They give her the charity cases, because she asks for them; doesn’t see the faces the other faenyr make behind her back, ignores the whispers of wet-behind-the-ears and you’ll regret it, because what’s the point of magic if you can’t make dreams come true?
Her first charge is five years old and starving, thin ribs shivering behind slashed rags. Her wide eyes go wider still when Bela explains she’s here to grant her a wish, any wish, and when the girl says, ‘Food,’ in an anxious whisper, Bela smiles and produces a feast.
The starving girl gorges until she throws up, her stomach unused to such rich dishes, then eats again, and again, and still doesn’t finish everything Bela gives her. She tries to store the leftovers, but Bela wasn’t thinking about the future - she just wanted to dazzle, impress, put some magic in the girl’s life, and now the food is rotting before she can eat it all, and other urchins are creeping into her basement to steal it anyway, and then it’s all gone, and Bela is meant to be done here, but the girl is hungry again, sobbing that she needs more food, and for the first time since she picked up a wand, Bela realises, with an unpleasant jolt, that magic doesn’t solve everything.
She goes straight to Madrys, asks her supervisor if she can’t help more, if there isn’t a way to bend the rules, and Madrys sighs through the hissing snakes of her hair and says, ‘We give them a taste of magic, that’s all. Enough to fatten their faith, but not enough to make them hunt us down. There was leeway enough in the wish that you could’ve helped her yourself, had you thought of it. The error is yours.’
'Learn from it,' Madrys says, firmly.
So Bela does. It’s difficult and painful, because mortal rules are strange to her, and just when she thinks she’s started to learn the trick of them, they go and change again. The first time a barren woman wished for a child of her own, Bela didn’t understand about sexual taboos, how the absence of the woman’s husband at the time of conception would be viewed by those around her, and was forced to watch, horrified, as mother and baby were disowned by everyone they loved. She did better next time, took care to parse such requests in full, but the haunted look in the first woman’s eyes never left her - a beseeching grief that, even years later, wakes her up at night.
Before she started, she thought that children would be the easiest to look after; all too soon, she learns the opposite. It’s heartbreaking, because the faenyr code is clear: she can’t dictate how the wishes are used or make suggestions unless directly prompted to do so - can only interpret what the mortals says to the best of her judgement. The children Madrys sends her to are poor and struggling, unloved and lonely, and only one in a hundred is wise or lucky enough to ask for something that will help them long-term, beyond the momentary easing of their pains. Wish that your father stays sober and employed, Bela wants to say. Wish that the coming war spares your town, wish for the education the king denies you, wish me fix the root of these evils, not sooth their symptoms -
But over and over and over, she has no choice.
'Let me change your mandate,' Madrys says one day, as Bela sobs over the death of a boy who begged her to regrow his missing foot. His neighbours were superstitious, hung him before he could flee their small village, and her magic has never felt more useless. 'Let me send you to kings and queens. You could be an emissary to the salt realms, or maybe - '
'No,' says Bela, wiping her eyes. 'Let me try again. Please, Madrys. I can do this.'
'All right,' Madrys sighs, and hands over her next assignment.
The girl is too old for childhood, yet too young for womanhood, her true name lost beneath a rime of ash and soot, and when Bela asks her heart’s desire, she says, ‘I want to marry the prince.’
For the first time in a long time, Bela’s heart lifts. It’s a long-term wish, one with real scope for imagination. She takes her time with it, carves out the details with care - she knows about peasants and nobles now, the differences between them; knows she needs her girl to be seen as special. There’s a ball, and a dress, and a spell that nudges up against the limits of what she can do with love (it helps that the prince likes pretty women, which Cinder certainly is), and then - finally, the pieces coming together like clockwork - a happily ever after.
Even Madrys is impressed. Bela beams at their wedding, smiling as the besotted prince crowns his blushing bride -
-then watches from the sidelines, stricken, as their marriage slowly disintegrates. For all her love of reading, Cinder has no head for politics and a skin too thin for court machinations. As pretty as she is, her husband needs more from his partner than she can provide; the shyness he once found alluring soon becomes a liability, and at public appearances, his wife’s lack of highborn manners becomes a source of embarrassment. The first time he hits her, it’s out of desperation: he needs her to come to a banquet and she’s too afraid to leave their room, and though he soothes the bruise on her cheek with kisses, covers it with powder, more and worse are to follow. He fucks the maids in their own bed, and when the courtiers laugh at Cinder, he starts to join in, until his jibes are the cruellest ones of all.
Four days after their daughter is born, the crown princess jumps from the battlements, and though the prince grieves briefly, his relief is palpable.
Bela goes to Madrys with iron in her heart.
'Give me vengeance,' she says, her fingers like claws around her wand. 'No more pretty dreams, no charity. They only ever bring pain on themselves; at least this way, they know what they’re really asking.’
Madrys doesn’t look at her. ‘Is this what you truly want?’
Bela thinks of hungry children and hard-fisted men; of faithless women and wretched laws. ‘I want to hurt them,’ she says, and her voice is hard as a curse. ‘Let me hurt them as they’ve hurt me.’
'All right,' Madrys says, softly.
germansingergirl
ellievsbear
