Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like. -- Lemony Snicket

Solvej was not a great believer in coincidences. If something happened, it had almost certainly happened for a reason. What that reason was, and who or what had made something happen, she had never yet been able to work out. But whatever the answer was, things rarely happened for no reason.

And so her reaction upon seeing the swan was to grumble, "Really?"

She had just been reading a fairy tale in which a swan -- or at least, its wings -- featured prominently. Now a swan had inexplicably flown right into the palace wall and broken its neck. Clearly, whoever or whatever was in charge had a sense of humour, and no sense of subtlety.

She knelt down next to the swan. It was undoubtedly dead, its neck bent at an unnatural angle, its eyes dull and lifeless. Why had it flown into the wall? Had some higher power literally hurled it in her general direction? Had it simply not been looking where it was going?

The ghost tried to pick up the corpse. This was harder than it sounded. A swan was a large bird, and dead creatures were always awkward to handle. Its head hung awkwardly and its wings made it hard to get a grip on its body.

Gritting her teeth, Solvej held the corpse as tightly and as far away from herself as she could as she carried it across the courtyard. She stopped at the door and glanced around. There was no one in sight, but that didn't mean no one was watching. It would be rather hard to explain why she was carrying a dead swan into the palace. It would be even harder to explain why she was cutting its wings off, if someone found her in the process.

She sighed. Supernatural help or not, this would be a right headache.

~~~~

One of the good things about the palace being so ludicrously huge was that there were no shortage of little-used nooks and crannies hidden around it. This extended to its stables. Solvej set the dead swan down on a pile of old sacks in a corner well away from the most-visited areas of the stables.

She leaned back against the wall and frowned down at the corpse. How was she supposed to use its wings to fly anywhere? She could remove its wings, and magically attach them to her back, but how could she make them work? She couldn't make them large enough to carry her, and making them move would require finding some way to attach their muscles to hers...

Or was she approaching this problem from the wrong angle?

The idea of cutting off the swan's wings would never have occurred to her if she hadn't read that story. But there was a way to use a dead animal to disguise oneself: skin it, place a spell on the skin, and wear it as a cape. If the spell had been cast properly, the wearer would then become the animal whose skin they wore. It was not a spell she had ever tried herself, but she was sure she could find some information on it in her spell-books.

Now, how was she to do all this before the Magician appeared?

~~~~

"You want me to what?"

Hjalmar hadn't heard correctly. He was absolutely sure he hadn't heard correctly. There was no way Solvej had seriously just asked him to help her skin a swan.

The ghost sighed. "I need a disguise so I can eavesdrop on the Magician without being seen. There's a spell that can make someone become an animal when they wear its skin. So, I need you to help me skin the swan."

There were so many things Hjalmar wanted to say that he spluttered for a moment, unable to decide which of them to say first.

"I don't know how to skin anything!" he exclaimed at last. "And this whole idea is bizarre!"

"A lot of magic might seem bizarre to someone who isn't a witch," Solvej said.

After so many months in her company, Hjalmar had learnt to tell when she was dodging a subject. She had a way of looking the person she was addressing in the face, but being careful never to meet their eyes. He gave her an unimpressed look. The ghost pointedly looked at the wall behind him. Hjalmar folded his arms. Solvej tried to whistle innocently, but apparently couldn't think of a tune. Hjalmar began to tap his foot against the floor.

Solvej's tuneless whistling died away. "All right, it's weird. I'm not exactly eager to skin something either. But I need a disguise."

Hjalmar closed his eyes and prayed for patience. "I don't think you can skin a bird. I've never heard of anyone doing it, anyway."

She frowned. "True enough. Well, will you help me pluck it then?"

There came a time when all one could do was shrug and admit defeat. This was that time.

~~~~

Plucking a bird was a most unpleasant business. It required grabbing each feather and yanking it off the bird's body, and the feathers had an irritating tendency to attach themselves to the clothes and hair of the person doing the plucking. In the last few hours, Hjalmar had suddenly lost any liking he once had for birds.

When the swan was finally plucked, Hjalmar and Solvej had a swan's corpse and a sack full of feathers to deal with.

"What do we do with all this?" Hjalmar asked, trying and failing to brush some of the feathers off his coat.

"I'll make a cape out of the feathers," Solvej said. "We can bury the swan."

For the second time today, Hjalmar found himself praying for patience. "Bury it where? In the royal flowerbeds? I think the King and Queen might complain if we go digging up their garden. Especially if we bury something there."

Solvej looked surprised. "Why would they complain? It would enrich the quality of the soil."

Good grief. Had she completely taken leave of her senses? Hjalmar was about to throw his hands up in despair when he noticed the smile playing around the corners of her mouth.

"That isn't funny," he said flatly.

Solvej dissolved into giggles. "The look on your face--!"

Hjalmar did not smile. Really, he didn't. This was no laughing matter. It should be treated with seriousness.

...Oh, who was he fooling?

~~~~

Laughing is all very well, but it doesn't make problems go away. One can laugh until they cry, but when the laughter stops, their problems are still as real as before. When Hjalmar and Solvej stopped laughing, they still had a bag of feathers and a dead swan.

A dead swan that was beginning to decompose, Hjalmar suspected. There was a whiff of some unpleasant smell lurking under the scent of hay and oats that hung around this part of the stables.

"I suppose we could just explain to the King and Queen," he said, glancing down at the swan, which looked so small and pitiful and naked without its feathers, and hurriedly looking away.

"Explain what?"

"Why we're digging up their gardens."

~~~~

Queen Maibrit didn't bat an eyelash when Solvej asked permission to bury a swan in the gardens.

"Don't dig anywhere near the flower beds, or in any of the wide open lawns," the Queen said. She spoke so calmly that one might have thought she received similar requests every day. But then, Solvej thought, when your daughter was cursed, it probably took a lot to rattle you. "Somewhere near the bushes would be best, I think. But be sure you consult a gardener before you start digging. They will point you to a suitable spot."

"Thank you," Solvej said. Hjalmar wisely decided not to say anything.

And that was that.

~~~~

Hjalmar, with the help of a junior gardener, was digging the swan's grave. The parasite-in-Rigmor's-mind was... actually, Solvej wasn't sure where the parasite was, but it was nowhere nearby and her spells told her that it hadn't left the castle, so she felt she could safely dismiss it from her thoughts for the moment.

She had a much more important problem to worry about. How was she to make a cape out of the swan's feathers? She had a cape, and she had the feathers, but how was she to put them together?

This required consulting a spellbook.

Several minutes later, she had a rough idea of how to add the feathers to the cape, and a rough idea of how to ensure the cape disguised her. She would have to do this in stages: first the feathers, then the disguise spell. It would be difficult, but she could do it.

Hours later...

"Damn it!"

Solvej buried her face in her hands. The cape, with only two feathers attached to it after all her work, seemed to taunt her.

Maybe I should put glue on it and throw the feathers at it, she thought, passing a hand over her eyes.

The idea made her laugh, impractical though it was. The mental image of herself wearing a cape covered in glue and badly-stuck-on feathers was comical enough to distract from her depressing lack of progress.

Solvej picked up another feather and held it over the cape draped over her desk. "You will become part of the cape," she commanded it, and let go of it.

The feather fluttered down to land on the fabric. Almost reluctantly, it attached itself to the cape beside the other two feathers.

Solvej sighed. This would take a long time. It also raised worrying implications for how good her control over her magic was. She could do large, flashy spells like creating animals out of illusionary flames. But she was finding it difficult to do a smaller, more precise spell. She would have to practice using her magic until she could do both sorts of spells with the same ease.

Hours later, the lights had been lit all over the palace. Outside, rain fell in a steady drizzle, the sort of drizzle that could last for hours and made life unpleasant for anyone unlucky enough to be out in it. There was little chance that the Magician would appear tonight.

Inside the palace, Solvej surveyed her work with an expression of triumph. It had taken hours of painstakingly attaching one feather at a time to the cape, but the cape was ready. Stage one of her plan was finally complete.

Stage two, on the other hand...

There was more than one spell she could use to disguise herself. This meant she had to spend another hour weighing up the pros and cons of each until she decided upon one. And then she had to actually cast the spell -- something she wasn't sure if she could do, after how weak her spells had been earlier.

Why could nothing be easy?

The spell she had chosen was a shape-shifting spell of sorts. When cast on a cape, it not only made the person wearing that cape appear to be something else, but it turned them into that something else. As soon as the cape was removed, the person went back to their original form.

When she first chose that spell, it seemed her best option. She might have to follow the Magician to some unpleasant and hard-to-reach place, after all, so she might as well be a bird at the time.

Now, as she considered how difficult this spell would be to cast, she wondered if she had chosen poorly.

It's all well and good, Solvej thought as she gathered her magic for her first attempt at casting the spell, for Fairy Godmothers to tell someone else to "Do this!", "Do that!", and "Make that happen!". They aren't the ones who have to do the actual work.

She concentrated on the cape as it was and the spell she wanted to cast on it. Contrary to popular belief, magic spells did not require much chanting or waving a wand. The most important things in casting a spell were to think of the spell you wanted to cast, then to think of the object you wished to cast it on, and finally to more or less throw your magic in the direction of that object. Magic words and wands made casting a spell more accurate, but they weren't essential.

All the same, Solvej wished she had a wand. She would need all the help she could get.

She cast the spell and waited to see what would happen. Minutes ticked slowly by. Nothing happened. There was no sense of the spell taking effect.

Result of attempt one: utter failure.

~~~~

Result of attempt two: the exact same.

~~~~

Result of attempt three: damn it!

Solvej ground her teeth and buried her head in her hands. It was after midnight, the rain was still pattering against the window, the candles she'd lit had burnt down to mere stubs... and her spell still wasn't working.

Maybe she should just choose another spell, one that was easier to cast.

Solvej reached for her spellbook again, then changed her mind. No! She had chosen this spell, and she would cast it properly if it killed her! ...Well, obviously it couldn't kill her when she was already dead, but she would cast it no matter how many tries it took.

~~~~

Result of attempt four: still the same.

~~~~

Result of attempt five: the spell was cast successfully, but it was so weak that it was essentially useless. Still a better result than all the previous times, Solvej thought, but hardly a ringing success.

The rain outside had stopped, and been replaced with a howling wind. The candles had long since guttered out. Her only source of light was a glowing ball of light that she had conjured, and which now hovered over the table. There wasn't a sound to be heard anywhere in the castle.

The ghost took a deep breath and prepared for attempt six.

~~~~

Result of attempt six: the spell was cast again. It was still too weak.

~~~~

Result of attempt seven: success!