Interlude An Excerpt from a Tourist’s Guide to the Capital of Evermore
Interlude: An Excerpt from a Tourist’s Guide to the Capital of Evermore
The first thing noticed by most visitors to the bustling capital of the Kingdom of Evermore is what the city lacks. The capital, which is the economic, cultural, and political center of the kingdom, doesn’t have a name. This is because of, and not despite, the city’s storied history.
End of Interlude
Gretsella landed very near the palace, then tucked her broom back into her suitcase, marched up to the palace’s huge iron gate, and announced, “I’m here to see Bradley.” The guards ignored her. She repeated herself more loudly. “I’m here to see Bradley.”
The guards deigned to look at her. “Who?”
“Bradley,” she said. “Oh, for wickedness’ sake. The king.”
“Move along, old woman,” one of the guards said.
“All right,” Gretsella said, and marched on through the gate.
The guards had evidently not expected this, because it took them a moment to leap after her.
She evaded them very neatly for a minute or so—she had enchanted her shoes for light-footedness—but alas, one of them had very long arms. He grabbed hold of her.
Gretsella would later maintain that she turned him into a parrot entirely in self-defense.
The parrot squawked. So did his colleague, who turned around to sprint away from Gretsella at a truly impressive speed. “Witch!” he screamed. “Witch!”
“Yes, exactly,” Gretsella said. “And let that be a lesson to you!” Then she started walking toward the palace steps again.
She had made it almost the rest of the way there when an enormous net descended upon her, followed by the full weight of a very large and very heavy guard. Gretsella said, “Oof.”
“We’ve got you now, witch!” the guard said. A large crowd of armed men was now gathered around her. Gretsella tried to aim a spell through the holes in the net and nearly singed her own finger off.
“Wizard work,” she hissed, disgusted. She didn’t approve of wizards. They were mostly men, and generally more satisfied with themselves than Gretsella thought that a man ought to be.
“Take her to the dungeon!” the leader of the guards cried.
“Oh, for the love of brimstone,” Gretsella said, and tried to wriggle her way free, but it was no use: The anti-witch net held firm, and the guards carted her off to the dungeon like a wild boar about to be made very intimate with some heirloom carrots and new potatoes.
They threw her, net and all, into a cell in the dungeon, then left her to her own devices. Her first device was to wriggle her way out of the anti-witch net. Her second device was to turn herself into a mouse and creep out of her cell and into the palace walls.
Gretsella climbed upward along the path of a drainpipe, passing a number of grand, empty rooms coated in dust. Then, eventually, she came to a room occupied by a young woman who appeared to be busily packing everything she owned into a suitcase.
She was about Gretsella’s size. Gretsella made her mouse’s head into a tiny version of her own head in order to speak, and immediately regretted the choice.
It was very awkward, and also objectively disgusting.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m the king’s mother, and I would like to borrow a dress. ”
The young woman looked up and, to her credit, let out only a very brief and muted scream. “You don’t look like the king’s mother,” she said after she’d taken a moment to recover. “You look like a hideous tiny cheese-eating nightmare fiend.”
“That may be so,” Gretsella said. “But it isn’t very polite of you to mention it. Just be a good girl and bring a dress over here.”
The girl threw a dress in Gretsella’s general direction.
Gretsella crawled into the garment and expanded herself into her usual human form to fit it, which created a very uncomfortable sensation, particularly in the area of the tail.
Once she was sufficiently expanded, she gave the girl a nod.
“Hello. What’s your name, who are you, and where are you going?
I didn’t know that there were other witches in the palace.
” Gretsella hated not knowing things. This girl was certainly a witch, though, if perhaps one still in the larval stage.
It wasn’t anything about how she looked, exactly.
She was a very ordinary-looking girl, if a bit gawky, with limp brown hair and light-brown eyes and little brown freckles on her nose.
“I’m not a witch, and I don’t see how any of that’s any of your business,” the girl said.
Then she hastily added, “That is to say, I wouldn’t want to annoy you by going on and on about my silly problems, Grandmother.
” She was smart enough to know how to properly address a witch, even if she was pretending that she wasn’t one herself.
This was a fairly usual phase in the lives of some young witches, though Gretsella had always thought it a fairly embarrassing one.
Refusing to embrace one’s own inherent witchliness was like going back to the shop and earnestly telling the cashier that he’d given you too much change.
“I would say that everything in the palace is my business,” Gretsella said.
Then she added importantly, “My son, Bradley—the king—asked me to come and help him straighten things out around here.” Gretsella had never cared about all of the vast riches that might accompany Bradley’s new title, but in this moment, she realized she very much enjoyed being able to wield the power of the throne purely to satisfy her own unquenchable nosiness.
“Oh,” the girl-who-claimed-she-wasn’t-a-witch said.
“Oh, well, I guess it doesn’t matter what I tell you.
I was the court jester, but the new king fired me, so now I’m packing up and heading home to Northwind County to sing songs about merry accommodating maidens until I drop dead of ennui.
” She shoved a fistful of underthings into her bag without stopping to fold them.
“And my name’s Janet. Janet Findimatabar.
” Then, in response to the look on Gretsella’s face, she added, “My father always told me that our surname came from my great-great-grandfather, whose exploits made him famous in all of the surrounding counties.”
“Hmm,” Gretsella said. “Sounds just like a man. And Northwind County, you say? That’s not far from Brigandale, is it?”
Janet blinked. “Brigandale? Yes. I grew up there, actually, but there aren’t enough taverns in the forest to make a living there as a wandering minstrel. Not that you can make much of a living at it in Northwind County either.”
Gretsella gave a satisfied nod. It made sense that the girl had been raised in Brigandale.
Gretsella could easily recognize an essentially witchy disposition when she was wearing its dress.
“There’s always apprenticing yourself to a witch, if you’re considering a change of careers,” she said.
Sometimes a young witch simply needed a little nudge in the right direction to be saved from a life of unwitchly delinquency.
“I don’t want to be a witch,” Janet said. “All of those nasty potions and things, and having to live alone in the woods. Begging your pardon, Grandmother. I like living at court. I like all of the gossip and scheming. Or I liked it, until the king fired me.”
“Why on earth would Bradley fire you?” Gretsella asked, genuinely perplexed by the very idea. She was fairly sure that Bradley didn’t have the cold-bloodedness necessary to fire someone, especially if it seemed as if they might be sad about it or—horror of horrors—shed a tear or two.
“He thought that I jested too cruelly,” Janet said. “I don’t think that my jesting was cruel. It was just ordinary jesting.”
“Oh dear,” Gretsella said. “I think that I’m beginning to understand. Did you say something that might have made someone feel a little badly, in the course of your jesting?”
Janet stared at her as if she thought Gretsella might have recently been clobbered over the head. “That’s the whole point,” she said. “You’re supposed to ridicule the foibles of king and court. What else is a jester supposed to do?”
“I don’t know,” Gretsella said. “Bradley’s sensitive. He must have been born that way. He didn’t get it from me.” She pondered for a moment. “Was it Bradley whose foibles you ridiculed?”
“Oh, he never minded that,” Janet said. “It was when I made jokes about that awful, self-satisfied Sir Harold always chasing after the kitchen maids.”
“Ah,” Gretsella said. “Bradley was probably suffering from an acute attack of jawline-induced mental collapse. He has them every six months or so. As far as I can tell, the condition’s incurable.
” She adjusted the sleeves of her newly borrowed dress.
An ordinary adjustment didn’t quite suffice, so she moved a bit of very confused matter from the window curtains to make her sleeves half an inch longer.
Then she said, “Come on. We’ll just have to tell him to hire you back. ”
Janet trotted along after her agreeably enough as Gretsella headed out into the hall. “Are you sure that you’ll be able to convince him to do it, Grandmother?” she asked. “He seemed pretty determined about firing me, though he was very polite about it.”
“Of course,” Gretsella said. “Bradley is always polite. And he’s usually fairly reasonable once you’ve explained things to him clearly.”
“I see,” Janet said. “But won’t he worry about whether or not you’re thinking straight when you suddenly appear in front of him without any shoes or stockings on?”