Free Snow White and Rose Red by Patricia Wrede Page B

already; now you shall stay in Faerie. But keep from my sight.”
    The Queen turned and swept away. John, staring after her, glimpsed a quick, satisfied smile on the face of one of the Queen’s ladies, but he was still too dazed to wonder much about it.
    In deference to his mother’s command, John, too, put on white mourning, though he refused to give up the hope that his brother could be helped. He began spending less time with Hugh; instead, he talked for hours with the physicians, then went to the adepts and the great magicians of the court. He pored over scrolls and tomes from deep in the archives of Faerie. And he became more and more convinced that the solution to Hugh’s difficulty lay outside Faerie, in the mortal world from which the spell had come.
    When John sought the Queen, to try once again to persuade her to let him leave Faerie in search of a remedy for Hugh, he discovered that he was barred from her presence. The courtiers and officials were polite; he was, after all, the Queen’s son. Unfortunately, they were also firm. The Queen would not see him, nor would she lift the spell that hid the border of Faerie from him. John must remain in Faerie.
    Enraged, John stormed away from the court and back to his brother’s bedside. What he found there was hard to endure. Hugh lay naked beneath the coverlet, for his attendants could no longer fit the linen nightshirts over his enlarged arms and shoulders, and a dark stubble of sprouting fur covered his skin wherever it was visible. His restless tossing was no longer silent; now he made small animallike growling noises, and as he growled his lips curled away from fat, yellow teeth. His nails were black and thick at the ends of stubby, awkward fingers, and the skin on his palms was like black leather. The worst of it was that, despite the mouth and nose that stretched into a narrow snout, despite the sprouting fur and heavy nails, despite all the changes that proclaimed so clearly that this was no longer quite a man, it was still recognizably Hugh who snarled and scratched at the edges of the bed.
    John stayed beside Hugh’s bed all night, his expression bleak. At dawn, he slipped quietly away, and returned to his own room on the far side of the palace. He spent an hour in various preparations, then lay down to sleep. At noon he arose and dressed in his finest white doublet and hose. He swung a cloak of white velvet across his shoulder and fastened it with a silver chain. Then he picked up a small sack he had left lying beside his bed and went out of the room. He made his way swiftly through silent halls of alabaster and rose-marble, malachite and jasper. No one saw him leave the palace and disappear into the Faerie forest.
    John quickly discovered that grim determination was not enough to defeat a spell set by the Faerie Queen. For two days he marched doggedly up and down and across and through all the places where he knew the passage out of Faerie ought to be, without finding a single trace of it. On the third day, Rosamund and Blanche arrived in Faerie in search of herbs.
    John was not immediately aware of their presence, but early in the night, just after Rosamund and Blanche had lain down to sleep, he stumbled across their resting place. He recognized Rosamund at once. He was at first amused by her presence, but when he saw the ring of herbs surrounding the two girls he frowned. The spell affecting Hugh had come from mortal lands, and it was plain that these two mortals knew far more of Faerie than was comfortable.
    For a moment, John was furiously angry. Then he looked more closely at the sleeping girls huddled together for warmth and at their makeshift protection. He frowned once more. Surely two such knowledgeable people would have come better prepared, had they intended to spend a night in Faerie. And if they had not intended to stay . . .
    Eyeing the girls thoughtfully, John pulled a wand of peeled willow from the sack he carried. He concentrated briefly,