The Sleeping Beauty by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online

wanted, the hard way.
    You had to slow breathing and heartbeat to almost nothing. Which was fine, a perfectly reasonable and not terribly difficult thing to do. Except that you had to do it without damaging the person you’d given the potion to. The human body—or most any body for that matter—does not like trying to exist on very little air or without the blood flowing at the right pace in the veins. Terrible things can happen when a magician does that without thinking; the poor victim ends up, once revived, with damage everywhere. Mostly, damage to the mind. You not only had to slow the breathing and heartbeat, you had to slow everything else down, so that the body no longer needed that much to live on.
    So, strictly speaking, you weren’t making a sleeping potion, or even a “this looks like death” potion. You were making a slowing potion.
    And that was very, very difficult indeed. You would think with so much magic about such things would be easier! But more often than not, magic only complicated an already-knotted situation.
    This was why most of the time, when these things were applied as curses, they were done so as spells rather than potions, with a trigger and a possibility of a release. The “Beauty Dreaming” for instance—that was a simple sleeping spell, no need to feign death there. Touch a finger to the object, draw blood—that triggers the spell, instant sleep. There it was, simple. And because, by the way that The Tradition worked, if a release had not been built in, The Tradition would put one in there. The Tradition did not like absolute curses with no way out. The more powerful the curse, the more likely it was that The Tradition would arrange the commonest release, that the Prince passes all the trials, and kisses the Beauty, and all is well.
    The potion was going to take some time to brew. Well enough, during that time she could go impersonate the Evil Stepmother impersonating the Helpful Old Woman. Right now, Rosa looked likefive miles of bad road. Under all the bruises and dirt, she still was the fairest in the land, but only The Tradition would have been able to tell that. All well and good, but to make the sleep spell easier to lift, she was going to have to look like the Beauty Asleep.
    Lily shook her head as she selected the components for her base, and began compounding. It was a wonder that more Godmothers didn’t go mad.
    However, not so bad really, because the Helpful Old Woman would be doing the work Rosa was supposed to be doing, making it possible for her to get a good bath, clean herself up, heal up all the bruises and look like a Princess again. Rosa would have to feel like a Princess for everything to work just right.
    Hopefully the Dwarves were inclined to ignore anything that didn’t affect them.
    She set up the workbench in the middle first, then the ones against the walls, with three stations on each of the wall benches, and four on the bench in the middle. The Brownies began arriving with the ingredients, and Lily started the thirteen separate components that would eventually be combined to make her slowing potion. Oh, and of course every one of those components had a cantrip or a minor spell that had to be cast on it, and you had more cantrips to cast when you combined them. And they had to be combined at the right time. And the right temperature. And it went without saying, in the right order.
    She left it all simmering or chilling or bubbling away, with a Brownie team keeping an eye on it all. The first lot would be ready tomorrow.
    Time for her illusion cloak.
    She placed a plain cloak on the mannequin as she carefully concocted the illusion she wanted associated with this cloak. First, the general shape of the body under it—round, matronly, sturdy. Since she could see through the vast majority of illusions, she clearly saw the mannequin under what she was doing, but atop it, she also clearlysaw the shape of an old peasant woman’s body. At this stage it looked a