Stinking Beauty Page 2

  But it had saved me a long search.

  I decided to let things slide. Just for now.

  “Thank you,” I said politely. “I truly appreciate it.”

  I picked up the mirror, wincing at its unexpected weight, and stared at my reflection for a moment.

  “Magic mirror in my hand

  Reach across the sea and land

  Do it fast, and please do hurry,

  Let me speak to my boss, Murray.”

  Chapter Two

  An irritated face appeared in my mirror. “Really, Grace, we’ve discussed this at length. My name is not Murray.”

  I tried to shrug in a way that wasn’t completely disrespectful. Based on my superior’s expression, I was not entirely successful. “It works, doesn’t it?”

  She sighed in the manner of someone who has been long-suffering for what felt like an infinite amount of time. “My name is Muriel, Grace. Godmother Muriel, if you can remember something that long.” She shook her head. “I despair of you sometimes, child.”

  And I disliked being called a child, especially since I was middle-aged by fairy standards, but I didn’t mention it out loud, did I?

  Did I?

  Apparently, I did. Godmother Muriel did not look impressed with me. Not that that was anything new. She was rarely impressed with anything, and with me least of all. She had been a Head Godmother since my grandmother had been in diapers. She had been very put out when I avoided what she saw as my duty for two centuries.

  Not that she looked a day over thirty-three in human years. That was one of the perks of working around Magic all the time. Those that handled Magic well were practically immortal.

  Which was why I inspected my own face for crowfeet and other wrinkles every morning before my brew. I wouldn’t put it past Magic to make me look like my own great grandmother overnight. I had a few ignorable lines. At least, I chose to ignore them.

  Fairies pretty much lasted forever, as long as there was Magic around. The only ways we died were by violence, acts of Magic, being starved of Magic, poison, Cold Iron, or sheer idiocy.

  I was sure to be one of that last.

  It was not that I was stupid. No one ever suggested that, not even my family. It was that I couldn’t keep my mind on one track when there were so many interesting tracks to get distracted by. There were butterflies and squirrels and… so many, many kinds of squirrels. And flowers. And bees…

  I started, realizing that Godmother Muriel was still speaking and I hadn’t heard a word she’d said

  “So, the princess is dead,” I interrupted, sure that that would get me off the hook for spacing out yet again.

  Godmother Muriel’s face grew serious. Not that it was ever not serious, but this was not the friendly-but-serious expression she affected most of the time, this was the genuine article. She always faced calamity appropriately.

  “That is dire information,” she said, managing not to sound overly pompous. “With the news that Brunhild has been found slain, as well, I fear we are stepping into precarious times.”

  She sounded a tiny bit pompous. I was distracted by the way she managed to flash concern from her violet eyes. She had beautiful eyes, surrounded by thick eyelashes and set in a face that would make painters weep in despair at ever capturing its beauty. My fingers itched to try, even though I had sworn to give up painting.

  I blinked back to myself. Muriel was waiting for my response.

  “Is there any question that the princess is actually deceased?” she repeated. I wondered how she kept the irritation from her voice at having to repeat herself yet again, but I supposed she was used to me by now. Poor fairy.

  “Oh, she’s definitely dead,” I said quickly. “She stinks. It’s horrible, really. She must have been dead for quite a while. She must have died shortly after the spell came into effect six months ago.”

  “What’s the status of the rest of the court?” she demanded. “Have we lost the entire kingdom?” Muriel might not look her age, but she fully sounded her age at times like this when she was upset.

  I held up the mirror, so she could look around at the sleeping courtiers. “It appears that everyone else is fine.”

  “Hmmm.” She tapped her lips with her fingers. “How strange. By rights, they should have died with her… or awakened from the spell if the curse succeeded in killing the girl.”

  “How will we wake them all up with the princess dead?” I asked. “I used the standard spell wording, which means that their waking was contingent on her being kissed by a man of honor and goodness, who would never betray her or her kingdom…”

  “And she’s dead.” Godmother Muriel sighed. “I will set a team to researching the matter. Meanwhile, I will send a crew over to see what we can discover about the poor princess’s death… I suspect we will find that it was not natural and not curse related in the least.”

  I felt a little glow of relief at her words. I had expected to be immediately blamed, especially since I had such a history of screw-ups behind me, all the way through my earlier life, and continuing through my schooling and training. The first assumption should have been that I’d done the spell improperly.

  But Muriel was giving me the benefit of the doubt.

  “Thank you,” I told her.

  She smiled slightly at me. “I do not believe your spell is at fault here,” she said. “And I do not believe that Brunhild’s death is a coincidence of timing. You are still in the lead in this kingdom, so I want you to do everything within your power to get things back on track. If that is not possible, I implore you to seek out a way to awaken the kingdom without needing a live princess.” She winced.

  I did my best not to make a face at the repugnant thought.

  “Has anything like this ever happened before?” I asked hopefully.

  If there was a pattern already made up in the rituals and bindings on Magic with this type of story involved, we would all have a much easier time coaxing Magic back into its proper channels.

  “I’m afraid not,” Muriel said, her face sympathetic. “I am concerned about what this will mean for our relationship with Magic. Has anything unusual occurred in the time since the princess must have passed?”

  I thought about Magic bringing me the mirror without being asked. That, certainly, had been unusual.

  “Nothing,” I said quickly.

  “Hopefully, we will get this all settled without too many consequences. The team should be with you shortly.” Muriel held a hand up to me in parting and her image on the mirror’s surface faded away until there was not even the faintest lavender mist left.

  Moments later, someone banged on the castle doors. I hurried out of the Great Hall and down the corridor to where the large, formal doors stood. The knocking continued, echoing down the stone walls and making me want to cover my ears at the racket. The banging was much louder than I would have expected from a team of fairies.

  So, I was not surprised in the least to discover that part of the clean-up-and-discover crew was a giant.

  “We’ve heard there was a murder,” she rumbled out in her deep, bass voice. “I’m Antoinette and I will be head of the crew. Next to you, naturally.” She inclined her head slightly and nearly took the door off of its frame. She grimaced as she patted it back into place.

  She wasn’t the largest giant I had ever met, but she was what my father would have called ‘big enough’. I suspected she could hold me in her hand and carry me around like a small doll, if she so desired. It wasn’t unheard of for a giant to work on a crew like this with fairies. As a product of their size, they were more than usually intelligent and exceptionally adept with puzzles.

  Muriel had sent me her finest.

  I didn’t know if that was a sign of her support, or of her opinion of my ability to sort this mess out.

  I stepped aside and let Antoinette and the rest of the crew enter the castle. I was relieved to see that Muriel had sent a complete full crew—fifty or so strong of creatures great and small. That
would make scouring the tower and the castle for clues much easier.

  I was not pleased, however, to note that part of the crew was my distant cousin, Gloriana.

  Gloriana was every bit as grand as her name implied. She had a dark complexion, silver eyes, and masses of bronze and gold curls that rioted around her in a fashion that was both chaotic and deliberate. She was svelte and pretty and intelligent.

  And good.

  And… everything I was not.

  Unlike me, she had gone straight into the family business from school. She had been successful from her first spell and earned the adoration of our entire clan while still in diapers. She was beautiful and accomplished and charitable…

  I would have loved to resent her. And sometimes on really bad days—usually bad nights in which I couldn’t sleep because I was too busy reliving all of my horrible lifelong litany of mistakes—I managed to resent her a teeny tiny bit.

  But she was just too genuine and nice and good to really get my back into resenting her.

  She was, as everyone always said, a very lovely girl.

  Did I envy her? Well, duh! And a big point of that envy was right in front of my eyes now, swirling with delicate gold and silver filigrees of power and… well, sheer gorgeousness.

  My cousin had earned her wings centuries ago, even though we were the same age. She had medals for her flying achievements. Those wings were just as operational as they were ornate.

  She didn’t mean to flaunt them. They somehow managed to flaunt themselves. Maybe it was the shine of the gold on silver patterns, but they couldn’t help but catch the eye. Gloriana would never have done something as selfish or cruel as to flaunt her spectacular wings in the face of her poor, pathetic, flightless cousin.

  “Oh, Grace, you must have been so frightened! How are you handling the shock?” Gloriana’s voice was as pretty as she was, alto and rich and just crammed with genuine emotion.

  Forbidden Word, it was just impossible not to adore her. It was incredibly unfair for any creature such as her to exist in the same universe as awkward, wingless me.

  “I’m fine,” I told her, pushing back my less delightful and less obedient hair back from my face. It wasn’t bronze and gold and spectacular, but a rather uninspired shade between black and blue. My hair was even lined with premature silver, which was not usual for fairies. Gloriana and I were the same age, but I looked at least a century older than she did. “It’s not a pretty sight, though. She must have been dead for a long time. Possibly since right after my last visit.”

  Gloriana looked distressed. She patted my arm gently. “Are you up for seeing it again? I can fly you up there, so you don’t have to face those stairs again.”

  I groaned in relief. Gloriana was always so considerate of my wingless state. “You can’t imagine how happy that makes me. My legs were planning a picket line.”

  She snorted softly, wrinkling her adorable nose. Mine wasn’t adorable and it came equipped with a full contingent of freckles. “I don’t blame them. I wish Magic didn’t have an unhealthy obsession with winding staircases.”

  “That’s what I said!” I grinned at her. “I’m glad you’re here. Honestly. Not that I want you to have nightmares for the next… eternity about this, but it’s nice to have a friendly face.”

  “About that…” She winced.

  “Oh, no,” I whispered. “Don’t tell me. Don’t say that…”

  She nodded sympathetically.

  “Well, what have you messed up this time?” A very unwelcome voice called from the castle doors.

  I turned to greet my beloved uncle. Well, he was my uncle, but not in the slightest bit beloved. Not by me, anyway. Everyone else he knew considered him beloved, just not me.

  “Hello, Ferdie,” I said crossly, not bothering to pretend to be happy to see him. We all knew that that was a lie. I might be a fairy, but that didn’t make me adept at lying. Ferdinand had been torturing me since I was just learning to walk, and he was just learning how to torture innocents.

  If I could pin some of this murder on mayhem on him, it would make my century. At least. It might even make my millennia.

  Too bad he was so squeaky clean. At least, officially. Even when we were young, he had managed to avoid doing anything that might mar his reputation where anyone might be able to see him.

  Anyone except pathetic little Grace. No one was going to take her word for anything when it came to the golden boy.

  Unofficially, he was the Big Bad Wolf wearing spangles and brilliant white wings. With feathers, not the usual for fairies. He looked like an angel, but I was way past being fooled.

  He fed off of my misery. I was sure he enjoyed making other people miserable as well, but I seemed to be his target of choice. Perhaps it was simply that I had always been an easy target.

  My family, other than Gloriana, turned a blind eye to his ‘antics’. When they were forced to face the things he did they did so by choosing to tell me to learn to take a joke, or that he was just playing with me. I shouldn’t take things so seriously.

  I did not lack a sense of humor.

  There had to be tainted blood somewhere in the family tree, because he was diabolical. Maybe Grandma Gwen stepped out with a demon of some sort to spawn him. Maybe those feathers of his were a sign of otherness in his genetics.

  In likelihood, though, he was just a mean fairy.

  I didn’t like him much.

  “Surprise, surprise,” he said in his melodic voice, loud enough for everyone to hear his every word. “If ever there is a problem of any sort, my darling niece is guaranteed to be neck-deep in it.”

  Gloriana scoffed. “What? Are you suggesting that she is responsible for this? Are you blaming Grace for murder now?”

  Ferdie looked me up and down slowly and scornfully.

  “Perhaps,” he said, a wicked glint of delight lighting up his eyes. “Shouldn’t we at least consider it?”

  Chapter Three

  Antoinette cleared her throat. The sound echoed through the hallway and made all of us smaller creatures wince at the noise. “I’ll just be in the Throne Room if you need me.”

  Ferdie flashed his lady-killer smile. “I will join you in just a moment. I’m just checking in with my niece.”

  “I don’t know why there so many Reynolds here at one time,” someone in the crew muttered.

  “It’s called nepotism,” I called in his direction, not even bothering to modulate my voice. “It grows on trees—family trees, that is.”

  Someone snorted with laughter, but it wasn’t Ferdie.

  He glared at me as if I had just called his bald, winged-cat a ‘cute kitty’. It wasn’t my fault that Winifred liked me more than she liked her so-called master. He was sure we were conspiring with each other against him.

  I would never tell.

  But we totally were.

  It was one of the benefits of being able to speak to some animals. Like most of my Magic, it wasn’t a dependable ability. I could speak to any animal I wished, but they only responded if they wanted. Which made them different from most people, who talked and talked and talked, especially when no one wanted them to talk. The less someone wanted to speak, I’d noticed, the more they seem to be compelled into endless dialogue.

  I, personally, babbled inanely at any given occasion. Unwanted attention? Let me recite a series of unimportant trivia.

  “Won’t you be quiet for an instant?” Ferdie hissed at me. “The embarrassment the rest of this family must endure for your sake… it is unbearable.”

  “I feel the same way about you,” I said, brightly, as if he had paid me the sweetest compliment. I smiled sweetly at Gloriana. “Do you know, sometimes I fantasize about plucking out each of those ridiculous, twisted feathers of his?”

  “I’m a frizzle fairy,” Ferdie scoffed.

  “Fairies don’t have feathers,” I scoffed back at him, imitating the way he tossed his head back in disgust. “You’re a cherub with weird feathers, not a fairy at al
l. Frizzles are a type of chicken, by the way. They’re not a type of fairy, no matter how many times you try to force everyone into agreeing with you. You are now the first fairy to ever tell a lie.”

  Ferdie shot me a look that would have killed most fairies, but bounced off of me because I really didn’t care a Forbidden Word about his opinion.

  Gloriana, possibly detecting just how close I was to expressing my lack of caring, touched my arm. “Come show me the tower,” she suggested.

  “Oh, yes,” Ferdie crowed smugly. “Take her away. It’s good of you to support those pathetic poor creatures who can’t fly.”

  I noticed a few of the crew—most of them made up of goblins and brownies and other non-flying types—shoot disgusted glances in his direction. He rarely attempted to charm those he considered as lesser than him, so they were inclined to share my opinions about his character.

  Or rather, his lack of one.

  Before I could mouth off some final remarks, my distant cousin grasped me firmly around the waist and lifted both of us into the air.

  I didn’t have many opportunities to fly, so I always tried to make the most of every chance I had to spend time in the air. I tried to revel in the way the wind flowed past my skin and the way the air even tasted different. It was the strangest thing to find myself passionate about, considering how terrified of heights I was. Somehow, flying never made me feel the kind of terror I felt any other time I was more than a foot about the solid ground. I couldn’t climb on a chair to reach for something on the top shelf without feeling wobbly and dizzy, but I never felt a moment’s trepidation when flying.

  Gloriana’s gorgeous wings flickered around us as she easily carried us both through the castle doors, which were still standing wide open to allow the crew to move about freely, and towards the highest tower, where Stinking Beauty lay.