interest in the bride-getting of their sons, even when it must save the boy from a curse conferred upon him by his father’s tainted blood. I stabbed the words at her, making them an accusation, though it was not by her choosing that he had left. But I was as angry with her, almost, as with him.
‘You said the curse upon my husband’s bloodline would be cured by marrying me,’ I hissed.
‘And so it shall be,’ said my husband’s mother mildly, and to my complete surprise. ‘You have only to find the right bride and test her well to end the curse forever.’
‘But I thought that you meant I cured the curse when I married your son,’ I said.
She laughed, and for a moment her habitual haughtiness was softened. ‘Do you really think that falling in love is an end to anything? It is only the end of the beginning for your kind no less than mine. It is in our children that our endings are written. As for us women, it is not as princesses we have true power, but as queens and mothers. It was as a mother that I scried out the future, and I saw that you would save my son, but more importantly, that you were the means by which the curse might be broken. But what I saw is only a revealed potential, which you must fulfil. I do not know how. It is a pity that you did not inform your husband sooner about the boy’s degeneration, though, for he might have bade him seek a bride the sooner. As it is, there is no time to waste.’
I was chilled by her words, but furious too, for how could I have known my son was cursed when no one had ever thought to tell me the symptoms of that curse? As to confiding in my husband, ought he not to have spent time enough with the boy to see for himself what was happening, instead of dallying in the Summer Palace or questing? I wanted to ask her those things and to demand savagely how my son was to catch his bride – was he to be sent out to sit on a stoop in a lane and await a fool, as her son had done? But I only bade her stiffly to tell me what to do.
An echo of the anger I had experienced that day in the flowery arbour with my mother-in-law flows through me, and I have to fight the impulse to dash the brush from Cloud-Marie’s patient fingers, for though I do not doubt my husband grieves over what came to pass as much as my mother-in-law, neither of them holds themselves in any way responsible. They do not say it, but I know they blame me, as indeed I blame myself. Yet even now, I do not know what I could have done to prevent what has happened.
The first of many things the queen-mother told me was that her son had spoken the truth; our son must wed a princess bride.
‘It would be best if the maid he chooses has some mortal blood,’ she told me gravely and reminded me that in Faerie, a true princess was not a mere princess by lineage, as in my world. A girl became a princess in Faerie as the result of a spell brewed up between the prince and his mother, the chosen candidate and a magical chamber such as the one that I had occupied in the King’s Palace.
‘But I have no magic,’ I cried, aghast.
‘The instructions you give your son, the way he conducts his hunt for his bride and the way his chosen responds to the tests set for her are the ingredients of the spell. It is the Princess Chamber that will cast the spell, but only if all the ingredients required are present in enough strength,’ said my mother-in-law. ‘And the better the ingredients, the stronger the spell.’
She summoned the other queens to instruct me in the rituals and practices surrounding a son getting a bride. In sympathy, or perhaps by tradition, all of them came in the guise of elderly faerie godmothers and each bore a gift. I was given advice and old wives’ tales, tokens and spells and tomes to aid me. I heard the full history of the curse that afflicted my husband’s lineage, which had been brewed up by a powerful faerie maiden who killed the human man she had loved after