Read Online The Fairy Godmother by Mercedes Lackey - Free Book Online Page B

them directly, we have to help the heroes who can.”
    â€œBut why can’t you fix them directly?” Elena asked, now truly puzzled and confused. “If you have all this power—”
    â€œAh. The answer to that is why you will be serving as my Apprentice for some time,” Madame Bella replied, wisely. “But the quick answer is that it would take all the magic of a hundred Godmothers working together to correct a single one of those problems if we had to go counter to The Tradition. We do not figure as heroes, you see. Whoever heard of a dotty old lady in shining armor?”
    Elena giggled at that; why not? She was going to wake up, after all, and things would not be nearly so pleasant when she did, so she might as well enjoy this dream. And it was such a good dream—she would very much like to be a Godmother’s Apprentice. And it was somehow comforting to have an explanation for why her life had gone from bad to worse, no matter what she had done to try to change things.
    â€œAnd you have to remember that the evil ones are always on the prowl, looking for their opportunities to make The Tradition work to their advantage, and they have one thing on their side that we do not,” Madame Bella continued. “Once one of them finds a place to work, they can concentrate on that one Kingdom, while we are spread out over many.”
    â€œHow many?” Elena asked, sobering. This might be a dream, but it certainly sounded as if this Godmothering business was quite hard work.
    Not that she was afraid of hard work, for heaven’s sake! But she had to wonder just how many Kingdoms Bella was responsible for, if there were so few of the Godmothers.
    â€œAt the moment, I am Godmother directly to two dozen of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, and I can be called upon to help with another twelve or fourteen,” Madame Bella said, and sighed. “And I am not getting any younger, alas. I have been looking for a good Apprentice for some time now.”
    Obscurely, Elena felt a surge of disappointment, even though this was a dream. So she had not been the only person that Madame Bella had considered!
    But in the next moment, Bella’s words made the disappointment vanish. “In fact, I have really been looking, inone way or another, from the day that I became the Godmother for these Kingdoms. I have seen too much tragedy come into the world because a Godmother left looking for her Apprentice until it was too late. I must say, though, in all that time, I never had a bit of hope until I found you. And I was not going to even hope that you could be what I was looking for until after you passed your eighteenth birthday.”
    â€œWhy then?” Elena wanted to know.
    â€œBecause if ever you had a satisfactory end to your personal tale—if, for instance, you had found a sweetheart who had successfully taken you out of that house—it had to be by then.” Bella sounded melancholy. “Far too many of the young women I have watched over the years did, indeed, make that sort of end. Why it should be before the eighteenth birthday, I do not know. Perhaps it has something to do with being willing to—to settle for less, to stop dreaming—to give up on hope. And then, perhaps the magic around you arrows in on whatever you can get, rather than what you hope for. I don’t know for certain, because I have never asked those young women about what was going on in their minds.”
    Elena licked her lips thoughtfully, tasting the last, faint hint of sweetness from an iced cake upon them. Yes, she had recently stopped dreaming—or at least day dreaming—but it had not been until after that critical eighteenth birthday. Even then, could she really say that she had given up on dreams? Not when she had continued to look out her window at handsome young men and make up lesser stories, smaller dreams about them.
    And in all that time, had she ever really tried to do