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was made, that the king and queen had wanted to invite everyone, really everyone. And that if the person with the royal lot showed up with a friend or two, chances were they’d all get in.
    That took care of the common citizens, and, barring the number and manner of them, that was the easy part. Much harder were the high tables: who would sit near the king or the queen, who would have to make do at a slightly less high table headed by a mere prince or duke or baron, which countries were to be invited to send emissaries, and whether the fuss made over the emissaries should have more to do with the size and status of the country, or the number of unmarried sons in the royal family.
    But hardest of all was what to do about the fairies.
    Court magicians were members of the court, and there would be special high tables just for them, where they could compare notes on astrological marvels, cast aspersions on the work of other magicians not present to defend themselves, and be slightly world-weary about the necessity of coming to so superstitious and ridiculous an event as a royal name-day.
    But fairies were a different kettle of imaginary watery beings. Some fairies were nearly as powerful as the magicians, and what they thought and did was much more varied and unpredictable. Magicians had to attend the Academy for a number of years, and anyone calling himself a magician—since it was usually a he—had a degree in hippogriff leather to show for it, although no one but another magician would be able to read the invisible writing on it. Magicians could make earthquakes happen if they wanted to, or a castle go up (or down) in a night, and a properly drawn-up magician’s spell could last a lifetime. Mostly they were hired by powerful people to spy on their powerful neighbours, and to demonstrate their existence, so that the powerful neighbours didn’t try anything with their own magicians. (Fetes where the magicians of rival families would be present were always well attended, because the spectacles were sure to be exceptionally fine.) Magicians without a taste for this sort of flash stayed at the Academy, or at other academies, pursuing the ultimate secrets of the universe (and philosophies concerning the balance of magic), which were, presumably, dangerous, which was why Academicians tended to have long sombre faces, and to move as if they were waiting for something to leap out at them. But the point was that magicians had rules. Fairies were the wild cards in a country where the magic itself was wild.
    Even the queen was a little hesitant about issuing a blanket invitation to fairies. Several hundred fairies together—let alone several thousand—in one place were certain to kick up a tremendous dust of magic, and fate only knew what might be the outcome.
    “But most fairies live in towns and villages, do they not?” said the queen. “So they are, in a way, included in the invitation our heralds are carrying.” The fact was that no one really knew how many fairies—even how many practising fairies—there were in the country; the ones people knew about were the ones who lived in the towns and villages with other people and visibly did magic. There were known to be fairies who lived in the woods and the desert places (and possibly even in the waters), but they were rarely seen, and it was only assumed that they were fewer than the known ones.
    There were also, of course, wicked fairies, but there weren’t many of them, and they tended to keep a low profile, because they knew they were outnumbered—unless someone angered them, and people tried very, very hard not to anger them. It was the malice of the wicked fairies that gave the good ones a lot of their most remunerative work putting things back to rights, but generally speaking, things could be put back to rights. People were diligently cautious about bad fairies, but they didn’t worry about them too much; less than they worried about the weather, for example, a