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drought that would make crops fail, or a hard winter that would bring wolves into the towns. (It was actually easier if droughts or hard winters were caused by a bad fairy, because then what you did was very straightforward: you hired a good fairy to fix it. The capriciousness of real weather was beyond everybody, even the united efforts of the Academy, who periodically tried.)
    “I think,” said the king slowly, “I think that’s not quite enough.”
    The queen sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.” There had been relatively little magic in her father’s country and she had never quite adjusted to the omnipresence of magic, and of magical practitioners. Magic had its uses, but it made her nervous. Sigil she loved dearly, and she was at least half-friends with several of the other fairies strategically employed in the royal household; the magicians she mostly found tiresome, and was rather relieved than otherwise that none of them were at present speaking to her because they blamed her for the secrecy of her pregnancy.
    There was a pause. “What if,” said the queen at last, “what if we invited a few fairies to be godmothers to our daughter? We could ask twenty-one of them—one each for her twenty-one names, and one each for the twenty-one years of her minority. Twenty-one isn’t very many. There will be eighty-two magicians. And it will make the fairies seem, you know, wanted and welcome. We can ask Sigil whom to invite.”
    “Fairy godmothers?” said the king dubiously. “We’ll have a time getting that past the court council—and the bishop.”
    Sigil had been worrying about the fairies, too, and thought that inviting one-and-twenty fairies to be godmothers would be an excellent idea, if they could hedge it round first with enough precautions.
    “No gifts,” said the king. “Too controversial.”
    “Oh, godmothers must give gifts!” said the queen. “It would be terribly rude to tell them they mustn’t give their godchild anything!”
    “The queen’s right,” said Sigil, “but we can tell them they must be token gifts only, little things to amuse a baby or flatter a baby’s parents, nothing—nothing—difficult.” What she meant, the king and queen both knew, was nothing that would make the princess unduly visible on the ethereal planes. That sort of thing was the province of heroes, who were old enough to choose it and strong—or stupid—enough to bear it. “And I think we should invite at least one man. Male fairies are underappreciated, because almost no one remembers they exist.”
    “You must be the first of the godmothers, dear,” said the queen, but Sigil shook her head.
    “No . . . no,” she said, although the regret was clear in her voice. “I thank you most sincerely. But . . . I’m already too bound up in the fortunes of this family to be the best godmother for the new little one. Give her one-and-twenty fresh fairies, who will love the tie to the royal family. And it can be quite a useful thing to have a few fairies on your side.” The king remembered a time when he was still the prince, when one of the assistant chefs in the royal kitchens, who was also a fairy, was addressed by a mushroom, fried in butter and on its way to being part of a solitary late supper for the king, saying, “Don’t let the king eat me or I’ll poison him.” There was always a fairy or two in the royal kitchens (the rulers of this country did not use tasters) and while it took the magicians to find out who was responsible for the presence of the mushroom, it was the fairy who saved the king’s life.
    Sigil took the queen’s hands in her own. “Let me look after the catering. What do you think the cradle should be hung with? Silk? And what colours? Pink? Blue? Lavender? Gold?”
    “Gold, I think,” the queen said, glad to have the question of the fairy godmothers agreed upon, but disappointed and a little hurt that Sigil refused to be one of them. “Gold and white. Maybe a little