"I can see that a dragon would be happy to add to his hoard, and all of those things are made of gold, so that would make them attractive to him, as well." Rosa nodded and turned back to her perusal of the garden. Things were getting quite interesting down there, more so by the moment. "What I don't understand is why he would be willing to have so many cursed objects near him. I would think even a dragon would need to worry about curses."
Lily laughed as she replied. "The reason is why this entire scheme works so very well for all of us. Sharpstone won't be any more concerned about those curses than he would be about fleas. He is one of those powerful old dragons whose very presence nullifies any magic but his own. It's something a dragon acquires over time, just like increasingly tough scales, which is why the older a dragon is, the harder it becomes to kill even with a magic weapon."
Rosa turned away from the window to see that Jimson was more or less looking over Lily's shoulder at her, both of them looking, not smug, but commendably pleased with themselves. "I didn't know that!" she exclaimed. "Is that why really old, wicked dragons need blessed weapons to kill them, rather than magic?"
"Indeed." It was Jimson who replied. "And that is half the reason why he is willing to take in cursed articles. The curses are negligible to him. He is so powerful he could nullify a hundred times more than we'll send him. But as you wisely pointed out, the objects themselves are gold, and there is nothing that a dragon of his sort loves better than gold." Lily smiled. "The other half of the sum that makes him willing to work with us is that fairly soon word will spread that his hoard is full of cursed objects, and it won't be possible for anyone to tell which are cursed and which are not. Would you try stealing from that hoard under those circumstances?"
Rosa had to laugh at that. It would be a very, very foolish person who would take that sort of risk — first to have to face an old and powerful dragon, and then assume that you might be infected with not just one, but many curses. Unless you had someone along with you who could do a wholesale curse removal..."I don't think so! And anyone who would — well he'd have to be so stupid he would deserve what he got. But where did you get all those cursed objects?"
Lily smiled ruefully, and shared a glance with Jimson. "Well, that comes under the day-to-day tasks that a Godmother does without really thinking about it. Things with curses on them turn up all the time, and when I find out about them, I generally take them away from the owner, because my control of Traditional magic is powerful enough to allow me to do that. Most magicians just can't command that kind of force — it's relatively easy to take a curse off an object before the curse has infected anyone, but it's a lot harder to negate the magic that binds the object and the curse to a person. Because we Godmothers routinely put these sorts of minor curses on people that need a lesson, Traditionally it's easier for us to bind and unbind curses and cursed objects."
Rosa nodded. "Witches would be good at setting them and taking them off, too?" she hazarded.
Lily gave her an approving glance. "Better at setting than taking them off, but yes. It's The Tradition, again. Wizards and sorcerers of all sorts are very poor at it, followed by sorceresses. Those with the most success are witches, and if you really want to make things skewed in your favor, it's best to make the witch look as ancient, gnarled and warty as possible."
"That's rather hard on pretty witches." Rosa giggled.
"I must admit, I'm glad that particular part of The Tradition doesn't apply to Godmothers." Lily smoothed the hair back from the side of her ageless face with an unconscious gesture. "When I get these things away from people, I can store them in a place that's shielded, where they can't hurt anyone. Sometimes they're useful to have around in case I need to teach someone a lesson, but mostly they gather dust in safe bins in the cellar of my Castle, because I either don't know or can't tell what it was they did. I have not only the ones that I collected down there, I have the ones that my predecessors gathered, and not all of them left careful notes." She walked over to join Rosa at the window. "Frankly, I wasn't going to give the Princes a choice, but I did have a modicum of pity for the adventurers. I told them what they were going to get, and that they could decline and leave. We lost a goodly swath of them, as you might imagine."
It was easy to tell some of the curses from up here. There was one poor fellow that seemed to be cursed with clumsiness; he couldn't pick up a glass without spilling it or an object without dropping it. People were giving him a wide berth.
"What if a Prince just can't get Sharpstone to take his wretched object?" Rosa asked after a while.
"In a week or so I'll offer the ones who are still left the option to take their chances with Sharpstone or admit defeat and allow me — the Godmother version of me — to take their object and curse away and forfeit the trials." She raised an eyebrow. "I'm not entirely unfair or without pity."
They both watched the Princes below. Lily had not been trying to bluff them into hurrying their plans when she'd told them that time was fleeting. Besides the Curse of Clumsiness, several curses were already manifesting... Boils, mostly; it seemed to be a very common curse. There were faces dotted in soothing salve, and necks and hands covered in bandages. Rosa felt very, very sorry for the poor fellows, because not only were none of these curses going to go away, until they finally decided to dare the dragon, it was only going to get worse.
Leopold and Siegfried stared glumly at one another. By nightfall, their curses had manifested. Siegfried's was the most...obvious. "Well," said Siegfried. "I can say this much. It's unique. And it's not as painful as boils."
Two toads and a frog fell from his lips.
That is, they appeared to fall from his lips; they actually manifested two inches away from his mouth and fell. He caught them expertly — he'd had a lot of practice by now — and tossed them in a bucket. Anytime he spoke, frogs and toads fell from his mouth. Real, live frogs and toads. He had no idea where they were coming from.
It didn't happen when he ate, breathed or yawned, only when he spoke, and the curse didn't seem to care if he shouted or whispered. The moment a word passed his lips, he got an amphibian. Sometimes more than one. He really did not want to approach the Princess with this happening. He didn't think she was the kind to squeal at a frog, but it wasn't pleasant to try to talk to someone and have slimy things raining down on your shoes.
"I'll trade you," Leopold replied glumly. His curse apparently had been bad luck — but only at gambling. This had him in deep despair, for gambling was not a trivial pursuit for him. "I don't have a father feeding me great stacks of money, Siegfried! I make my living gambling! Technically this, going after the Princess, is a gamble! If I don't get this thing off me, I won't have a chance of winning her!" Obsessively he threw a pair of dice over and over again, and each time they came up ones.
"I'm pretty certain trading doesn't work, Leo," Siegfried replied, catching the toads as they fell. "Two of the others tried it and they ended up with both curses. And their original objects returned to them anyway. I think they have this tied up pretty neatly to prevent us from doing anything but face the dragon or give up." He took the bucket to the window and turned the toads out onto the lawn, where they hopped indignantly away.