“Bradley is a hairdresser, not a farm boy,” Gretsella said. “But I agree.”
“You do?” Lady Cordelia asked. Then she recovered herself. “As you ought to, yes. What, exactly, would be the terms of my employment?”
Gretsella hadn’t thought this part through yet, but shedidn’t let that stop her from making wild pronouncements. “More generous than whatever they were in your last position,” she said with enormous and unearned confidence. Considering what she knew about the state of the crown’s finances, making such promises could be considered highly irresponsible. Fortunately for Gretsella, it wasn’t in the tradition of witches to care about fiscal responsibility. She was sure that she’d figure something out. “Can you start work tomorrow afternoon?”
Lady Cordelia said that she could.
Unnumbered Chapter from the Point of View of King Bradley, to Be Inserted Anywhere It Might Roughly Fit In with the Central Narrative
Bradley wasn’t too stupid to know that he wasn’t very smart.
He knew that people thought he had no idea that he didn’t know very much. He never tried to prove them wrong. It made people uncomfortable to be around someone who was obviously dissatisfied with himself, and he always did his best to make people feel comfortable. Besides, it wasn’t that he wasunhappy, exactly. He tried to be a cheerful person. He just knew for a fact that some things were hard for him that other people seemed to be able to do without any difficulty at all.
When Bradley was a little boy, he’d sometimes gone with his mother to the mill to buy flour, and he’d watched the big millstone going around and around. The old stone was uneven, so you could see from the side that there were somespots where the wheat could sort of huddle down into a crack and the stone wouldn’t be able to grind it into flour no matter what. That was what Bradley’s brain felt like when he had to do something that wasn’t very easy right away. Some things—like cutting hair or dancing or reading interesting novels—came to him almost instantly. Other things—like geography or cashing out at the salon at the end of the day—turned his brain into that millstone. He could feel the grinding. It wasn’t a very nice feeling, so when he’d encountered it in the past, he’d usually turned toward the person nearest to him, given them his best smile, and explained that he thought they would do a much better job at solving his problem than he could. They usually did it right away, which fixed things temporarily, at least. It had never occurred to him that his strategy might fail him when something really important happened that he would have to deal with on his own.
Becoming king was a pretty important thing to have happened. The grinding had gotten so loud that it was hard to fall asleep at night.
On this particular morning, he’d slept especially badly and woken up feeling more tired than he ever had during his very brief career as a blacksmith’s apprentice. As he shaved—he’d given up on being allowed to dress himself, but he drew the line at shaving, having been, after all, ahairdresser—he examined his face very carefully in the mirror. He didn’t lookold, exactly. He definitely lookedolder. That worried him. His face had worried him his whole life. People were always talking about it when they thought he couldn’t hear them.What abeautiful little boy, they’d said, and now they said things likeWhat a gorgeous man.Then they would smile at him. Sometimes they also said things likeYou don’t need brains with a face like that!, which was exactly what worried him. He didn’t need brains with a face like this, but he knew that one day he’d wake up with a face that called for a little more brain than he’d been given. He knew this because he’d been told so, spitefully, by his best friend in elementary school, a little girl named Gillie who had dramatically ended and then reaffirmed their friendship at least twice a month. He’d gone to his mother about it in tears. “Mother,” he said, “Gillie says that I’m going to get old and ugly one day and everyone will hate me because I’m so stupid!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” his mother had said. “People won’t hate you. You’re a very nice boy, and you’ll stay that way when you’re old and wrinkled and have hair growing out of your nose.”
That hadn’t comforted him back then. It didn’t comfort him now either. He was fairly sure that what from a handsome young man was charming grew very quickly intolerable when it came with lots of hair growing out of his nose.
In any case, his worry about his face was, in a way, what had gotten him out of bed despite his exhaustion this morning, just as it had almost every morning since he’d become king. He was trying to educate himself. He’d had one of his knights buy a lot of very important, difficult books for learning about things like ethics and astronomy and law and foreign languages and other things that a king should know, andhe studied them for two hours every morning before the lords of the robes et cetera came marching in to pull on his socks.
This morning, he was attempting to learn about macroeconomics. His brain ground more loudly than it ever had, he was sure, in his entire life.
There was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” Bradley said. Then he changed it to “Enter!” because that sounded more kingly.
The knocker entered. It was Sir George. Bradley immediately started blushing. George gave a very elegant bow. “Your Majesty,” he said, “I saw the light under the door as I passed, and I thought that I might invite you to join me for a ride. It’s more pleasant in the morning, before it gets too hot.” It was early enough in the day that it still wasn’t completely light out.
George, Bradley thought with a surge of despondency, probably knew all about macroeconomics. He probably did seven brisk macroeconomics every morning after his coffee and before his push-ups. “That’s very kind of you, Sir George, but I’m afraid that I have work to do,” Bradley said, politely. Not that he’d consciously decided to speak politely: That was just the only way he knew how to talk. George’s eyes flicked down to the books on the desk. Bradley blushed harder. He tried to cover the books with a casual arm but instead sent them all cascading to the floor in an agonizingly prolonged chorus of rustles and thumps.
George rushed to help him pick them up, because that was the sort of person George was. He was a picker-up of things that other people had knocked over. When he saw what he waspicking up, he said, in his warm, quiet way, “Oh, you’re studying economics, Your Majesty? I don’t think I’d be able to manage that this early in the morning. When I was in school, I remember thinking it was interesting in the sort of way that made your head ache after about an hour.”
“It’s not so bad,” Bradley said. “A little difficult.” George was looking at him kindly. Bradley blurted out, “I think that I’m too slow to understand it.” Then he felt himself go tense. He knew better than to say that sort of thing. There was just something about George that shook the honesty out of him like sauce out of a bottle.
There were certain faces that people usually made at Bradley when he’d said things like that, back before he’d learned not to. There was the quickly-covered-up sneer of disgust. There was the exaggeratedly furrowed brow and downturned lips of pity. There was the bared-tooth rictus of extreme discomfort. George didn’t make any of those faces. He looked at Bradley very calmly and said, “I don’t think that you are, Your Majesty.”
Bradley squirmed, his heart sinking. This was, possibly, the worst reaction of all: when people looked at his handsome face and assigned brilliance to him that he simply didn’t possess. “I’m not being modest,” he said. “I’ve been reading this for hours, and I still can’t make any sense of it.”
George gave a thoughtful nod. “I don’t mean to argue with you. You know better than anyone how quick or slow you are. But I think that most people who really understand this sort of thing took more than an hour or two to get there.” Hepaused. “If you like, Your Majesty, maybe you could tell me where you’re having difficulties, and I could try to help. Sometimes I won’t understand something that I read in a book, but it all comes clear when someone explains it to me.”
“Oh,” Bradley said. He flushed. “Well…I always used to hear people complaining about taxes. Talking about how the nobility was robbing them blind and they couldn’t afford to feed their children—things like that. So the first thing I did when I became king was cancel all of the taxes, and then everyone started talking about how I’d ruined the economy, and how there were starving people filling the public squares because of me.” He swallowed. “I only wanted to help, but it all went wrong, and all of my advisers sigh or smirk or lie to me and tell me that the people are just ungrateful when I try to ask questions about it. So I tried reading these books, but they don’t say anything at all about what happens when you cancel all of the taxes.”
“That might be because no one has done it before exactly the way you did,” George said. “But I think that the trouble with all of this economics stuff is that anything you do can have all sorts of different effects that you didn’t plan on. Like, have you ever heard of a holly dragon, Your Majesty? Where I grew up, we used to nail them over the doorframes to guard our homes on Midwinter’s Night.”
“Oh, of course,” Bradley said. “I think they must have them everywhere in Evermore. I loved putting ours up every year.”
“And did you ever try to buy one on Midwinter’s Day?”
Bradley shook his head hard. “We always had one for free. Mother grows holly in the garden and makes her own. She always said that she’d burn herself at the stake before she’d pay what they sell them for at the shops, especially just before Midwinter.”
“Your mother is a very intelligent woman,” George said with the exact sort of expression on his face that people usually had when they complimented Bradley’s mother. “Why are holly dragons so expensive?”
“Because everyone needs a holly dragon to guard the door at midnight,” Bradley said. “So the shops can set whatever price they like, especially just before Midwinter, when the stocks are running low.”
