One of the worst things about becoming a Fairy Godmother is the weight gain. Seriously, for the first few centuries I could eat all of the gloaming dew and tickleberry nectar I could stomach, and my belly stayed flat and taut as a satyr's drum.
Then I one day a lightning bug trundles up, dumps an envelope in my lap. Then he goes "You've been served!" As soon as I open the folder with my Godmother duty selection, I swelled up like a breakfast sausage. Let me tell you, we fairies like gossamer and lace and showing off a lot of skin, and those kinds of clothes are not really designed to adapt to the ass of their wearer quadrupling in size in an instant. I had to fly home fat and naked, sweating like a pig on wings that were
not
used to working that hard.
So yeah, Godmother Duty. Kinda like your human idea of jury duty, in that it's nothing anyone wants to do, unless you happen to get assigned to some high-profile case like Cinderella that you can make bank writing a book about later. That almost
never
happens. Every princess has to have a Fairy Godmother by their third birthday, and you have to stick around until they marry a prince and get the ever after.
And
you have to be nice. That last bit may not sound like a big deal, but you have to remember that
every
fairy is eligible for Godmother Duty. I am not your run-of-the-mill dandelion-riding glitter-farting tart. I happen to be attendant to the Unseelie Court, and we are
not
known for our predilection toward benevolence.
For that reason, the selection committee generally gives us a pass, given our enthusiastic affection for things like needle-sharp teeth and human suffering. Still, we're signatories to the Convention, which means a certain percentage of us
have
to be selected, or all sorts of paperwork kicks in. There aren't
any
types of fairies that like paperwork.
So I let the queen know what's up, Court-attendance-wise. She's irritated, obviously, but she's pretty cool about it. She grants me a boon and a geas to help me out. The geas is to do my best for the survival of my princess or suffer torment. That sounds like kind of a downer, but it's actually more along the lines of keeping me motivated. Our people just prefer to be under a geas if we have to do something we don't like, or we tend to wander off or start torturing things.
The boon I held on to. The Queen of Winter has a lot of power, way way more than I do, so a boon from her is a hell of a thing. You gotta be kinda careful with it, though. She's bound by her word to grant what you ask, if it's in her power to do so, but if you ask for something that irritates her, she has a million billion ways to make your life miserable, for
centuries
. So, I figured it was best if I thought about it for a while until I could pick one that would please her, or at least not bother her.
So armed (and many-chinned), I set out to meet the little turdburger I'd been saddled with for the next decade or two. Turns out she was born in a castle, which is good, because I was a little worried it was going to be a rags-to-riches sitch. Said castle turned out to be big and white and shining, pennants blazing from every spire, a shining beacon to all the land, et cetera.
Only downside is the kingdom itself. My princess was the heir to the Magic Kingdom. Like there's only one, right? I personally know of at
least
a half dozen that are also called the Magic Kingdom. What would be magic was if any of the founders had had the creativity to invent a proper noun. Anyway, this particular Magic Kingdom was pretty standard western-myth stereotype. Wizards, witches, orcs, elves, the occasional giant, a bat-winged, fire-breathing dragon every twenty years, you know the sort of thing.
The problem with this kind of neighborhood is that it's practically
founded
on the idea of the kidnapped princess. I checked the paperwork from the Fairy Godmother Committee, and yup, there it was. The FGC mandated that I preside over
at least
one kidnapping for my princess. That didn't mean I had to have her kidnapped, it meant that
someone
would be contracted for a kidnapping, and I had to tag along to effect timely advice or minor magic to ensure her eventual escape and/or rescue.
Not a big deal, right? Except that if the little ditz manages to get killed, my credit for Fairy Godmothering is void, and I'm stuffed right back at the front of the queue for the next princess in line. Since kidnappings in kingdoms like this are
never
political, they generally only happen after the princess grows tits. That means that if she croaks before that all that time putting up with her while waiting on the jugs to develop doesn't count for anything.
Now, I don't want you to misunderstand me. I don't have anything against the concept of princesses in general, or against mine in particular. Hell, I was kinda curious to see what kind she turned out to be. A cousin of mine in the Court had duty and
her
princess turned out to be this tomboy joan-of-arc type asskicking warrior. Said it was the most fun she'd ever had, still checks in on the descendants every now and then. She even shows up in a corner of their coat of arms, wings and teeth and all.
Well, it's kind of hard to judge how someone is going to turn out when they're three years old. Usually. In my case, it was pretty obvious right away. The first time I saw Princess Natalie, she was staring intently at one of the castle's collection of feral cats, watching as it carefully gave itself a tongue bath. This lasted for a few minutes, until she levered herself upright and bumbled over to the animal, which ignored her and continued licking itself. At least, until she bent down, grabbed a double fistful of fur, and began licking it too.
I used up the FGC magic quota for a week preventing that cat from mauling her. It never got over the trauma, and would attack the princess on sight from that moment on. I put up with this for about two more weeks before the body of the offended feline mysteriously turned up in the pen the king kept his hunting dogs in. I can understand wounded sensibilities, and I like cats (natural sociopaths), but my patience has limits.
----
Princess Catlicker didn't improve my impression of her intelligence over the next few weeks, and it became clear that the vast majority of my Fairy Godmothering would be preventing her from killing herself through acts of blind stupidity before I could get her married off. She was basically good-natured, and as she grew it became clear that she would be a willowy beauty, just like her genre of princess should be, but I swear to the Queen she had to be the stupidest creature I'd ever met.
Her toddler years were basically a study in steering her away from sharp things, hot things, and ledges (so many ledges in that castle...
so many
). After a while, I could more or less handle that on autopilot, and the status quo held up for a few years. By the time she was eight or nine, her stupidity took on a sort of cunning wit of its own, and became infinitely more subtle in its attempts to kill her. I spent her tween years preventing her from smelling, ingesting, and applying-as-makeup more toxins than I ever knew existed. Did you know humans can't eat hemlock? They don't get high or anything, they just turn funny colors and die.
She almost didn't survive puberty, because
I
wanted to kill her. Her sex drive didn't manifest in an interest in men, even though I went out of my way to make sure she tripped and landed in the arms of a strapping young castle guard or two. I don't mean that she wasn't straight, I mean that whatever was crosswired in her head knew she had a lot of new urges, it just didn't know what to apply those urges
toward
. Which meant that she did everything with a sort of breathless, frustrated,
idiotic
gusto. I applied to the FGC to be allowed to teach her how to masturbate, in the hopes of bleeding off some of the overflow, but they're kind of prudish about that sort of thing. The did append a coda to my assignment that freed me from having to safeguard her virginity, because I was burning through the magic budget like a flame sprite just to keep her alive.
A lot of the people that you think of as 'stupid' aren't, not really. What they are is unmotivated. True, functional idiots are as rare as actual geniuses. Princess Natalie was a diamond among these. She
was
motivated. She loved life, and people, and cats, and chickens, and knives, and fire, and the moat. Sometimes a number of these things at once. Even standard princessish activities like needlework were a minefield of narrowly missed arteries and almost-disfiguring scars.
Then, finally (finally!) her tits came in. Nothing special or anything, nice, high, not too big, pretty pink nipples, appropriate to the graceful figure of the newly adult princess of her eighteenth summer. Now all I had to do was keep her alive through a kidnapping, and the FGC had promised to use its influence to get her married off as quickly as possible afterward. The chairman confided in me that he was glad I'd ended up with the assignment, because he didn't think anyone without a touch of evil could have weathered her this long. I was inclined to agree.
Then, inevitably, she screwed it all up by kidnapping herself. On the morning after her eighteenth birthday, she wasn't in her bed. The castle was in an uproar. The FGC hadn't sent me any word of a pending action, and they do
not
fuck up on that kind of stuff. As far as bureaucracies go, the Fairy Godmother Committee is a model of studied efficiency.
So, anyway, she was gone. Even with my locater spells I couldn't find her for fifteen minutes. When I finally did, she was on a thin trail, threaded through acres of marsh behind the castle. She had set a determined pace, and in a rare flash of practicality, she was wearing one of her coats. Wearing it over her nightie, but still. I flew around the next bend ahead of her and landed, taking the form of an old peasant woman.
When she came upon me, she spake, "Hello, old peasant woman!"
"Hello dearie, what are you up to today?"
