Original Fic -- Blueberry Muffins, 1/1
Summary: Odile, the great sorceress whose magic had helped rescue a princess and taken a tyrant off the throne, has some trouble with muffins. And with her housekeeper, but mostly it's the muffins.
Pairing: None
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None.
Author's Notes: I swear, this is meant to be a one-shot. I don't care if there's a backstory where the princess Odette is transformed into a white goose (though the bards prefer swan, since it's more romantic) by her evil sorcerer father, King Rothbart, and gets her secret lover, the duke Siegfried, to get her cousin Odile to help break the curse so she can marry Siegfried and take over ruling the country. And I absolutely, positively will not write another oneshot, where Odile gets to be oblivious and romantic and pine after the woodcutter who's trying to woo her. Or one where she helps out some other questing knight. This is a one-shot.
Blueberry Muffins
"Odile!"
Jumping guiltily, the sorceress' hand skidded over the carefully planned design she had chalked onto her worktable, drawing a line between points she had not meant to have meet. The centre of the table rippled, swallowed a great gulp of light, then belched back out a basket. Glumly, she examined its contents.
"Did I miss an appointment again, Maggie?"
"You missed lunch, from the looks of things," the other woman informed her. "And you've got ink in your hair again."
"Oh," she replied. Glancing around, she found a no-longer-steaming tray of soup and bread sitting on its designated table by the tower door. That explained why she'd been so hungry, of course. Satisfied with that, she turned her attention back to what her spell had produced. The colour was pretty much right for blueberries, but the shape was disturbingly wrong, and she hadn't actually been trying for blueberries in the first place. Curious, she turned her attention to the runes she'd crossed through when her hand had slipped. There was the sign for blue, of course, and she supposed that when she'd crossed through many it had started looking a bit like much, though that still didn't explain--
"Odile!"
"I'll wash my hair tonight, honestly," she assured her servant. Maggie snorted. "I will. I always wash my hair."
"And you never get the damned spots out."
That was true. She had masses of absolutely dead white hair, thanks to an incident with a unicorn and a wonky translation spell when she was ten. It was terribly suitable for a sorceress, so she'd never tried too hard to fix it, but the upkeep was awful. She usually ended up braiding the whole thing back and tying it up in a gigantic knot at the back of her head, which of course was then the perfect place for her to keep the handful of pens and brushes that accumulated in a day's work. (She'd tried to keep them in their places, but then she'd just start putting them down and losing the damn things. Keeping them tucked up behind her ear had never worked, either. Not enough room, for one thing, and then the ink blotches wound up dripping into her eyes. She knocked them out whenever she put on her reading glasses, too.)
"Sorry, Maggie. Do I have a formal audience or something coming up?"
"No."
She frowned. Margaret of Bendford was one of the most sensible, pragmatic women she'd ever met, and the only one who'd managed to keep the sorceress' household in order since she'd given up doing it for herself. In truth, she did it better than Odile had ever been able to do. She did yell a lot, though, and when she was really annoyed she started grinding her words out through her teeth in much the way she was doing now.
Turning away from the basket of giant blueberries, she fixed her housekeeper with her best I'm-really-terribly-absentminded-don't-mind-me-I-didn't-do-it-this-time look.
"You've a politely worded note from Masters Flick and Penning, of the publishing firm. They'd like to know if there's any chance of a grimoire coming out soonish," Maggie informed her frostily.
"Flick and Penning?"
"The publishing firm. Who put out your Common Curses and Commoner Counters last year, and Simple Charms the year before that. And offered to supply you with all the paper you need, in exchange for taking the publication of your next three books. Including the stationery with rose petals pressed into it, that Her Majesty complimented you on, the last time you wrote her."
"All the paper I need? But... That'd bankrupt them in a week! It'd bankrupt me if I didn't just conjure it up when I needed," she gasped, gesturing around her. Her workroom was, indeed, adrift in paper. A merry fire crackled in a fireplace dangerously surrounded by bookshelves, her worktables had huge sheets of foolscap tacked down on them, and the breeze through her numerous windows made the crumpled bits of rejected magic rustled like a strange and somewhat dangerous carpet.
"Fools they may be, but they're the best publishers you've ever worked with," Margaret announced severely. "You may be the grand high muckety-muck for now, but mark my words, it won't be long before all the decent apprentices are going to more reputable masters for their training, and all that fuss about the Queen will start sounding like some kind of myth."
She winced.
"But I don't even take on apprentices now! You won't let me -- you made me stop when Ian had that accident in the kitchen."
"He blew up my kitchen. And nearly with me in it."
"And it's not as though the bards have gotten the story right anyway," she continued to argue. "Not that my part in it was all that difficult, but they can't even get the details right. Odette was a white goose, not a swan, and I didn't cast a charm on Siegfried's armour to keep Rothbart's curses from hurting him, he just ducked a lot. And Rothbart wasn't any better a sorcerer than he was a King."
Margaret continued to glower at her.
"Er. But that doesn't matter? What's important is that the curse was broken, and Odette and Siegfried could marry? And Rothbart died?"
She glanced back over her shoulder at her latest spell. No, she wasn't going to be allowed to fix it until she'd fixed this.
"I could probably put together a little book of harmless love spells? Before the spring festival? The, er, the kinds of spells nobody's likely to do any real damage with?"
"That. Would do. I'll bring you a fresh tray for tea, my lady."
She smiled in relief as Maggie swept back out of the room. That had gone relatively well.
Turning back to the basket of blueberries, she tapped her chalk against her lip in contemplation. Then she shoved the chalk, and the long wooden wand Isaac had carved to hold it, into her hair, where it jounced against two fountain pens and a thick-bristled calligraphy brush. Picking up one of the fist-sized fruits, she took a careful, curious bite.
Inside was a ball of perfectly baked, but now rather soggy, muffin. She scowled.
"Damnit. How did I get them inside out?"