Of all the Godmothers that she knew, Aleksia was the most adept with mirror-magic. Why that should be, she was not entirely sure. It might have been because of the nature of ice, so close to glass in its transparency and fragility, and most especially in its reflective qualities. It might have been that it was not she who was so adept, per se, but that the position of Ice Fairy, perforce remote from everything, carried with it the compensating ability with mirrors so that a friend and colleague was never more than a reflective surface away— “And how are things on top of the mountain?” asked Godmother Elena as she faded into view. “Quiet, I hope?” The glimpse of wall behind Elena told Aleksia that her fellow Godmother was in her own study, rather than in her workroom of the Order of the Champions of Glass Mountain. Elena spent roughly half her time there; she and her husband, who was the Preceptor of the Order, had agreed to that arrangement. It seemed to suit them. Aleksia rather thought that such an arrangement would suit her as well. It meant that Elena got to travel at least twice a year, and get a real change not only of scenery, but of a way of life. She would meet new people as new young Champions presented themselves. She would be living in a place full of faces she did not know so well she was more familiar with their faces than the one that looked back at her in the mirror.
     Elena was possibly the closest thing to a friend that Aleksia had among the Godmothers, even though they had never actually met in person. Elena shared a bit of the Ice Fairy’s sardonic sense of humor, and was one of the few sympathetic about Aleksia’s rather onerous position among the Godmothers. Perhaps that was because Elena had a history of dealing with the same sorts of miscreants—one of which had eventually married her. Those Godmothers who only had to reward the good and fend off evil simply didn’t understand how tedious it was to be regarded with hostility by the very people you were helping. Elena’s own Champion and husband had begun his acquaintance with her as one of her “problems.” In fact—she’d turned him into a donkey for a while. Aleksia didn’t often get to do things like that, much though she wished to at times; it was difficult enough to keep her reindeer in good condition up here, and they were cold-hardy in the extreme. It would have been very nice to turn the brats like Kay into beasts of burden rather than have them running about in her palace.
     Aleksia rolled her eyes and described her latest charge. Elena shook her head, a single blond tendril escaping her upswept hair to bounce against her cheek. “I ought to talk to some of the others around Led Belarus, and see about getting you some congenial company. Perhaps a Snow-maiden, or someone of that sort. There must be some intelligent creatures that would find all that cold to be attractive. You are too much alone, Aleksia. I know you have your Brownies but—”
     “But they hardly stay more than a month before another takes his place. And my three faithfuls—“ she paused “—I would not for the world say anything against them, but I can generally recite everything I expect them to say, and I do not doubt that they can do the same for me.”
     The wood on the fire was cedar today, and Aleksia was mirror-watching from her cushions. There was a terrible blizzard outside, and she had felt disinclined even to get out of her bedgown. Instead, she had wrapped herself in a dressing-gown of quilted silk lined with rabbit fur, tucked her toes into slippers that matched, and was enjoying a very late breakfast of battered sausage and tea while the wind raged at her windows and it looked as if there was nothing out there but a solid white wall.
     The idea that Elena had suggested was appealing provided the poor “guest” didn’t perish of boredom. “I would not for the world want to replace any of the Brownies, but it would be nice to see someone new, not a servant, and someone that I didn’t have to discipline,” Aleksia said, with a melancholy sigh. “If it is at all possible—if you could find some compatible beings that could do their own work from here, I should love to play permanent host. You are very lucky to have the Order about you; sometimes the lack of anyone my peer to talk with is very wearing. Especially once I am snowed in. I know I shouldn’t complain but—“
     Elena sniffed. “You have every right to complain; you hardly ever come down from the Palace, and we hardly ever get up there. How often do you see the rest of us when it is not in a mirror? I would be lonely too! It’s not as if you are close enough you can easily come down for a wedding or a christening. Mind, I would love to see you more often. The Champions—“ she rolled her eyes “—they are all very hearty sorts. I have no one to discuss gowns and hair with, even the women want to talk of nothing but armor and weapons! Not that this is bad, it is just not something I care to debate for hours at a time. And I have not yet found a way to translate across the leagues instantly, or I swear, we would be having tea once a week.”
     “Nor have I…” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “But it does occur to me that I might research stepping through a suitably enchanted mirror. The Elven-kind must do something of the sort, the way they can simply appear and disappear at will.”
     Elena laughed, and shook her head ruefully. “I am no clever, inventive magician, really, to research this sort of thing. I will leave that to you—but—“ she bit her lip. “I am glad that you contacted me, and brought this up yourself. It is good to know that you actually have not been able to invent such a thing yet. There are some troubling rumors I wish to apprise you of. All is not well there in the North.” Something about the expression in Elena’s eyes put Aleksia on the alert. “I trust you are going to enlighten me.” “Well unless you actually are turning to the bad, and you have found a way to walk through mirrors and are hiding this from me, the fact that I am speaking to you and I know you are in your Palace, means that whatever is going on, it is not your doing.” Elena’s lips thinned. “Someone is causing…problems…in the vicinity of the Sammi. And she is using the name of ‘The Snow Queen.’”
     Suddenly the sausages were no longer so appealing. Aleksia set them aside to listen very closely to everything Elena had to say.
     #
    
     When Elena was finished and the mirror was back to reflecting nothing more interesting than her own face, Aleksia found herself in a very disquieted state. It was not greatly surprising that she should have heard nothing of this. To most people, everything out of their immediate geographic sphere was vaguely “over there” and concatenated into a single whole in their minds. Granted, a Godmother’s sphere did tend to be much larger than even the average monarch’s—but there were Five Hundred Kingdoms, and a great many places which, like the land of the Sammi, were not strictly Kingdoms at all, and there was a lot of distance between the Palace of Ever-Winter and the land of the reindeer-herders. The very nature of this mountainous country magnified the distances; the eagle might fly from here to there at will, but people had to find pathways through and over the mountains. So to Elena’s mind, rumors of something that might herald trouble seemed to be centered on an area very near the Palace of Ever-Winter, when in fact, it was not at all surprising Aleksia had heard nothing.
     She got up from her nest, and allowed her attendant to help her into a gown without paying much attention to it until the Brownie was doing up her back-laces. Only then did she notice that her little servant had intuited that she was not going to want to see Kay in person today; this was not one of her “Ice Fairy” gowns, not a magnificent silk creation. In fact, when she was Princess Aleksia, her stepmother would probably have been horrified to see her in something so plain and so plebian—it was a very simple, tight-sleeved gown of gray wool, apparently without a single ornament. But the wool was not just from any sheep—it was from special flocks that lived only in the mountains, and grew coats softer than that of a newborn lamb. Yarn spun from this wool could be made so fine that a lace shawl knitted from it could pass through a woman’s wedding ring. It made her look business-like, even a bit severe; when she spoke to her various contacts via the mirror, they would know this was no light matter. She continued to plan what she would do as her attendant put her hair up in braids and wrapped it about her head, crown-like.
     That someone up to mischief would have the audacity to use the title of “The Snow Queen”…that made her angry, and just a trifle alarmed. As the blizzard outside subsided, she made out a list of who might know something about these rumors. And it was going to take some organization on her part.
     She spent the rest of the afternoon until well after the sun had set and the moon was rising over the snowfields in front of her mirror, reaching out to those witches and sorceresses she knew that lived near the Sammi. Speaking with someone via mirror who was not expecting you to contact her was not just a matter of casting the spell and seeing them. Alas, no. She had to work a rather complicated bit of magic that would leave a message on whatever reflective surface was nearest them. It was simple, it had to be—just that she needed to speak with them. Then she had to wait for them to go to their own mirrors and initiate the contact. And of course, none of this would happen in a controlled manner. At one point she had a conversation going in three different mirrors at once, resorting in desperation to her little hand-mirror that she used to see the back of her head when she was checking a complicated hairdo on the rare occasion she made an appearance in public.
     None of those she contacted had heard any of the rumors that Elena had reported. All of them promised to probe their own sources of information. And that was the best she could hope for at this point. The thing was, the land of the Sammi was rather—unregulated. There were not many witches and sorceresses of the sort that made regular reports to the Godmothers.
     That much she knew already; that evening was spent in her nest with books the Brownies brought from her library, and a great deal of hot tea. She learned that most magic workers among the Sammi were Wise Women and Shamans, who often were aware of Godmothers only vaguely, if at all. From a travel book by a Godmother, she proved what she had suspected—that part of the world was full of demigods and nature spirits that were laws unto themselves and rather disdainful of the Godmothers.
     That gave her a moment’s pause. If it was one of them that was causing mischief, well…Aleksia would probably be able to tell right away if she could handle the situation herself. Tread cautiously here, Aleksia.
     Still, there were demigods, and there were demigods. A god of Winter would be able to squash her like a melting snowball, but a god of a single glacier—did not even rate a level of concern. If she could not deal with the troublemaker on her own, well, quick delving into more books assured her that it had been proven before that not even a demigod could stand up to the combined power of two Godmothers and a Fay. Elena would certainly help, and she had more than enough contacts among the Fay to call in a true Fairy Godmother. The Fay had created the mortal Godmothers in the first place, because, Aleksia presumed, they had grown tired of the constant meddling in human affairs that steering The Tradition required.
     With a goblet of hot mulled wine in hand, she went back over all she had done that day. Finally she concluded that there was nothing more to do at the moment, and with a resigned nod, she dismissed it from her mind. In the absence of information the only thing she could do was allow her agents to gather it for her without troubling them further. It wasn;t as if she didn’t she have quite enough to keep her busy at the moment.
     She put her wine down, and passed her hand over the surface of the mirror to look in on Gerda. The girl was braiding up another girl’s hair, in some small room heaped with a magpie’s treasure-trove of pirated goods. A bed was almost hidden under a riot of colored pillows, a truckle-bed only partly shoved beneath it. Gaudy necklaces were festooned from a tarnished and blotchy mirror, and the dressing-table was awash with silk ribbons, more jewelry, paints and powders, perfumes and kerchiefs. The owner of this room got whatever she wanted, and it seemed that what she wanted was Gerda to wait on her.
     Though Gerda looked desperately unhappy, she did not look ill-used. Ah good. She seems to be holding her own. As Aleksia had known would happen, because she had nudged things in that direction with her own subtle magic, nothing had happened to her other than being robbed, imprisoned, and frightened. The Chief of the band Aleksia had chosen had a daughter about Gerda’s age, and as Aleksia had made sure would happen, the daughter had taken one look at Gerda and claimed her as her own particular servant.
     No one dared to molest the young woman after that; the robber girl had been schooled in violence since she could crawl and had no compunction about enforcing her demands with whatever weapon came to hand. In particular, she was masterful with knives, and every man in her father’s band knew she could beat him to a pulp, then slice him up into ribbons if she chose. They already looked to her as her father’s heir, and while it was barely possible that one of them might challenge her, it was more likely that such a man would be beaten and become her right hand and partner. Aleksia had plans for her in good time, but she was not quite old enough yet. It amused her, though, to think of this wild girl righting all the wrongs of her father’s band and more as a Champion—yes, and turning the entire band from robbers into freedom fighters. There was a tyrant ruling over the Kingdom of Svenska, one of those things that Aleksia had not been able to prevent; it was not yet time for him to be deposed, but that time was coming soon, and Valeri the Robber Girl would be just the woman to do the job.
     That was at least three years away. First, Valeri had to do a bit of traveling and discover the truth for herself. Then it would be a matter of waiting until her father came to the end of all Robber Chiefs, and Valeri was called home. Yes, three years away, at the least, perhaps as much as five.
     So now the Robber Girl was acting as she always had; deep down, fundamentally kind, but selfish, helping herself to what she wanted. At the moment she was wearing Gerda’s fine clothing; Gerda had been carelessly given some of the Robber Girl’s leathers and furs—which were actually going to stand her in much better stead on the road ahead of her than her original clothing would have. Gerda needed to win Valeri’s sympathy, and to harden a little more under privation. In another week or so, it would be time for the next step.
     So Gerda was sorted. As for Kay…
     She passed her hand over the mirror and looked for him. He was not in his workshop, nor the library. Finally she found him at the window in his bedroom, staring out at the snow, an expression of bleak loneliness on his face. On the windowseat beside him was a half-finished drawing, not of some clockwork mechanism, but of a girl’s face. It wasn’t very well done in comparison to his clockwork plans, in fact it was hardly recognizable. But the hair gave it away as Gerda.
     Well, things were coming along nicely there as well.
     Time to look over the rest of her charges.
     This took a bit more effort; concentrating hard, she called up the image of the energies of The Tradition, silently telling her mirror to overlay them on a map. It looked rather like a many-colored fog-bank over the landscape rendered in extreme miniature, and she saw a problem almost immediately.
     And just in time; a huge surge of Traditional power showed her where the trouble spot was, and she followed the train into the deep forest outside the tiny village of Gottsbergen in the Kingdom of Svenska. She made the mirror backtrack in time a little—it could look into the past, but unfortunately not move forward into the future. She watcned as a cruel stepmother in Svenska sent her stepchildren out into the forest after nuts—it was, of course, just a little too early for nuts, but they didn’t know that. They were already far too deep into the woods to be anything but lost. This could go badly very quickly…with that much Traditional Power building so quickly around them, they were a far-too-tempting target for the Tyrant, or to be more precise, the Tyrant’s pet magician. He would not even have to do anything, just allow them to die…or be killed. They could last for several days in the woods, getting hungrier, colder, with the power building all around them.
     She firmed her jaw, feeling a flush, not quite of anger, but of something close to it. This was why she had become a Godmother. Not for the sulky Kays. For innocents like these. And she put everything else out of her mind but the need to save them.
     Using her second mirror, which she kept an eye on the children in the first, Aleksia searched for someone who could help. A Witch, a Sorceress, one of the creatures of the Faean, like a Giant or a Unicorn, even a Wise Beast—
     But the woods were singularly empty. Blast it. Blast the Tyrant and his pet magician all to perdition! Between his purely mortal evil and his magician’s ability to track rivals down for the pleasure of eliminating them and to hunt out the arcane beasties and Other Races for pleasure and profit, if there was anyone about, he, she or it was in hiding. For all practical purposes, there was no one nearby. She would have to work some magic at a distance. She could use the very magic boiling about these children to fuel it. But first—first she made sure there was nothing about that could harm them in the time it would take her to search for a way to get them help. She set an “aversion” spell about them, that would make anything carnivorous avoid them. Crude, but effective.
     Sure now that they were safe for the short term, she set about finding a solution that would make The Tradition “happy.” In the second mirror, she searched for what she needed, and after a moment, found it in the Kingdom of Daneland. Just over the border was another, quieter eddy of Traditional power building up, where a lonely cottage stood, owned by a woodcutter and his wife. As the babes searched the underbrush fruitlessly for hazelnuts, she siphoned off some of the magic around them and cast the “All Paths are One Path” spell directly ahead of them, putting the terminus in Daneland, just at the gate of that little cottage. She made sure the magical route would bring them there just at sunset. Then she waited, watching, holding both ends of the “All Paths” spell in her mind, keeping it balanced and ready—if someone else stumbled on that path at either end, it could make things very complicated indeed. They were already complicated enough. She was juggling two spells at a great distance, and one of them was potentially dangerous.
     When both of the chiuldren finally had put their feet on the magic path, she dismissed the aversion spell, then let go of the terminus at Svenska with a sigh of relief for more reasons than one. Among other things, now they were entirely in her power. Neither the Tyrant’s magician, nor any other, could interfere with them until she chose to let them go. Now all she had to do was watch. If anyone from that cottage accidentally left and got tangled up in her spell, no worries; it only went straight back to the cottage.
     But no one did, and in the blue dusk, two tired children, crying because they were lost and hungry, stumbled out of her spell, out of dark and ominous woods, right onto a lovely little soft path that ended in a cozy cottage. And the middle-aged, childless couple who had longed all these years for children of their own, heard them and came rushing out, reacting instinctively, and without hesitation, to the sound of children in distress.
     They could not understand each others’ language of course. That wouldn’t matter. In a few weeks, the little ones would be prattling in Dansk, filling the lives of their adoptive parents with joy. They would have forgotten their stepmother, and as for their father, well, he would become something vaguely remembered in dreams.
     And as for the wicked stepmother…
     Another day, Aleksia decided. She wanted to think on an appropriate punishment, in case what her stupid husband came up with was not enough. Or in case she managed to feign innocence and convince him that she was not to blame.
     Having her own child taken by gypsies might serve the purpose…
     She would have to look into that. Then again…there might be a simpler way.
     It was very difficult to deal directly with The Tradition. You could not exactly “communicate” with it, and trying to do anything by brute force was a little like a flea trying to shift a warhorse. But if the flea bit the horse in exactly the right place at the right time…
     She spent a good hour putting together a subtle spell. It was nothing like a compulsion; more like—a suggestion.
     She turned it loose and it settled around the countryside like a cobweb, much too subtle for the Tyrant’s wizard to detect. And if he did, he would not care about it. This had nothing to do with him, nor with the Tyrant.
     Bur from this moment on, every storyteller, every woman reciting tales to put the little ones to sleep, every gaggle of girls about a fire, every two-penny musician singing for his supper would be telling tales of wicked stepmothers who got what they deserved. This was the flea biting the warhorse, for the more these tales were recited, spun, and sung, the more The Tradition would be impelled to make them come true. And who, at the moment, was the wickedest stepmother in all of the Kingdom?
     Aleksia smiled with a certain smug satisfaction.
     With that crisis averted, Aleksia continued to look into the Kingdoms for which she was responsible, following the flows of the power generated by The Tradition. Everywhere that there was a situation that corresponded to a tale, a myth or a legend, the Tradition accrued power to force it down that Traditional Path to the Traditional Ending. Sometimes that was just fine; Godmothers didn’t have to intervene. In fact, there was an Ella Cinders story waiting to be recreated in Eisenberg—wicked stepmother, nasty stepsisters, lovely young girl turned into a servant, all in the capitol of Konigsberg. The girl was the right age to be married to the Prince, the Prince had no particular sweethearts, and the King and Queen not at all averse to him wedding a commoner if his heart took him there. It just needed a little more time to percolate, as it were, and then all it would need was Aleksia’s timely appearance, and just enough adversity thrown in their path to make the “Happily Ever After” all the more satisfying. She smiled to herself as she contemplated the poor girl scrubbing pots at the hearth. She should have been sad, but somehow she was able to take pleasure in small things. The Tradition was truly working hard on this one—if she had been any sweeter, any more self-sacrificing, any better-tempered, she would have been sickening. This, of course, was one of her rare ones.
     The list of her usual headaches, however, went much longer.
     There was a woman who was so much a shrew to her long-suffering husband that she was legendary to everyone around her. The Traditional force building around her was such that Aleksia judged it was time to let it take its course. But she made a mental note to keep an eye on the old man, lest her punishment overflow onto him. What would be best? There were a number of things in the area that she could put into the shrew’s way. The neighbors, she decided, finally. She wove another subtle spell and set that in motion—the idea that it would be a fine trick to play on the nag, to put her in a position where her sharp tongue dug herself a deeper and deeper hole until she found herself in real trouble. The only one with any sympathy for her then would be her long-suffering husband, who, strangely enough, still loved her, despite being mocked, ridiculed and berated without end. Well, there was no accounting for taste. Either he would save her, or he would leave her; in either case, he would no longer be subject to her abuse.
     The Tyrant, however, was more troubling. With his punishment at least three years in the future, and with The Tradition moving now to keep him in his place, she considered that there ought to be something she could do to ease the situation of his people. At the moment, he was grinding them into poverty, and The Tradition wasn’t helping. Tyrants did not get good weather and bountiful crops. Tyrants got late springs and early winters, too much rain or not enough, and when their peasantry could not produce bountiful crops, tyrants took it out on them, adding torture and murder to the hardship of semi-starvation.
     This, of course, tended to produce heroes and champions, but it was dreadfully hard on the people themselves.
     Tapping one finger on her lips as she considered the image of the Tyrant himself, seated rigidly on his throne, Aleksia wondered what she could do to ease their lot. Interestingly, this man was no usurper; he had come to this throne legitimately.
     Well, after a fashion, anyway. The King had managed to die without an heir, and that was entirely due to the current Tyrant. Benevolent though he had been, he had also been weak. His nephew had had no difficulty whatsoever in persuading him to put off marriage, meanwhile ingratiating himself to the old man and all his advisors in order to be named Crown Prince over all the other claimants. A little judicious spending, a bribe here, the assurance of reward there, the creation of a small private army, and when the King died and the Crown Prince was virtually rushed onto the throne by the greedy and corrupt Court.
     Then, when the new King proved to be something other than what had been expected, it was too late. Because the new King had known very well that a man who takes one bribe will take many, and a man who seeks his own preferment over the good of his country can be counted on to turn his coat whenever anyone offers him something he wants. So all those hints and half-promises came to nothing, and if they were lucky, most of those who had arranged for the Crown to be placed on the Tyrant’s head found themselves shuffled out of power themselves. The other claimants were dead, or in hiding, those nobles who objected to all this were all looking at a man who had a great many hardened mercenaries who knew how to use weapons well, and the new King could assume his true colors without much fear of being ousted.
     So…the problem before Alexia was how to distract him. “Show me those upon whom he depends,” she ordered the mirror.
     There were the usual types. The Tyrant did not much care for fighting, but he was very smart about how he dealt with the need to go to battle. He had put a General in charge of his armies who lived for conquest and blood—but was not at all interested in the tedium of ruling. Aleksia frowned. The General was a simple sadist. He knew what he wanted—free rein to allow his men to run roughshod over the populace. He got it often enough, whenever the Tyrant saw the need for an object-lesson. No hope there; there was nothing that anyone could offer the General that he did not already have. The Tyrant’s advisors were all very shrewd as well as suspicious, shrewd enough to know that none of them stood a chance of deposing their master alone, suspicious enough not to trust any of the others to help with a palace coup. That was a pity; it would have been the idea solution. The Magician was content to enjoy the fruits of his Master’s success. Like the General, he had what he wanted; a luxurious life, the freedom to pursue whatever line of research in magic that he fancied, regardless of how blackly evil it was, and a steady supply of victim upon whom to experiment. Like the General, he had no interest at all in ruling a country, and his ambitions all centered on success in the Dark Arts.
     But then, as she let the viewpoint roam, the mirror showed her someone she had not expected.
     Ensconced in a tower chamber was a fellow in elaborate robes of black and purple. Surrounding him were all the trappings of a wizard, although Aleksia knew he could not be anything of the sort, since there was not one jot of Traditional power about him, nor any other sort of magic so far as she could tell. This intrigued her, enough so that she issued orders not to be disturbed and had the Brownies bring her dinner in her rooms.
     Who are you, my little man? she asked him silently. The Tyrant’s Magician did not seem to consider him a threat nor a rival. She had never heard even a rumor of this fellow, who, from the crockery piled outside his door, seldom left his tower.
     She spent the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening watching him, and finally enough of what he did struck a chord with her that she realized she knew what he was.
     An Alchemist.
     But this was more than merely an Alchemist. He was clever enough not to call himself one, hence the wizardly trappings, although the Magician visited him once, and it was obvious that although the Magician considered the Alchemist an inferior, he also respected the Alchemist’s abilities. Once again, the Tyrant had been clever enough to find someone who could be given everything that he wanted. Now whether he was also clever enough not to waste his time in the search for the Philosopher’s Stone—which was a metaphysical concept anyway and did nothing to transmute base metals to gold—or whether he really did realize it was a metaphysical concept, he was not involving himself with crucibles and alembics and furnaces. She watched him, instead, making very useful things such as poisons and antidotes, cures for the unfortunate diseases that men who indulged themselves in certain vices were prone to, and watched with extreme interest as the Tyrant appeared for what must have been his daily dose of a concoction of at least thirty common poisons. No wonder he didn’t employ a taster! His Alchemist gave him immunity to anything but a truly exotic poison, and probably had the antidote handy for anything truly exotic. Exotic poisons tended to kill slowly, leaving plenty of time to administer an antidote. This was sheer brilliance.
     Once the Tyrant was gone again, the Alchemist turned to another pursuit entirely. Aleksia watched as he secured the door, bolting it from the inside, pulled a velvet pall off of some object, and settled himself into a comfortably chair in front of it. He imbibed some sort of concoction of his own…and went into a trance. His head fell back so that Aleksia could see that he was staring into an enormous crystal ball.
     Now, as every Godmother knew, it was possible for perfectly ordinary people to have visions of the future if they took the right sorts of potions. You had to be very disciplined—which this Alchemist clearly was—and you had to be good enough to know how to sort the hallucinations from the real visions. Usually these visions were not very accurate once you tried to look more than three months in the future, but for someone like the Tyrant, that would be enough.
     “Well!” Aleksia said aloud, staring into her mirror with probably the same expression that the Alchemist was wearing, staring into his crystal ball. But it just so happened that anyone who did this sort of parlor-trick could also be very easily deceived. And that gave Aleksia precisely the opportunity she was looking for.
     After all, the great crystal was a form of glass. She could make him see whatever she wanted him to see. In his drugged state he would be very suggestible, and his powers of discrimination would be set aside. Besides, he would have no reason to suppose that anyone else would be sending him visions. Why should there? There was no reason to think that anyone could, or would, interfere. No one knew about him but his master and the Magician, and neither wanted him deceived.
     So it was he emerged from his drug-induced trance, it was to run straight to the Tyrant with the description of what he had seen—a conspiracy against the ruler, the meeting of the conspirators, all of whom were robed identically and masked. And just to make it all the more interesting, she had made the leader some sort of magician, who had conjured up a demon that promised them success in their endeavor. The surroundings, as crafted by Aleksia’s imagination, were opulent, but apparently subterranean. When anyone spoke, it was with the cultured tones of the upper classes. And they made reference to “The King In Waiting.” It was quite the fantastic creation, but very believable, especially to someone like the Tyrant. The Tradition would be working against him in that way, making him suspicious and looking for conspiracies, and the fact that he couldn’t find any would make him all the more certain that they existed.
     Now the Tyrant would be actively searching for this conspiracy, powered by a magician. His search would concentrate on those of the upper classes. He would not be able to tell if these were his own nobles, or those in exile, for she had given no clues at all as to the location. He would only know that whoever was involved had wealth as well as occult power. He would assume that somewhere along the line he had missed a potential heir.
     This would drive him mad trying to ferret it out. And he would be so fixated on it he would leave his peasantry alone.
     Aleksia made a mental note to keep sending more false visions whenever she managed to think of some new variation.
     I should also make an attempt to put disturbing things in the palace from time to time. Perhaps an ornate dagger in the Tyrant’s bedpost, or a burned rug and the smell of brimstone in his dressing room. These things would take some arranging, but they would be worth the doing. Anything that kept him nervous and alarmed. Perhaps she could leave a hint that the apocryphal conspirators knew about his immunity to poison. Brownies could slip in anywhere, and slip out again undetected; alone of the elvenkind, they had no difficulties with Cold Iron. They could easily leave daggers and burned places anywhere they chose, and one of them might find it amusing to slip some concoction into the Tyrant’s nightly draught to make him sick…
     And this would have the effect of making Valeri’s job so much easier when she and her band were ready and made the attempt to depose him. It was not wise to depend too much on The Tradition alone to take you where you wanted to go. It was always better to have so many hedges around what you wanted accomplished that The Traditional power flowed downhill in the channel you wanted like so much run-off water.
     Aleksia dismissed the image in her mirror and looked up with the realization that she had been bending over it for hours. Her shoulders and neck were stiff and sore, and her eyes felt dry. One of her Brownies was at her side as she straightened, appearing, as they often did, without needing to be summoned.
     “It is after midnight,” the little woman said, as Aleksia massaged her own shoulder carefully. Rosemary, that was her name. “Young Kay moped about the dining room, pushed food about his plate, and retired to his suite when you did not put in an appearance. It seems he has decided the experiment of getting drunk tonight.” Rosemary grinned, with just a hint of malice. “He is going to have a head in the morning.”
     “Then one hopes he won’t repeat the experiment.” Aleksia smiled a little herself. If Kay was suffering from a hangover, he would not be a nuisance for some time tomorrow. “Rosemary, would you have any objections to other residents here? Not like Kay,” she amended. “Pleasant ones, and hopefully permanent ones. Peers of mine,”
     “None at all, Godmother,” the Brownie replied serenely. “The Palace can hold a small army, and if we need more help here, ‘tis easy come-by.”
     “Ah good.” That was a relief. There were times when Aleksia was not quite sure just what her privileges as a Godmother were, nor what they extended to. As a Princess of the Blood, she had taken such things as servants and where one put guests for granted. As a Godmother, who tended to both the highest and the lowest, she had learned that it was never wise to take anything for granted. In fact, her first apprenticeship year had been very enlightening. She would not have considered herself “spoiled”—but her eyes had certainly been opened to just how much work went on behind the rooms frequented by the noble and wealthy. She had learned that magic was not always the answer to a problem. She knew now, for instance, that the Palace was so remote that her Brownies changed monthly. At first, she had thought there was a never-ending stream of them, but now she knew that the little folk, who were highly social, aside from her very particular three—Tuft, Crups and her special maid Moth—most simply found remaining for any length of time at the Palace of Ever-Winter too much of a hardship. So Aleksia did her best to learn their names in the month or so they were with her, but if she forgot one, merely apologized, since the Brownies themselves didn’t take it amiss.
     Of course one benefit of this was that her menu, which could have gotten very tedious with the same cook, was instead changed with the tastes and training of the Brownie in charge. This month there were a lot of lightly spiced fish dishes; an excellent change from the cook of the previous month, who favored stews and complicated soups and meat dishes with fancy sauces. And that had been a change from the month before that, when the menu had boasted very little meat, and many varied noodle and vegetable concoctions, some of which had been so highly spiced her eyes had watered.
     “Well, Godmother Aleksia, I trust you are hungry? You have certainly been working hard enough to warrant something before you sleep.” Rosemary had the expectant look of one who is prepared to honor any request, from a single teacake to an entire baked horse.
     “Just some herb tea and one of those cheese biscuits,” Aleksia replied. “If there are any left.” Not that she would be denied; even if there hadn’t been any, she had the feeling the Brownies would produce a batch just to satisfy her. “I still need to record all this in my Occurrence Book.”
     Without being asked, Rosemary brought the latest volume of the Book. Aleksia didn’t know if all Godmothers did this, but she, at least, as had her predecessor Verushka, recorded all her projects, whether they succeeded or failed, as well as work in progress. There were eleven other volumes so far; the work of the previous Godmother had filled more than seventy. Aleksia found them very useful, especially in the first year or so of her tenure as the sole Godmother here. Whenever she had been at a loss for what to do in a given situation, even if she had not found an exact answer in those books, she had at least gotten a direction.
     Sometimes she actually sat down with a pen and ink and wrote it all out by hand, especially when the situation was vexing or puzzling. But tonight she simply dictated what she wanted to say, and watched as the words formed of themselves on the page.
     More magic, this of her own making. Each book was enchanted to respond to her voice when she began it; when she had filled it, she ended the enchantment. In part, that was so she was never tempted to go back and revise. A few projects had ended very badly indeed, and she felt the need of honesty there, for the sake of the Godmothers who would come after her, as well as her own sake. Living in isolation, answering to no one but herself, self-deception was an easy trap to fall into.
     When she was done, she left the book on the desk and went to her bedroom. As she had expected, a hot pot of tea and a freshly split and buttered cheese biscuit waited for her. The aroma was both heady and comforting at the same time. Her silken nightrobe was laid out on the bed—if she wanted to be dressed, she could, of course, ring for someone, but as often as not she simply disrobed herself. It wasn’t as if most of the gowns of the Ice Fairy were complicated or difficult to get into or out of. Not like the corseted, laced, and ruffled court gowns of her birthplace. It took two servants to get a girl into the simplest of those, and three to get her out again. Sometimes Aleksia wondered how anyone managed to have children; by the time one was ready for bed, one was already exhausted.
     But the gowns of the Ice Fairy were intended to mimic the sweeping, snow-covered slopes of her mountain; for the most part they were loose, flowing, and draped, with trains and sleeves that trailed behind her on the floor, and generally a diadem of quartz crystals. Depending on where she was going, the gowns were either of velvet lined with ermine, or of samite with embroidery of tiny crystal beads. White, of course. Except when she was in disguise, she never wore colors.
     Tonight, though, she didn’t immediately go to her fireside chair, which was a lovely warm pouf of a thing rather like a soft nest. Nor did she go to her collection of cushions on the other side of the fireplace. Instead she went to the window and swept back the gold and scarlet curtains to look out at the view.
     The moon shone brilliantly down on the white breast of the snow, and the stars gleamed in the blackness of the sky like the most perfect of diamonds on sable velvet. And she wondered as she looked out at it, if she was becoming as cold and unfeeling as that landscape.
     Because tonight, she had had three major tasks to deal with. The first had actually involved working against The Tradition to save the lives of those two tiny children. The Tradition had another end to their story—exhausted and in tears, they should have gone to sleep in each others’ arms and died out there, to be covered by leaves. Gerda’s plight in the hands of the robber band was a terrifying one for any young woman; when Aleksia had banished her image, Gerda’s expression of fear and grief should have melted a stone. And as for the Tyrant—there she was juggling life and death on a massive scale. Any sensible person would have been shaking with trepidation.
     Instead, she had been unmoved. All that had excited her had been the need to find a clever solution, to outwit The Tradition, and win the game. She had not been afraid for the children, in tears of sympathy for Gerda, or angry at The Tyrant.
     And now, she was only tired. Not triumphant, only—satisfied, as having done a good day’s work.
     Was she slowly becoming as locked in ice, emotionally speaking, as that perpetually frozen landscape?
     She shivered and dropped the curtain over the window.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

—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.