Free The Snow Queen by Mercedes Lackey

and trying to do anything by brute force was a little like a flea trying to shift a warhorse. But if the flea bit the horse in exactly the right place at the right time…
    She spent a good hour putting together a subtle spell. It was nothing like a compulsion, more like—a suggestion.
    She turned it loose and it settled around the countryside like a cobweb, much too subtle for the Tyrant’s Wizard to detect. And if he did, he would not care about it. This had nothing to do with him, nor with the Tyrant.
    But from this moment on, every storyteller, every woman reciting tales to put the little ones to sleep, every gaggle of girls about a fire, every twopenny musician singing for his supper would be telling tales of wicked stepmothers who got what they deserved. This was the flea biting the warhorse, for the more these tales were recited, spun and sung, the more The Tradition would be impelled to make them come true. And who, at the moment, was the wickedest stepmother in all of the Kingdom?
    Aleksia smiled with a certain smug satisfaction.
    With that crisis averted, Aleksia continued to look into the Kingdoms for which she was responsible, following the flows of the power generated by The Tradition. Everywhere that there was a situation that corresponded to a tale, a myth or a legend, The Tradition accrued power to force it down that Traditional Path to The Traditional Ending. Sometimes that was just fine; Godmothers didn’t have to intervene. In fact, there was an Ella Cinders story waiting to be recreated in Eisenberg—wicked stepmother, nasty stepsisters, lovely young girl turned into a servant, all in the capitol of Konigsberg. The girl was the right age to be married to the Prince, the Prince had no particular sweethearts and the King and Queen were not at all averse to him wedding a commoner if his heart took him there. It just needed a little more time to percolate, as it were, and then all it would need was Aleksia’s timely appearance and just enough adversity thrown in their path to make the happily ever after all the more satisfying. She smiled to herself as she contemplated the poor girl scrubbing pots at the hearth. She should have been sad, but somehow she was able to take pleasure in small things. The Tradition was truly working hard on this one—if she had been any sweeter, any more self-sacrificing, any better-tempered, she would have been sickening.
    This, of course, was one of her rare ones.
    The list of her usual headaches, however, went much longer.
    There was a woman who was so much a shrew to her long-suffering husband that she was legendary to everyone around her. The Traditional force building around her was such that Aleksia judged it was time to let it take its course. But she made a mental note to keep an eye on the old man, lest her punishment overflow onto him.
    What would be best? There were a number of things in the area that she could put into the shrew’s way.
    The neighbors, she decided, finally. She wove another subtle spell and set that in motion—the idea that it would be a fine trick to play on the nag, to put her in a position where her sharp tongue dug herself a deeper and deeper hole until she found herself in real trouble. The only one with any sympathy for her then would be her long-suffering husband, who, strangely enough, still loved her, despite being mocked, ridiculed and berated without end. Well, there was no accounting for taste. He would save her or he would leave her; in either case, he would no longer be subject to her abuse.
    The Tyrant, however, was more troubling. With his punishment at least three years in the future, and with The Tradition moving now to keep him in his place, she considered that there ought to be something she could do to ease the situation of his people. At the moment, he was grinding them into poverty, and The Tradition wasn’t helping. Tyrants did not get good weather and bountiful crops. Tyrants got late Springs and early Winters, too much