That door stood open on what had been a garden, and now looked like a tangle of wicked thorns as long as a man's arm. As she looked for magic, they all glowed; they had been magically grown, then.
Oh no...Thorns? Tower? He was using The Tradition, too! The thorns that guarded the Beauty Asleep! No wonder he kept her sleeping most of the time! No wonder the Huntsman had laughed about awaking her with a kiss!
Everything but the table in the kitchen was gone, replaced by new fittings and utensils. The Huntsman carried her up a new set of stairs built along the outside wall in what had been that storage room to a second and much more luxurious room. The original cottage was now the base of a fortified tower.
In the center of the room on the second floor was a chair, covered, rather ominously, with engraved signs. The Huntsman put her in that chair — of course she still couldn't move, but as soon as she got over the shock of recognition, she began trying to see the bonds of the magic that held her. As she began to make them out, she saw that they were like heavy shackles, one on each arm, one on each wrist, made of braided bands of power. Experimentally, she tugged a little on one of the ends.
It loosened.
Yes! She could do this —
Then heavy footfalls above warned that someone was coming down. Her chair faced the staircase that slanted down the outer wall, and she knew it was Desmond from the moment she saw the too-shiny boots.
The genial manner was gone, replaced by a complete lack of expression. She had seen statues with more animation. By now, she had managed to ease herself free a little, and he didn't seem to have noticed, so she kept quiet and acted as if she was still paralyzed.
Meanwhile, he went to work.
He began to chant.
And within moments she knew this was going to be a real fight, for her mind, for her very self.
But in the same moment she realized that, she also felt some thing else. The necklace of unicorn hair lying around her neck began to warm.
Neither the Huntsman nor Desmond had taken it from her; for whatever reason, they hadn't noticed it. They probably assumed it was from a dead unicorn, not a live one, and couldn't do anything to help her — and of course, once she was bespelled, Desmond could have it merely by asking her for it. Strictly speaking, it couldn't help her, she supposed. But the bands of power that were snaking around her, trying to bind her, pulsed with a faint sensation of evil, and the necklace would not allow them to actually touch her.
She didn't know how long that would last...but the fact it was happening at all gave her the breathing space she needed. I can study how these things are weaving, so I can unweave them, she thought with a spark of anger-fueled energy. But she remembered what Siegfried had taught her about anger, and using it, and not being used by it. She throttled that anger down, letting it become the force behind her concentration, rather than letting it destroy her concentration.
Siegfried had taught her so many things — not just how to defend herself, but how not to be helpless. How to keep still and see a way out of what looked hopeless. He had shown her that, even if The Tradition was trying to steer your fate, you could push right back at it and change it.
She wasn't going to let The Tradition rule her, and she certainly wasn't going to let some arrogant Prince who fancied himself a great sorcerer do so. The very fact that he was depending on exact ritual meant he wasn't nearly as good as he thought he was.
So Desmond thought she was just some helpless little idiot, did he? Unable to stand up against his magic, and unable to help herself. He was going to find out exactly how wrong he was.
Chapter 19
Siegfried woke from a dream of sharpstone guarding the border, a dream that he knew in an instant was the key to his winning Rosa's hand. Dragons! He thought with elation. Not all dragons are bad, but they all need a lot of feeding and safe lairs ....
But the dream was driven out of his mind by the agony that woke him, screaming, with twenty kitten claws impaling his left foot with red-hot needles of pain.
So much pain that for a crucial moment he was paralyzed. Then his reflexes kicked in — and so did he. The bedclothes went flying.
Fortunately the kitten had better reflexes than he did, and leapt off his foot and out of harm's way before his reflexes made him do something regrettable to it.
He sat up, eyes bulging, staring at the demon-in-fluff that had lacerated his foot. He tried to get words out, and failed utterly.
"BigMan, BigMan, Big Man!" the kitten mewed, bouncing like a demented ball of wool "Mama says get BigMan! Mama says BadMans take Lady!" It repeated this in a high-pitched cat-yowl that cut right through his bewildered brain.
By this point, the bird, awakened by the screaming, was flying blindly around the darkened room, screaming "Cat! Doom! Cat! Doom! Cat!"
Siegfried hit the side of his head to clear it, but it was several moments before he managed to fumble a match onto a candlewick — by which time the bird had flown into a wall and knocked itself silly and had to be rescued from the kitten. It was longer before Siegfried could get any sense out of the kitten.
But once he did, he was into clothing and tearing down the hallway to the Royal Chambers as fast as he could go. Of course, the guards there wouldn't let him in, but he was shouting so loudly before they grabbed his arms to drag him away that he made more than enough noise to wake Godmother Lily, who came to the door of her rooms herself. More to the point, he made more than enough noise to wake Rosa's maids, who discovered that she was gone about the time that Siegfried was insisting to Lily that she was in danger, which prompted more shrieking and shouting. Siegfried was at his wits' end by that point, trying to getsomeone to listen to what he had to say about the kitten —
Lily quelled it all by dropping her disguise of Queen Sable with a probably unnecessary thunderclap.
When the stunned crowd fell silent, she began issuing orders. She pointed to the guards who had been at her door. "You guards — check on the remaining Princes.Now. Find out who is missing." She pointed to the ones that had come running at the fuss. "You guards — see if the Huntsman is gone." She turned to the maids. "You get back in those rooms, and if you can't calm yourselves, at least keep your hystericsin there. " And then to Siegfried. "Where is the mother cat?"
It was the kitten, clinging to the shoulder opposite the one that the wary bird claimed, that replied. "Mama outside! Mama see BadMans!"
"Put him down," she ordered Siegfried, who was perfectly happy to pry those twenty little needles out of his shoulder and put the kitten on the floor. "Take me to your mama," she ordered the kitten, who scampered off. "Find Leopold!" she called to Siegfried as she followed.
Siegfried ran back the way he had come, and burst in the door of Leopold's suite — for now that there were so few candidates, they all had their own suites again. Leopold was groggily clambering into his clothing, having been awakened once by Siegfried's screaming and again by the guards checking on the Princes.
"What in hell is going on?" Leopold demanded, blearily, looking haggard and a bit the worse for wear.
"The Princess is missing, an animal came to tell me someone had taken her, the Godmother is — "