Leopold was waiting for him, with a finely carved wooden box in front of him. When Siegfried arrived in the doorway, he grinned and waved him to the table.
"Come see if this looks fit for a Princess," he said, as Siegfried sat down beside him. He opened the box, and the pure white braid glowed against the velvet interior. There was a simple gold clasp on it, and nothing more.
"I am no woman, but I think that will please her," he said gravely. "Did the jeweler know what it was?"
"He did, and he gave me the gold clasp for the cost of silver if I gave him a single hair. He means to braid it with silver and gold wire for a ring for his daughter. That seemed harmless enough to me." Leopold gave Siegfried a sharpish, sideways look. "I confess I took a few of the hairs that you saved. I thought they might come in handy. You never know, right?"
Siegfried shrugged. "You made a good bargain with them. But you should be sure that the jeweler either knows you are a Prince or does not know you at all now. There will be wizards and sorcerers who would pursue you for those hairs or that necklace, and you either want to be thought of as too high to dare to harass, or impossible to find."
Leopold nodded. "So, shall we head back to the Palace? I hope you have had your fill of running about in the woods for now. I, for one, would be glad not to see them again for a while!"
The number of suitors had been pared down, one trial at a time, over the past several weeks. From tournaments to hunts for odd items, to fiendishly complicated problems, the trials had been successful at eliminating most of the Princes.
But there were still ten left.
"I need more trials" muttered Lily, as she massaged both temples. "More than that, I need a long-term solution to keeping Eltaria safe. Thurman would still be alive if he hadn't been worn to a thread by running from one border crisis to another. Celeste might still be alive if he had been here instead of on the border."
"And you will be worn to a thread if you aren't careful, Lily," Jimson said with alarm and concern. "You do not need that many more trials. There are only ten candidates left. Three of them are the enemy Princes and two more are from Kingdoms flanking them. We are still safe. You can stretch this out as long as a year without any of them taking umbrage, I think."
"And I still don't have a long-term solution!" the Godmother said with despair. "I have been Godmother to this Kingdom for three hundred years, and I still haven't got a solution that doesn't involve sending the Kings to an early grave!"
There was no one to see her but Jimson, no one to he alarmed at her weakness, no one to wonder if she was no longer up to the task....
Even though she herself now wondered just that very thing.
For the first time in three hundred years, she felt inadequate to the job. She put her head down in her hands, and wept. The Fae, even the half-Fae, as she was, were not supposed, by mortals at least, to weep. Mortals didn't know. The Fae did not cry often, and never in public, but oh yes, they wept. When you lived as long as the Fae did, there was a great deal to weep over. She had not wept in decades, but she was at the end of her proverbial rope.
"Lily — Lily — "Jimson sounded frustrated and helpless. "Please, do not cry — you are a good Godmother. No one could have managed better than you!"
She couldn't stop weeping, although she wept as the Fae did, quietly, the tears flowing from her eyes like rain. It was all, suddenly, too much. Even if one of the decent men won the right to Rosa's hand, it would all begin again. This poor little kingdom would be the tasty morsel that the neighbors all wanted to devour as long as there was no practical way to protect it.
Jimson continued to try and comfort her with soothing words, with reminders of several of the many disasters she had averted, and then just with "it will be all right," repeated over and over. But for the moment, she was inconsolable. Finally he burst out, "Ah, I wish I was in your world, my love. I could at least hold you!"
That stopped her tears. She looked up suddenly and saw in the eyes of her Mirror Servant something she had never expected to see.
"Jimson?" she faltered.
He flushed. "I should never have said that," he mumbled, and started to fade.
"Wait!" she called. He paused, halfway between there and not there.
"Did you mean that?"
Slowly, he came back tothere. "It slipped out."
"But did you mean it?" She stared at him, as if she was seeing him, reallyseeing him, for the first time. For three hundred years, he had been her faithful helper, companion and confidant. Everything, everyone else, would come and go — but not Jimson. When had her feelings crossed that line? When had his? They had been together so long...