keep an eye out.”
“You’re on your way to Elspeth, I daresay. I just left her. That hag’s prices are absolutely criminal, but still…” Blanchefleur held up a little vial. "It'll keep the milk and roses in my hue or my money back. Care to try a drop? That shade of green is such a trying color, even for youthful years. Not to mention that wimples look so nunnish.”
Elspeth’s potions, Calantha had learned from long experience, were at their best insipid, and at their worst pernicious—rather like Blanchefleur. Declining with thanks a little strained, Calantha would have changed the subject, but Blanche beat her to it.
“You’re giving the next feast, aren’t you? I hope you’ll have suckling pig. I adore it.”
As Blanche launched into a rapturous litany of favorite dishes, Calantha inwardly bristled. It was bad enough that Blanche considered herself invited as a matter of course, but even worse that since she was single, with little more than a tower for a dwelling, she never had to endure the bother of providing food, drink, and minstrelsy for several score lords and ladies exceedingly fond of good cheer. As if that weren’t enough, Blanche gloried in the type of figure that always stayed a damsel’s no matter how much she ate, and hair that made gold seem detritus. Her blinding tresses fell in silken profusion to a waist almost impossibly slender, set off by a gown of watchet samite so perfectly fitting and obviously costly that it took one’s breath away. Although she was of fully the same years as Calantha, she was as beautiful as an angel in a missal.
“I’m thinking of bringing hennins back in style,” she was saying.
Calantha, who had been too rapt with her own thoughts to pay much attention to whatever Blanche was saying, started at the mention of that hideous headgear, and reflected that Blanchefleur would look divinely fair even with her glorious locks scraped under a cone. The thought was infuriating. "It's quite a chilly day," she all but snapped. "I fear you'll catch cold in that gown, my dear, although it is a shame to veil so faultless a bosom."
Blanchefleur glanced down with complacent admiration at her snowy decollete, which was extreme almost to indecency. "Oh, I never feel the weather; no worries.” Contemplation of her temptingly rippable bodice seemed to inspire a change of thought. “By the way, there’s a new romance going the rounds. I’m next in line to read it, and you can have it after me if you like.”
There was always a love-manuscript written by some bard or other being passed about among the Everafter ladies. The stories could be relied upon to provide lubricious and horrific thrills right up to the inevitable happy ending, and were decorated with illuminations that spared the imagination any undue effort. By the time the book reached the last lady’s hands, it could be counted upon to be dog-eared, underlined, margin-scrawled and creatively stained, with most of the illustrations missing. Blanche was suspected to be a frequent offender in that regard.
Before Calantha could refuse her friend’s offer with the observation that romances were tedious and predictable and she hoped to never read another again in her life, Blanchefleur’s cerulean orbs gazed past her and became animated for the first time since the mention of food. “Why, there’s Bors!” And dealing Calantha a perfunctory wave of farewell, she dug an exquisitely spurred heel into her palfrey’s side, sending the horse prancing away into the deep woods, exactly in the opposite direction of the dark-armored knight just coming into sight down the path.
Calantha distinctly heard the knight grumble an oath and heave a resigned sigh, waiting a minute or so to give Blanche a good start before urging his war-horse into a gallop. As he thundered past Calantha he bowed from the saddle, and his eyes met hers an instant before giving a significant upward roll.
Having no time to react to Sir Bors’ atypical show of emotion, Calantha watched him crash through the woods until he was lost to sight. It was well known, or at least generally supposed, that Bors and Blanchefleur were paramours. Both were unmarried, which was far from usual in Everafter Acres, and although Blanche often alluded to her maiden status, people noticed that she always made herself scarce during unicorn sightings.
Moodily Calantha continued her ride, and soon reached the crazy little cottage that was Elspeth’s abode. As always, smoke spiraled from the crooked chimney of the thatched roof, and rumpled chickens scratched about the open door, from which issued a mildly revolting blend of odors and the high faint whine of senile crooning.
Lifting her skirts to clear it from the bare bird-fouled dirt of the cottage’s yard, Calantha lowered her head to enter the cramped little doorway, and greeted Elspeth with the civility due a seeress, making sure to keep her skirts elevated since the cottage floor was no cleaner than the trampled earth outside.
The blear-eyed crone barely looked up from the mess she was stirring at the hob of the hearth. “Bring me anything?”
The bag around the palfrey’s saddle-horn held not only a flask of wine, but rich delicacies. Elspeth had a sweet tooth--it was one of the few in her head--and she at once began munching marzipan between sips of malmsey. By now used to such wordless intervals interrupted only by stifled gulps and belches, Calantha examined the arcane oddments and pickled horrors on the room’s tables and shelves.
Elspeth wiped her mouth on the back of her veiny mottled hand and took a breather. “That Blanchefleur baggage was just here, craving a new potion for that pretty phiz of hers. Will ye be wanting the same, m’lady? I’ll have to brew it stronger and charge more, I warn ye.”
Calantha flinched. “No, thanks.”
“A dye then, to get the gray out of your hair? You’d not need to hide it under a rag, then.”
Calantha pretended to ignore this allusion both to her faded tresses and her spotless, intricately-pleated headdress of finest lawn. “I’m past those sorts of things, Elspeth.” She set down the gnarled bit of dried mushroom, or perhaps mummy, that she’d been idly scrutinizing. “I just want something to…” She hesitated. To what? Give her the zest of her young days? Alleviate the tedium? Allow her to just…vanish? Tears began to gather in her eyes, and her sinuses became troublesome.
Elspeth regarded her with a piercing squint. “So. In the doleful dumps again, are we?”
Calantha sniffled agreement.
“Life seems a bit tiresome, eh?”
“More than a bit.” Calantha looked down at her waistline with renewed dismay. “I used to be as lissom as Blanchefleur.”
“Lissomer. I remember.”
“I thought I’d be young forever. How’d this happen, Elspeth?”
“People forgot about you.”
That stung. “Clearly they didn’t forget about Blanche.”
“That’s because she stayed single. It kept her interestin’. Well, there’s always drink to keep your wits addled and happy. If not, I’ve got this herb…”
“No.” Calantha wiped her eyes with her flowing sleeve. “Maybe I’ll just wander into the woods and let a griffin eat me.”
Elspeth snorted at her client’s sullen tone, and helped herself to more of the rare malmsey with irritating liberality. “Go see how far it gets you.”
At those words, Calantha felt a strange jolt that took her away from herself a moment. “What?”
“I said try it.”
“You want me to be eaten by a griffin?”
“Can’t say as I care, but it won’t happen no matter how hard you try.” As Calantha stood astounded, Elspeth shook the marzipan-crumbs from her apron, which were instantly intercepted by some of the chickens.”And don’t stare so gormless. Do you honestly think being a wise woman is any fun around here?”
Calantha ignored the question. “Are you saying the monsters aren’t…real?”
Elspeth shrugged. “Oh, they’re real enough. But they won’t harm you. They can’t. They’re stocked like carp in a pond, and have about as much bite to ‘em.”
Calantha remembered the loud and violent but consistently harmless griffins of the north woods, and contrasted them with those of her long-past days as a damsel. The
latter had been absolutely, universally lethal. In comparison, the former were little more deadly than Elspeth’s chickens. Her heart sank. “You always knew this?”
“Yep.”
“Who…stocks them?”
“The management, I s’pose. Does it matter?”
“But what made you tell me?” Calantha put a sharp emphasis on the last word.
“Because no one ever complains, ‘cept for you. Reckon I got tired of it.”
“You’re lying about the monsters, you…you hag.”
Elspeth only cackled. “Go back out to the woods and try to get yourself killed. Try your hardest. If you live, you owe me.”
“For what?”
“You’ll see.” Stretching in a gaping yawn, Elspeth dropped back in her frowsy cushioned chair, raising a faint cloud of dust. “Malmsey always makes me nappish.” In another moment she was snoring.
There was no point in waking her. Calantha stared down at the cryptic hag’s ravined wrinkles, sickle nose, and lipless mouth. Had Elspeth ever been young? Ever been lovely? No amount of imagination could envision her as other than she was. She had always been a part of Everafter, always the way she looked now, except at the present moment she was even uglier than usual.
“Liar,” Calantha whispered. Resisting the urge to drop a nearby black beetle into the crone’s now wide-open snaggly jowls fully as revolting as an orc’s, she left the house, scattering chickens with the