Stinking Beauty

  Stinking Beauty

  A Middle-Age Fairy Godmother Story

  Elizabeth A Reeves

  Book Title Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth A Reeves. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover designed by Elizabeth A Reeves

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Dedication:

  To Jade. You couldn’t read, but you’re a part of my story. You are unforgettable. I hope you are knocking things off of the table in Heaven.

  If we shadows have offended,

  Think but this, and all is mended,

  That you have but slumber'd here

  While these visions did appear.

  And this weak and idle theme,

  No more yielding but a dream,

  Gentles, do not reprehend:

  if you pardon, we will mend:

  And, as I am an honest Puck,

  If we have unearned luck

  Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,

  We will make amends ere long;

  Else the Puck a liar call;

  So, good night unto you all.

  Give me your hands, if we be friends,

  And Robin shall restore amends.

  William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Chapter One

  The witch was dead.

  But, so was the princess, which meant that we were facing nothing short of a catastrophe.

  It wasn’t for a lack of princesses. The royal family had six other daughters—seven being the usual number for princesses in this sort of kingdom. But, Princess Talia Aurora Briar-Rose Soleil Luna Cuthbert Veronica Felicity Eunice Adele Bronwyn Ruth Carolina of the Kingdom Gilterra was dead—not still sleeping as I had at first hoped, but well and truly dead.

  I said one of the Hundred Forbidden Words for Fairy Godmothers.

  Thankfully, there was no one about to hear it. That would have resulted in a severe dressing-down by my supervisor and a lengthy explanation for why such words were forbidden in the first place. Luckily, no one was there to hear it.

  They were still all asleep. Or potentially dead. I hadn’t checked yet. There was a chance that the entire kingdom had managed to die under my watch.

  Which meant that my problems were snowballing in front of my eyes.

  I slapped my wand against the palm of my hand hard enough to make it sting. How had this happened? And why had it transpired under my watch? The tradition spell had followed the prescribed ritual in every particular. Seven good fairies had all appeared at the Christening of baby Princess Talia, with their invitations in hand, as expected.

  The elderly Fairy Brunhild, assumed deceased of old age by the entire kingdom of Gilterra, had also arrived in good time, sans invitation, and been turned away at the gate.

  Exactly as planned.

  As it had unfolded a thousand times before, after all the invited fairies had bestowed generous and somewhat useful gifts upon the infant, the angry and ignored aged fairy had cursed the young princess to die under a terrible curse.

  At which point I, under the gaze of my overly cautious mentor, had stepped in with one last fairy Gift, to turn the Death curse into a century-long sleep.

  It had all gone to plan.

  Or had it?

  Learning Brunhild was dead had been shocking enough. Despite being called a witch at times, and gossip to the contrary, there were no evil Fairies at large in the world. At least, any more than there are truly evil humans or other creatures. Fairies, like anyone else, had good days and bad days. As they got older, certainly, the bad days could outnumber the good…

  So, finding Brunhild had been found dead in the woods somewhere had not been grounds for celebration as the average person would have expected.

  Despite her age, she’d always been in the best of health and only looked one of her several centuries in age. I should have been in her castle, this very moment, helping to sort out what had happened to her, but instead, I had decided to make a little detour and check on my Sleeping Beauty.

  Who was more of a Stinking Beauty at this stage of things.

  “Oh, Great Jiminy!” I whispered, wringing my hands and trying not to breathe through my nose. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  I tried to remember if this castle happened to have a Magic Mirror. That would certainly help expedite things. I needed to contact my superiors at once, and inform them of this disaster. As usual, I had misplaced my personal hand-held mirror. Knowing my luck, it was sitting on the table at home still, charged up with Magic, and ready to be used. My talent for losing useful items regularly was not a strength I wished to nurture.

  Not that anything within this mess reflected well on me. I was the Fairy who had countered the curse, or was supposed to have countered it. I was responsible for whatever had happened.

  But, what could have gone wrong? I had felt the magic settle in, the way it was supposed to. I knew it had worked properly. There was always a sort of rightness in the air when magic went well.

  I had felt that. I would have sworn so.

  At least, until I came face to face with the rotting form of what once had been the Great Beauty.

  I shuddered. Certainly, nothing was appealing about her now. Even a necromancer would have found her too far gone for their grisly projects.

  There was one piece of business I needed to take care of, even before I contacted the Godmothers.

  I gulped and turned my feet towards the stairs—Sleeping Princesses were always kept in the highest towers. It was just how things were done. This wouldn’t have been much of a problem if I had earned my wings, but I was stuck with my own two feet on this one.

  I needed to make sure the rest of my spell—that the princess’s people, family, courtiers, and all, should sleep for as long as she did—was intact.

  I sincerely hoped I wasn’t going to come across any more surprises. Or corpses.

  Or surprise corpses.

  Those were the worst kinds of surprises.

  Now that I’d thought of it, I couldn’t shake the image of a castle full of dead surprises just waiting for me to discover them.

  If that were the case, I should have been able to smell them. But I could ignore pretty much anything when my mind was on something else. It was possible that I could have missed even something as extreme as a castle full of rotting corpses.

  I swallowed hard. There was no room in the Fairy Corps for squeamishness. If I wanted to be a true Godmother, I was going to have to face much worse than a castle full of rotting bodies.

  Probably.

  I hadn’t noticed anyone in particular in my journey up to the tower. That was sadly a common trait with me. I often didn’t take notice of my surroundings. I’d been
trying to break the habit, in hopes of eventually earning my wings. No one needed a distracted flyer in the air.

  I chewed on my bottom lip as I hurried down the endless stairs. Or rather, huffed my middle-aged out of shape body down the stairs. For whatever reason, Magic always insisted on the need for endless stairs at the end of any quest. I, personally, worried that being faced with that many steps after completing a harrowing quest would lead to a prince tossing his royal crown to the ground and stomping it to smithereens before saying something to the tone of, “forget this,” probably using one of the Hundred Forbidden Words, and returning home to a less complicated and much more likely to be happy relationship.

  Which would lead to people like me out of a job, and lead to terrible repercussions in Magic itself…

  Good thing most princes seemed to be the hearty, physical type. Maybe endless stairs were why so many of them had rather nice backsides.

  Hey, I was a fairy. I may not be able to marry a human prince, and I somehow had never made a match of any sort, but I sure could appreciate one!

  Magic seemed determined to make all princes beautiful, so it would be difficult not to notice. They all seemed to have great hair, or fantastic bald heads in some cases, strong faces, and unrealistic musculature. They were the sort to draw and keep attention.

  That is until they turned into Kings and Magic stopped caring about their appearances.

  Unfortunately, Magic was fickle and didn’t care so much for things like, oh, the handsome prince not being a psychopath and knowing how to read big words like ‘cow’ and ‘horse’.

  Which is why Fairy Godmothers like me existed. We were the ones that kept the chaotic forces of Magic from destroying the world entirely. We did that by way of complex rituals and spells which tamed Magic into almost manageable controls. It was like fitting a wild horse with a good bit and saddle. It was still a wild horse, but a good rider could stay on top of it. Only, a wild horse wouldn’t try to eat its rider if they fell off.

  Magic would.

  I was not exactly a good rider.

  Not yet.

  It was true that I was a new rider for my age. Being a Fairy Godmother and following the family path to glory had never been my intention. I had made a bargain with my parents, as a young fairy, that I could have two centuries, the amount of time most fairies used to plan and raise a family, to prove myself in any other career, and then, if I failed I would return to the family business. They said ‘when’ I failed. I was the one that modified that to an ‘if’.

  There weren’t that many good jobs for fairies. I could be a smith, if I had the odd and rare fairy without the crippling allergy to Cold Iron. Sadly, I was extremely sensitive to the stuff. One horseshoe nail could land me in bed for a month with aches and pains. I could have been a cobbler, if I had had that kind of creative magic, though that was usually reserved for Good Folk like brownies. I could have served in one of the Great Courts or Fae houses. There were those who handled magical creatures or magical beings. There were those who repaired rifts in the worlds and made sure things didn’t leak in or out…

  I had tried my hand at creating art in the form of tapestries and statues and painting and even pastries, but I had never found an amount of success that would be acceptable to my clan.

  The best job available for a fairy, the one that held the most distinguishment, was that of a Fairy Godparent. We were the ones that performed the rituals and traditions and spells that kept Magic appeased and manageable. We were the ones that kept Magic from ripping our world back into the stream of Chaos it had formed from. Magic thrived in Chaos, those of us creatures born of Magic, did not.

  Fairy Godmothers, I had been told all my life, were heroes. The kind that had Forbidden Words emphasizing just how heroic they were in common conversation. They were looked up to and admired by everyone, even royalty. Other than the Highest Court, Godparents were the most powerful creatures in all the lands.

  And I was pretty much the biggest screwup of them all.

  I was new to the game, certainly, but not new enough to explain just how bad I was at Godparenting.

  Even for a fairy, I was blunt and honest. By nature, we fairies and other Fae creatures are unable to lie, which would be a good thing if we weren’t so good at deceiving with the truth. Like our world, we had been formed from Magic and chaos, so it was in our nature to be chaotic. Fairy Godmothers had to learn to control that internal need to feed Chaos, and instead organize and calm and soothe.

  It took a special kind of fairy to be a Godmother.

  As it happened, my entire family was made up of that kind of fairy. Way back in my genealogy, centuries of my ancestors had fought and shaped and manipulated Magic. We were descended from the very first Godmother, the fairy who had figured out how to tame Chaos and shape it into the form we recognized as Magic.

  Expectations, therefore, might have been slightly elevated when it came to me.

  And I had thrown all those expectations in the faces of my family and run off for two centuries to paint murals and bake three-tier cakes.

  I huffed as I ran down yet another flight of stairs.

  To say that my family was disappointed that I hadn’t earned my wings yet was a dire and unforgivable understatement. I should have been able to earn my wings in any of my other careers, if I had been truly successful.

  Unfortunately, or perhaps, fortunately, my family had as a whole decided to put that all that lack of success down to anti-nepotists and jealousy against our family’s successes and not my utter lack of talent or skill.

  One day they would realize the truth, but I was going to make Forbidden Word sure that that day wasn’t today.

  I jumped off the last stair onto flat ground and was torn between shouting and pumping my arms in triumph or falling on my face and kissing the stones beneath my exhausted and aching feet. Why had anyone ever decided that stairs like that were a good idea?

  Oh. Right. I’d forgotten. The stairs were designed that way to keep princesses safe from anyone who wasn’t an obsessed, single-minded prince or someone who could fly.

  Like Fairy Godmothers were supposed to do.

  I was a great swimmer. I would have fared better if the caste had been underwater. I had spent several decades working with merfolk and making waterproof art.

  Maybe I’d ask for a transfer to an underwater kingdom next case.

  Hoping that there would be a next case.

  Hopefully, I wouldn’t get terminated on my very first solo case.

  I settled for not doing a victory dance and also not collapsing on the floor. Instead, I crossed to the doors of the Great Hall and threw them open dramatically. In case I had an audience, of course. Godparents school suggested that Godparents always be dramatic, so as to impress the puny humans we were forced to mingle with, even though we were a far superior species.

  Considering I had been trounced by humans in all my careers of choice, I did not share the general opinion of fairies when it came to humans and their innate inferiority as a species.

  There, like a piece of art, the courtiers sat around. They were collapsed like brilliant and delicate flowers, with heavy skirts of velvets and silks pooled around man and woman alike. This kingdom was known for its opulence and decadent fashion for all sexes. The King and Queen sat on their thrones, with the princesses arrayed around them on smaller thrones like glittering pieces of sculpture.

  I sniffed experimentally.

  It didn’t smell too bad, actually. A little musty and dusty, but nothing to suggest the amount of rot and decay I had faced up in that tower.

  I tapped my wand on my hand and circled the tip in the air. “Magic, pay attention, please,” I said politely.

  “A little dust is fine on occasion

  But please clear up this room

  Without hesitation

  And brighten up this gloom.”

  It wasn’t an official Godparent spell or even any form of an approved spell, but one that I had come up with
on my own. I found it useful, as long as no one knew I was practicing unregistered Magic.

  Immediately, blinding light filled the room from every window and the chandelier above. I cringed and covered my eyes, wincing as the light pierced even my hands.

  “Seriously?” I demanded. “Tone it down a little, will you?”

  I felt the Magic swirl grumpily around me, but the light toned down enough that I was able to move my hands from my eyes and looked around.

  “Now, that’s much better,” I said, taking in the sparkling floor and the way the queen’s crown glistened as if it were newly made and not centuries old. “Well done, Magic!”

  I thought the Magic felt a little smug, but I decided to let that go. It was always easier to get my job done when Magic was pleased with itself.

  I figured it would be a severe breach in etiquette to check for vital signs on anyone before the king, so I crossed the floor quickly and ran up the stairs of the dais to the grand throne. My calves whimpered in protest. They had had enough with this steady diet of stairs and were looking forward to something a little more palatable, like sleeping for a few weeks.

  If only I had wings.

  I delicately reached out, just in case the King was as dead and disgusting as the princess upstairs, or playing a prank on me and waiting to jump out at me or something, but his skin was appropriately warm and supple when I felt for his pulse on his neck.

  He was alive. And still under the Sleeping Spell. I could feel it tingling under my fingers, my own signature flowing through the spell.

  I put my hands on my hips.

  “Well, this is a conundrum,” I said. “I’m going to need a mirror.”

  Magic swirled around me and something clinked at my feet. A beautiful and ornate hand-mirror settled to the stone floor and glinted up at me.

  I hesitated. Magic was not supposed to do anything it wasn’t directly instructed to do. I hadn’t spoken a spell or activated my wand in any way. The Magic should definitely have not responded to me talking to myself and taken it as instructions. If any of my colleagues saw something like this, there’d be too many unanswerable questions. If any of my family had seen this, there would have been an unnecessary number of lectures on how I was a failure and a disappointment. Magic acting in any way out of the ordinary was not a good sign.