksia caught his reflection off the surface of the ice. The corners of his mouth turned down further, his eyes narrowed, and a crease appeared between his brows. And they he spoiled it all, as his lower lip began to protrude in the start of a pout. For all that he allegedly wanted to be left alone, he hated being ignored. But then, Aleksia knew very well what was actually going on in her “guest’s” mind.
“And you, of course, have such a vast experience of Fairy Godmothers,” Aleksia said, finally answering him, in a voice that dripped with sarcasm the way that the trees in her mirror dripped moisture. Her voice rang crisply in the empty chamber, utterly calm, and maddening. At least, she hoped it was maddening. She shifted again, this time for the little pleasure of feeling the silk of her gown slip across her body.
Kay started at the sound of her voice, then glowered. He hated having his “authority” challenged even more than he disliked being ignored. Aleksia would have found it more amusing if she had not played this same sort of scene over and over again with other guests in the past, and would play it with still more in the future. Still. It was potentially as funny as watching an ill-tempered rabbit challenge a war-horse.
And that was a dangerous stance to take in the hall of one who could have sent him outside to be eaten by an ice-drake by merely snapping her fingers, but he was very young, and utterly convinced of his own intelligence, knowledge, and immortality. “I—“ he began.
“Most of your sentences begin with ‘I,’ and you might find it more profitable to find some other way to begin them,” Aleksia continued, still not turning from the mirror. She wished that the next act of the drama she was watching would simply get on with it. She was regretting coming to the throne room to keep an eye on the situation now, regretted deciding to allow Kay to find her today—but this was the only mirror powerful enough to let her see all she needed to, from so far away, and she hated asking the Brownies to move it. “No one cares about you. You are an unlicked cub, a mere youth, barely out of childhood.” She had been longing to say this for days, and she might as well do so now. She began to warm to her subject, and chose her words with care. “You have no experience worth hearing about, no store of wisdom from reading or studying with wiser men, and your personality is repellant. There was but one person who loved you, and you persisted in thrusting her away. Instead, you wanted to be left alone to concentrate on your work. You were, in fact, injudicious enough to wish for just that out loud.” She saw him start again out of the corner of her eye. “So. I have given you that, on condition that you devote yourself to your work and make me wonders. There is a library here. There is a workshop. You have but to say that you want something, and it appears. Go and make use of these resources, for which older and wiser men than you have pined and languished. And when you find something or make something you think might be worthy of my attention, you may bring it to me, provided I am not otherwise occupied, and provided you begin your sentence with some other word than I.”
Reflected in the surface of the ice, Kay looked utterly, utterly shocked. No one had ever spoken to him like that before. He had been rather too much indulged and made much of by parents who thought he was clever; as a child, he had the best schooling and a mother and father who greeted every accomplishment as if he was the only boy in the universe to have achieved such things. And he was very clever, even Aleksia would admit that—but clever did not compensate for the level of self-absorption he had managed to achieve in seventeen years. When she had appeared before him on the night of the first frost, heralded by an out-of-season snow-storm, in her flying sleigh pulled by four snow-white reindeer, he had taken it as his due that such a creature should materialize and offer him her help. He had accepted her invitation, of course. There was never any doubt that would happen. He was too self-absorbed to consider that it could have been a trap for the unwary.
And now he had been here for three weeks, seeing nothing and no one but Aleksia herself. She had made her servants and helpers invisible to him, so that he would be unaware how full the Palace really was, and so that he would be unable to talk to anyone. She had made herself unavailable to him as well, making it as clear as possible without ever actually saying anything to him that she was far too important to cosset him.
And now he found himself in the position of having everything he had asked for, and yet subject to something he had never, in all his life, actually experienced before.
He was alone. There were no parents to praise him, no sweetheart to gaze at him with adoration, no rivals to triumph over or peers to boast to. There were not even any visible servants to question, look down upon, or bully. It was just him, and his own thoughts, and he was finding that an uncomfortable experience.
He was a prisoner in a cage made of gold and lined with silk, as isolated as any hermit-hunter snowed into a mountain cabin. He took his meals alone, was attended but never contacted in any way, and only saw her briefly, generally at a distance. Day by day, she watched him without his being aware of the fact, and watched it wear on him.
Today she had told the servants to allow him to find the Throne Room and her in it, rather than confusing his steps as they generally did. This was the result.
He could be redeemed—he would not be here, in the Palace of Ever-Winter, the home of the Ice Fairy, if he was not capable of redemption. The Tradition had made that part clear enough by building such an enormous store of magic about him that if Aleksia had waited until winter to fetch him, he would have found his initials written in frost on the windowpane, snowmen would have taken on his features when he passed them, and the cold would have grown so bitter that wildlife would have been found frozen in place. Even so, things had gotten to the point that ravens had taken to following him about. Presumably if Aleksia had done nothing about him, and no other wicked magician had discovered him and virtually eaten him alive for the sake of that power, he would have gone to the bad all by himself. He was too self-centered and arrogant to have escaped that particular fate—and most likely, given his turn of mind, he would have become a Clockwork Artificer, one of those repellant individuals who tried to reduce everything to a matter of gears and levers, and tried to imprison life itself inside metal simulacrums. While not usually dangerous to the public at large the way, say, the average necromancer was, Clockwork Artificers could cause a great deal of unhappiness—and in their zeal to recreate life itself, sometimes resorted to murder of the most inoffensive of people.
Judging by the ravens, Kay would have become one of that latter sort.
The only cure for this kind of affliction was a shock, a great shock to the system. One that forced the youngster to confront himself, one that isolated him from the rest of the world immediately, rather than gradually. He had to lose those he still cared for, at least marginally, all at once. He had to learn that people meant something to him.
“It’s lonely here!” Kay complained, with a touch of shrillness, still not stirring from where he stood beside her throne. Well she certainly hoped it was! She would not have been doing her job otherwise.
She cast him a glance. Yes, definitely. He was unhappy, but not quite at the depth to which she wanted him to descend. Soon he would be profoundly unhappy, and he would understand just what it meant to get for what you wish for, when what you wish for is to take yourself out of the ranks of humankind.
She looked back at the mirror to see shadows slipping through the tree trunks. Ah. There they are. It took two to make this dance, and Kay’s little friend Gerda, the girl who loved him with all her heart, who was currently trudging towards the next episode in her own little drama, was the co-conspirator in the Traditional Path that ended in a Clockwork Artificer. Her nature was as sweet as her face, her will as pliant as a grass-stem, and her devotion to Kay unswerving, no matter how often he neglected her. She needed redemption almost as much as Kay did. Such women married their cold-hearted beloveds, made every excuse for them, smoothed their paths to perdition, turned a blind eye to horrors, and even, sometimes, participated in the horrors themselves on the assumption that the Beloved One knew best. Gerda required a spine, in short, and an outlook rather less myopic than the one she currently possessed. And this little quest she was on was about to give her one.
This had all been very carefully orchestrated, because if a Godmother didn’t tend to that manipulation of the participants in these dramas, The Tradition most certainly would. Everything had been planned down to a nicety. Aleksia had called up a magical snowstorm in a very limited area around Kay’s house. She had done so at an hour when she knew that Gerda would be in her little bedroom, probably looking out of her own window, sighing at Kay’s. When the snow began, Aleksia caused a gust of wind to drive a few hard snow-pellets against Gerda’s window to ensure that if she had not been looking out it before, she most certainly would be when Aleksia’s flying sleigh, drawn by the snow-white reindeer, came swooping down out of the sky. She had added a flash of white light in Gerda’s window. It all worked, of course. As Kay studied the unseasonable snowflakes, Gerda was in place and watching from the window in plenty of time to see the sleigh land. Gerda saw Aleksia speaking to a dumbfounded Kay, saw her offer him her hand, saw her settle him in beside her, bundled in white furs, and saw the sleigh rocket off again.
Nor was that all. No Godmother worth her wand would leave things so half done. Aleksia had contacted one of the village witches and made sure Gerda knew who had taken Kay, and in general, where he was.
Poor Gerda! Screwing up her courage to visit the witch in the first place was only the beginning of her ordeal. She would never have believed it if she had been told the truth, that her childhood sweetheart was turning into a remote and arrogant elitist all by himself, so she had been told that the Snow Queen had done something to him as a child, made him cold hearted, so that she could whisk him off now. She had also been told that she and she alone could melt Kay’s heart and save him with her love—and being a young maiden of romantic nature, and wanting it to be true, she absolutely believed what she had been told.
Up until she had entered the forest, things had been relatively easy for her. Her sweet nature made people like her, and want to help her. She had actually done very little walking up to this point; farmer had given her rides in carts, horsemen had taken her up behind them, peddlers had offered her space in their wagons. The trek into this forest however had been without meeting anyone who could help, and at this point she was footsore and very weary. Now she was about to find out that the quest was going to have a lot more hardship involved in it than a few blisters.
The shadows flitting through the woods, having ascertained that the girl was all alone, had surrounded her. Now they pounced—because they were robbers, and she was very tasty looking prey.
The robbers came swooping down on her, materializing from among the tree-trunks, crowing with glee at having caught such a pretty little prize. Gerda froze in abject fear, and her mouth opened in a silent scream of terror, her face going as white as frost.
There. Nicely managed.
Aleksia dismissed the vision in the mirror with a thought and a simple wave of her hand, and turned to Kay. She schooled her face into an expressionless mask. She must seem as remote as a snow-statue now. Mostly she was feeling a mixture of amusement and annoyance. Amusement because Kay had no idea he was not unique, that he was treading a path already worn down by countless others. Annoyance because, well, Kay was Kay.
“It is lonely here because that is what you asked for,” she said, crisply, thinking that she was going to be only too glad to have this over and done with. He was intelligent enough, or so she hoped, that she would not have to go through this speech more than once. “Or do you fail to remember?”
“Remember?” Kay’s handsome brow—and he was a handsome young fellow, as blond and blue-eyed as Gerda, and if his chiseled features habitually wore an expression as cold and forbidding as that on the marble bust of a religious fanatic (when he wasn’t pouting like a spoiled baby told there was no candy forthcoming) that didn’t make the arrangement of his features less pleasing. If his natural complexion was too fair to wear black well, he was certainly handsome enough in other colors. And on the rare occasion that he smiled, his face was quite transformed, and showed exactly what it was that Gerda had fallen in love with. There was a heart in there. It just needed waking up. And if anyone could wake it up, it would be Aleksia. This was not the first such “guest” she’d had in the Palace of Ever-Winter, and it would not be the last.
“Yes. Remember.” Aleksia looked down at him from the lofty height of her “ice” throne, which was not ice at all, but carved crystal made to look like spires and shards of ice, and cunningly provided with a spell that made it warm as a living thing when she sat on it, but as cold as what it looked like if anyone else dared set derriere to seat.
Kay had, of course, made the attempt, and been discomfited before he got much of a chance to make himself at home. She had watched, invisible, as he had given up after not too very long.
He was always cold, here. The very food was cold, or lukewarm at best. His bed was cold at night, and did not warm up until his shivering body warmed it. The temperature in the rooms he roamed was always chill. His clothing was, unlike hers, just a trifle…thin; fur trim did nothing but look soft, and the velvet was not thick enough to keep the chill away. Hers, when she must share the same space as he did, was warm and sometimes fur-lined, and even her hands were kept warm with a tiny touch of magic.
He, who had always thought that cold brought perfection, who preferred winter because it brought perfect snowflakes, glass-smooth ponds, and all ugliness covered with pure white, now was coming to find that he did not desire the cold nearly as much as he had thought.
He looked baffled, she sighed with feigned impatience. “The night when you and Gerda saw the falling star,” she elaborated. “You both made wishes. You wished that you could go somewhere far from people, where you would not be bothered anymore, and where you could have all the unfettered time you wished for your studies and inventions.” She waved a hand at the implied expanse of the Palace beyond the Throne Room. “You wished that it would always be winter, so that perfection could be preserved. You desired that you should be served invisibly, imperceptibly, so that nothing could intrude on your thoughts. Here you have all that. I fail to see why you are less than content.” She made a shooing motion. “Go. Study. I brought you here so that you could create wonders. Leave me in peace until you have something material to show me.”
Long habit made it possible for her to repress her smile as Kay slouched his way out of the room. His shoulders were hunched, his hands balled into fists at his side. He was angry now, but at the moment he was not sure who to be angry with. Himself? He had gotten what he asked for. Her? She had given him what he asked for. As yet he did not look any deeper than that. She hoped that he would, that he would see the fundamental wrongness of what he wanted, and why. Otherwise—well, something else would have to be done about him.
Ay urge to smile faded once he was gone; she did not want to have to think about what she must do if she could not salvage him. She failed very rarely, but when she did fail, it meant she must do what an evil magician would do—drain him of the magic building around him, and place him somewhere that it could not build again. With some primitive tribe perhaps, but certainly in a land where he did not know the language and could not ever become a Clockwork Artificer. This would effectively ruin two lives, his and the girl’s.
She shook her head to clear it of the melancholy thought. She had not lost yet. She was not even close to that point.
She surveyed her surroundings with a sigh. Other than the benches around the walls, the only two pieces of furniture were the clear crystal throne, and the clear ice mirror. She would have used crystal there, too—except that she was the Ice Fairy. The Tradition made it so much easier to enchant things if they were made of ice.
Dear gods, she was tired to death of ice.
She left the throne room, moving silently as the kiss of snow through the long white corridors of her Palace. She, of course, could see the servants there, polishing, cleaning, making sure nothing marred the pristine white surfaces. The walls alternated smooth panels with carved ones, bas-reliefs of mountains, snow-covered forests, iced-over lakes, ice-caves. No humans appeared in these carvings, only birds and animals of winter. White bears, foxes, deer, white Gyrfalcons, white Peregrines, snow-hares. She paused at the carving of her very own mountain and put her hand to the peak. The magic recognized her, and the entire panel slid aside, and scented warmth billowed out to embrace her as she stepped into her suite of rooms.
Here, at last, in her quarters, where no one was allowed to come but her Brownie servants, there was not one speck of white. It was all fire colors, the warmest of scarlets and browns and golds, like the red, beating heart of the Palace. The sweet scent of applewood wreathed around her. There was a huge hearth where there was always a fire burning, and standing beside windows that looked out over the trackless white of the snow around her home were delicately nurtured plants in terracotta pots. She had, in effect, her own garden, complete with trees that reached to the lofty ceiling and gave the lie to the name “Ever-Winter.”
If she had not had that, she would have gone mad. Doubtless, nearly every other Ice Fairy had felt the same, since the trees and the warm private rooms had been here when she was first apprenticed—and it took a long time to grow potted trees that tall. Aleksia had changed very little except the color-scheme; Verushkhe, the previous Godmother, had favored deep rose pinks rather than scarlet and brown.
Aleksia moved forward into the embrace of her rooms, and waited while one of the maidservant Brownies unlaced her gown and slid it from her shoulders where it pooled around her feet. She shook her hair free of the crystal-topped pins and let it fall free, and the Brownie wrapped her in a soft, quilted-silk robe. She went to stand before her fire for a moment, then settled into nest of cushions beside it, to reflect on the odd turns of her life that had brought her here.
Aleksia was unique among the Godmothers; most of them were involved with reprimands and rewards in equal measure. Like all of them, she had been beset by a plague of magic when she had been apprenticed by Veruschka. In her case, had all the surrounding circumstances matched up, she would have been a Snow-White. She had everything that was needed, she was pale as a snow maiden, her hair was as white as the moon, she had a sister as rosy as a flower in summer. Their mother died in their infancy, their father remarried a witch.
However, their new stepmother was as kind as anyone could have asked. When her own child died in infancy she did not turn vile to the little girls. Instead she cherished them the more. As they grew, she tried to find husbands for them that they would like—and both understood that, as they were princesses, the needs of the Kingdom came before their own. Both were prepared to wed dutifully.
But their Kingdom had a very good Godmother, who made sure to intervene at all the right times. She counseled Aleksia’s stepmother when the baby died, spending long hours with her that Aleksia only now understood. She spent equally long hours with the nannies and governesses, so that Aleksia and Katya grew up as decent human beings rather than spoiled, pampered brats.
And it all paid off, although at first it certainly had not seemed that way when Katya was stricken with a terrible wasting illness. Everyone had despaired—until a strange fellow appeared, claiming to be a doctor—and cured her.
She could still remember how she had been so suspicious of this fellow, who had looked nothing like any doctor she had ever seen. He had looked like a cross between a gentleman fallen on hard times, and an utter vagabond. She had been sure he was a fraud.
He was nothing of the sort, of course. He was another of that massive tribe of wandering Princes, who scoured the Five Hundred Kingdoms hoping that something would happen to give them their own happy ending. He had, in the proper fashion, befriended a Salmon, who had advised him to undergo a quest to this very Palace, the Palace of Ever-Winter and beg for one of the fruits of the trees of what was then Veruschka’s chamber. Which he did. And of course, the fruit was the magical cure for Katya’s wasting disease.
The Prince, having no Kingdom of his own, was overjoyed to settle down in theirs and become a son to their father and stepmother. Katya adored him. Prince Kobe was kind, clever, and if not handsome, was certainly not bad to look on. He loved music and books, preferring them to hunting and hawking, although he certainly knew one end of a blade from the other, and could fight very well if he needed to.
The trouble was, the music and books he adored were the same ones Aleksia loved. They both excelled at chess and games of strategy, which Katya found pleasure only in watching. Kobe went out of his way to be kind to Aleksia, and Aleksia found herself, all unwilling, watching her sister’s happiness bitterly. She grew thin, and wretched, fighting the impetus to make her hate her sister and desire Prince Kobe. And everything was now in place for Aleksia to become the despised Jealous Sister who murders her sibling and steals her husband.
She passed her hand over her eyes for a moment, still feeling the ache of that terrible jealousy. She had been poised equally between killing her sister and killing herself.
Until Veruschka showed up with another plan entirely, for now there was more than enough magic building up around Aleksia to fuel her spells for three or four times her own lifetime, what with not one, but two Traditional paths twined around her.
Veruschka proposed to apprentice Aleksia. Desperate for anything that would remove her from this intolerable situation—though she herself had not yet understood that she was being forced into it—Aleksia quickly agreed to go with her.
And it was here, in this Palace, that Aleksia learned what really steered the lives and fortunes of the people of the Five Hundred Kingdoms.
The Tradition, that implacable, faceless magical force that attempted to turn the lives of the people of the Five Hundred Kingdoms into time-worn paths dictated by myths and legends, tales and fables, was a force that the Godmothers in their turn did their best to manipulate and sometimes thwart. Take the well-known tale of the Cinder Girl. Not every girl with a vile stepmother and two equally repugnant stepsisters had an available Prince to rescue her from her life of drudgery, and not every available Prince was….suitable. Some were children, some were dotards, some were rakes and roués, some were…well they would have preferred to save a beleaguered stepson from a wicked stepmother. And yet, The Tradition would place incredible magical pressure on those whose lives outwardly conformed to a familiar story.
It was a Godmother’s task to identify these poor souls, and somehow give them some kind of a life free of the further regard of The Tradition. Aleksia’s own Godmother had managed to save her and her sister from attempted murder, by turning their tale from that of Snow-White and Rose-Red into that of the Wasting Princess. And once it became clear that Aleksia was being sent down the way of the Jealous Sister, Veruschka came to the rescue, as Godmothers had to do when they could.
Because if they did not…sometimes things could go horribly, horribly wrong. Not only were there Traditional, tragic tales, there were also other dangers. With so much magic building up around the ones whose tales were thwarted by circumstance, they became prey for evil magicians and sorcerers, who would take them and drain the magic off for their own use, thus not only killing the hapless victim, but giving themselves more fuel for further vile deeds. And sometimes the object of The Tradition’s regard him or herself went to the bad. Or, as in what almost happened to Aleksia, the Tradition forced them into terrible deeds.
Not every tale has a happy ending, after all. Aleksia knew that, only too well. She had been witness to some of the terrible endings, having come too late to be of any service. There were few Godmothers up here, and a great deal of territory to cover. She could not be everywhere. And there were places, dark places, even now, where the best she could do was to confine the damage.
And so, most of the Godmothers had the pleasant task of rewarding and helping the deserving, or at least the innocent, as well as administering the Traditional rebukes and punishments to the villains, and preventing as many unhappy endings as they could. There were, of course, no end of Traditional tales about the unworthy getting their comeuppance, and no end of ways some of those people could be redeemed through trials. Or, if they could be caught in time, a few could be recruited into the ranks of the Wizards and Godmothers themselves.
Magic and long, long study of tales and lore were the provenance of the Godmothers. They were aided in this by the wide ranks of the witches and wizards, the sorcerers and enchantresses, who served as their eyes and ears, and sometimes hands. Veruschka taught Aleksia much, gave her the tools to learn the rest, and then—left.
And Aleksia, feeling as unready as any other that took up the mantle of Fairy Godmother, became the Ice Fairy of the Palace of Ever-Winter.
But of all of the Godmothers that Aleksia knew, only she was the Fairy Godmother in charge of—for lack of a better term—“Be careful what you wish for.”
Maybe it was the remoteness of her location. The Palace of Ever-Winter was located high in the mountains, where the snow never melted, which made transportation a bit difficult and visits by those in need of Godmotherly help as much of a trial as the tribulations themselves. But there had been an Ice Fairy here at this place for as long as there had been Godmothers, and when Aleksia had been groomed for the position, it had not really seemed such an onerous one. In fact, since she had a rather solitary and slightly aloof nature, it had seemed ideal.
And possibly it was the nature of the position of Ice Fairy and the Palace she commanded itself. Certainly no one was much inclined to attribute warmth and loving with names like those…. And The Tradition could work its will on Godmothers just as readily as on anyone else.
And Aleksia was by now very, very tired of it.
She was tired of playing the cold hostess to youths like Kay, who were obnoxious at the beginning of their tenancy, and only became tolerable near the time when they were to leave. And at that point, of course, she had become the enemy, and they didn’t care to offer her more than the briefest nod of grudging courtesy. She was tired of the isolation; the Brownies were good little folk, but there were times when all she wanted was to sit in a village tavern, have a nice bowl of soup and some fresh bread, and listen to ordinary gossip. She didn’t visit her family anymore; that was just a disaster. People tiptoed around her, even her own twin, and acted as if they expected her to curse them with icicles if she were the least little bit provoked.
And besides, every time she went there, it seemed that there was yet another child. Now, Aleksia enjoyed children in moderation. They could be very amusing. But she preferred to be able to give them back to mothers or nursemaids in an hour or so, and in the Palace…well, there was no escaping the children, because Katya had gotten this notion that it would be a fine thing for all of the nobles to send their offspring to the Palace to provide playmates and schoolmates for her brood. They were everywhere.
And they looked at her as if they expected her to curse them with icicles.
She sighed, and stared at her fire, and managed to refrain from making any wishes herself. Wishes were dangerous things, as Kay had proved. She was not going to wish for anything stronger than that one of the servants would bring her a snack. Presently one of the Brownies brought her cakes and tea, and she took up the book that had been lying there. The cakes were sweet and nutty, dense and moist; the tea was one of her favorites, with the flavor of almonds. The book was utterly forgettable, very light verse, but it was something to read, at least.
From time to time she looked up into a small mirror on a stand that held her plate of cakes and her cup. In it, she could see Kay laboring in his workshop. He seemed to be grinding lenses. She frowned.
“What’s the cleverest lad in the world think he’s doing now, Pieter?” she asked the Brownie who came to refresh her tea. The little fellow, who looked exactly like her sister’s major-domo shrunk down to the size of a child, wrinkled his nose with amusement.
“He’s making spectacles that he thinks will allow him to see us,” Pieter replied, chuckling, as his bright brown eyes twinkled. “He seems to think we’re spirits or something of the sort.”
Aleksia sniffed. “He’d know better if he had paid half as much attention to his old nurse’s stories as he did to taking things apart,” she replied, and grimaced. “This is the most tedious stage of beating them into shape. Has he started trying to find a way to escape yet?”
“Not yet, Godmother. He’s just starting to feel the edge of loneliness. It hasn’t really dawned on him yet that it only gets worse with time.” The Brownie offered her honey for the tea; she tendered a nod of acceptance. “In my opinion?”
“Your opinions are invariably good ones, Pieter.” She sipped the tea and felt the warmth penetrate into her chilled bones.
The corners of the Brownie’s eyes crinkled as he smiled. Pieter had a wise face, that would have looked very old indeed if it had not been for the perpetual hint of mischief about him. “It’s time to give him a view. We’re going to get a blizzard; let him see it. I would say ‘throw another log on the fire under him,’ except that we really want the opposite effect.” Pieter chuckled at his own cleverness.
Aleksia smiled. “The result is the same, a rise in discomfort. All right.” She concentrated a moment, holding her hand palm-upwards, until a tiny spark of white light wafted up out of her hand hovered there for a few moments, then evaporated. That was her way of getting the attention of the Palace.
The homes of all the Godmothers, whether they were Palaces like this one, fortified Castles, lonely Towers, or any other sort of dwelling, were living things. They responded to the needs of the Godmothers that lived there. Some of them were so good at it that entire rooms would grow before the Godmother herself realized she was going to need one. But some, like this one, needed just a trifle of prodding to wake them up.
Veruschka always assumed it was because of the Palace’s immense age, but Aleksia had the feeling it had more to do with where it was. The Palace slumbered like a hibernating bear, and whenever she needed to communicate with it, she always got the sense that she was looking in on its dreams.
Presently, she sensed a difference in the room around her, and the mirror frosted over. Dim images that were certainly not Kay in his workshop moved behind the frost, pale figures that could have been human, or Elves, or spirits, or none of these things. She felt the sense of waiting all around her.
“I would like windows in the boy’s rooms now, please,” she said aloud. “Like mine, if you would, quite weather and leak-proof. I don’t need him getting ill from drafts.”
She waited. The Palace generally took its time about these things.
Finally the mirror cleared and showed her a view of one of Kay’s two rooms. Now, instead of a blank, white wall, there stood an enormous glass-paned window, which looked out down the mountain that the Palace stood on, and across the valley to the unexplored peaks beyond. Everything was shrouded in a blanket of snow, of course, and it was about waist-deep in most places. The mountains on the other side of the valley thrust their white peaks aggressively into the sky, the black storm-clouds gathering just behind them providing a suitably ominous view should Kay return to his room before sunset.
“Thank you!” Aleksia said. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t needful to thank the Palace, but she always did anyway.
The mirror cleared again, giving her a view of nothing more than her own reflected image.
“That looks like a bad storm,” the Brownie observed. Aleksia nodded. Her own rooms faced east and south, rather than west and north. She disliked being able to see the storms approaching; the wait before clouds finally descended and let loose their burden of snow always seemed worse to her than the blizzard itself.
But there was no doubt this would have a profound impact on Kay. She could only hope that it would be for the better.
Because if it was for the worse….
She was going to wall him up in that workroom of his rather than be forced to listen to him whine and pout any more. And she did not want to contemplate what she would have to do if he turned down any darker path.
—Reprinted from Snow Queen by Mercedes Lackey, by permission of Harlequin Books, Copyright © 2008 by Mercedes Lackey. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.