“And with your having been so accustomed to being able to askmefor advice,” Gretsella said as she packed a few pairs of clean stockings. The trick with Bradley, she had found, was to keep gently herding him toward the conclusion at which you wanted him to arrive, for significantly longer than you originally expected would be necessary. He would get there eventually, given enough time.
“Oh, Mother!” Bradley said then, his voice gone suddenly brighter. “That gives me an idea! Why don’t you come to the capital and be my chief adviser?”
“Why, what anidea, Bradley!” Gretsella said. “I never would have thought of it. Do you really think I might be helpful? I don’t know anything about running a kingdom.” She would go there by stagecoach, she thought, for the sake ofcomfort, but she would also bring her collapsible broomstick in case of accidents on the highway.
“Oh,pleasecome, Mother,” Bradley said. “You’re the smartest person I know. I’m sure you’ll be able to help me out of this mess.”
“Well, if you really think so, Bradley,” Gretsella said, consulting her crystal ball to see when the first coach was leaving town the next morning, “I suppose I might be able to come and do my best to advise you.”
Chapter 4
In Which Gretsella Gets to Work
Gretsella very soon regretted her decision to take a stagecoach to the capital. The highway was extremely pitted—far worse than she remembered it being when she’d last made this trip as a starry-eyed young witch embarking on a journey to visit the execution grounds of various Great Witches of History—and they were still several miles outside the capital when traffic came to an abrupt and total halt. She waited for half an hour while growing increasingly impatient with the insipid conversations of her fellow passengers—what sort of unbalanced personality could possibly have so much to say about awedding?—until she finally gave up, unfolded her collapsible broomstick, and took flight.
Traveling by broomstick, in addition to being more convenient than being trapped in a stagecoach, provided Gretsella with a sweeping view of the current state of the city. The stateof the city did not appear to involve much in the way of glistening palaces on the hill, prancing unicorns, or anything else that Bradley might have expected to encounter when he rode off to rule his kingdom. There were lots of tents in the public squares. Gretsella, though not an expert in urban environments, suspected that this was not the intended use of the squares in question. It certainly struck her as somewhat untraditional to stock the squares with poor and desperate people living in tents, instead of poor and desperate people who had formed an angry mob in order to indulge in a bit of rotten-egg-throwing, witch-dunking, or politician-beheading. As far as Gretsella was concerned, watching poor and desperate people violently get the best of the upper classes was one of the chief joys of a city vacation, but watching poor and desperate people sit around sadly next to the statue of a naked woman who was supposed to represent the Spirit of Charity could only suffuse one with the Spirit of Melancholy.
Interlude: An Excerpt from a Tourist’s Guide to the Capital of Evermore
The first thing noticed by most visitors to the bustling capital of the Kingdom of Evermore is what the city lacks. The capital, which is the economic, cultural, and political center of the kingdom, doesn’t have a name. This is because of, and not despite, the city’s storied history.
The capital of Evermore was initially called Warrockston, after the ancient warrior-king who, it is said,[*1] discovered a spring of sweet water when he thrust his sword into the ground at the end of a long battle and decided to build a fortress on the spot. Despite having been married seven times before his prolonged and unpleasant death from poisonousatmospheric vapors,[*2] Warrock never managed to produce a legitimate heir, and his death resulted in a lengthy war between factions led by his chief adviser, his younger brother, and his eldest son, Horace the Unacknowledged. Horace emerged the victor and, in an act of bracing spitefulness, moved the seat of government to a rural hunting lodge and gave Warrockston a new name: Bastordston.[*3]
Horace was instructed by his advisers to shore up his strategic alliances, so he married a highly educated foreign princess, who quickly came to the conclusion that her only hope of finding someone capable of holding a conversation in the entire Kingdom of Evermore was to give birth to and then educate that person herself. She had eight children, all of whom could speak five languages and still never talked to their father if they could possibly avoid it. Horace’s eldest son, Hiram the Extremely Learned, promptly moved back to the capital before his own coronation and renamed it Meddonoloparpanell, which means “Place of Continuous Virtue” in Old High Evermorish.[*4] Afterhisdeath,hisson, Morton thePractical, ruthlessly abbreviated the name to the nonsensical (and vaguely flatulent) Parpo. And so it went, king after king, until the people of Evermore quietly gave up on remaking their signs and maps every few years and started to refer to the capital as, simply, the Capital. Patriotic citizens of Evermore will often, while abroad, attempt to convince patriotic citizens of other countries that adding “of Evermore” after “the Capital” is a type of mispronunciation. This usually doesn’t go over very well, but the people of Evermore aren’t known for their cultural sensitivity.[*5]
End of Interlude
Gretsella landed very near thepalace, then tucked her broom back into her suitcase, marched up to the palace’s huge iron gate, and announced, “I’m here to see Bradley.” The guards ignored her. She repeated herself more loudly. “I’mhereto seeBradley.”
The guards deigned to look at her. “Who?”
“Bradley,” she said. “Oh, for wickedness’ sake. Theking.”
“Move along, old woman,” one of the guards said.
“All right,” Gretsella said, and marched on through the gate.
The guards had evidently not expected this, because it took them a moment to leap after her. She evaded them very neatly for a minute or so—she had enchanted her shoes for light-footedness—but alas, one of them had very long arms. He grabbed hold of her. Gretsella would later maintain that she turned him into a parrotentirelyin self-defense.
The parrot squawked. So did his colleague, who turned around to sprint away from Gretsella at a truly impressive speed. “Witch!” he screamed. “Witch!”
“Yes, exactly,” Gretsella said. “And let that be a lesson to you!” Then she started walking toward the palace steps again. She had made it almost the rest of the way there when an enormous net descended upon her, followed by the full weight of a very large and very heavy guard. Gretsella said, “Oof.”
“We’ve got you now, witch!” the guard said. A large crowd of armed men was now gathered around her. Gretsella tried toaim a spell through the holes in the net and nearly singed her own finger off.
“Wizard work,” she hissed, disgusted. She didn’t approve of wizards. They were mostly men, and generally more satisfied with themselves than Gretsella thought that a man ought to be.
“Take her to the dungeon!” the leader of the guards cried.
“Oh, for the love ofbrimstone,” Gretsella said, and tried to wriggle her way free, but it was no use: The anti-witch net held firm, and the guards carted her off to the dungeon like a wild boar about to be made very intimate with some heirloom carrots and new potatoes.
They threw her, net and all, into a cell in the dungeon, then left her to her own devices. Her first device was to wriggle her way out of the anti-witch net. Her second device was to turn herself into a mouse and creep out of her cell and into the palace walls.
Gretsella climbed upward along the path of a drainpipe, passing a number of grand, empty rooms coated in dust. Then, eventually, she came to a room occupied by a young woman who appeared to be busily packing everything she owned into a suitcase. She was about Gretsella’s size. Gretsella made her mouse’s head into a tiny version of her own head in order to speak, and immediately regretted the choice. It was very awkward, and also objectively disgusting. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m the king’s mother, and I would like to borrow a dress.”
The young woman looked up and, to her credit, let out only a very brief and muted scream. “You don’t look like theking’s mother,” she said after she’d taken a moment to recover. “You look like a hideous tiny cheese-eating nightmare fiend.”
“That may be so,” Gretsella said. “But it isn’t very polite of you to mention it. Just be a good girl and bring a dress over here.”
