Stinking Beauty Read online

  The air was cool and crisp around us. I drew in a deep breath, savoring the cleanness of the breeze. Up here, there was no taint of human living, with the stray scents of cooked carrots and unwashed bodies. Gloriana’s scent surrounded me, washing over me from her wings. It was subtle, like sunshine and carnations. I wondered briefly if I stank after spending so long staring and a corpse and wishing it would come back to life.

  No, not like in a zombie way. More like in a, please don’t be dead, please let her just really like skunk perfume and have bad taste in facial beauty masks kind of way.

  Forbidden Word, the last thing I needed was for Stinking Beauty to become one of the walking undead. Princesses were already spoiled without being literally rotten on top of it.

  As the spell had dictated, the castle was surrounded by climbing roses sporting sword-like thorns. To any human interloper, these thorns would have been a real threat. They were razor-sharp and could even move a little, just to make them all the more lethal.

  Of course, the plants didn’t bother us, because of the way Magic worked. Any Godparents or person accompanying a Godparent would be perfectly safe from the protections that the spell placed on the castle and the princess.

  The perfume of the roses, though, was intoxicating. It filled the air as we flew higher, making me almost dizzy with the richness of their perfume. One rose we passed was nearly the size of my head. As we passed by, my eyes burned at the intensity of its perfect perfume. The rose itself made any other art meaningless with its perfection in form and function. It was so beautiful that I wanted to weep, just looking at it.

  Magic sure appreciated beautiful things.

  It was funny, Magic was supposed to be this mysterious, powerful, dangerous force, but if it was given any freedom at all, it filled the world with beauty and wonder. Even the darkest sides of Magic were exquisitely beautiful if one had the right heart to appreciate it. Dark, dripping forests of moss, in my opinion, could be just as lovely as a cheerful flower dancing in a windswept and sunny meadow.

  Gloriana popped us neatly through the large tower window that I had left open to help deal with the smell and let me go. I stumbled a few steps before I righted myself. I noticed Gloriana wasn’t even breathing heavily. Flying was easy for her. She probably hadn’t even noticed my additional weight.

  Meanwhile, I was a little breathless from being carried.

  I glanced down at myself. I probably didn’t weigh that much. I was curvy, but I was short for a fairy, so that all balanced out at some point. I still had a little extra fluff on me from my time trying to get my bakery off of the ground. My time on the stairs had warned me that I was terribly out of shape.

  Working more with Magic would, no doubt, cure me of that issue.

  Gloriana pressed a hand against her nose. “Oh, the stench,” she muttered. “Let’s open the rest of the windows.”

  I agreed and hurried to do so by hand. I could have used my wand, but I didn’t want to risk my cousin seeing my unusual, unofficial spell-work or Magic deciding to volunteer again in front of her. She was my favorite family member and I wanted to keep her on my side.

  She was a good person, which meant that she’d feel obligated to report anything unusual she saw to the proper authorities.

  And I had a hunch that wouldn’t be a happy day for me. No one, as far as I knew, suspected just how strange my relationship with Magic could be. They all knew I was a bit of a screwup, but that didn’t make them suspect that there might be more to it. It had always been that way for me, though it had certainly worsened as I grew older.

  Yet another reason to loathe the aging process. I could very nearly ignore the exclamation point lines appearing on my forehead, but I couldn’t ignore Magic. It would be very unwise of me to try.

  I was a fairy, for Forbidden Word’s sake! I was supposed to age gracefully if I was to be unfortunate enough to age at all. Fairy’s weren’t supposed to have midlife crises. Fairies weren’t supposed to notice being middle-aged.

  Forbidden Word, I was only starting to figure out that there was something more to the way Magic behaved around me than just my imagination running wild.

  Even I wouldn’t have imagined up the mirror appearing like that.

  The princess, sadly, was still dead. There wasn’t much I could do to fix that.

  I pushed open the other windows that framed the tower room and let the clean air from the outside rush in to purge the horrors from within. Somehow the clean air rushing in made the stench all the more unbearable.

  Despite my job, I wasn’t closely acquainted with death. I knew no Reapers and I had spent no time with dead bodies. Even when I had worked in the ‘bad areas’ of our world and less prosperous cities, I had never come face to face with anyone dead. At least, that had been true before this horrible Forbidden Word of a day.

  It was a little ironic that I had spent two centuries out in the world seeking my fortune only to find death when I entered the elitist word of Godparenting.

  I didn’t want to look at the horrors that lay so tragically on that bed. Death wasn’t a good look on anyone, outside of vampires, and that wasn’t at all the same kind of dead as this.

  This was the permanent, clay returns to clay sort of death.

  It made me think about mortality, and I was a fairy, despite my lack of wings. Fairies don’t like to think about mortality. It’s just so… human.

  Yes, the poor dead girl in front of us was human, but that didn’t make me look down on her, except in the sense that I was literally, physically looking down at her. I’d always loved watching humans, with their short lives full of energy and tragedy and beauty. I was new to the Fairy Godmother gig, but these were far from the first humans I had known.

  One of the reasons I had loved living out in the world was the opportunity to mingle with humans and to take part in their stories in some little way.

  But I’d never had one I’d known, one I was supposed to look after, look like this.

  Bile rose in my mouth, and not just because of the smell that I would never be able to get out of my nostrils.

  I was, I realized, furious.

  How dare someone step in a kill an innocent girl! How dare someone come in a steal away her path towards a Happily Ever After! How could someone look down on her sweet innocence and decide to take that away from her?

  I could not understand what it was about humans that made them so… murdery.

  No, that wasn’t the word… homicidal. That was it. Fairies could be Forbidden Words. And some of them tiptoed that line towards evil, but we weren’t, as a rule, the kind of creatures that were so… brutal. Humans were uniquely brutal. Perhaps it was a trait they had brought through the gashes from their original world into our world of Magic.

  Back when they’d first appeared, there had been those that wanted to chase the humans back through the holes in the ether that Magic’s chaos had created that spanned through countless worlds. They were not native to our world, so many had argued that we should send them back where they came from.

  It had been Titania, the first Godmother, who had realized that humans were uniquely capable of helping to control Magic. Perhaps it was that they came from a Magicless land. Perhaps it was because they lived such a short time.

  For whatever reason, shaping how the humans lived their lives helped keep Magic from being a force of destruction and Chaos. They were, in fact, the key to our survival as a world.

  It was Titania who had realized that involving humans in our rituals and spells made the rituals and spells so much more powerful than without the human element.

  She had not thrown those early humans to their fates, though she could have. She had been, by all legends, the most powerful fairy of all times. She could have done whatever she wanted. She could have ruled them all with her beauty and power and they would have worshipped her as a goddess.

  We know this is true because there are records. They tried to make her into a goddess.

  Instead,
she organized a council of humans and fairies and other creatures of Magic’s land, and together they came up with the structure we still followed today, the rituals and spells that kept Magic quiet and the land safe.

  In the little traffic that still passed between the human world and ours, we had discovered that these traditions of ours had been given a different name in the human world: fairytales. There they were stories. Here they were a necessary reality.

  Titania had not stopped there in her mission of peace and goodwill. She had bound all those who followed in her path, all the Fairies of her line and others who would join her, to protect and watch over the humans with their short lives.

  We became the Fairy Godmothers and Godfathers.

  And then she married a human man and disappeared from all records only fifty years later, after his death.

  Titania was still out there somewhere. Everyone except the most extreme conspiracy nuts believed that she was still watching over us, just from a distance. Most believed that she would return again if Chaos ever returned in full force to our land.

  I glanced at the rotting corpse in the bed of roses and silks and hoped that this wasn’t the beginning of that time. That the long line of traditions had been broken was not a good sign.

  Gloriana made a soft sound. I realized that she was standing above the princess and weeping softly.

  “I gave her one of her blessings,” she whispered, “when she was an infant. I gave her the gift of Kindness.”

  “From all accounts, she was very kind,” I said, giving my cousin a gentle hug. “I’d forgotten you were one of the gift-givers.”

  Gloriana smiled at me through her tears. “I volunteer as a gift-giver often,” she admitted. “I love looking at all the beautiful babies and trying to give them a gift that truly matters.” Tears filled her eyes. I knew her own lack of children gave her pain. “But what’s the point if this is how it all ends? She was so beautiful, now look at her. You would never believe she was ever a princess.”

  I sorrowfully looked down.

  I narrowed my eyes.

  I really looked at the body on the bed.

  “I don’t think this is the princess,” I said.

  Chapter Four

  “What?” everyone demanded at once.

  I clutched my wand behind my back and fought the urge to bite my lips in nervousness. I did not like being the center of attention. And, at this moment, that’s exactly where I was standing. I cleared my throat and repeated myself for what had to be the twentieth time. “I suspect that the… body in the tower is not that of the Princess Talia.”

  “Ridiculous!” someone shouted.

  “Preposterous!”

  “Inconceivable!”

  “Do you even know what that means?”

  I glanced at where Gloriana stood in the crowd and she gave me an encouraging nod. A supportive smile graced her lips. While it was nice to have her support, I felt that her optimism was currently out of place.

  Upon my discovery in the tower, we had hurried to inform the crew at the castle what I suspected. That had led to a convening of a partial council of several Godparent elders, including my boss, Muriel.

  No one was happy.

  Most of them were making their unhappiness vociferously clear.

  “She’s lying,” Ferdie interjected in his superior way. “Grace will do anything to garner attention. She’s always causing ridiculous spectacles.” He pronounced it as ‘ridicule-us’. Sadly, as he was a fairy and unable to lie, this was what he truly felt about me.

  I bit back a protest, knowing that it would do me no good. No one won an argument against Ferdie. He always got the last word.

  Always.

  “Hush now,” Muriel said. Her voice was not particularly loud, but she was respected enough in our world to gain nearly instantaneous silence.

  I wished I could learn that trick. I wasn’t sure that it would work on my family, however, and they were the ones I would have most liked to use it on.

  Too bad.

  “What makes you suspect that the corpse is not that of Princess Talia?” she asked me. Her eyes warned me not to make a mess of this.

  That did not make me feel any more comfortable.

  With my history, I was bound to make a mess of something.

  I wrung my hands and nearly stabbed myself in the nose with my wand in the process. “The corpse in the tower is in a bad state of… decomposition…”

  Everyone winced. There was no way to sanitize the situation and still say what I needed to say.

  “But, there are a few characteristics that Princess Talia had that were… well, obvious.” I licked my lips nervously. “Because she was the eldest princess, and had a Fairy Christening, she was saturated, in a sense, with Magic. This made her characteristics…”

  “She was given gifts of Beauty,” Gloriana interrupted. I knew I had to be fumbling horribly if she decided jumping in was the best solution. “One Fairy Godmother gifted her with, let’s see, hair as golden as sunshine, lips red as roses, eyes blue as a winter sky, curls that never snarled, skin that never blemished… You know, the usual.”

  “Also, they included hands that never calloused and nails that never broke and always looked perfectly manicured,” I added. “It’s very clear that the unfortunate in the tower, no matter her condition, had both calloused hands and rather badly bitten fingernails.”

  The room recoiled in disgust. I thought the reaction was overblown. Nail-biting was unattractive as a habit, to be sure, but it wasn’t like she went around chopping people’s heads off like the queens in that one country regularly did.

  I was just glad not to be their Godmother.

  I fought the urge to hide my own bitten nails. I’d been under a lot of stress lately. I was pretty sure they were a hideous mess.

  I glanced at Gloriana’s hands and wished I hadn’t. Hers, of course, were perfectly manicured. Maybe she had been blessed at birth, like the princess.

  Then, what had happened to me?

  How did Gloriana do that? I couldn’t keep three ducks in a row let alone the millions she must have trailing around in perfect order. It was disheartening to have such a perfect cousin.

  If I didn’t love her so much, I would despise her.

  Godmother Muriel cleared her throat. I realized they had been speaking without me for some time. “Based on your evidence, we must explore more deeply into the identity of the corpse in the tower. While we cannot be certain at this point, the body not being that of Princess Talia would explain why the court remains asleep. While we are investigating here, we feel it best if you go to Brunhild’s keep and see if you notice anything of note left behind by her demise.”

  In other words, I interpreted, they wanted me out of the way while they decided whether I was a complete incompetent or had any merit in my observations.

  “I was headed that way before I detoured here,” I said in agreement. “At least I can make sure that her pets are fed.”

  Almost as one, the semi-council shivered. Brunhild had had an unusual taste in pets. She’d been around long enough to get to that stage of life where one appreciates the unusual and the nearly morbid. Whispers said that Brunhild had always been a tad odd, but it was kinder to blame it on her age in public.

  I liked most animals, so her pets didn’t bother me much. Kelpies and drakes and flocks of miniature wyverns, ravens, and such didn’t make me break out in goosebumps. Someone had to explain to those poor creatures that their mistress was gone. Many of them would be fine returning to the wild, but others would need a little help in finding new homes.

  I eyed Gloriana speculatively.

  “No,” she said firmly.

  “We’ll see,” I responded airily. “I don’t suppose you would like to give me a lift to Brunhild’s Keep, would you? That is, if you are not needed here.”

  “I have a carriage,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “Just how were you planning on getting there yourself, before you took the detour her
e?”

  “I rode a winged horse,” I said, innocently. She didn’t need to know that it had dumped me and run away the second I’d given it an inch of rein. The stables knew that I would never complain, so they always gave me the most challenging mounts they had. Usually, that was fine, I would bring the mounts back in better condition and better behaved than when we left. This time, though, the winged horse had been all run and no sense. He’d been a metallic sort of gold color that was quite pretty, so I suspected they had focused on breeding for color, not brains.

  Gloriana was not fooled by my lack of answer, but she didn’t push me, either. She led the way to the coach she used for longer distances. Wings were beautiful and useful, but they still got tired over long distances.

  Gloriana’s coach was pulled by a team of twelve winged dogs, the lean, tucked-up kind that liked to run. They were tall enough that the leader would have been able to rest her chin on my shoulder. They wagged their tails and yelped eagerly as we climbed into the open carriage they pulled.

  Gloriana sketched a shape in the air, which rippled in the air in front of us and settled down against the dogs. Now that they knew where we were going, we could sit back and relax.

  I held on tight to my plush seat as the dogs bounded in place, opened their wings, and took to the sky.

  Sometimes, it seemed that everyone had wings except for me.

  “What’s with the dogs?” I asked my cousin. Thanks to Magic, we were not bombarded by forceful wind and were able to converse without shouting at one another. If I hadn’t known we were traveling through the air, I would have guessed that we were sitting peacefully in the middle of a meadow. The dogs were an addition to Gloriana’s stables. I had never seen them before this moment.

  Gloriana shrugged. “Freja has her cats, you know, and my mother has always been competitive with that line of the family. She thought it sounded smart, having the carriage pulled by giant greyhounds.”