Twelve Dancing Witnesses Read online

  My parents had requested that we join them for a luncheon at a well-known bistro in a town fairly nearby to my house. The town was made up of a mixture of Magical creatures and humans. Nothing was truly near Brunhild’s Keep, but it was close enough for me not to need a map to get there.

  My parents were not the sort to enjoy mixing with the “lower creatures”. By which they meant anyone who was not a fairy and then only a certain sort of fairy. They probably considered meeting at the fancy bistro some sort of great concession they were making on my behalf.

  As long as they weren’t charging into my home, I was fine with whatever plans they made. Keeping the secrets of the dragons was only one reason I didn’t want them at Brunhild’s Keep.

  I called a farewell to my house as I left. It closed the door behind me with a snap. Unlike me, the house did not understand why visitors were a bad idea. My house was alive and aware and eager to show off all the skills it had gained since its awakening. What it could not understand was my reluctance to let any of my relatives visit.

  I could appreciate the house’s desire for a broader audience. As appreciative and enthusiastic as I was, I was still only one fairy.

  My house had grander ambitions.

  What did it say about me that my house was more ambitious than I was?

  Not that I wasn’t making headway in my work. I just wasn’t as flashy or… talented as my house?

  That didn’t make me feel any better about myself.

  “Astraea needed the carriage,” Dallan said. “So, I suggested that Autumn and Skye might want to take us up in that fancy phaeton of yours.”

  I weighed my options. The phaeton was fancy and my mother-and-son team of winged horses loved to pull it. The red and gold of their coats and wings went quite nicely with the paint and trim of the vehicle. The flip side of that carriage was that those particular winged horses were incredibly fast and the phaeton was an open carriage. We would arrive quickly and in high style, but also in vast disarray.

  It would be fun for Autumn and Skye, though. And someone should get some enjoyment out of my having to meet with my parents. It might as well be the winged horses.

  “Sounds perfect,” I said, taking Dallan’s hand in mine and squeezing it.

  We hadn’t had a long enough relationship to have lost all the self-consciousness in the gesture yet. It still felt Magical just to have our hands touching. I wondered if I would ever be able to touch Dallan and have it feel like something casual. While the idea of easy intimacy was attractive, so was the idea of holding onto whatever this was that drew us together so forcefully.

  I was four hundred years old, nearly four hundred and one, but I was still an amateur when it came to my relationships. All my history so far had been wrapped up in a fairy who had manipulated and betrayed me until I’d learned to question everything about myself.

  It made me wary of moving too quickly in my relationship with Dallan. It wasn’t fair. Dallan was a far cry from Cooper. But Dallan never rushed me.

  Maybe that was because he was older than Magic.

  Literally.

  Dallan and I hadn’t tried to figure out what we were. We hadn’t given it a name. We hadn’t discussed futures. We just lived in the present and spent as much time as we could together while working two high profile careers.

  We climbed into the fancy crimson and gold phaeton. The winged horses unfolded their wings and took to the sky. The wind pulled at my dark blue hair. The briskness of the breeze woke me up and made me smile.

  This was a welcome change to my constant working.

  I currently had four different cases in my workload. One was a case I’d been familiar with and started from the ground up, but the other three I had inherited from my uncle Ferdie and they were a mess.

  I would never understand how Ferdie always managed to pull his feathered wings over fairies’ eyes, but he had left his kingdoms in complete disarray and it had taken him literally attacking my house with a series of damaging spells to wake up the fairy community to just how imbalanced he was.

  Ferdie had nearly lost his wings due to his crimes. To save them, he had sworn the unbreakable oaths to never set foot near me or my property again. They had been careful to word the oaths in such a way that even a manipulative brain-leech such as Ferdie would not be able to wiggle his way out.

  His wings meant more to him than anything. Even whatever malicious, because it was most certainly malicious, use he believed he had for my new home and library.

  I was sure that all this business with Ferdie was the only reason why my parents had wanted to meet for luncheon. Over the past several months they had made various attempts at coercing me into “forgiving” my uncle and helping to reinstate him as a Godparent. He was so misunderstood and had just been playing around and I was far too serious for my own good, anyway. Who needed a house that big? Certainly not a failure like Grace. I just needed to let these foolish charges go.

  No matter how much they pleaded, cajoled, and manipulated, that was never going to happen.

  I was painfully aware that to my parents I was the one in the wrong, not Ferdie. Despite the public threats he had made against me, despite the damage he had done to my house and property, they both believed that I had wronged him.

  Just as my distant aunt and mother of my banished cousin, Gloriana, believed that I had wronged her. My aunt had made a point of visiting every Godparent she could in an effort to poison them against me.

  It was hard to tell if her campaign was working, or if it was Ferdie’s slander against me, or just my being generally unlikeable, but there were very few Godparents willing to work with me, let alone be seen with me in public.

  No wonder my parents thought they were making concessions to meet me in a place where they might be seen.

  The horror.

  Fairies might not be able to lie, but they surely twisted the truth until it was unrecognizable.

  Autumn and Skye landed neatly on the cobblestone road of Emerton and joined the light traffic leading towards the bistro. Emerton was a midsized town with a burgeoning population of just about every imaginable intelligent Magical creature.

  I waved to a familiar family of centaurs as we paused to let them cross the road ahead of us. A working group of picketing gnomes stopped them to add signatures to a clipboard the shortest one was waving.

  And there, looking regal and uncomfortable at an outside table of the bistro, sat my respectable and resplendent parents.

  I tried not to grin as I climbed out of the phaeton and thanked my winged horses. They would trot down the street to a livery and wait for me there. It would not do to let my parents see me smiling. They might get the all-too correct impression that I was laughing at them.

  My mother, who used fine clothing as a weapon and always looked perfectly in place in any elite fairy gathering, was not as adept at fitting in at a “lesser” establishment. She wore an elegant day gown with a cinched corseted waist, double bustles over each hip, and a giant griffon feather in her enormous wide-brimmed hat. Her skirt alone must have been twenty layers. With her outfit and her fairy-appropriate wings, she took up enough space for any ten less ostentatious fairies.

  Next to her, my father looked slight and bent in an aesthetically acceptable sort of way. He did his best to always appear scholarly and intelligent. He wore unnecessary glasses on a chain and kept looking at a timepiece he kept in his best waistcoat. Like my mother, he was dressed in perfect mode for tea with Godparents at some upscale local. Sitting in a bistro in the middle of town, the pair of them bordered on the ridiculous.

  I glanced sideways in appreciation at Dallan. In an act of support I very much appreciated, he had kept down the hood of the cloak he usually hid behind. His short, dark hair had been recently trimmed into his usual austere crispness. His whole air was one of neat simplicity. His clothing was fine but simple. The fabrics were rich, but the colors were dark and subtle. All in all, he looked every inch the Voice of Mercy without the eff
ort my parents and others like them put into their appearances.

  My parents, I had started to understand only in the past few years, were more pretentious than genuine. They cared much for the gilding, without a thought for substance.

  My mother caught sight of me. Her face twisted in a rictus of disappointed disgust as she took in my simple dress, my wind-mussed hair, and my lack of wings. Why she always acted so surprised that I still had no wings when that had been my natural reality for the past four centuries, I didn’t know. It did, however, cut me to the core. Which, naturally, was the purpose.

  My mother’s expression shifted to one more benign when she realized who was walking by my side. Her sharp eyes took in every detail of the way Dallan and I walked together, our hands clasped.

  I half expected Dallan to pull away from me then and put on a more formal display. Instead, he pulled me closer and bent to whisper in my ear.

  “You are worth a million of them,” he murmured. “That they are too blind to realize it reflects badly on them. Not you.”

  With those words of encouragement, we went to lunch.

  Chapter Three

  *Present Day*

  Water dripped down the back of my neck.

  My bones ached. I was too old to sleep on a cold, damp, uneven surface and come out of it feeling fine. I was feeling every one of my four hundred years just now.

  A soft voice hissed to me and I realized that was what had awakened me from my restless sleep. I dragged myself partly up with a groan.

  “Come with us,” a voice whispered. “Quickly, though.”

  I wasn’t sure quick was a possibility with how stiff I felt. I bit back another series of moans and yelps as I dragged myself in what I hoped was the right direction for the voice. The ringing in my left ear didn’t help me know which way the voice was coming from.

  A yelp escaped me as the floor abruptly disappeared from beneath my hands and I tumbled unceremoniously forward. Fortunately, arms were there to catch me. Unfortunately, those arms just made my ribs and protesting body scream louder.

  I hissed, clenching my teeth so I wouldn’t make any other embarrassing sort of sound. I thought the person holding onto my back made the slightest sound of approval.

  “Can you walk?” The voice came from a few feet away, so not from one of the two or so people keeping me more or less upright at the moment. My hosts or captors, or whoever these people were, numbered at least three by my count.

  I slowly set my weight on my feet. My left leg hurt, but it would carry my weight. Thankfully, it didn’t appear I would need to crawl. I wasn’t sure my wrist would be able to handle anything more of that.

  I walked a few steps, with steadying hands surrounding me, then waved off my helpers. There was just enough light here that I could see the shapes of my helpers. As I hobbled along, that light grew brighter, though was never bright enough for me to see faces, just outlines.

  I wondered if that was on purpose.

  A soft voice sobbing reached my ears. I paused. “Who is that?” I asked. “What happened? Can I help?”

  A pause greeted my words.

  “She’s fine,” someone said roughly. “She needs sleep.”

  “We all do,” someone else muttered.

  “I’m sorry that you have to help me like this,” I said. “I don’t mean to intrude.”

  “Don’t you?” The second voice was unmistakably sour this time.

  “I don’t know where I am, how I got here, or why I hurt all over,” I said. “So, no, I don’t mean to intrude, and I am sorry that I am burdening you when you so obviously don’t need something more to worry about.”

  “You’re a Fairy Godmother, aren’t you?” a new voice asked.

  “A horrible one, it would seem,” I muttered. I sighed wearily. “Yes, I’m a Fairy Godmother.”

  “You don’t have wings,” the first voice pointed out.

  “I know.” Believe me, I knew. Flying would probably hurt less than walking right now. That is, if I could see. Flying blind was a terrible idea.

  “I thought fairies had wings,” that voice sounded younger than the other.

  “Fairies who earn their wings have wings,” I explained. “I never earned mine.”

  “Why?” someone asked.

  “I wish I knew. If you find out, you can tell me. I would have thought that I’d have them by now. I’m nearly four hundred and one years old and I don’t even have wings yet. It’s pathetic.” Exhaustion and pain were making me a little glib. I hoped the others in this dank hole wouldn’t mind. They didn’t even have to torture me for me to start spouting nonsense at them.

  Stoic of me.

  I blinked as we stepped into a slightly brighter room. It appeared to be a cave at first, but after a moment I realized that the enormous walls around me were all hand-made. The entire room was made of millions of blocks carved out of stone. Most of them were covered with dust, tree roots, and those strange winding plants that like underground spaces all over the Magical world. It smelled faintly of dust and mildew.

  The lower half of the room had seen some sort of attempt to clean it. Tables and chairs and other odds and ends of furniture were scattered around at apparent random. Chests and wooden boxes of various shapes and sizes finished the general air of clutter.

  A smugglers den, perhaps?

  I looked at my helpers. They were, as I had surmised earlier, all young women. The tallest stood at my right shoulder and I thought was the owner of the bitterest voice. There were five girls standing close to me, and I could make out the shapes of a couple more in the distance.

  Something niggled my memory. Not smugglers. “There’s wouldn’t be twelve of you, would there?”

  I was surprised when my question created a series of growls and displeased mutters all around.

  “Why do you ask?” the tallest girl demanded, even as one of her companions escorted me to a short stool. I lowered myself tentatively onto it. Surprisingly, it didn’t break under my weight. It wasn’t as rickety as it had appeared.

  I was grateful for the distraction that sitting offered me because I didn’t know what I could say to answer the girl’s question. As a Godmother, I wasn’t supposed to tell people who were part of a spell-work anything about Magic, Chaos, or the framework of spells that surrounded their lives.

  But they had known I was a Godmother, which suggested they already knew more than they were supposed to about the way our world worked.

  “I don’t trust her,” a girl said from behind me.

  Well, that was fair. I didn’t trust them, either. Had these girls been in any way responsible for the attack that had left me battered and abandoned in that dark hole?

  “She won’t talk to us,” the girl who had given me the stool said, handing me a bowl of something steaming hot and nice-smelling and a wooden spoon.

  “She can’t. You shouldn’t ask.” She smiled at me. “I’m Joette.”

  Joette had long hair, the color of which I couldn’t make out in the dim, tucked as it was under a kerchief. She had a strong face, made beautiful by her eyes and the fineness of her mouth. It wasn’t a pretty face. It was beautiful. Maybe handsome, even. It was strength, not sweetness, that I saw there.

  All the girls that I could see were also beautiful, in the same strong, determined sort of way. They did not look like sisters, particularly, but that wasn’t uncommon for this particular spell tradition. Magic liked its princesses to be easily distinguished from each other, even when there were twelve of them to work with. Most siblings looked somewhat like each other, but those of this sort of spell often did not.

  The girls had not responded to my question, but I was pretty sure I had stumbled into the middle of the worst of the messes Ferdie had left me. How he had managed to snarl up so much Magic and so much time in one of the simplest spell forms still confused me.

  The framework of the Twelve Dancing Princesses was simple. Twelve beautiful princesses who were locked up by their father every night wo
uld reappear every morning with their shoes danced through. This would continue until a man kind enough to receive assistance from a stranger—usually a Godparent in disguise—and clever enough to follow the girls for three nights running would inform their father where they were going. The man would then marry a princess of his choice and become the next king. It was a simple work-and-reward sort of pattern.

  “What time is it?” I asked. Perhaps I should have asked what day it was.

  “Nearly dawn,” one of the girls answered. She yawned hugely. “We will have to leave shortly.”

  “We need to hide her someplace safe,” Joette said, glancing over her shoulder at something I couldn’t see. “It’s just for a few hours, then we will return.”

  “We have to make an appearance,” the bitter one said.

  “Gillie,” another girl said, shaking her head. “It’s easier if you just let go. Don’t let the anger eat you up.”

  Gillie sighed, but she nodded. “You’re right, Caroline. I’ll try. I’m just… so tired.”

  All of the girls murmured in agreement.

  “She can rest in my room,” a shockingly male voice volunteered. “I won’t be using it.”

  “Gabriel.” One of the girls bit her lip nervously, looking at me. “Do you think you can keep her hidden. You know, in case…”

  He laughed softly, but there was little humor in it. “Who will question me? I’m supposed to be here, aren’t I? Who would ever notice?”

  “You’re a good friend,” another tall girl said. She caught my confused expression and offered me a half-smile. “I’m Amanda. I’ll make sure everyone introduces themselves to you during the day. We don’t have time now.”

  The girls filed quickly out of the dim room and I found myself being ushered into a much smaller space, hardly more than a cubby. There wasn’t even a window. It held a small cot with a blanket.