Mercedes Lackey - Sleeping Beauty

You had to slow breathing and heartbeat to almost nothing. Which was fine, a perfectly reasonable and not terribly difficult thing to do. Except that you had to do it without damaging the person you'd given the potion to. The human body — or most any body for that matter — does not like trying to exist on very little air or without the blood flowing at the right pace in the veins. Terrible things can happen when a magician does that without thinking; the poor victim ends up, once revived, with damage everywhere. Mostly, damage to the mind. You not only had to slow the breathing and heartbeat, you had to slow everything else down, so that the body no longer needed that much to live on.

So, strictly speaking, you weren't making a sleeping potion, or even a "this looks like death" potion. You were making a slowing potion.

And that was very, very difficult indeed. You would think with so much magic about such things would be easier! But more often than not, magic only complicated an already-knotted situation.

This was why most of the time, when these things were applied as curses, they were done so as spells rather than potions, with a trigger and a possibility of a release. The "Beauty Dreaming" for instance — that was a simple sleeping spell, no need to feign death there. Touch a finger to the object, draw blood — that triggers the spell, instant sleep. There it was, simple. And because, by the way that The Tradition worked, if a release had not been built in, The Tradition wouldput one in there. The Tradition did not like absolute curses with no way out. The more powerful the curse, the more likely it was that The Tradition would arrange the commonest release, that the Prince passes all the trials, and kisses the Beauty, and all is well.

The potion was going to take some time to brew. Well enough, during that time she could go impersonate the Evil Stepmother impersonating the Helpful Old Woman. Right now, Rosa looked like five miles of bad road. Under all the bruises and dirt, she still was the fairest in the land, but only The Tradition would have been able to tell that. All well and good, but to make the sleep spell easier to lift, she was going to have to look like the Beauty Asleep.

Lily shook her head as she selected the components for her base, and began compounding. It was a wonder that more Godmothers didn't go mad.

However, not so bad really, because the Helpful Old Woman would be doing the work Rosa was supposed to be doing, making it possible for her to get a good bath, clean herself up, heal up all the bruises and look like a Princess again. Rosa would have to feel like a Princess for everything to work just right.

Hopefully the Dwarves were inclined to ignore anything that didn't affect them.

She set up the workbench in the middle first, then the ones against the walls, with three stations on each of the wall benches, and four on the bench in the middle. The Brownies began arriving with the ingredients, and Lily started the thirteen separate components that would eventually be combined to make her slowing potion. Oh, and of course every one of those components had a cantrip or a minor spell that had to be cast on it, and you had more cantrips to cast when you combined them. And they had to be combined at the right time. And the right temperature. And it went without saying, in the right order. She left it all simmering or chilling or bubbling away, with a Brownie team keeping an eye on it all. The first lot would be ready tomorrow.

Time for her illusion cloak.

She placed a plain cloak on the mannequin as she carefully concocted the illusion she wanted associated with this cloak. First, the general shape of the body under it — round, matronly, sturdy. Since she could see through the vast majority of illusions, she clearly saw the mannequin under what she was doing, but atop it, she also clearly saw the shape of an old peasant woman's body. At this stage it looked a great deal like a doll made of dough.

She tinted the dough with a healthy skin color, weathered and rosy. This was the stage at which most people began to be unnerved, because her creation was starting to look too much like a person for comfort.

Next, she added the clothing — it would be much easier not to do that, since she had so many costumes in her extensive wardrobe that it was a step she could easily skip, but she also wanted the Traditional impact of throwing off the cloak and revealing her true self. It was just another way of making The Tradition do what she wanted.

So she added another layer over the skin-colored body — a set of worn, sturdy leather shoes; heavy woolen stockings; a patched linen petticoat; the fustian skirt, also patched, over that; and a clean, crisp, embroidered apron over that. Then the clean, slightly threadbare linen blouse, the embroidered black felt vest. She walked around it, examining it from all sides. Kalinda, who had done this many times before, did the same.

"It's very solid, Godmother," the little Brownie said, then moved in to check closer. Lily's vision of what was really there showed Kalinda reaching out and fingering air; her vision of the illusion showed her checking the weight and feel of the apron, the skirt, the blouse and the vest. You actually had to know how these fabrics felt and acted in reality to replicate them in illusion. The simplest illusions, and the easiest to break, were the ones that acted only on the eyes. The best extended to all senses. Kalinda sniffed.

"Smells just right, too, Godmother," she said with satisfaction. "Just perfect. Like you'd washed it all and left it to dry in the sun, then put it away with some lavender."

"Excellent. Hands now, I think."

"Right-oh." Kalinda held hers out as models.

Kalinda was a Brownie accustomed to hard work, and her hands showed it. There were tiny scars, the nails were groomed but uneven and the thumb was a bit chipped. The skin was brown, there were calluses in the right places from using household implements, and the middle two knuckles of the right hand were just a little scraped. Lily replicated all of that for her illusion.

Now the head. First, gray hair, long, neatly braided, fastened up on the top of the head in a sort of crown. Over that — because in this kingdom no respectable married woman or widow went with her head uncovered — a faded red kerchief, tied under the nape. Kalinda checked those details for feel, while she went to work on the face.

She tried never to duplicate the face of someone living, but she had been alive for three centuries, and she had met a great many people in that time. So she considered her options, and chose an old woman who had been the nursemaid for Prince Sebastian some two hundred years ago.

She stepped back and examined the kindly face she'd created, adding a few more wrinkles, a couple of moles that hadn't been on the original's face, and making the forehead just a little lumpy. There. This was the point where people sometimes back uneasily out of the room, because this looked like a person, only one without any life.

Then Lily untied the cloak, swirled it around her shoulders, and tied it in place.

She didn't feel any different, but when she looked down at herself, she saw the illusion like a transparent layer over her own body. She walked, bent, jumped a little, trotted back and forth, until Kalinda nodded. "It's solid, Godmother. Unless someone stronger comes along to dispel it, you should be all right."

Lily breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the cloak off. "In that case," she said, "it's time to get to work. Back to the Palace. Queen Sable needs to cement her hold over the Kingdom, or The Tradition will probably do something on its own."

Siegfried von Drachenthal considered himself to be a very lucky Hero, so far. Hero, because, well, he did Heroic things: slew dragons — only the evil, plundering, destructive ones of course, and only the ones that couldn't be reasoned with — defeated wicked knights, drove out bloodthirsty barbarians, destroyed rampaging giants and killed every manner of monstrous beast that your average village was having problems with. He hadn't rescued any Princesses yet...but there was a reason for that. He had come to the aid of a prince or two, a lot of counts, one duke and assorted adventurers. But not Princesses. On the whole, he was trying to avoid Princesses, just on general principle. He could not afford to have the wrong sort of Princess fall in love with him.