Chapter 4 In Which Gretsella Gets to Work
In Which Gretsella Gets to Work
Gretsella very soon regretted her decision to take a stagecoach to the capital.
The highway was extremely pitted—far worse than she remembered it being when she’d last made this trip as a starry-eyed young witch embarking on a journey to visit the execution grounds of various Great Witches of History—and they were still several miles outside the capital when traffic came to an abrupt and total halt.
She waited for half an hour while growing increasingly impatient with the insipid conversations of her fellow passengers—what sort of unbalanced personality could possibly have so much to say about a wedding?
—until she finally gave up, unfolded her collapsible broomstick, and took flight.
Traveling by broomstick, in addition to being more convenient than being trapped in a stagecoach, provided Gretsella with a sweeping view of the current state of the city.
The state of the city did not appear to involve much in the way of glistening palaces on the hill, prancing unicorns, or anything else that Bradley might have expected to encounter when he rode off to rule his kingdom.
There were lots of tents in the public squares.
Gretsella, though not an expert in urban environments, suspected that this was not the intended use of the squares in question.
It certainly struck her as somewhat untraditional to stock the squares with poor and desperate people living in tents, instead of poor and desperate people who had formed an angry mob in order to indulge in a bit of rotten-egg-throwing, witch-dunking, or politician-beheading.
As far as Gretsella was concerned, watching poor and desperate people violently get the best of the upper classes was one of the chief joys of a city vacation, but watching poor and desperate people sit around sadly next to the statue of a naked woman who was supposed to represent the Spirit of Charity could only suffuse one with the Spirit of Melancholy.