Gothel and the Maiden Prince (A Villain's Ever After) Read online

  At any rate, it seemed unlikely that any more rocks would be thrown, unless the child had run ahead to make another ambush.

  Lucien strolled along at a decent distance from the woman, his trousers drying slowly but surely in the open sunshine of the road, and when the village drew closer, he found himself hurrying a little more than the dryness of his trousers quite warranted, unwilling to let the woman too far out of his sight.

  He should probably be grateful that she was striding ahead without looking to the left or right: if she had thrown him into a puddle without knowing he was there, he hated to think what she could or would do if she thought he was following her.

  The woman was a mere fifty yards ahead of Lucien when the scent of freshly-baked bread wafted into his nostrils, making his stomach grumble. There was very little he could do about stunning women in red other than use them as a guide to the village, but he could do something about the hunger, so when the road levelled out and he found himself strolling between the first couple of houses, Lucien left the woman in the red dress to go her way and followed his nose.

  Perhaps that abandoning of himself to fate was what led to the happy chance of his emerging from a small bakehouse some half hour later, just as the woman in red strode past again. Someone inside the bakehouse swore softly and disappeared; another likewise swore, but Lucien had an idea it was a more interested expression, for the girl who had thus spoken emerged from behind the counter and preceded him into the street, her eyes sharp and attentive.

  Brushing the crumbs from his repast onto the hardened dirt as he walked, Lucien followed the woman in the red dress once again. His motive this time was sheer curiosity: unlike earlier, when it had seemed obvious that she was on her way home, or perhaps to the village, he was quite certain the woman in red was on her way to do something. There was a kind of decision to her step that hadn’t been there before, despite the stride with which she had walked.

  This time, too, the entire village seemed to watch her progress. If she had slipped into town unnoticed earlier, she had been walking around for long enough to get the attention of nearly every villager he saw. Lucien was quite sure she had earned that attention, but he wondered exactly how.

  He was to find out.

  Lucien heard the scuttering of feet behind him as he followed the woman: others also drew near, but not too near, he noticed, when he looked covertly over his shoulder. Unnerved by the amount of attention he himself was getting, he quickly settled down on the curved wall of the village well, leaning against the well’s housing and comfortably out of sight once again. Stranger though he was, he couldn’t compete with the woman in the red dress: villagers gathered at the head of the streets that led into the square, and curtains twitched aside in windows all around.

  And the sorceress strode across the square without stopping, her course toward the ornately gardened, newly-made building ahead straight and clear. The door swung open hastily as she approached, and a mutton-chop whiskered man fairly fell into the garden and hurried to meet her in the open square rather than meet her in his garden.

  Lucien didn’t blame him. He had seen the aftermath of the woman’s power: he doubted that the trees and shrubs within reach of the earlier blast on the road had yet recovered.

  Tall, ruddy-cheeked around the mutton-chops, and square-shouldered, the man shut the gate behind himself with the half-hunted, half-conscious look of a man who is prepared to argue that he’s done nothing wrong and that it was taken out of context.

  Lucien saw the matching light that sprang to the woman’s eyes: derision, or perhaps just weary contempt.

  “You,” she said to the mutton-chopped man as she stopped in front of him, her smile bright and fierce, and as all-consuming as the sun. “You told the prince where to find me, didn’t you?”

  “Mother Gothel—I—”

  Mother Gothel? thought Lucien, his eyebrows quirking in amusement. Despite the thick streak of white at her temple, the woman couldn’t be much older than himself—if older at all—and he was just approaching his twenty-sixth birthday. Mother was a title given to powerful grandmothers and older ladies of charity.

  “I told you,” said Gothel, her deep voice hard, “what I would do next time you took money to send a prince in my direction.”

  “Mother Gothel, what can I do? They ask for directions, and I can’t refuse an order!”

  “It seems as though you certainly can’t refuse the money,” she corrected him. “Very well. I gave fair warning.”

  “Mother Gothel—wait—please!”

  Gothel didn’t hesitate: as Lucien watched, fascinated, she stepped decidedly across the square once again, magic gathering behind her in a furious whirl of power, and raked her hands through the air at shoulder level from just behind her shoulders and until they almost met. Lucien felt the ground shake beneath him—heard the screams from inside and outside the houses around him—then all of that power coalesced in Gothel’s hands and she flicked it away with a contemptuous look at the building directly in front of her.

  The earth shook once again, and the building across the square shivered, as though it, too would have screamed if it had had a voice. Then it began to lean to one side, and as it did so, people poured out of it to safety in the square, shrieking and babbling. It fell before they were all quite out: Lucien saw the last of them tumble out in a cloud of dust and rubble, coughing, as the house-front fell down on itself into the garden.

  Mutton-chops yelled in despair or rage, Lucien wasn’t quite sure which.

  It was an inn, he realised belatedly—small and with an outhouse or perhaps a cheesehouse beside it. That small outbuilding received a smart, heavy blow to the roof from one of the falling beams, and its walls promptly split and drove themselves into the dirt. Something large and dirty-white clawed at those split walls from the inside, but between the pandemonium and his superior vantage point, perhaps only Lucien saw what came wriggling out of the wreck of timbers at the back—or what was there, waiting for it. It was a raggedy old cur, long in the tooth and hoary of hair, wriggling out of the newly misshapen out-building to be received into the fierce embrace of the stone-throwing child, who took only a moment to hug it before grasping it by the scruff and making off into the next row of houses.

  Lucien, charmed, propped his back against the stone wall, wrapped his arms around one knee, and watched the scene with a renewed, delighted interest. So Gothel had known where the dog was, after all?

  He looked back toward the mutton-chopped man, who watched with an expression of mingled rage and helplessness as his inn quietly shuffled its component parts in a residual stirring of magic. As he did so, Gothel came to a stop in front of the man once again.

  “Your inn is in need of attention,” she said to the innkeeper. “Perhaps you’ll confine your attention to it in future. It would be a shame if your house required similar attention.”

  “I understand,” said the innkeeper sullenly.

  “I sincerely hope so,” Gothel said, and this time her voice was sweet and low. She raised it a little to add loudly enough for the entire square to hear in the silence that had fallen, “I don’t care to have to keep visiting the village, but it really is necessary after every prince comes to call on me.”

  “There won’t be any more trouble,” said an older, male voice from the front yard of the house by the innkeeper’s. Lucien tore his eyes away from the vibrant figure of Gothel, and found himself looking at a crabbed old man little more than waist high. “I’ll make sure of that.”

  Gothel sent a sharp look down at him, then nodded. “You’d be well-advised to make sure you can carry through with that,” she warned him.

  “The next person to sell information to a prince will find themselves in need of a new knee,” promised the man.

  “Delightful,” said Gothel, and, turning on her heel, she swept from the square and back out of the village altogether.

  Lucien felt a temptation stronger than anything he had ever felt before, t
o leave his seat on the well and follow her wherever she was going. He made himself sit still despite that: he didn’t know whether the compulsion came from her magic or the exquisite mystery of her, or perhaps just because he found her attractive on a more baseline level. Before he went following her through the woods, he felt that he would like to know which one it was.

  There were quite a few things he needed to check before he went following strange women through the forest, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t his general practise to follow women through the forest: they were rightfully inclined to see any man in such a situation as a threat, and Lucien preferred people not to think of him as a threat unless he meant to be one. Ironically, very few people actually thought of him as a threat when he was trying to be one, which was inconvenient in a completely different way.

  Once he had forced himself to sit still for a few moments longer rather than rushing off in the first heat of his instinct to follow Gothel, a way forward presented itself. He had been ignoring the fuss in the square around him—the babble and the cross voices—in favour of watching Gothel. When he drew his attention back to his nearer surroundings, the innkeeper had already received more than an earful by the looks of it; now he drew himself up against the turned shoulders and angry looks, and stumped grimly across the square toward the nearest street.

  Here was someone Lucien could follow without feeling as though he was likely to be taken for a bandit or disreputable man.

  He was also someone that Lucien thought he might be able to get some information out of. Unbiased information, perhaps not. But if he could sift through it well enough, the man might still be useful.

  He found the innkeeper some way down the street, stripping off his half-buttoned collar and sipping beer on a bench outside a white-washed ale-house. Lucien popped his head into the low doorway and ordered ale for himself, then dropped down on the bench across from the man—too far away to be encroaching, but just close enough to make it natural to fall into conversation with a stranger should the means of opening dialogue happen to appear.

  While he waited for his ale, Lucien played with small sparks on the end of his fingers, turning them gold and silver and letting them dance on the benchtop.

  “Magic user, are you?” asked the innkeeper, warily, looking across at him. “People around here don’t like that.”

  “So I noticed,” Lucien said, banishing the sparks. He leaned confidentially toward the man and added, “I can see why, if that’s the sort of thing that happens often. Was anyone hurt?”

  “No thanks to her!” the other man said bitterly. “Last time it was the dance-hall that she took down, and I’d swear at least five princes have disappeared so far, along with a good score of knights and mages. One or two of the village boys disappeared as well.”

  That was something of a shock, but Lucien tempered it by reminding himself that the source he was currently questioning was perhaps not the most unbiased. He would need to speak with a few more people before he left the village.

  The old gentleman who had appeared to assuage Gothel’s anger, for one. Perhaps one or two of the women in the marketplace who were old enough to be more fair-minded in their views.

  “It’s a wonder the governor around here hasn’t done anything about it,” Lucien said, shaking his head.

  “He tried,” the innkeeper said grimly, much to Lucien’s astonishment. “None of them could find the village, let alone the tower! Or so they say; we didn’t see hide nor hair of the governor’s men. Not a mage to be found, either!”

  Interesting! The governor mustn’t have sought the king’s help, in that case. Or had he? Was that what Father and Ned had been doing last year when they went away for a few weeks? Why hadn’t they thought to include Lucien, who might actually have been some use? They had certainly taken no mages with them.

  Unless, he thought shrewdly, Father hadn’t actually wanted to fix the problem, but just look like he was trying to solve it. It might not have been something big enough to induce him to use actual resources on it—or, it was something that he actively didn’t want solved, which was even more interesting. Father didn’t tend to tell him things he thought Lucien might not approve of—“Never liked a nagging child!” he always said, when Lucien objected to a proposed law, or alliance, or execution. “You nag too much for a man.”

  Lucien, who had never known a man—or a person, for that matter—to nag as much as his father routinely did, thought that was fairly rich. Still, it was entirely possible that he and Ned had gone off to fix the problem in their own way without seeing fit to tell Lucien anything, lest Lucien interfere in a way of which they didn’t approve. Irritating, but not surprising.

  “Aren’t you afraid that she’ll come back for you again?” he asked, genuinely curious. From his reading, the innkeeper was genuinely afraid of Gothel, though he rather thought the man was exaggerating rumours he had heard into something far worse. “For telling me all of this, I mean.”

  The innkeeper spat on the ground. “I’m leaving this place. I’ll send trouble after that spiteful cow one last time, if it’s the last thing I do! She can raze the town, as far as I’m concerned: I won’t be there.”

  “It’s your lucky day, then,” said Lucien, in a light, encouraging voice that he hoped hid the extreme dislike he had taken to the innkeeper. He didn’t intend to cause trouble for the village, but the innkeeper had no way of knowing that—he simply didn’t care what trouble visited the village he was leaving behind. “I’ve every intention of visiting that tower, and I’ve got enough of my own magic to see me safely through, I should think.”

  Not only was it his duty as prince, it was something that deeply interested him on a personal as well as professional level: how had such a powerful sorceress come to be living near one of the villages? What she was doing here, and why had the townspeople, so obviously afraid of her, been unable to secure help from the crown?

  It didn’t hurt that by doing so he would be—presumably—able to find out more about why the fascinating sorceress in red had knocked down an entire inn and, in the process of so doing, had rescued the dog of a child who had thrown rocks at her.

  Lucien would have given a great deal to know which of those had been the plan all along; if neither, he would like to know what had been the plan.

  “I’d advise you to keep away if you don’t wish to die,” said the innkeeper bitterly. “But if you’re a magic user as you say, perhaps you’ll have more of a chance than the last poor lad.”

  “He was a prince, too?”

  “Some hot country over the mountains and across the desert,” agreed the innkeeper. “Came here with all the usual information and all the usual goals. All I did was point him in the right direction—even told him it was dangerous if he didn’t have a talent for magic.”

  “I’m sorry to be so ignorant,” Lucien said pleasantly, “but what exactly is the usual information?”

  The innkeeper looked askance at him. “She keeps a girl locked up there—a princess, they say. Every now and then, a prince or a commander of an army will come looking for the princess and ask directions to the tower so that they can kill the sorceress, rescue the princess, and make a name for themselves.”

  No wonder the sorceress looked so annoyed! thought Lucien. It did happen sometimes that a baseless rumour began from the smallest mischance—or mischief rumour—and a magic user gained the reputation as someone to be bested, or overcome, and the stream of seekers never ended. No doubt each of the defeated princes and knights had skulked away through the forest rather than face the village again, having failed: it was possible that Father and Ned knew as much, and simply didn’t care to waste energy on one sorceress.

  “What does she do with all the princes that arrive?” Lucien asked. “To defend herself, I mean?”

  The innkeeper snorted. “As if that one needs to defend herself! I’ll tell you this much: not one of them returns once they’ve been to the forest!”

  Lucien tried not to smile
. “You think she kills them?”

  “Not straight away. First she plays with them—lets them ask questions, feel at home, get comfortable.”

  “I see. They came back to tell you this?”

  “Oh aye. They come back for the first day or two, then it’s all up with them. The whole forest seems to expand with a storm near the tower, then the lad is never heard from again.”

  “Terrifying,” said Lucien.

  He didn’t think for a moment that the sorceress really had a princess imprisoned in a tower in the woods: he would, however, very much like to know how such a rumour had started, and why Father and Ned had seen fit to get involved without fixing the problem for the villagers. There was only one way to find out.

  While he was asking the sorceress about that, perhaps he would be able to find out exactly what such a woman was doing hiding in the woods, and what had led to her amassing such an impressive amount of power.

  Lucien started out from the village again with a bright, sparkling feeling of anticipation. He hadn’t been able to get the old man to say more than a hello—and then a swift, disapproving goodbye when he learned the purpose of Lucien’s visit—nor had he been able to convince anyone else in the village to talk to him. Still, the puzzle of the dog-saving sorceress was now legitimately his; moreover he had a small paper bag of goods from the bakery to eat as he went along. So long as he didn’t ask about the sorceress, the villagers seemed willing enough to talk to him—and especially to sell to him.

  More delightfully, now that he knew exactly what the sorceress’ magic looked like, he should have significantly less trouble finding his way through the woods to her tower.