Mercedes Lackey: Sleeping Beauty

I love comedy.

But comedy is nothing to laugh about. I know from listening to comics talk and reading their thoughts about it that comedy is hard, hard work. The best comedians study comedy, study timing and pacing, balance a fine line between "too far" and "not enough."

Terry Pratchett, for instance, has my undying admiration. He manages to sustain comedic writing on that narrow line for entire books; he doesn't rely on tricks like puns or pratfalls, and his books just flow from one great scene to another, loaded with terrific one-liners and dry, wry descriptions and little asides to let you knowhe knows that you are smart enough to get the joke and that he appreciates that.

Alas, I do not write comedy. I'm not nearly brilliant enough for that. I settle for "occasionally funny," with the occasional drop intoAmerica's Funniest Home Videos territory.

But I did have fun, a great deal of fun, with this latest Fairy Godmother book\emdash the fifth in my Five Hundred Kingdoms series. Here we have a truly fractured set of fairy tales\emdash when Sleeping Beauty gets hijacked by Snow White, then punted right off the field by the Siegfried saga. All three have sleeping princesses in them, which is how they manage to get crossed up, but how theystay entangled is what made this so much of giggle to write.

I'd also suggest you listen to comedian Anna Russell's hilarious routine "The Ring of the Nibelungs (An Analysis)." You can find it online. I fully agree with her observations.

At any rate, I hope you find a laugh or two in this chapter of the Fairy Godmothers. Heaven knows there are few enough of them to be had these days.

"Mirror, mirror, in my hand, who's the fairest in the land?" Fairy Godmother Lily stared intently into the book-size, gilt-framed mirror she held cupped between her palms, and muttered under her breath, "And if you say you are, Jimson, I am going to hurl you so hard against the wall they'll be looking for your shards with tweezers for years."

"You don't need to get so appallingly aggressive, Godmother," the round, slightly green face in the mirror huffed. "I'm only the messenger."

"I'm appallingly aggressive because The Tradition has been gathering over this Kingdom in force for the past three weeks."Ever since Queen Celeste died. "I need to know who it's about to gather up and fling, like I am going to fling this damned mirror unless you give me a good answer!"

Though she expected it, the "good answer" would not be —

"Princess Rosamund, Godmother," sighed Jimson. "Cheeks, roses, check. Mouth, cherry, check. Hair, spun gold, check. Eyes, sky, check. Not even weeping buckets over her dead mother, sleeping little and eating less has changed any of that. And that indefinable something that means The Tradition is taking an intense interest in her makes her nothing short of radiant. If it weren't for the loss of her mother, she would be a prime candidate for the Beauty Asleep path. Still, that's relatively harmless..."

"Relatively? Leaving Eltaria unguarded with everyone asleep for a month, let alone years, would be a disaster." Fairy Godmother Lily-groaned. That Rosa was the "fairest" was not what she wanted to hear. It would have been much better if it had been some shepherdess somewhere. Or even herself. She had been in charge of the Kingdom of Eltaria for three hundred years now. Unlike many of the Fairy Godmothers, the Godmother of Eltaria had been the same person all that time, rather than a different Godmother under the same name. Her longevity was aided in part by the fact that she was Fae on her father's side, and partly because the Fae themselves had made sure that Lily was granted extraordinary Gifts at her birth, even more than the firstborn Princess of any Kingdom, ever. They had known what she would become, and she had been trained for this since she was old enough to prattle. The kingdom of Eltaria was a very special case, and needed a Godmother who was skilled, vigilant and knew every trick in the Godmothers' book.

Eltaria was small, but tending it was a full-time job for its Godmother, because it was incredibly wealthy. The mountains that comprised most of it yielded gold, silver, copper and gems in abundance. Where the farmers and peasants of other Kingdoms rarely saw a copper piece, here even the humblest shepherdess had at least one gold ring and a thin gold necklace with a locket of her true love's hair in it. Unlike most fanciful tales, the monarchs of Eltaria actually did dine on gold plates and drink from gem-studded cups. Eltaria also had greedy neighbors. Often, the only thing that kept them from invading was the knowledge that if one did, the monarch would soon find himself facing off against the other three. The current King, Thurman, at whose christening Lily had presided, wore his Crown of State so seldom it had just been locked in the Vault, and his War Crown so often it had needed replating three times.

Thurman had married a darling little shepherdess he had met while out hunting in true fairy-tale fashion, thus neatly sidestepping the question of having to choose the daughter of one of his neighbors or the daughter of one of his nobles. One did not argue with true fairy-tale endings in this land, even though his choice somewhat disgruntled the small — and in Lily's opinion just a bit too inbred — Eltarian noble families. Nevertheless, fairy tales are fairy tales, and Eltaria was Eltaria, and no one dared to flout a choice approved by the Kingdom's Godmother. Lily did not intervene in the actual workings of the Kingdom often, but when she did, it was important.

It was not long before the new Queen became very popular in any event, for Celeste was sweet, practical, and clever as well as pretty. She did all the things a good and kind Queen is supposed to do, and more. She was a natural peacemaker. Among the peasants and farmers she was adored.

They had produced a single daughter, Rosamund. On Lily's advice, they had not had a public christening, which would simply have been the occasion for a veritable swarm of Wicked Witches, Dark Fairies, Evil Sorceresses and the like to decide that they had been slighted and come descending on the celebration to curse the poor thing. Instead, claiming, after the fact, the child's frailty at birth, they had had the priest waiting to perform an immediate christening before the child even got a chance to draw her first breath. With a completely mortal godmother, so that no blasted troublemaker could say that Lily had had foreknowledge and level a curse anyway.

Of course, no public christening meant no horde of Good Fae to come bless the child, but everyone agreed that the inevitability of curses, more curses and multiple curses, outweighed the loss of some blessings.

Thurman and Celeste, like all monarchs of Eltaria, and unlike most other Kings and Queens, were nearly as educated in the workings of The Tradition as Godmothers. They had to be. It was the only way that Eltaria had stayed intact for this long.

But of course, only a Godmother, or one of the Fae themselves, had the ability to sense that The Tradition was gathering to strike, and the power to command the sort of servants that could show them where....

"All right, show me where The Tradition is gathering thickest."

"I'm working, I'm working," Jimson grumbled. The Mirror Servant could see anything that was in view of any reflective surface, but that was a lot to sort through. Lily wished she could have her hands free to rub her aching temples.

If it had been possible to exclude The Tradition from every one of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, she would have done so in an instant. That powerful, yet completely unintelligent force of magic that the Fairy Godmothers called "The Tradition" quite literally made stories come to life. If a tale got told often enough, it became part of The Tradition — and the force then sought out those whose lives matched that tale closely in order to replay the story over and over again.