“By all that is holy! Your face! If either of those men — ” the Godmother began, her face twisting into a mask of outrage.
“No! I mean, yes, but not in the way you think!” Bella said hastily, and explained what had happened. Elena listened without interrupting, her anger calming as quickly as it had arisen, then pursed her lips thoughtfully.
“Well,” she said. “This is — unexpected. I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.”
Bella grimaced, which, of course, made her face hurt. “Oh, it does. But not as much as being bitten on the foot.”
Elena gave an unladylike snort. “Well. On the one hand, you were not nearly in as much danger as Eric would have liked you to think,” the Godmother said, cautiously. “Even if the poachers took you for a young man, you were extremely well dressed, and they probably thought you were a noble at the least and Sebastian at the best. One doesn’t kill a rich prize like that. In either case, they were not going to spoil what would have been a very lucrative kidnapping by slitting your throat.”
Bella was taken a little aback. “Oh…” she said, feeling deflated, and now, guilty. Because if she had not been in danger of her life, then those two men had been killed over nothing —
“Eric, however, was completely expendable, and they’d have gutted him without a moment of hesitation, then sent his body back on his horse as a token that they were in earnest,” the Godmother continued, as calmly as if she was discussing whether fish or soup would be a better first course at dinner. “So I must say, you did well in keeping your wits about you.” She leaned over and said something to someone who was out of sight of the mirror. “As soon as my assistant returns with it, I’ll push a pot of one of my salves through the mirror to your side. By tomorrow you won’t have so much as a pink mark.”
“You’ll — what? Push something through the mirror? You can do that?” Bella tried not to gape with surprise.
“And travel through mirrors, as well, yes, when I need to.” The Godmother made a dismissive motion. “Godmothers can. That’s another subject. You can see magic?”
Of course. Granny must have told her. Granny probably had one of these mirrors, too. It was no wonder the green-faced thing answered instead of Elena; the Godmother would likely spend every waking moment talking to mirrors if she didn’t have someone to act as a secretary for her. Bella nodded. “It looks like…like glowing dust motes. Or maybe like streams of smoke in bright sunlight, because there are streams and trickles and threads of it.” She groped after words to describe what she could see, but Elena just nodded.
“Well, this is an unexpected development, I must say,” the Godmother told her with a sigh. “Not entirely unwelcome but…it does complicate things. The Granny of your woods and I had thought you were going to be a very late bloomer and come into your power with your gray hair, but it seems your story just took a different turn.”
“You expected this?” She felt her mouth falling open, and snapped it shut.
“Of course. Magic generally runs in families. Your mother had a touch and she would have been a witch. Sebastian’s mother had it — that’s why you feel so at home in her stillroom. His father did, too, but the old fool kept trying to repress it. That’s why Sebastian is as good as he is — he got a double dose.” She looked a little annoyed for a moment, and tapped one finger on the table in front of her. “Well, there is no help for it. I am going to have to tell you about The Tradition.”
“The tradition of what?” Bella asked, when the Godmother didn’t continue.
“Not the tradition of — not that kind of tradition. The Tradition. The force that makes puppets out of us all.” The Godmother smiled grimly. “Or it tries, at least.”
And so, as Bella sat there, feeling more and more stunned by the moment, Godmother Elena explained that everything she had thought she had known about how the world wagged was wrong.
As Elena related, calmly and clearly, that she and everyone else in the Five Hundred Kingdoms was being manipulated by a force that had will, but no intelligence, Bella could not believe that the Godmother could relate all this so calmly. This Tradition — it was a horror — a mindless pressure on every living thing to fulfill particular roles. Roles that were dictated…
“…by stories?” she repeated, feeling a mix of shock, outrage, disbelief and a growing anger.
Elena nodded, her own expression one of acute sympathy. “It’s hideous,” she agreed. “Completely unfair. Just because people start telling each other tales over a fire, why should that mean that ten years later, some poor lad or wench finds him or herself playing that tale out again? But that is exactly what happens — ”
“But what happens if the people aren’t what the story says? For instance, what if a stepmother is kind — or at least, not unkind? Does she get forced into being a viper?” Bella wanted to know. Because if that was true…it would explain quite a bit about Genevieve…
“Or for instance, what if the poor abused stepdaughter lives in a Kingdom with no free prince?” Elena countered. And then she proceeded to tell Bella exactly what happened to a girl in that position. “…and so basically, with all that Traditional power building around her, trying to force her into a Path, it either has to get drained off harmlessly so she can live a normal life, or something drastic will happen to her and it generally isn’t pleasant. More often than I care to think about, that ‘something drastic’ comes in the form of an evil magician. And at that point the best she can hope for is to be kidnapped and locked up to serve as a sort of — well — magical well-spring. But we’re getting off the subject, and I will be happy to go on about this in detail later. The point here is this. Keeping these nasty things from happening, and arranging matters so that people can go back to having ordinary lives, is what Godmothers do.”
“Oh.” Bella thought about this for a long time. Elena waited patiently.
“You wouldn’t be telling me this now unless you saw a potential for a bad outcome. Well…what story am I being forced into?” she wanted to know, after a very long moment while she sorted through the hundreds of questions she wanted to ask. “No, wait. Let me guess. The Monster in the Labyrinth?”
“No, although that is a good guess. Sebastian would be both the magician that created the maze, and the Monster. But no…we think, and by ‘we’ I mean a number of Godmothers and I, that you are being forced into one you might never have heard of. It’s a tale of a nobleman transformed into a hideous beast until a girl agrees to marry him of her own free will. Very popular in some Kingdoms.”