“Ooh, there’s jugglers!” Bradley said, and the toad went silent.
Gretsella frowned. “Bradley?” Maybe she shouldn’t have been quite so suspicious. Maybe she ought to have expressed more sincere congratulations on his victory. Maybe, as his mother, she ought to have said that she was proud. “Are you there, Bradley?”
The toad said, “Ribbit.”
“There’s no call forsarcasm,” Gretsella said, and put the toad into the nettle patch as its punishment for cheek.
For the next few weeks,Gretsella found herself feeling distinctly displeased. She refused to call itsad. Witches didn’t just wander around in their nightgowns eating chocolate cake andfeeling sad, so that obviouslycouldn’tbe what Gretsella was doing.Brooding, she called it. She brooded. She did it wickedly. She invented several exciting new curses, including one particularly fiendish little number that afflicted its subject with hiccups whenever they attended a wedding, a funeral, or the sort of concert that included lots of long, solemn pauses in order to trick the audience into applauding.
She missed Bradley. The toadaphone hopped through the garden in silence.
A few months passed. Then, one day, Barb appeared on Gretsella’s doorstep. She was wearing a sleeveless pink dress and holding a Bundt cake. “Hello, Gretsella,” she trilled. “I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by.”
“With acake?” Gretsella asked. “Didn’t you notice that I cursed you?”
“Well, yes,” Barb said. “But I didn’t want to take it too personally. I assumed that you were just upset over Bradley moving out.” She eyed Gretsella’s hair, which hadn’t been brushed for a span of time considerably longer than what even witches generally found acceptable. A witch might deliberately cultivate the impression that shemighthave bats nesting in her hair, but most witches drew the line at the point when smallanimals really did start getting trapped in the snarls. “May I come in?”
Gretsella glared at her. “What kind of cake is it?”
“Lemon,” Barb said. “With a lavender glaze.”
“I curse you once more, Barb,” Gretsella mumbled, and stepped aside to let Barb in. The wicked old hagknewthat Gretsella couldn’t resist a lavender glaze.
They sat down for tea and cake in Gretsella’s living room. Barb served Gretsella a very large slice, which Gretsella gobbled down almost in one gulp while trying not to look visibly sad, like a python going through a difficult breakup. Barb looked alarmed. Then she said, “You know, I’m a little worried about Bradley. Did you hear that he’s canceled the taxes?”
Gretsella blinked. “Which taxes?”
“That’s just the thing,” Barb said. She took a dainty bite of cake, chewed, and swallowed. Then she took a sip of tea. “According to the papers, it’sallof the taxes.”
“Oh Bradley,” Gretsella said. She really didn’t know what was going to happen to the boy, and she didn’t at all like the way the tea leaves were swirling. Briefly, she considered whether the economic depression that the nation had surely just entered would present a good opportunity to apply for a low-interest mortgage on a new cottage, one with enough space for a dedicated studio for her arts and crafts projects (like cursed amulets and little dolls with authentic human teeth). Then she rememberedwhohad probably single-handedly crashed the stock market, and sighed. “Barb, he’s anidiot.”
Barb, wisely, chose not to respond to this directly. “More cake?”
The matter of the taxes nagged at Gretsella a bit. It was such a ridiculous, birdbrained—Bradley-brained—thing to do. It was, she imagined, the kind of thing that some sort of adviser with a long white beard and whatever passed for wisdom among the menfolk should have told him not to do, but apparently no such adviser had bothered.
She would have told him what was what ifshewere his adviser, but he’d left her behind when he marched off to the capital.
She considered cursing him. She settled on continuing to refuse to call him first.
She had come fairly close to reestablishing a comfortable, cozy, Bradley-free routine for the first time in eighteen years when, a few days after her visit from Barb, she heard sobbing coming from her back garden.
She went back there to investigate and found the sobbing emanating from her toadaphone. She fished it out of the nettle patch—it had taken a worrying liking to the nettles—and spoke to the toad. “Bradley!” she said. “What is it, darling?” Then she blinked and resolved to dose herself at bedtime with a strong potion that would prevent her from ever again uttering the worddarling.
“Everything is absolutely awful,” Bradley cried, and then the toad was forced to produce a number of loud thumping and rustling noises, which Gretsella could only assume were the consequence of Bradley having dramatically flung himself onto his kingly four-poster.
“I’m so terribly sorry to hear that,” Gretsella said, though this was a bold and wicked falsehood. She wasn’t sorry to hear it at all. She was, in fact, very pleased to hear it, due to her presumption that the more miserable Bradley became, the more likely he was to forget about all of this ridiculous king business and come home.
She didn’t say anything to that effect aloud, of course. She was far too sly a crone for that. Instead, she carried her toad back into the cottage and set it on the countertop so that she could make a pot of tea while they talked. She suspected that this might take a while. “Tell Mother all about it.”
Bradley told her all about it. She wasn’t wrong about it taking a while: Bradley had a whole litany of complaints to recite woefully from under his blankets (she was sure he was hiding from his courtiers under the covers). The Treasury was running dry, and the queen of Overthere was threatening to call in Evermore’s debts. The crops were failing in the South, and streams of hungry peasants were setting up tent cities in the capital. There were rumors of insurrection from a number of noble families in the North. And, worst of all, the handsome knight who had whisked Bradley off in the first place had lately been seen canoodling with one of Bradley’s kitchen maids. “What am I going to do, Mother?” he asked her, his voice somewhat muffled by goose down and despair. “Peepers keeps shouting at me about how I’m going to cause the downfall of the kingdom!”
“That’s very odd,” Gretsella said. “Toadaphones don’t usually prophesize independently. Maybe it has to do with theclimate at the capital.” More likely, it had something to do with the hasty way in which Gretsella had enchanted the toad, but she certainly wasn’t going to tell Bradleythat. “Don’t you have any wise advisers to tell you what to do?” she asked, then got up and went to her closet to pull out her long-neglected suitcase.
“No!” Bradley said. “They all left when I drove off my great-uncle, the usurper! There’s no one here who’s half as wise as you!”
“Oh dear,” Gretsella said, examining her best black dresses for moth holes before carefully folding them and packing them into the suitcase. “It does sound very difficult to be all alone there, with no one you trust to advise you.”
“Itis, Mother,” the dejected Bradley said.
