She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises. -- Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

Solvej's immediate reaction was to jump back and look around wildly for somewhere to hide. It took a moment for common sense to overcome her shock. She realised then that the Magician was not actually in the room with her. He was standing on the windowsill, glaring in at her, and behind him, floating in mid-air, was one of the most bizarre monsters she had ever seen. Under other circumstances, she would have been very curious to know what sort of creature was shaped vaguely like a giant dog, with eyestalks and multiple legs. The Magician, however, could not be ignored for a cryptozoological investigation.

"How can you be here?" the Magician hissed. The windowpane muffled his voice. She warily took a step closer so she could hear him better. "I killed you!"

"And I did my best to kill you," she returned. "Obviously, we're both too stubborn to die."

He hissed again, sounding like a snake that had just been trodden on. "You did die."

"Well, yes," she conceded, "but I don't intend to let a little thing like that stop me getting revenge."

He growled like an angry lion. She wondered if he spent his free time practicing animal noises. Perhaps he had learnt to communicate with animals. He was on roughly the same mental level as the lowest of them, she thought with a great deal of spite.

"This engagement is some plot of yours," the Magician said, pacing back and forth. At first she thought he was walking on the windowsill. Then it dawned on her that he was, in fact, walking on thin air. "You are using the Princess as bait to draw me out!"

Solvej almost attacked him there and then, her lack of weapons and the window between them notwithstanding. She restrained herself by thinking that that was exactly what he wanted.

"Unlike you, I don't use people as my puppets. This engagement only happened because of me, I admit. But I arranged it to break your spell, not to draw you out! Anyway," she finished with a dismissive sniff, "there was no need to draw you out. You came running in a panic at the first sign your dastardly designs were in danger."

She felt quite proud of herself for that last sentence. It had been great fun to say. What a pity she'd never had a chance to say it before!

The Magician glared at her. Behind her, his extraordinary pet -- or whatever it was -- did the same.

"All your plans will come to nothing," he said. "I will win, and when I do..."

He trailed off. Solvej said nothing, but she thought a great deal.

~~~~

Rigmor, after a lifetime of living under the Magician's thumb, had learnt how to tell when he was nearby. When the temperature plummeted, when the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stood on end, and when the atmosphere suddenly became still and tense in some hard-to-define way... Those were all sure signs that he was there.

Her instinctive reaction was to run and hide. She forced herself to stand her ground. Where would she run to, anyway? He would catch her before she could get far.

All the same, nothing prepared her for the reality of him appearing outside her window, riding some enormous monster.

"There you are," he said, baring his teeth in a parody of a smile. "How nice to see you again."

Rigmor suppressed the urge to run away screaming. "I could say the same to you, but my parents told me not to tell lies."

His eyes narrowed. He gave her a look that could have burnt her to a crisp on the spot.

"Where is your..." He paused, a look of disgust flickering over his face, "fiancé? I want to have a few words with him." 

Hjalmar, if Rigmor remembered correctly, was currently being quizzed by her parents on how much of her aunt's lessons he remembered. He might see the Magician's interruption as a blessing in disguise.

"I don't know," she said.

It wasn't strictly a lie, but it wasn't the whole truth either. She would say no more, however. The Magician seemed to realise this.

"I met your ghostly friend a few minutes ago," he said conversationally. "How noble of her to use you to get her revenge on me!"

Ah, there was the old "turn people against their allies" trick. It was a clever ploy. It might even have worked, if she hadn't spent so much of her life under his control.

"Do go away," she said in the most bored tone she could manage when her heart was pounding in her ears. "You're spoiling the view."

No matter how scared you were of someone, it was easy to mock them when they were on one side of a window and you were on the other. Rigmor did briefly worry that he might be angry enough to try to break the window, but he seemed content to glower at her from the back of his flying monstrosity.

"Do you think you've won?" he asked. Despite how emotionless his voice invariably was, he managed to convey a sense of genuine curiosity. "This isn't the end of the war, princess. It isn't even the end of the battle."

~~~~

The only thing more irritating than being forced to memorise long, complicated family trees, Hjalmar had discovered, was being forced to list long, complicated family trees. Even worse was having an audience who were more than willing to point out every mistake he made.

"Prince Edvard succeeded his mother and married Duchess... er... Heiðrún?"

King Severin groaned and buried his head in his hands. "This boy's hopeless, Maibrit. He can't remember a thing he's been told."

Hjalmar just barely restrained himself from an angry outburst.

Queen Maibrit frowned at her husband. "You would find this every bit as difficult if you were in his position."

Hjalmar decided that he liked Rigmor's mother a great deal better than her father.

"Will someone please give me one good reason why I have to learn all these--" He broke off with a high-pitched and -- he was ashamed to admit -- decidedly undignified squeak. But really, he felt he was justified in squeaking. Who wouldn't, if they happened to glance out the window and found themselves looking at a creature straight out of a nightmare?

The King and Queen turned to see what he was staring at. They both leapt to their feet when they saw the monster hovering outside their window -- and its rider.

Hjalmar had never seen the Magician before, but it required very little imagination to guess that this was him. Like Solvej had said, he looked human at first glance, but the longer you looked at him the less human he appeared.

"What do you want here?" the King growled, pulling a sword from a suit of armour propped against the wall. "Get out of my castle before I cut you to ribbons!"

Hjalmar revised his opinion of the King. No matter how annoying someone was, if they went around wielding swords then it was probably best not to antagonise them too much.

The Magician appeared to think so too. In spite of the window between them, he moved his flying... creature further away. His strangely-colourless eyes raked over the King, the Queen, and the contents of the sitting room, finally settling on Hjalmar. Those eyes seemed to peel back his skin and stare right into his mind. Hjalmar felt suddenly sick and dizzy.

"So this is the boy." Despite the pane of glass separating him from them, they could hear his every word clearly. "So this is the latest to defy me. Haven't you learnt your lesson by now?"

"We have nothing to say to you, Magician," the Queen said, so frostily that the temperature of the room seemed to plummet. "Begone."

Even through the waves of nausea brought on by the Magician's gaze, Hjalmar found the presence of mind to wonder what stopped the Magician from simply breaking the window and charging into the room.

The Magician's mouth twisted into a bizarre grimace. It took Hjalmar a moment to realise the Magician was smiling. Well, trying to smile. He apparently didn't know what a smile was supposed to look like.

"You cannot command me to do anything, your Majesty." His eyes darted to Hjalmar again, and the feeling of nausea and vertigo returned. "I want a word with the boy."

Oh, no. This couldn't be good.

"I have nothing to say to you," Hjalmar said firmly. As firmly as he could manage when the room was spinning around him, anyway.

The Magician bared his teeth in another not-smile. "No, you'd rather listen to your ghostly... friend."

Hjalmar frowned. What was that supposed to mean? What was the Magician up to? His instincts warned him that this was some sort of trap, but what did Solvej have to do with it?

"What do you mean?" he asked warily, not taking his eyes off the Magician in spite of how dizzy it made him feel.

The King made a noise like an engine letting off steam. "Are you out of your mind, boy? Don't talk to him!"

"Why, don't you know? Your little witch is setting a trap for me, and using you as the bait."

It was a painfully obvious ruse. Hjalmar knew that as well as he knew his own name. So why was it that everything the Magician said suddenly sounded like excellent sense? His thoughts were slow and strangely muddled. He knew what he was being told was wrong, but he couldn't think why.

A sharp, stabbing pain shot through his arm. Hjalmar yelped and instinctively jumped back.

"I apologise," the Queen said, putting her hair-pin back in place amid her carefully-styled hairdo, "but a jolt of pain is the best way to shake off the nastier kinds of magic."

Hjalmar rubbed his arm. He almost wondered how she knew what was and wasn't effective, then remembered that this was a woman whose daughter had been cursed.

Outside the window, the Magician growled like an angry dog. "Do you think you can defy me and survive?"

"We're defying you right now," the King said, brandishing his sword menacingly, "and we're surviving just fine."

~~~~

The Magician's uninvited visit cast a shadow over the rest of the evening. The King and Queen decided not to interrogate Hjalmar on his lessons any more after what had just happened. Hjalmar was too shaken to be able to appreciate this. The revelation that the Magician could... could meddle with his mind like that... It made him feel ill. It also made him feel very worried about what might happen if he ever met the Magician when there were no hair-pins nearby.

The next morning, both Solvej and Rigmor were curiously grim and silent. Hjalmar didn't notice at first, because he himself was caught up in his thoughts, but it suddenly dawned on him that the breakfast table was dead silent.

Rigmor was pushing her porridge around her plate, not eating any of it. Solvej, who didn't need to eat and who didn't like porridge, was reading a heavy, dusty old tome with an uncharacteristic scowl on her face.

"Is something wrong?" Hjalmar ventured to ask after several minutes of silence broken only by the scrape of Rigmor's spoon.

"The damn Magician, that's what," Rigmor growled, jabbing her spoon into her porridge with such force that he wondered if she was imagining the Magician in its place.

Solvej tore herself away from her book. "You saw him too?"

"Too?" Hjalmar repeated. "Did he go to you two as well?"

For a moment, the three of them looked at each other in surprised silence.

"Yes," Rigmor said at last. "He popped up outside my window with one of his pet monsters."

"He did the same to me," Solvej said, slamming the book closed.

"And me." Hjalmar shuddered at the memory. "Is it normal to feel sick when he looks at you?"

"I feel sick every time I see him," Rigmor said.

"Sick in what way?" Solvej asked, looking suddenly interested. "Sick in an 'I can't believe such a being exists' sort of way, or sick in an 'I'm going to vomit' way?"

Hjalmar thought for a moment. "Both ways, but mostly the second."

Oh dear. Had he said something wrong? Now both Solvej and Rigmor were looking at him in alarm.

"He tried to take over your mind?" Rigmor's voice was little more than a whisper. She looked as if she might faint on the spot. That in itself was unusual enough to make him worried. He had never seen Rigmor look so shaken. "Did he succeed?"

"Obviously not, or you wouldn't be here," Solvej said grimly.

"The Queen's hair-pins broke his hold on me," Hjalmar said.

Solvej looked blank. Rigmor laughed -- a very brief, startled sort of laugh that suggested she hadn't expected to hear that.

"You felt the wrath of the hair-pins too, then?" she asked with a wry grin. "Mother's hair-pins have been the terror of every long-winded politician for decades. During council sessions and parliament meetings, if someone talks too much, or causes a disturbance, or starts insulting someone else, Mother will take one of her hair-pins out, and then everyone knows to shut up."

Solvej's eyes widened. "You mean she goes around stabbing people?"

"Not stabbing," Rigmor said, shaking her head. "Just... poking them."

Hjalmar remembered what a poke from the Queen's hair-pin had felt like. "Stabbing" might be too strong a word, but "poking" was too mild. "Jabbing", perhaps? Whatever the right word was, it had stung badly at the time, but the pain had faded quickly.

"Has she ever poked the Magician?" Solvej was saying.

Rigmor shook her head again. "No, but not for want of trying. And if she ever managed it, "stabbing" would be the right word."

Hjalmar made a mental note to never get on the Queen's wrong side. That thought led to another, rather odd thought. Perhaps, to defeat the Magician, all they would have to do was get the Queen in a rage, throw him in her general direction, and then run for cover?

"So the Magician has made his presence known," Solvej said, changing the subject. She turned to Rigmor. "I think we can reasonably expect him to bring you back under the curse sometime... oh, in the next few hours? Not longer than a day, if I know him."

The colour drained from Rigmor's already-pale face, but otherwise she showed no alarm. "I'd better be ready, then."

"So will I," Solvej said. "So will I."