The Sleeping Beauty by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online Page A

great deal like a doll made of dough.
    She tinted the dough with a healthy skin color, weathered and rosy. This was the stage at which most people began to be unnerved, because her creation was starting to look too much like a person for comfort.
    Next, she added the clothing—it would be much easier not to do that, since she had so many costumes in her extensive wardrobe that it was a step she could easily skip, but she also wanted the Traditional impact of throwing off the cloak and revealing her true self. It was just another way of making The Tradition do what she wanted.
    So she added another layer over the skin-colored body—a set of worn, sturdy leather shoes; heavy woolen stockings; a patched linen petticoat; the fustian skirt, also patched, over that; and a clean, crisp, embroidered apron over that. Then the clean, slightly threadbare linen blouse, the embroidered black felt vest. She walked around it, examining it from all sides. Kalinda, who had done this many times before, did the same.
    “It’s very solid, Godmother,” the little Brownie said, then moved in to check closer. Lily’s vision of what was really there showed Kalinda reaching out and fingering air; her vision of the illusion showed her checking the weight and feel of the apron, the skirt, the blouse and the vest. You actually had to know how these fabrics felt and acted in reality to replicate them in illusion. The simplest illusions, and the easiest to break, were the ones that acted only on the eyes. The best extended to all senses. Kalinda sniffed.
    “Smells just right, too, Godmother,” she said with satisfaction. “Just perfect. Like you’d washed it all and left it to dry in the sun, then put it away with some lavender.”
    “Excellent. Hands now, I think.”
    “Right-oh.” Kalinda held hers out as models.
    Kalinda was a Brownie accustomed to hard work, and her handsshowed it. There were tiny scars, the nails were groomed but uneven and the thumb was a bit chipped. The skin was brown, there were calluses in the right places from using household implements, and the middle two knuckles of the right hand were just a little scraped. Lily replicated all of that for her illusion.
    Now the head. First, gray hair, long, neatly braided, fastened up on the top of the head in a sort of crown. Over that—because in this kingdom no respectable married woman or widow went with her head uncovered—a faded red kerchief, tied under the nape. Kalinda checked those details for feel, while she went to work on the face.
    She tried never to duplicate the face of someone living, but she had been alive for three centuries, and she had met a great many people in that time. So she considered her options, and chose an old woman who had been the nursemaid for Prince Sebastian some two hundred years ago.
    She stepped back and examined the kindly face she’d created, adding a few more wrinkles, a couple of moles that hadn’t been on the original’s face, and making the forehead just a little lumpy. There. This was the point where people sometimes back uneasily out of the room, because this looked like a person, only one without any life.
    Then Lily untied the cloak, swirled it around her shoulders, and tied it in place.
    She didn’t feel any different, but when she looked down at herself, she saw the illusion like a transparent layer over her own body. She walked, bent, jumped a little, trotted back and forth, until Kalinda nodded.
    “It’s solid, Godmother. Unless someone stronger comes along to dispel it, you should be all right.”
    Lily breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the cloak off. “In that case,” she said, “it’s time to get to work. Back to the Palace. Queen Sableneeds to cement her hold over the Kingdom, or The Tradition will probably do something on its own.”
     
    Siegfried von Drachenthal considered himself to be a very lucky Hero, so far. Hero, because, well, he did Heroic things: slew dragons—only the evil, plundering,