Back to the Janet-Based Digression
Janet, as a professional entertainer, had spent a great deal of time among The People.
Singing for her supper had made her extremely highly attuned to what The People wanted.
She could also, considering her background, claim to be one of The People herself without feeling any need to blush or demur or obfuscate the extent of her father’s real estate holdings.
She therefore very quickly developed a Theory of the Top Five Things The People Actually Want from Their King. The Things were as follows:
For the cost of bread to be lower, or at least not dramatically higher
For there to be less dung of various and diverse origin (horse, dog, human, misc., etc.) in the streets
For knights in shining armor to have a bit less latitude when it came to lopping off the head of any peasant who mildly annoyed them (though not a total lack of latitude, just in case a knight was annoyed by someone who had it coming)
For a few extra holidays per year, especially if the government also sponsored a parade and provided everyone with one (1) pint of free beer in a special commemorative mug they could take home with them
To feel as if they had A Choice in the Matter
Janet thought these were, largely, perfectly reasonable things to want.
More to the point, she believed in the Will of The People, so if—when—she was elected the new king of Evermore, she would do her determined best to make items one through four come to pass.
She was passionate about democracy partially out of a pure mercenary lust for power, and partially because she truly thought The People deserved better than the watery governmental gruel that had been served to them for untold generations.
The People might be, as Gretsella was prone to saying with a milk-curdling degree of scorn, mostly not particularly intelligent, pure of heart, or pleasant to gaze upon.
Janet didn’t care. They were still people.
Janet was of the opinion that all people deserved to be able to afford to eat, to have relatively sanitary streets to walk on, and to not have to worry excessively about whether a knight-errant might chop their head off if they failed to tug their forelocks with sufficient obsequiousness.
Above all, Janet believed The People deserved at least some say in the way their own country was run.
The farmers and smiths and coopers and carpenters and bakers and hairdressers of Evermore were, after all, the entire reason why the country existed in the first place.
Without them, the king and his court would just be a bunch of naked, hairy, hungry people bowing at one another in a muddy pit.
It was only good and right and just that the common people should have the power to choose.
Whether or not they could make a truly free choice when their main source of information was a devious professional propagandist wasn’t of particular concern to Janet.
She would bring democracy to the populace.
If the transformation of Evermore into a republic incidentally happened to propel Janet to the absolute pinnacle of fame, power, and fantastic wealth, then future generations might consider that the just fruits of her heroic efforts to bring Freedom, Justice, and a New Annual Parade to the populace.
Deny it as she might, in her deepest heart of hearts, Janet was sometimes forced to admit that there might be the teensiest degree of inherent witchiness about her temperament.
The polling stations opened promptly at six the next morning. Bradley’s advisory council rose with the birds to shuffle off to various stations across the city, eager to watch The People exercise their right to vote.
The People, in their teeming throngs, stayed in bed.
The novelty factor of participating in a democratic election had worn off after the first attempt.
They hadn’t even been paid for voting the last time, which The People, in their huddled masses, thought was absolutely typical: Trust the government to ask you to do all of the work of making important decisions for them and then not even pay you for it.
A few wild-eyed local eccentrics duly showed up to cast their ballots, mostly while mumbling to themselves about things like municipal rezoning.
Gretsella felt almost comfortable around them, not because they were anything like witches—the dynamism of the average witch’s disdain for local regulations could be used to power an entire broomstick manufacturing plant in an area strictly zoned for single-family housing—but because they were very much like a type of creature that a witch might summon from some dark plane to rain terror and despair upon her enemies.
Woe betide any man who crossed a witch, as he might find that he ever after would have his every attempt to better his lot in life beset with forms that must be submitted to receive a permit to apply for a license, and peppered with bright-orange stop-work orders owing to his having neglected to pay for the other permit that would have allowed him to receive the form with which he could submit his semiannual license renewal fees.
Gretsella and Janet stood side by side, watching the anemic crowd of civically minded freaks trickling its way into the public library as the morning sun grappled valiantly with the capital’s morning smog.
Janet was frowning. “Grandmother, where do you think we went wrong? The People don’t seem excited at all about participating in the democratic process. ”
“Of course they don’t,” Gretsella said. “They’re normal.
Normal people don’t care about processes, especially not at six in the morning.
They care about what they’re having for breakfast. If you really want them to care about something they can’t eat, you have to give them prizes for doing it.
” She was attempting to direct only her usual amount of nastiness toward Janet so that the girl wouldn’t notice something amiss and realize Gretsella had uncovered her wicked scheme.
“Prizes?” Janet asked, as if she was taking the notion seriously. “Like what?”
“Anything,” Gretsella said, a little annoyed that Janet wasn’t taking her criticisms of both The People and the concept of democracy with the extremely ill spirit with which they had been intended.
“The People are dense as flattened toads. You could hand them a cheap button and tell them it was a prize and they’d sew it onto their shirts and show it off to everyone in town. ”
“Buttons,” Janet said, with clear and unnerving enthusiasm. “What a wonderful idea, Grandmother! Big, brightly colored ones, maybe, that say I Participated in the Democratic Process Today! Everyone will want one!”
“Nerds might,” Gretsella said with all the scornful superiority of a woman who read books about the history of cauldrons for fun. “And those would have to be some enormous buttons to fit all those words. Couldn’t you come up with something snappier?”
Janet got a look on her face that reminded Gretsella of Bradley back when he was a fat, jolly baby who occasionally went cross-eyed in the course of trying to aim his own foot into his mouth.
Then she shouted, “I’ve got it!” and darted abruptly off.
Gretsella, who didn’t actually give a banker’s socks about witnessing the democratic process in action, decided to take this as an opportunity to stomp off in search of some breakfast. She found a nearby coffee shop, where the proprietor annoyed her by attempting to tease her about the slice of cake she’d ordered to go with her coffee. “Cake for breakfast, eh? Man trouble?”
Gretsella drew herself up and narrowed her eyes.
“I trouble men,” she said. “They do not trouble me. As for my choice to eat cake for breakfast, I notice that you sell muffins, sir. A muffin is a cake for women who apologize too often and men who lack the courage of their convictions. A muffin is a cake that feels ashamed of its own nature. I am a witch, sir. I fear nothing, I make no apologies, I feel no shame, and I would like whipped cream on top. If you would be so kind, sir.” This last sentence she pronounced as, If you value your life, you insolent grub.
The baker blanched like an almond. Then he served her a plate of cake covered in such a thick layer of whipped cream that it took her several minutes of determined excavation work to hit the chocolatey bedrock at the bottom.
Thus fortified, she returned to the polling place, just in case Janet had returned and done something interesting in her absence.
As it turned out, she had. The polling place had been turned into a sort of workshop: Energetic young apprentice jesters were cutting the words I Voted out of massive sheets of paper, pasting the words onto buttons, and pasting the buttons onto pins, which they then pinned, still sticky, onto the beaming local weirdos who’d shown up to vote.
Except, Gretsella realized, it wasn’t just the most ghoulish and unwholesome local-ordinance-reading public-meeting attenders proudly receiving their sticky buttons.
They looked, in fact, like ordinary citizens of Evermore.
They were, if not upstanding, at least upsitting, or not obviously downlying.
You could tell that they were ordinary and at least moderately respectable by their clothes, which were neat and clean, and by their faces, which were all beaming with delight over getting a special button of their very own to show off to all of their friends.
There was actually a line beginning to form.
This was, of course, only to be expected: If there is any motivating force in the greater universe stronger than the prospect of receiving a special button, it’s realizing that other people are waiting in a long line to receive a special button too.
Even the staunchest button detester might waver in the face of such a display.
“Idiots!” Gretsella said scornfully. Then she started inching toward the table full of buttons.
True, she hadn’t actually voted. But it would probably look bad if she, in her position as Bradley’s chief adviser, had visibly not bothered to vote.
If she just snuck a button from the pile—
“Diabolical!” Gretsella said aloud, catching herself and shoving her treacherous hand into her pocket.
She cast a glance toward Janet, then eyed the buttons.
“You won’t catch me, my fiendish friend,” she said.
Then, a few feet away from the line of voters, Gretsella pretended to pause to tie her bootlace and tossed a subtle little spell in the voters’ direction.
The hours passed, and the voters carried on voting.
The demand for buttons quickly outstripped the supply, and Janet was forced to conscript some ladies and young boys from the neighborhood to paste buttons together as piecework—five buttons for a penny.
By late afternoon, they had to move their operations from the library to the meeting hall of the Brotherhood of the Golden Ankles, thereby disturbing several elderly men who had been peacefully engaged in sewing some bright-yellow tassels onto their ceremonial robes.
Gretsella beat a hasty retreat. If anything was a certainty in life, it was that the sort of old man whose evenings regularly involved ceremonial robes without any tassels would immediately corner the nearest available woman and tell her stories about his college football days until even a witch as powerful as Gretsella would be forced to beg for mercy.
As for men in robes with tassels, they simply didn’t bear thinking about.
Gretsella suspected that any unfortunate female who fell victim to the tassels would hear all about the tassel bearer’s long and successful career in sales and marketing, a fate that, if not worse than death, was certainly worse than most other things that could happen to you while attending a beloved uncle’s retirement party.
It was now almost dinnertime, and Gretsella decided to have food sent to her room before taking a nice long nap.
She would take a shorter one, but she knew that the part where they had to count all the votes was coming up next, and as she didn’t plan on making herself even the slightest bit useful, she thought it a good idea to be asleep when the work commenced.
Not that she ever felt the need to provide excuses for her refusal to help with unpleasant tasks, but other people generally expected that some sort of excuse or apology would be forthcoming, and Gretsella would be forced to waste valuable time that could have been spent sleeping or staring blankly at her interlocutor until they got nervous and started apologizing to her instead.
When Gretsella finally woke up, it was, conveniently, just before the time that Janet had hoped to have Bradley announce the results of the election to the excited throng of citizens below his balcony.
Gretsella put on her robe and slippers and shuffled down the long hall to Bradley’s chambers, hoping there would be snacks set up for the vote counters that she could tuck into.
Gretsella loved a good late-night snack, and she appreciated the generosity of spirit that led people to so often provide easily accessible buffet tables for hard-working employees, volunteers, and brazen witches who just happened to be wandering through at the time. Sometimes they had fruit platters.
There were no snacks this evening. There was, instead, a small gathering of Gretsella’s associates, who were sitting around a table looking extremely nervous and uncomfortable.
They had, it seemed, just learned about the fruits of Gretsella’s most recent efforts.