Chapter 8
In Which Gretsella’s Efforts Achieve Results
Predictably, time passed. Just as predictably, Gretsella was proved right. Everything functioned much better when sensible, responsible people were in charge. After a few months, the palace’s affairs were running along as smoothly as the buses on the public highways weren’t. Mr. Kedge had whispered into the ears of his beloved numbers sweetly and tenderly enough to have discovered all sorts of areas where the palace could economize, all of which were swiftly acted upon by the formidable Lady Cordelia. He’d also convinced Bradley to levy high taxes on certain products used primarily by the wealthy, like fur capes and little silver forks that were only used to eat sardines. The income from these new taxes on luxury goods was then used to shore up holes in the budget, obviating the need to send knights out into the countryside to rip the silver buttons off the coats of the few remainingpeasants who could still afford buttons in this economy, to say nothing of the coats.
Within the palace itself, Lady Cordelia had fired a number of people, hired several more, and ruthlessly imposed order upon the newly scrubbed and starched foot soldiers in her domestic army. The kitchen was cleaned top to bottom, hygiene practices were instituted for the kitchen maids, and fashionable new menus were forced upon the head cook. Rooms that had been locked up and empty for years were opened, scoured, refurbished, and prepared for visitors. A variety of guests had been invited to attend the series of balls and tourneys organized by Lady Cordelia to formally present King Bradley to the noble families of Evermore and the kingdom’s allied nations. She and Sir George had also created a daily schedule for Bradley to follow, with set times for him to grant audiences to his increasingly devoted and appreciative subjects.
While all of this was going on in the palace, Janet had been going out among the people, spreading pro-Bradley propaganda wherever she went. One particular song that managed to be both humorous and complimentary about Bradley’s good looks had become a music hall sensation, and Gretsella often heard it being sung very loudly and horribly in taverns when she slunk around the city at night. (She liked to slink around the city at night in pursuit of such wicked business as peeping through windows to see how strangers liked to decorate their living rooms and cutting interesting long-stemmed flowers out of other people’s gardens to use in her floral arrangements.) A more straightforward song of praise had been takenup by many of Bradley’s most fervent admirers to be sung whenever he appeared on a balcony to wave to the adoring masses gathered below.
Any ordinary citizen of Evermore would be excused for thinking that their young, handsome, fortunate king was delighted with his lot in life. They would, therefore, be surprised and baffled to be presented with the morose and wan face of King Bradley as it appeared over breakfast, or between audiences with various vassals, or as he shuffled through the palace halls with his fur-lined cape dragging along behind him like the tail of a dispirited border collie.
At first, Gretsella ignored this behavior. She let him stew.Hewas the one who had decided that it would be a good idea to flirt and right-hook his way into being responsible for the well-being of the nation: He could spend a few days reflecting on how deeply misguided that decision had truly been. She waited like a snake watching a particularly fat chipmunk, monitoring the dolefulness of his window-out-gazing and the gustiness of his sighs.
All of this reign-induced misery made Bradley somewhat offensive as a companion, so Gretsella spent her time in the much more congenial company of Old Mr. Herman in the stables, who served her tea and cookies and managed to maintain his good sense and cheerful demeanor even in the face of her most irritating behavior. She found this invigorating in the way that she imagined cats must enjoy encountering particularly spirited mice.
One morning, Gretsella woke up in her luxurious dowagersuite and had the thought that there was really no point living in a palace where a fleet of servants catered to your every whim unless you had someone to show off to. With this in mind, she enchanted the mirror in her bedroom—it was truly extraordinary how well they worked when they weren’tsulking—and called a convocation for the following Sunday.
The members of Gretsella’s coven agreed to be treated to lunch at the palace with an alacrity that spoke only ill of their characters, the wretched, grasping bunch of social-climbing witches that they were. Gretsella had expected no less. They all arrived very promptly, each dressed in a fashion that they thought suited the occasion. Hyssop and Yarrow each wore their finest black silk robes and pointed hats, with discreet little decorative brooches on their chests, Hyssop’s a silver bat with rubies for eyes and Yarrow’s a cat with eyes made of emeralds. Magnetia also arrived in traditional black, but she had ornamented her ensemble with a bewildering array of buckles and pins that didn’t seem to perform any discernible function in terms of connecting or fastening, in addition to an enormous number of brooches, rings, and necklaces similar in design to those worn by Yarrow and Hyssop but of obviously much lower quality. Barb, for her part, was wearing a black linen sundress and a pointy black straw hat. She had accessorized with a charm bracelet from which dangled tiny cats, broomsticks, cauldrons, et cetera, and she carried a matching black straw bag. She looked very nice, which was extremely annoying of her.
Sartorial matters aside, the convocation was a great success. Bradley was extremely supportive—It’s so nice that you’ve invited your friends over, Mother—and stopped by with Sir George to say hello halfway through their luncheon, which precipitated an amount of giggling and cooing and cackling that Gretsella found frankly unbecoming from a group of accomplished hags. He also instructed Janet to give the witches a thorough tour of the palace and grounds, with all appropriate attention to be paid to relevant and entertaining historical anecdotes et cetera. Janet did an admirable job, though she seemed a bit self-conscious to be in the company of so many witches when she herself was neck-deep in denial of her true nature. Hyssop, Yarrow, and Barb kept giving each other knowing glances and then smiling at Janet so condescendingly that you could practically hear the clumps of precipitated smugness hitting the floor. Janet and Magnetia, meanwhile, kept stealing furtive little glances at each other. Eventually, just after relating an amusing story about a gargoyle that was said to be the petrified familiar of an ancient warlock, Janet burst out with “I just wanted to say that I totally love your outfit!”
“Oh my Go—devil, thank you!” Magnetia trilled. “It’s all thrifted!”
This set off a degree of witchly shrieking and burbling between the two of them that would have chilled the bones of the doughtiest of priests or clerics. The elder witches eyed one another, then shrugged collectively. The youth had their ways,no doubt. It was nice to see two junior witches bonding, even if it was over paying real currency to buy someone else’s smelly old clothes.
After this highly successful social event came to an end, Gretsella had nothing else left to occupy her other than monitoring her son, which she rededicated herself to with renewed energy and zeal. Finally, after what Gretsella felt was a suitably lengthy exposure to subtle psychological warfare, Bradley sighed so loudly over lunch that the startled footman jumped and spilled the gravy, and Gretsella decided that her son was ripe for a nice old-fashioned motherly manipulation. “Bradley, my dear,” she said, and then immediately regretted it. She never called him “my dear.” She had noticed in Bradley, as of late, an increasing and slightly alarming predisposition toward formingthoughtsand, from those thoughts,conclusions. He might become suspicious. She coughed and pounded her fist against her chest for a moment in an attempt to give the impression that the “my dear” had been brought on by a passing spasm in her lungs. Then she started over. “Bradley,” she said, “what’s troubling you?”
“Oh, Mother,” he said, and started pouring his heart out all over the lunch table. Gretsella found this somewhat inconsiderate of him, considering the fact that the table had already been soiled by almost an entire boatful of gravy, but she made sympathetic sounds in her throat and patted his hand as he talked. There were, it seemed, a number of things troubling Good King Bradley. Some of his knights, annoyed with him for his decision to tax fine furs and sardine forks and fancygold-plated jousting outfits instead of boring things like bread, had been behaving as frostily toward him as they thought they could get away with. The ones who weren’t angry with him about the taxes were angry with him for so obviously favoring George above all the rest of them, and they were bullying poor George whenever they had the opportunity.
Beyond his markedly diminished social life, Bradley was feeling overwhelmed by his demanding new schedule, and had grown increasingly suspicious that Lady Cordelia was trying to have him married off to a princess of Joymany. (She was: The princess in question was named Brunhilde, and was noted for being as intelligent and highly educated as she was beautiful. Lady Cordelia had told Gretsella about her plans, and Gretsella had warmly encouraged them. If there was anything that would get Bradley to abdicate, it was being menaced with the prospect of a beautiful and highly intelligent foreign princess who would probably expect Bradley to read very long books about modern philosophy and discuss what he’d learned from them over the breakfast table.)
“And,” Bradley said, concluding his recitation of woe with a burst of dramatic flair, “I can’t sleep at night because Peepers keeps shouting at me that I’m going to bring about the downfall of the kingdom!” He gazed at Gretsella with big, damp, pleading eyes. Bradley, Gretsella had always thought, had the eyes of an extremely handsome prize Guernsey. “What should I do, Mother?”
“Well,” Gretsella said, “what would youliketo do?”
“Marry George and move back home and play football with the fellows every weekend and work at the hair salon,” Bradley said on a single breath.
Gretsella blinked. Then she crowed internally. Then she said, “Then you obviously ought to quit being king.”
A Digression on the Subject of a Quiet, Cozy Domestic Life
Once upon a time, the average person couldn’t read or write, believed very fervently in a local god or two, and never strayed much farther away from the place they had been born than they could manage on foot before the sun started to go down. In those days, just about the greatest aspirations anyone could ever have were a full belly, someone to hold at night, and a few roly-poly babies who survived past their roly-poly babyhood. The truly ambitious might have yearned to kill a wild boar bigger than the boar that their cousin was always bragging about, or to own a necklace made of red coral beads as beautiful as the one owned by their uncle’s second wife. It was impossible to wish for anything more, because you can’t wish for something that you can’t even imagine. Stories, when they were told, were about the gods or the exciting boar exploits of the ancestors. No one knew thatthey could be dissatisfied with their full bellies, loving companions, and roly-poly offspring who survived long enough to become insufferable on the subject of boars.
Then, one day, in every little village or clan roundhouse or family cave everywhere in the world, a traveling minstrel (or the local equivalent) wandered through and asked to exchange some food for a few stories. Everything went downhill from there.
As it turns out, a quiet domestic life is much more achievable than adventure, glory, and a royal crown. It’s also, unfortunately, often the case that a person successfully slays the dragon, solves the riddle, and doggedly scrambles their way to the highest frozen peaks of fame, fortune, and success, then takes a moment to catch their breath, looks around a bit, and says, in a voice both astounded and despairing, “But I don’tfeelany different!”
Chapter 9
Back to the Discussion Between Poor King Bradley and His Increasingly Smug Mother
“Mother!” Bradley said, as scandalized by her wickedness as ever. You’d think that he would have gotten used to it, having been raised by a witch, but he never failed to expect everyone around him to be as kind and honest and pure of heart as he was himself. “I can’t justquit being king. Evermore would be left without a ruler! The Prophecy of Peepers would come true! And George would be so disappointed in me if I publicly abandoned my sworn duty to pursue my own selfish happiness.” George was, unfortunately, just as virtuous as Bradley, despite being significantly more intelligent.
The sound of the phrase “the Prophecy of Peepers” temporarily rendered Gretsella both cross-eyed and incapable of human speech. Once she’d recovered, she said, “So we’ll find a suitable replacement to overthrow you.”
“To overthrow me?” Bradley repeated, his brow furrowing. “But I don’t want there to be awar. People might get hurt.”
Gretsella refrained from noting that people would certainly get hurt in a war, because that was the entire point. If no one was hurt in a war, then it was just an armed discussion. “They wouldn’tactuallyoverthrow you,” she explained, summoning all of her available patience. “We would pick someone to replace you, and then you wouldpretendto be overthrown. That way, no one would have to be embarrassed by your abdication.” Then she added helpfully, “That’s what it’s called when a king quits.”
