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i.
She was a large, placid, rosy-cheeked girl, who looked a bit like a milkmaid.
(Or, that is, what the farmer remembered a milkmaid looking like. After five years of war, all the milkmaids had either gone into the army or been killed in one of the White Queen’s raids. The farmer had been milking her own cows for two years, when she wasn’t hiding them in the back pasture to protect them from foraging soldiers or common looters.)
“What do you want?” the farmer asked the girl, not unkindly, but cautiously. In these days, you had to be careful. Even though this girl looked about as far from dangerous as you could be.
The girl smiled, gap-toothed. “A job.”
~//~
The girl – Millie, she said her name was – turned out to be a good worker. The farmer was proud of herself for taking a chance on a girl from across the border; but then, ever since one of their own knights killed the White Queen, food had to have started getting pretty scarce on the other side. A girl like Millie, who worked hard for her keep but enjoyed her meals, would have found it difficult in the Northern Realms these days.
Millie sung as she worked, strange folk songs the farmer had never heard before. They seemed to help her work, her arm muscles bulging as she swung hay bales up into the loft, her broad face glowing with both sweat and a good-natured smile. When one of the cows had a difficult calving, she crooned strange words to it, a hypnotizing sing-song, and both cow and calf lived.
The farmer wondered sometimes what Millie was running from, or if it was the famine alone. Millie looked over her shoulder at sudden noises, and it was impossible to sneak up on her. She’d just spin round and laugh, as if at a great joke, and you found yourself laughing with her. It was impossible not to.
~//~
ii.
It was a small farmhouse, nothing fancy, but the knight saw the curl of smoke from the chimney, and she could smell sausages. Sausages were her great undoing, and she hadn’t had a taste of one in donkey’s years. Not that the Southern Reaches were experiencing famine like across the border, but if you weren’t a farmer (and thus able to hide a pig or two from foraging soldiers), you couldn’t find a sausage for love or money.
She paused, walking up the lane, to listen. There was laughter inside what must be the kitchen, great bursts of cheerful laughter, interspersed with a child’s joyful shriek. It made her smile, remembering her own small boy, safe with his grandmother in a country castle far from the front. She hadn’t heard children’s laughter in almost as long as she’d had sausages.
When she pushed open the door, she looked in at the startled faces of a farmer and her two young children, and into a poker pointed at her face by a terrified young milkmaid. Her rosy cheeks had gone white and her eyes wide, even though she was gritting her teeth and not letting the poker shake.
“Whoa,” the knight said, smiling, holding her hands up to show that she meant no harm. “One sausage. Just one? Surely you could spare one measly little sausage for a soldier of your Queen.”
There was a moment’s tense silence, and then, at a nod from the farmer, the milkmaid put the poker down and collapsed into a chair. The knight sank into a chair herself and grinned happily at the children.
~//~
The knight was saddling her horse when the milkmaid came out to her. “Please,” she said, looking terribly earnest, “take me with you?”
Her accent was strange, but she wouldn’t be the only woman this near to the border with mixed ancestry. Or perhaps she was a refugee; either way, she was well-loved here. The children had perched on her massive knee, and the farmer had smiled at her when she got up to collect the dishes. “Why do you want to leave? I’d think you’d be happy here. Sausages, remember?”
The milkmaid laughed. “Yes. But I want to help.” She waved her hands around, artlessly. “You know. Help the war. We have to win.”
The knight thought about it. Anyone who was still gung-ho about the war effort was very naïve, but then this milkmaid did look pretty young. Her bright kerchief made her seem even younger, as did her chubby cheeks and big eyes. And her solid farm muscles would be a great help on the road…
“All right,” she said, and watched the milkmaid’s face break into a wide, gap-toothed grin. “But you’ll have to walk until we can steal a horse.”
~//~
Travelling with Millie was a decided improvement on travelling alone. The knight was proud of herself for taking a chance on a farm girl, but then, life as a de facto squire had to be more interesting than sitting on a little farm with only a farmer and two children for company. The war at home wasn’t that interesting these days, not with the White Queen dead and their own Queen off in enemy territory mopping up her remaining troops, but it was more interesting than milking cows.
Millie could start a fire from almost nothing, she had an excellent nose for finding things farmers had hidden from foragers, she was a miracle worker with the horses, and she was an excellent listener. The knight spent countless happy hours telling her war stories and, when those ran out, all the tales of castle hijinks she could remember from her training in the capital. Millie loved those stories, and her simple unaffected laughter was catching.
The knight wondered sometimes what Millie was thinking of, when she stared off into space, her eyes somewhere far away; but, knowing milkmaids, it was probably only about a boy she’d tumbled, or (perhaps even more likely) nothing at all. Or, perhaps, sausages.
~//~
iii.
The bishop groaned as she sank her aching feet into the basin of hot water. After a long day’s travel, this was pure heaven. They might be winning the war, but going from castle to castle checking for spies was not the bishop’s idea of fun. First, you had to travel all the time. Then, you had to do magic all the time, and not in your own carefully controlled environment, with everything just so, but like as not in a great big drafty hall, with squalling children and mewling kittens and countless small disturbances. It was enough to drive one to distraction.
And even after the magic was done, you had to make nice with the locals, smiling through a banquet they always threw in your honour. (People were so superstitious about not offending bishops. Just because she could conjure you impotent with the flick of a wrist didn’t mean she would. Even though fewer brats underfoot might be an improvement.) Banquets wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, except that somewhere back at the beginning of all this travel she’d been rash enough to compliment a bowl of tadpole soup, and now it was the centrepiece of every banquet.
Anything to liven up the daily slog was welcome, so when the great doors clattered open in the middle of the (duly tadpole-souped) banquet, the bishop looked up with interest.
It was a knight, dusty and careworn, her helm a bit dented but plume still defiantly intact. “Shelter for the night, milady?”
The hearty squire next to the knight looked as if she was rather more interested in food than shelter. From the size of her wide eyes, she’d also never seen a bishop before. The bishop smiled at her; she was well aware that her ecclesiastical robes were indeed quite stunning. Well might she stare.
~//~
The knock on the bishop’s door sent her foe-detector to spinning tizzily. She frowned at it, then picked up her wand, just in case.
But when she opened the door it was only the big squire, blinking owlishly at the wand, and the bishop put it down. Truly this job was a frustrating one, with so much magical interference. This girl was the farthest thing possible from a spy, even if she hadn’t been the squire of one of the Queen’s own knights. Spies were slender mysterious things; the last one she’d caught had been hiding in the chimney of a baron’s library, sneaking out under cover of darkness to read confidential missives and then sending smoke signals to a collaborator on a nearby hilltop.
Perhaps it was the reminder of how difficult her job was that made her listen sympathetically to the squire’s request to join her team. She already had an assistant and a bodyguard, but the assistant was for magic and the bodyguard was too stupid to live. This Millie, with her cheerful look and ready smile, might be just the person to make her job less trying. (And, given her hearty appearance, she might be willing to down the tadpole soup, which would truly be a blessing.)
~//~
Millie was a revelation. The bishop was proud of herself for taking a chance on a military girl. Someone had taught her how to massage tired shoulders – perhaps the knight, after a weary day’s travel – and she turned out to adore tadpole soup. During their journeys, her simple merry laughter rang out easily, cheering them all up and making even the dour bodyguard smile. She knew the oddest and most fascinating stories, even if her storytelling was rough and untutored (her accent was a bit strange, too, but that was what the lack of an education would do), and she was even willing to be coaxed into a song now and again.
And when it came to the actual job, Millie was a quick study. Oh, she was no magician – she must be some sort of anti-magician, actually, as the foe-detector never did stop spinning tizzily whenever she came near, until the bishop swore at it and manually set it to accept her. Sometimes magical nullness did that to magical things; it was one reason magic was an art, not a science (a rant that Millie listened quite patiently to, with a blank but pleasant look on her broad face). But Millie didn’t need magic to be helpful – she was always willing to be told what to do, and she never forgot an instruction. Within weeks, she’d learned the most vexing distractions for a magician, and had eased the bishop’s work by eliminating both squalling children and mewling kittens. (Usually by taking them into a side courtyard and playing with them; both children and kittens seemed to fall in love with Millie instantly.)
With Millie along, the bishop’s mood cheered up considerably. Oh, they didn’t find any spies on the remainder of their swing through the eastern territories, but her magic was humming along much more easily, and without having to eat tadpole soup every third night, so were her insides. By the time they headed back to the capital, she was feeling better than she had in years.
She wondered sometimes what Millie thought about, staring off into space as she saddled up the horses in the mornings, but it was probably just covetousness over her ecclesiastical robes, or anticipation for their visit to the capital. The bishop had been excited herself the first time she’d been to the royal castle, forty-odd years ago. It was completely understandable.
~//~
iv.
The chamberlain polished her pince-nez wearily, stopping to examine a smudge that might be a scratch and then tiredly putting them on again. In all her years of managing the royal keep, there had seldom been more trying days than these.
Oh, the war was going well enough. The queen had been away crusading in the north for more than a year now, but that was no hardship. Ever since the White Queen fell, the enemy forces had been overmatched and easily outmanoeuvred. It was only a matter of time before their king, fleeing from fortress to fortress with the baby princess, would be cornered and captured. And there hadn’t been any campaigning in their own country for months and months. A full harvest had been brought in, and the farmers were prospering. Why, only last week a passing knight had been telling tales of sausages.
But keeps did not run on war news alone. This one was currently troubled by such varied things as the playboy nature of the king, the escapades of the princesses – only four years old, they were, but twin terrors – and the constant rumours of spies. The chamberlain had sent out the sole remaining bishop (the other having been lost in an unfortunate encounter with a pitchfork-wielding giantess) to comb the countryside, but so far the bishop had reported nothing. She was due to report in today, but the chamberlain wasn’t holding out much hope.
(As for the playboy king and the mischievous princesses, those were everyday annoyances. Headache-inducing, but bearable.)
Adjusting her pince-nez again, she bumped into a wide-eyed young woman.
~//~
Any other day, the chamberlain would probably have turned down the bishop’s maid-of-all-work without thinking twice. While good help was hard to come by, even for a royal keep, the girl hardly looked like good help. She looked like a well-fed milkmaid, with rosy cheeks and a faintly cow-like expression in her big eyes. The chamberlain had seen enough of big-eyed rosy-cheeked girls in recent months, since the Queen had ridden away to campaign in the north; if the bishop’s maid had been pretty, she’d have refused her immediately. The king did well enough for himself without the chamberlain putting more temptations in his path.
But the bishop’s maid wasn’t pretty, and when the chamberlain took a closer look she could see the hardworking muscles and callused hands. Her reason for wanting a change seemed solid enough – magic was a jittery thing, and being in close proximity to it on a daily basis might turn even the solidest of stomachs. If the queen had been in residence the maid would have been out of luck, for (as everyone knew) queens were the foremost mages of their kingdom, but the queen would be in the north for some months yet. With her gone, the Magician’s Throne sat vacant, and the maid’s stomach would be untroubled.
The chamberlain still wasn’t sure about taking the maid on, but the bishop herself tipped the balance. They were taking tea in the chamberlain’s quarters, after the bishop had given her report to the Small Council (predictably, she had failed to find any spies, despite the rumours that they were everywhere), when the bishop mentioned how useful the maid was in charming small children and keeping them away from her conjuring rites.
The chamberlain, who just that day had saved one of the princesses from a watery grave (by hauling her out of the well) and the other from death by burst appendix (by forbidding the cooks to bake any more sweet biscuits for a fortnight), brightened considerably. A chance to fire the princesses’ incompetent nanny, with an already-vetted replacement near at hand? Salvation.
~//~
Millie turned out to be an excellent nanny. There were no more near-death experiences, and the princesses even stopped going up on the battlements and dropping jelly doughnuts on the soldiers patrolling the moat. Millie chased them around the castle quite cheerfully, never getting frustrated or making them wail, and the chamberlain gratefully closeted herself in the council room, taking reports from the spy-hunters that she’d recently sent out to bolster the bishop’s efforts. Without the constant headaches of small children underfoot, she found her burden lessened quite considerably.
Sometimes when she took a break from her work and stepped to the window to polish her pince-nez, she could see the princesses playing in the courtyard. They looked like much sweeter little spitfires now. Their pinafores were still rumpled, their faces often just as dirty, but Millie was teaching them to sing, and dance, and care for small animals. They might not be having the most regal of upbringings at present, and the queen might immediately hire a governess when she returned and found her daughters being cared for by a maid, but the chamberlain quite frankly did not care. They were healthy, not in danger of imminent death by drowning or pastry, and giggling instead of wailing. Time enough for lessons and deportment later.
And the princesses’ new baby kittens were adorable, even the chamberlain had to admit.
(She hadn’t time to wonder what Millie was thinking about when she stared up at the battlements, as if overcome by their size. She had spies to find.)
~//~
v.
Technically, it was a library.
Practically, it was a quiet spot in the keep that nobody bothered about since his wife had ridden north, and it had a lot of clever nooks for hiding alcohol and surreptitiously meeting with obliging courtiers. That busybody chamberlain was always bustling about the corridors looking severely over her pince-nez, but she never came in here; something about it being a royal spot and having too much royal magic, or some faff like that.
The king didn’t put much stock in ‘royal magic’. He didn’t have any magic himself, and it hadn’t done him any harm, had it? He’d still successfully wooed a princess and become a king, and kept his good looks and charm to boot. Magic gave you forehead lines and made your head ache, if his wife was any indication. No, the library might be full of ‘royal magic’ and dusty grimoires that sometimes gave the king the shivers, but the important things about it were his personal cache of whiskey and the comfortable pile of pillows and blankets he’d set up in one corner.
A pile of pillows and blankets that today had far more toddlers and kittens than he was expecting.
~//~
He’d vaguely noticed her before, a solid country girl who made his daughters laugh more than they ever had since their mother went north. She wasn’t near pretty enough to tempt him – he liked lovely sylphs who batted their eyelashes at him and floated gracefully across the floor – but he approved on principle of anyone who made his daughters laugh. They were scamps of the highest order (they should be, they were his), and he didn’t have much time to spend with them, but he did like them.
As they swarmed his ankles, demanding to be swung up in the air, the nanny smiled at him. She looked nicer when she smiled, the gap in her front teeth notwithstanding; he favoured her with a dazzling smile, and felt pleased when she blushed. He might not want her, but the whole castle being in love with him was as it should be. He was the king, wasn’t he?
Somewhere in between tickling one toddler and bouncing the other one on his knee, the king found himself consenting to letting the nanny use the library in the mornings. It wasn’t like he was awake at that hour anyway, and she had some plan of teaching the girls their letters. Their mother would like that, and he was fond of a good fairy story on occasion. Perhaps he could even find an evening or two to read to the girls himself. They were adorable little things, though their kittens had sharp claws.
~//~
With the nanny in residence, the library became an even more wonderful refuge. She was seldom there when the king shuffled in at noontime, blinking against the chill winter light, but her touches were everywhere. Hangover-cure appeared tucked thoughtfully next to his whiskey, and the blanket-and-pillow pile was always fluffed. (With the exception of the time the twins built a blanket-fort, but he’d brushed aside her apologies on that occasion with a hearty guffaw and dived underneath to pretend to be an attacking dragon.) She even found out somehow of his love for fairy stories and started leaving a book tucked invitingly amongst the pillows.
One night he stayed up reading late – something he hadn’t done in years, but he simply couldn’t put the book down – and fell asleep in the pillows instead of in his own regal bed (half-cold now without his wife there to warm it; he might have paramours, but he stopped short of taking them to his marriage bed). When he woke up, disoriented – not least from the lack of a hangover – the first thing he heard was the nanny’s melodic voice reading to the princesses.
He looked up at the bookcases, letting her voice wash over him. The accent had just the barest hint of something strange – not exotic, no one who had seen the nanny could have thought her anything exotic, but something different nonetheless. It was soothing, and he listened sleepily, watching the winter’s light playing over the long lines of magic grimoires. She’d been dusting, he thought vaguely; the library looked practically shining, the books well-loved.
He closed his eyes, lulled back to sleep by the singsong of the nanny’s voice as she read the girls the story of the first queen to sit the Magician’s Throne.
~//~
vi.
It was the night of the midwinter feast, and the pounding music and shouts of laughter from the great hall reached all the way up the winding tower stairs to the princesses’ bedroom. They snuggled down to sleep, Millie’s lullaby still echoing in their ears.
Millie smoothed down her skirts, took a deep breath, and started down the stairs.
~//~
She thought of the farmer and her daughters, pawns in the grand scheme of things, eking out a slender but happy living on their little border farm, of how the farmer had taken her on and shown her kindness, of the sausages and laughter around their small loving table.
She thought of the knight, patrolling the borderlands, of the tired slump of her shoulders and her rough-hewn charm, of her little boy living with his grandmother; she thought of all the knight’s stories about the war and the royal keep, with so many interesting and useful details.
She thought of the bishop, grand and more than a trifle conceited, who did so love to show off, even when what she was showing off were magical rituals that should perhaps be more carefully guarded; she thought of how the bishop had always made sure that her team was well fed and that they had comfortable sleeping arrangements, and of her transparent hatred of tadpole soup.
She thought of the chamberlain, so caught up in her search for spies, so desperately thankful for a competent nanny at last; she thought of the look on the old woman’s face as she watched the princesses play with their kittens, the smile only half-hidden behind her pince-nez.
She thought of the king, caught in a gilded cage of his own construction, too lazy or too comfortable to turn his nominal power to real use; she thought of the way he slept amongst his pillows, pretty and harmless, and of the way he swung his girls up into the air, laughing and proud.
And then she shook off her thoughts and stepped into the great hall.
~//~
No one took any notice of her at first.
The king, paying court to a pretty girl – the knight, helping herself to another plate of sausages – the bishop, turning this way and that to show off her midwinter finery – the chamberlain, surreptitiously rubbing her temples at the hubbub – they all had their own concerns, and none of them involved a milkmaid-squire-maid-nanny making her quiet way up the side of the great hall, toward the Magician’s Throne sitting vacant and cold at the top. (The milkmaid’s carefully constructed invisibility spell might have had something to do with it as well.)
Millie reached the Throne.
She skipped the second step, hopping nimbly over it (in one of her stories, the knight had said it squeaked). She blocked out all distractions (the bishop had taught her well). She reached out her magic (so painstakingly trained in those early morning hours in the library), letting the Throne smell her like a kitten would, its suspicious kitten-nose nuzzling at the edges of her magic. It tickled, and she smiled.
For a moment, she wasn’t sure, despite all her hard work, despite all her countless hours of reading and long nights of practice, what would happen. Perhaps she was about to be blown to kingdom come, and the only thing remaining of her would be her colossal cheek, thinking she could steal across an entire kingdom and fall upon the enemy from behind. Perhaps the bards would never know what she had meant to do, but would only make a comic song about the milkmaid who fancied herself a queen. Perhaps all these months of careful watching, listening, and learning were to be in vain –
But then the Magician’s Throne purred.
There was no other word for it. The low rumbles shivered their way up her arms, and Millie opened her eyes triumphantly, feeling its power coil under her fingertips, hers to do with as she wished, as the Throne acknowledged her as Queen.
~//~
“Millie?” (The knight, confused, finally looking up from her sausages as the floor shook.)
“And just what do you think you’re doing?” (The king, laughing, finding this all highly amusing.)
“Stop her!” (The bishop, dread in her voice, feeling the magic.)
Only the chamberlain was silent, and there was the numb shock of defeat in her eyes.
~//~
vii.
Millie sat on the step of her home, looking out over the valley. If there had been a doctor, which there wasn’t – any doctors in the Northern Realms had been long pressed into service with the army – she couldn’t have told them anything Millie didn’t already know. Their mother was old, and old age waited for no one.
Her sister sank down on the stoop next to her. “You always have a home with us.”
Millie stared blankly at the rolling hills. Yes, she could go home with her sister; she could help get the harvest in, and sing to her baby nephews, and try not to think about the extra mouth she was, with the famine everyone knew was on its way. She could bury her grief for her mother in good honest work, forgetting that she had ever dreamed of anything else.
“She wanted to send me to university,” Millie said, her voice flat even to her own ears.
Her sister sighed. “No university left now, even if we had the money,” she said, and pressed Millie’s hand with her smaller one. “You’ll have to use your magic to keep the cows healthy, I’m afraid.”
Just across those hills was the Southern Reaches, their sworn enemy. They wouldn’t have famine this year. Their land hadn’t been devastated, knights and armies alike sweeping across their fields, their queen slaughtered and their king fleeing from castle to castle with the baby princess. Their old women wouldn’t die unshriven, with neither bishop nor doctor to mark their passing.
“What else is there?” her sister asked, to Millie’s silence. “You can’t join the army. I’ve never seen a foot-soldier come back alive. We have to survive, for the children’s sake. I’d rather pay homage to the Dark Queen than starve.”
Millie watched the southern hills, feeling the wild germ of an idea stirring in her brain, old fairytales waking to life. “Maybe,” she said, slowly, “I don’t have to join the army to fight for my country.”
“You’re a farm girl from the borders,” her sister said, bluntly. “Yes, you have some magic – although you’ve only ever trained it with old Bertha – and some muscles. I’ll even grant that you have some charm. But what can you do with a little magic, a few muscles, and charm?”
“I think,” Millie said, watching the sun rise over the hills, “maybe I can do everything.”
~//~
viii.
The milkmaid, one hand resting lightly on the arm of the Throne, reached out the other, power sparking from her fingertips.
Compelled by the magic, the midwinter ball fell to its knees, bowing their heads.
“Queen me,” she said, softly.
~//~