that would make the frogs help her find what she sought. She answered pettishly that she did not need the croaking of a useless old woman any more than she needed the croaking of frogs to find the gold ball, which the sour crone of the house required before she could sleep there. She would summon her seven protectors, who would find the golden ball soon enough for her. She had already sent the pet dove they had given her to fetch them. Then she went back to trying to admire her reflection in the water.
Of course I did not allow the dove to deliver its message, having released from its jewelled box a simple confusion spell that would prevent it leaving, so my son’s hapless chosen passed the night in the field before stalking away at dawn in a filthy temper, forfeiting her chance to become a princess.
‘You are choosing the stupidest tests,’ my son snarled. ‘What does it matter if she cannot find a gold ball in a field, or turns her back on a beggar woman, if she has passed through the Wolfsgate Valley?’
‘You know perfectly well by now that the Wolfsgate Valley does not truly test any but a full mortal,’ I snapped. ‘That is the reason the queen sets tests, so that the lack may be answered. As to the girl you hunted this time, she was vain and ruthlessly self-centred. I would be surprised if she could tell me the colour of your eyes, for given her nature, the only thing she would have looked for in them was her reflection. There was nothing to her but a crafty cleverness, shallow wit and hollow beauty!’
I bade him hunt again, for time was running out for all of us.
The fourth maid he chose was a mortal who had come to Faerie when she was but a child. She had been adopted by a sweet merchant. She was plump and kind and had a soft full mouth and a gentle heart, which made her promise at once to help the unicorn that dropped the battered golden ring into her lap, but she was also exceedingly simple. She had no magic, being fully mortal, and survived the Wolfsgate Valley only because a faerie godmother had blessed her with luck and because of my son’s vigilance and vicious unicorn strength. I had given him that form in the hope that he would be inspired by it.
When she came to the palace to give me the ring, I assayed a test to see if she had even a modicum of common sense. I warned her specifically not to accept food from strangers, though she was hungry, but to walk in the garden, and I would send Cloud-Marie when a meal was ready. Within ten minutes, she took a poisoned apple from me in my old-woman’s disguise, and ate it. Loosening her stays and dribbling the antidote for the poison she had eaten into her lovely mouth, I thought it a pity she had not wit enough to temper her sweetness, for a queen cannot rely on luck and sweetness alone.
Still, she had pretty manners, and when I sent her off, saying my son had not really needed rescuing, she went trustfully, woebegone but wearing a bracelet of undying violets, and an instruction from me to her father to bid him wed her to his clerk. She had confessed to me that they had pledged their troth in secret as children, for her father would never permit her to marry so low.
‘You sent her away! You can’t do that!’ my son shouted. ‘I wanted her!’
‘I told her that your disguise was a trick and that you had no need of rescuing, so she ought to go home, and she went. If she had been wiser, she might have guessed I was lying.’
‘You are ruining my life,’ shouted my son, but there was fear in his eyes for the first time, and it broke my heart, for I realised that, with this girl, he had truly been trying to find a candidate who would please me.
It had struck me then that part of the problem faced by my son was that the curse had nullified all the grace and cunning of his faerie blood, leaving only the mortal part, and at his age, many mortal men are little more than lumpish boys without subtlety or finesse. How should such a boy be capable of choosing a girl who could become a