“So are most of the rulers we have now,” Janet countered. “The People can’t really do much worse than a bunch of talking animals. No offense, Your Majesty.”
“None taken,” Bradley said, his face gone slightly pink. “I do think that the mice and squirrels might have been a littleoverenthusiastic when it came to supporting my reign, because they liked the part where I was the old king’s son and raised in the forest. They don’t have to pay taxes, after all, so they don’t have to be very practical about the government.”
Everyone took a moment to digest this pronouncement. Sir George had a very soft, silly sort of look on his nice, earnest face. “That was…very insightful, Bradley.” Thesurprisinglywas present but unvoiced, because Sir George was a kind man who was also clearly, truly fond of Bradley. The fact that he was still making soppy faces at him now, when he knew that Bradley was soon to experience the world’s most precipitous demotion in his plunge from king to journeyman hairdresser, made that very clear. Even Gretsella herself, if not actually moved, was at leastnudgedby George’s devotion to her only child. And Bradley’s insight into squirrel psychologywasfairly impressive, by Bradley standards.
“Thank you,” Bradley said, his face gone even pinker. He cleared his throat. “Anyway, couldn’t we give this democracy idea a try? Maybe the people would like it.”
“Thepeopleare very likely to like allsortsof things that aren’t any good for them,” Gretsella said, but now she was considering it. “How exactly do they determine who the people want to be their leader?”
“People who want the jobrun for office,” Janet said, pronouncing the phrase as if it were the name of an expensive foreign wine. “They go around making speeches in town squares and things, and whipping the crowds up into a frenzy about how they’re going tovote the bastards out. Then there’s anelection, and everyone gets to vote on who they’d like to be in charge, and whoever gets the most votes gets to run the country.”
Everyone was staring at her, their faces full of fascination, bafflement, and abject horror. Sir George was the first to speak up. “But then, couldn’t just any maniac end up running the country?”
“That could happen now,” Janet said. “As long as the maniac has the right father. It isn’t as if they screen princes for competence before they let them take over.”
There was a beat of uncomfortable silence as everyone tried their best not to look at Bradley.
Then, to Gretsella’s surprise, Herman spoke. “So, will we just go around telling people that the king’s getting tired of kinging and wants to do a democracy, and maybe they might want to try their hands at the job? I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, but I think if I went down to my local bar and said that, everyone would just think I’d gotten kicked in the head again.”
“We’ll need it to be more organized than that,” Janet said. “Maybe a public education campaign to teach everyone about democracy and why they should like it.”
“Apropagandacampaign, you might call it,” Gretsella said. She was looking at Janet now, thoughtful. She might still be denying that she was a witch, but Janet was very witchlike in her eagerness to ply her trade. “It’s lucky for us that we have a minister of propaganda already established in the role.”
“I’d be happy to take charge of the project, of course,”Janet said demurely. “I’m sure that you’re much too busy to waste your time writing silly songs about the electoral process, Grandmother.”
“I certainly am,” Gretsella said, forced to agree with this characterization of her importance and busyness despite her mounting suspicion that she was beinghandled. Janet was much too much like a witch tonotbe up to something. Gretsella wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Janet was already making plans for negotiating a generous severance package by any means necessary. She already had enough blackmail material on everyone surrounding Bradley to power a lifetime’s worth of anonymous letters with the words all cut out of magazines. It was a good thing that Gretsella knew an excellent spell for giving the senders of nasty letters a debilitating twitch whenever they ventured near a pair of scissors or a pot of glue. “You’ll do your propaganda campaign, then, and we’ll give this democracy thing the old coven try.”
Janet threw herself wholeheartedly into the propaganda campaign, which turned out to be complicated enough of a task to require a budgetary increase for the Propaganda Department so that Janet could hire junior jesters. This was, perhaps, what Janet had been after in the first place. If there was one thing that had better staying power than a king, it was the elaborate overpaid bureaucracy surrounding him. If Janet really wanted her position to become permanent, Gretsella thought, she would hire at least three administrators who could invent forms for the jesters to fill out before, during, and after they did any jesting. However, she decided to refrainfrom making this suggestion to Janet directly: The girl was fully capable of coming up with fiendish schemes all on her own.
In any case, the junior jesters were apparently competent enough at their tasks for their work to have immediate and obvious effects. The streets of the capital echoed with the sound of the worddemocracy, particularly in the context of sentences such as “What the hell is ademocracy?” and “Why are all of the damn jesters singing about nothing butdemocracyall of a sudden? What happened to a nice old-fashioned love song?” and “If I have to hear one more word aboutdemocracy, I’m burning this whole place to the ground, so help me I will!”
Gretsella spoke to Janet, who conceded that the junior jesters had, perhaps, been slightly overzealous in their efforts. She instructed them to be less irritating in their propagandizing. Herman suggested that a pro-democracy organization funded by the Propaganda Department could give out free grilled meat and beer on the street corners. “We could call themcommunity festivals,” he said. “As if they just happened on their own, natural-like, only we’ll be using them to trick the people into wanting to overthrow the government.”
“Diabolical,” Gretsella said admiringly. “Make it so, Janet!”
Janet made it so. The revolutionary spirit began to bloom on the streets of the capital. A few people were even so bold as to announce themselves as candidates, though most of them were the sorts of people who liked to wear extremely eye-catching hats and talk a lot about one-time-only opportunities to start work-from-home businesses. At what Gretsellaand Janet mutually decided was the most opportune time, Bradley gave a stirring speech from the palace balcony on the many advantages of democracy. Gretsella noticed the people in the crowd exchanging glances before venturing a cautious cheer or two. Eventually, some clever personage started up a chant of “Hail, King Bradley, Bringer of Democracy!,” which created a bit of glance exchanging up on the balcony.
“They’re sounding awfullyroyalistfor a bunch of democracy fanciers,” Lady Cordelia said. She was, perhaps, the biggest democracy skeptic in the whole group, though she was sensible enough to avoid emotional attachment to any particular form of government. People with strongly held faith in any particular political system, in Lady Cordelia’s opinion, were to be viewed with the same gently pitying regard as a barmaid who thought that her young sailor would be coming back any day now.
“The people love their Good King Bradley,” Sir George said, and gazed lovingly at Bradley.
“They love keeping their heads attached,” Herman muttered. Gretsella didn’t respond to this aloud—it sounded too much like skepticism about the plan that she’d been supporting—but she did take note of it. The man had a point. It was a pretty bold thing to publicly support the overthrowal of a king, even if the king in question was suspiciously encouraging of the idea.
The election was two weeks later.
The people elected Bradley with 98 percent of the vote.
The next day, Bradley’s advisory council gathered to discussthe results of the election. “I sent some of the junior jesters among the people to ask them about it,” Janet said.
“And the people said that they loved their Good King Bradley?” Sir George asked.
“Well, some of them,” Janet said. “Most of them just picked the only name they recognized. The rest thought that the whole thing was some kind of elaborate loyalty test and that they’d have their heads chopped off for backing anyone but Bradley. The people in that bunch were pretty proud of themselves for having figured it out.”
“But that would be horrible!” Bradley said.
“A clever idea,” Gretsella said, impressed. “The next democratically elected king should implement it to ruthlessly root out all of his political opponents and kill them before they dare run for office. Anyway, it sounds as if the real problem is that we need to pick someone to replace Bradley. We’ll just have to do it again but make the propaganda campaign about supporting whoever we’ve picked.”
“We can’t just pick someone to replace him, Grandmother,” Janet said. “That’s not the way democracy works.”
