At six o’clock, a servant brought her supper on a tray. The soup was too salty. Gretsella cursed the soup. Then she went to bed early and slept the sleep of theextremelyrighteous.
The next morning, Gretsella was woken up by the distant sounds of battle. This was annoying for two reasons: First, it was very early in the morning, and the noise of what she could only surmise were some man’s final screams had disrupted her sleep. Second, she was in a palace, not on a battlefield, and she hadn’t expected warfare on the premises. Gretsellahatedbeing taken by surprise.
She considered sulking in the dungeon for a while longer, just to drive home the point that everything always went badly when she wasn’t around to keep things in hand. But her curiosity (always one of her strongest traits) overwhelmed her pettiness (another of her strongest traits), so she turned herself into a mouse and went creeping through the walls to find out what, exactly, was going on.
What was going on, it seemed, was a large number of men attempting to kill one another all over the palace. They were rushing around at such swift speeds that it took her a considerable amount of time to work out that there were two obviousparties involved: the palace guards, who wore red plumes on their helmets, and the other ones, who didn’t. This was somewhat alarming. Strange men fighting the palace guards suggested an attempted coup. Gretsella didn’t at all approve of people trying to overthrow her son when she wasn’t the mastermind behind the attempt. It struck her as very disrespectful. She didn’t go intotheirhouses and attempt to teachtheirsons about potion brewing or personal hygiene. It was only common courtesy not to try to parent other people’s errant children, especially via violent insurrections.
She crept her way through an exhausting catacomb of nooks and crannies, got lost in a drainpipe that ran along the outside of the grand ballroom, and had to ask for directions from an astounded pigeon. Then she finally made her way to Bradley’s bedchamber, where she found Bradley and Sir George, both in states of partial undress, putting up a good fight against some of the armed invaders. Sir George was wielding a sword, which Gretsella could only assume he must sleep with. Bradley was wielding nothing but his devastating right hook and, in his left hand, a chamber pot. Judging by the smell in the room, someone had used it for its intended purpose before Bradley decided to repurpose it for walloping home invaders.
Gretsella watched these goings-on for a minute or so with great interest and amusement. Then one of the strangers lunged out with his sword and managed to draw blood from Bradley’s shoulder, and it stopped being even a little bit entertaining. She felt a hot flush envelop her entire little mousebody. She gave an infuriated squeak, which transformed halfway through into “absolutely enough ofthat!” as she flung herself off the top of the doorframe, metamorphosing mid-fling from tiny gray mouse into infuriated nude witch of sophisticated vintage. She had turned all of the enemy soldiers into fruit flies by the time she hit the ground. Then she stood there in the middle of the room, waiting with patience and modesty to be thanked for her incredible cleverness, skill, and general heroism.
“Mother!” Bradley said, obviously nearly entirely overcome with awe and gratitude. An enemy fruit fly hovered, fruitlessly, near his right shoulder. “Did you change your mind? And would you…like to borrow a bathrobe?”
This was somewhat less than the effusive thanks Gretsella had expected. She squinted at Bradley for a moment, considering refusing the offer. It was, however, chilly in the room, and it was against Gretsella’s principles to ever sacrifice her personal comfort for the sake of principle. “Thank you,” she said. “And a pair of slippers.”
A bathrobe and slippers were provided. They were too large, so Gretsella shrank them, transforming the extra matter into some nice decorative runic embroidery around the cuffs of the bathrobe, plus some attractively witchly silver tassels on the slippers. Bradley sighed. “That was my favorite robe, Mother. I’m happy to lend you things, but I wish you would ask before you shrink them.”
“You’re the king,” Gretsella said dismissively. “You can get new slippers whenever you like.”
“An interesting thing to say!” Sir George said, swatting irritably at his fruit-flyified enemy combatants, two of which were circling his left ear. “You seem to appreciate Bradley being the king when you aren’t sending armed men after him to have him killed in his own bed!”
“Stop talking about Bradley’s bed,” said Gretsella, who had most certainly noticed Sir George’s casual use of her son’s heathen name. Being near nude in her son’s bedroom was one thing, but calling himBradleyseemed to indicate a level of familiarity that she would need to keep an eye on. She stilllikedSir George, but she’d noticed in him an alarming tendency toward defending Bradley against all comers, including his own doting mother. “I don’t like thinking about it. And I’ve never sent men after him in his life. I was busy dying of exposure in the dungeon when I heard the carrying-on up here and crept out to investigate.”
“Oh no, did you catch a chill down there?” Bradley asked, all sweet solicitude. “I knew that we should have had you thrown into the tower instead of the dungeon. It’s awfully damp in the basement.”
“She wasn’t actually dying of exposure, Bradley,” Sir George said. “You can’t be exposed in a nice underground suite. There’s a four-poster down there. And anyway, I’ve never seen a healthier-looking woman in my life.” He eyed Gretsella for a moment. “You really had nothing to do with the attack?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Gretsella said firmly. “I want tostageafakeviolent coup and install a new ruler so that Bradley can go home and get back to peacefully cutting hair and playingfootball and enjoying himself instead of having to suffer through all of thiskingnonsense. I don’t want toactuallysee him violently overthrown. He can’t peacefully run a hair salon if he’s been killed by hired goons, can he?”
“That does sound nice,” Bradley said wistfully. “Going home, and working at the salon, and playing football with the fellows. You never really appreciate the simple things in life until you have to take responsibility over the welfare of a nation and its people, do you?”
“I don’t think thatishow most people learn to appreciate the little things, Bradley,” Gretsella said. “Buying horrible books full of inspirational poetry usually does the trick for anyone who doesn’t have the common sense to enjoy themselves like a normal person in the first place.” Gretsella was firmly opposed to Life Lessons of all kinds. There were, in her view, two proper ways to come to an understanding about the ways of the world: through native intelligence and old-fashioned common sense, as she had, or by having the ways of the world firmly explained to you by Gretsella, as she preferred for everyone else. It was much simpler for everyone that way, so long as she wasn’t forced to repeat herself.
“But if you didn’t send those men after Bradley,” Sir George said, “then that means that someone else isactuallytrying to usurp the throne and reallydoeswant to see Bradley dead!”
“It almost makes you feel as if a nicely arranged announcement of your abdication, complete with a ready-made replacement, would be a lovely way to gracefully exit the political sphere, doesn’t it?” Gretsella asked.
They all looked at one another.
“Mother,” Bradley said, “I think that I’d like for you to overthrow me.”
“Hail, King Bradley!” the toadaphone cried out from under a cushion on a nearby settee, where it had been hiding from the melee. “All hail King Bradley, Destroyer of the Kingdom!”
“Shut up, you,” Gretsella told it, “or I’ll turn you into a man.”
Chapter 10
In Which Gretsella Encounters Some Unanticipated Plot Twists
Over the next day or so, Gretsella was forced to admit that plotting to overthrow the king was much easier once she’d obtained His Majesty’s consent. She had him write very polite notes to the members of his advisory council in which he alerted them to this new state of affairs and appointed his mother Chief Minister Responsible for the Collapse of Government. (The title was Gretsella’s idea; Sir George had expressed skepticism about whether or not itsent the wrong message.) Her first task in her new role was asking Janet and Herman to nose around a little and find out who was responsible for the attempted coup. The answer came quickly: It was the horrible Sir Harold of the Rugged Jawline and his equally nasty brothers, who were all incensed over Bradley’s recent adjustments to the tax code. Bradley was quietly devastated by the news. Fortunately for him, Sir George was there toprovide sympathy and comfort. He also provided amusingly catty mumbled remarks about Sir Harold when Bradley was out of earshot. Gretsella patted Sir George’s knee. “I never liked him either,” she said, and didn’t bother getting Bradley’s permission before having the whole Harold clan tossed into one of the palace’s damper dungeon cells.
With that out of the way, the next step was to devise a plan for gracefully extracting Bradley from power. Gretsella held another meeting, this time in the warm and well-lit council hall, with Bradley in attendance. Janet piped up the instant Gretsella declared that the meeting was in session. “What if, instead of a coup, we tried to establish a democracy?”
Everyone made utterances like “Ah!” or “Hmm” at that. Bradley rubbed his chin thoughtfully. No one said anything for a long moment. Finally, brave Sir George spoke for all of them. “What’s ademocracy?”
Janet explained: “It’s when you allow The People to choose their own ruler every few years.” She said “The People” with the audible capital letters of someone who had read a lot of books on political theory but spent very little time with the smelly and irritating members of the general public.
Gretsella frowned. “That’s aterribleidea,” she said. “The people are mostly idiots.”
