“It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate his magic from the signs of someone or something else working magic on him,” Elena continued. “I will simply describe it as holding a lit candle between yourself and the sun, and trying to separate the light of the candle from the sunlight. So without knowing who or what the other worker of magic is, we cannot work out what was done to him. All we can do is eliminate things.”
“Such as?” Bella asked, uncertainly.
“He was never bitten by another were, which is the commonest form of the change. And contrary to popular belief, it is the easiest to cure, provided one has the sympathy of a Godmother. The bite of a were leaves a permanent scar, and one that is easy to recognize. Sebastian has no such scar.”
“But — ” Bella began.
“I assure you, we did not simply leave it at that,” the Godmother continued. “It was possible he could have been infected by a very minor wound, and one that would leave so small a scar we wouldn’t recognize it. One of us even suggested a number of other implausible means of infection, so we assumed nothing. But despite vigorous searching, we never found another were, nor signs of one anywhere in the Redbuck Forest, nor within even the most pessimistic distance of the Redbuck Forest.”
“Oh…” she said, and bit her lip. I really should know better than to question a Godmother…
“That left us with two other common options. The first is that he was a terribly wicked person who died as a result of a specific curse on the part of one of his victims, was buried and returned as a were. Mind you, while I call this ‘common,’ it’s not, and has never been heard of in any of my Kingdoms, but it is known in others, and had to be considered. However, since he is not wicked, did not encounter the sort of shaman who would make that kind of curse and obviously did not die, that could not be the case.” The Godmother turned her head slightly, and looked at Bella again. Seeing her reaction? Probably. She seemed satisfied by it.
“The second possibility was more likely than the first, since we already knew that he is a sorcerer. There is a specific spell which requires a belt of wolf skin that allows someone of sufficiently depraved character to physically become a wolf. I say ‘depraved,’ because part of the spell requires that the person first eat human flesh. As it happens, since we found no such belt, and he has transformed without any such belt, this also is obviously not the case.” Elena finished transplanting the seedlings, and dusted off her hands before looking back at Bella.
“Haven’t I heard — I mean, I thought — Are there other ways?” she said, flailing a little, mentally.
Elena nodded. “But all of them are less common than those three, and all of them were easily disproved. He didn’t drink water from a wolf footprint, he wasn’t born on the last moment of the winter solstice, he never ate the flesh or brain of a wild wolf, there is no magic pool that causes Transformation closer than a thousand leagues, he didn’t even know how to make the Transformation potions or salves, and he certainly never swore a pact with infernal forces in exchange for revenge. And none of those causes of Transformation has ever been known to occur within my Kingdoms. There is no explanation for what happened to Sebastian. He was a perfectly normal young man until one full moon he suddenly became a werewolf.”
“I’m not sure what all this means,” Bella replied, feeling bewildered. Elena was getting at something, but what was it? She felt as if she must be missing something.
Fortunately, Elena didn’t take this amiss, and seemed to be perfectly happy to explain. “This means either he was cursed by someone untrained, but extremely powerful, someone we have not been able to find, or there is another way to make someone into a were-beast, one that none of us have been able to determine. It is also a means that can be worked, without detection, on someone who was relatively closely watched because he was the heir to a noble household. Now, can you see where that places us?”
Bella’s mind went blank for a moment, then began racing. She had always had a particularly good imagination; that was one way in which she ensured against problems cropping up — or rather, was prepared for them when they did. And once the Godmother had pointed out the circumstances surrounding this —
“If it can be done to Sebastian — it could be done to anyone,” she said, slowly, a feeling of slow horror dawning on her. “Anyone at all. The King — the Prince — ”
“Any King, any Prince, any General commanding an army in war. Any influential priest or other man regarded as holy. It might have taken a magician to create the means, but we are fairly certain it did not take a magician to place whatever brought the change about, which tells us that any ordinary agent could be used. And just imagine how devastating that could be,” the Godmother said gravely. “From your reputation and what your father has said of you, Isabella, you know history, and you are very good at making deductions. The potential for disaster is immense. Right now, we honestly don’t know if this is the result of a single disgruntled magician with a grudge against Sebastian’s family, a magical accident that can never be repeated again, a magical accident that will strike again, some sort of magical plague or someone trying out his new weapon. Until we know — well, we are trying to keep all the variables to a minimum and we have to assume this was the work of someone, or several someones, whose motives we do not know. And if this was the work of an outsider, we would rather that he didn’t know he was successful. Thus we are keeping it secret.”
Bella digested all of this. It was hard to keep her own thoughts coherent, when they were running off in all directions, with all sorts of possible scenarios, but one emerged above all the others. “This is a lot bigger than just one Kingdom.”
Elena nodded gravely. “Every Godmother in the Five Hundred Kingdoms knows about this and has been keeping in touch with me about it since Sebastian changed. So far there have been no other instances of werewolf change that could not be ascribed to the three common causes, or to circumstances peculiar to that particular Kingdom. But I have to add that we know of. It is possible that there is another like Sebastian running wild in some remote area who is smart enough to hide his condition and remote enough that he hasn’t drawn attention to himself with killing sprees. Since it has been five years since Sebastian was infected, the situation has become less urgent, but is still no less dangerous.”
“What does that mean for me?” she asked in a small voice.
“It means that the odds of you being infected are lower than they might otherwise be,” the Godmother told her. “Yes, you were bitten, but so far as any of us can tell, the only weres that can create other weres with a bite, are the ones that were made that way themselves. But again, we don’t know. Not for certain. And with so much at stake, we can’t take the chance that we are wrong. That is why you must stay at Redbuck for three months, and be locked up safely for three full moons.”
Bella brooded about this for a very long moment. “And if I am infected,” she asked, finally, “what then?”
Elena looked at her levelly. “Then we can try cures we did not try on Sebastian, because I am relatively certain that you, unlike Sebastian, will agree to them. He did not feel enough urgency to take the chance with things that were so dangerous. He is by nature a shy and solitary young man, and as long as he is sure that he won’t hurt others, he doesn’t find being confined to Redbuck all that onerous. You, on the other hand, are of a different nature. If you discover you are infected, I think that you will take risks for a cure that he will not.”
Bella simultaneously hated and admired the Godmother at that moment. Hated her for being so blunt and apparently unmoved by Bella’s plight and the desperation she was feeling. Admired her for telling the absolute truth without any attempts to make it sound like anything other than it was — a life-or-death risk.
“And if these cures don’t work?” Bella continued. “If I’m still changing at the full moon when you run out of things to try?”
“Provided you survive all the failed attempts, I believe we will be looking into the remote-island and deserted-castle possibilities,” the Godmother said — though her expression and tone of voice gave no indication that she actually expected Bella to live through too many attempts at a cure.
Well. There it was. The very worst possible scenario, all laid out. And oddly, that actually made Bella feel a little, tiny bit better. She knew that the Godmother was actually actively working at solving this. She knew that she would be protected, if for no other reason than to serve as someone that dangerous cures could be tested on. At least there would be no mobs with torches and pitchforks in her future.