It was two weeks later that Arthur Crumm returned home from work, a bag of groceries in his arms, and found the seven Sugar Plum Fairies perched on various pieces of furniture in his living room.
Bluebell was wearing sunglasses and a set of gold chains. Indigo was smoking a cigar that was at least as long as he was. Silverthorne had a small diamond tiepin pierced through his left ear. St. Looie Blues had traded in his saxophone for a tiny music synthesizer. The others also displayed telltale signs of their recent excursion to the West Coast.
“How the hell did you get in here?” said Arthur.
“United Parcel got us to the front door,” answered Royal Blue. “We took care. of the rest. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I suppose not,” said Arthur, setting down his bag. “You’re looking … ah … well.”
“We’re doing well,” said Royal Blue. “And we owe it all to you, Arthur.”
“So you really managed to stop distribution of Fantasia?”
“Oh, that,” said Bluebell with a contemptuous shrug. “We found out that we were meant for better things.”
“Oh? I thought your goal was to destroy every last print of the film.”
“That was before we learned to work their computer,” answered Bluebell. “Arthur, do you know how much money that film makes year in and year out?”
“Lots,” guessed Arthur.
“‘Lots’ is an understatement,” said Royal Blue. “The damned thing’s a gold mine, Arthur—and there’s a new generation of moviegoers every couple of years.”
“Okay, so you didn’t destroy the prints,” said Arthur. “What did you do?”
“We bought a controlling interest in Disney!” said Bluebell proudly.
“You did what?”
“Disney,” repeated Bluebell. “We own it now. We’re going to be manufacturing Sugar Plum Fairy dolls, Sugar Plum Fairy T-shirts, Sugar Plum Fairy breakfast cereals …”
“Carnage and pillage are all very well in their place,” explained Purpletone. “But marketing, Arthur—that’s where the real power lies!”
“How did you manage to afford it?” asked Arthur curiously.
“We’re not very good at dimensional quadrature,” explained Royal Blue, “but we found that we have a real knack for computers. We simply manipulated the stock market—buying the New York City Ballet and all the rights to Balanchine’s notes in the process—and when we had enough money, we sold Xerox short, took a straddle on Polaroid, and bought Disney on margin.” He looked incredibly pleased with himself. “Nothing to it.”
“And what about Tchaikovsky?”
“We can’t stop people from listening,” replied Bluebell, “but we now own a piece of every major recording company in America, England, and the Soviet Union. We’ll have the distribution channels tied up in another three weeks’ time.” He paused. “Computers are fun!”
“So are you going back to Sugar Plum Fairyland now?” asked Arthur.
“Certainly not!” said Royal Blue. “Anyone can be a Sugar Plum Fairy. It takes a certain innate skill and nobility to be a successful corporate raider, to properly interpret price-earnings ratios and find hidden assets, to strike at just the proper moment and bring your enemy to his financial knees.”
“I suppose it does.”
“Especially when you’re handicapped the way we are,” continued Royal Blue. “We can’t very well address corporate meetings, we can’t use a telephone that’s more than twenty inches above the floor, we can only travel in UPS packages …”
“We don’t even have a mailing address,” added Purpletone.
“The biggest problem, though,” said Bluebell, “is that none of us has a social security number or a taxpayer I.D. That means that the Internal Revenue Service will try to impound all our assets at the end of the fiscal” year.
“To say nothing of what the SEC will do,” put in Silverthorne mournfully.
“You don’t say,” mused Arthur.
“We do say,” replied Bluebell. “In fact, we just did.”
“Then perhaps you’ll be amenable to a suggestion …”
Three days later Arthur Crumm & Associates bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and they added a seat on the AmEx within a month.
To this day nobody knows very much about them, except that they’re a small, closely-held investment company, they turn a truly remarkable annual profit, and they recently expanded into Sugar Plum Fairy theme parks and motion picture production. In fact, it’s rumored that they’ve signed Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Madonna to star in Fantasia II.
Winter’s King
Jane Yolen
He was not born a king but the child of wandering players, slipping out ice-blue in the deepest part of winter, when the wind howled outside the little green caravan. The midwife pronounced him dead, her voice smoothly hiding her satisfaction. She had not wanted to be called to a birth on such a night.
But the father, who sang for pennies and smiles from strangers, grabbed the child from her and plunged him into a basin of lukewarm water, all the while singing a strange, fierce song in a tongue he did not really know.
Slowly the child turned pink in the water, as if breath were lent him by both the water and the song. He coughed once, and spit up a bit of rosy blood, then wailed a note that was a minor third higher than his father’s last surprised tone.
Without taking time to swaddle the child, the father laid him dripping wet and kicking next to his wife on the caravan bed. As she lifted the babe to her breast, the woman smiled at her husband, a look that included both the man and the child but cut the midwife cold.
The old woman muttered something that was part curse, part fear, then more loudly said, “No good will come of this dead cold child. He shall thrive in winter but never in the warm and he shall think little of this world. I have heard of such before. They are called Winter’s Kin.”
The mother sat up in bed, careful not to disturb the child at her side. “Then he shall be a Winter King, more than any of his kin or kind,” she said. “But worry not, old woman, you shall be paid for the live child as well as the dead.” She nodded to her husband who paid the midwife twice over from his meager pocket, six copper coins.
The midwife made the sign of horns over the money, but still she kept it and, wrapping her cloak tightly around her stout body and a scarf around her head, she walked out into the storm. Not twenty steps from the caravan, the wind tore the cloak from her and pulled tight the scarf about her neck. An icy branch broke from a tree and smashed in the side of her head. In the morning when she was found, she was frozen solid. The money she had clutched in her hand was gone.
The player was hanged for the murder and his wife left to mourn even as she nursed the child. Then she married quickly, for the shelter and the food. Her new man never liked the winter babe.
“He is a cold one,” the husband said. “He hears voices in the wind,” though it was he who was cold and who, when filled with drink, heard the dark counsel of unnamed gods who told him to beat his wife and abuse her son. The woman never complained, for she feared for her child. Yet strangely the child did not seem to care. He paid more attention to the sounds of the wind than the shouts of his stepfather, lending his own voice to the cries he alone could hear, though always a minor third above.
As the midwife had prophesied, in winter he was an active child, his eyes bright and quick to laugh. But once spring came, the buds in his cheeks faded even as the ones on the boughs grew big. In the summer and well into the fall, he was animated only when his mother told him tales of Winter’s Kin, and though she made up the tales as only a player can, he knew the stories all to be true.