halfshellvenus | LJ Idol: Wheel of Chaos: "Cursecraft"

Cursecraft
Idol Wheel of Chaos | Week 5 | 1605 words
Toi toi toi (warding off bad luck)

x-x-x-x-x

Helga McTwittle was a hag, and proud of it. She kept her hair long and stringy, and she rubbed toads on her face to enhance her warts. She kept her fingernails gray and ragged, and she honed her screeches and cackles with the diligence of a singer practicing her scales.

She wasn't as powerful as her former schoolmate, the Evil Queen, but that was all right. Helga had a good business doling out curses and enchantments for money.

She lived in a house made of cookies and candy, which she used to entice little children. Once she had them, Helga made them clean her house. Then she laid a forgetting spell on them before releasing them back into the forest. It required more effort than most hags would find reasonable, but Helga hated housework, and little children were able to get to the small spaces that Helga (who frequently sampled her own house) could not.

She once tried to change a rat into a tiny person for cleaning purposes, but she wound up with a large rat with human hands, which was disgusting even to Helga.

Helga's home sat near one of the common forest paths, ensuring regular visitors. Evil stepmothers kept her supplied with children on a weekly basis, and the woods' extensive population of talking animals and woebegotten princes and princesses provided her with regular clientele. Though admittedly, her customers' requests were sometimes puzzling.

"A pistol?" she asked the frog who came to her door one afternoon.

"Yes, and a sword," he said.

"What does a frog need with either of those?"

"It impresses the ladies. And Miss Mousey is a very fine lady indeed!"

"Your horse is eating my begonias. I charge extra for that."

"Perhaps if he were smaller…" the frog suggested.

"Nice try," Helga said, "but I charge extra for that too."

"Drat!"

There was steady business in the number of young royals who disagreed with their parents' plans for their future. Princesses who were expected to embroider and strum harps all day longed for adventure. Princes who were sent to slay dragons wanted to carouse and wench, and those who were given important jobs at the castle wanted to peruse scrolls and languish in meadows instead.

Hardly anyone was satisfied with who they were. Except wolves, who terrorized pigs and disguised themselves as grandmothers and sheep to get the job done. Helga quite admired wolves. They made their own luck.

Helga herself was more feared than admired, because she had a temper that sometimes got the better of her. Lack of respect was one of the things that triggered it. She'd turned a few rude princes into frogs (and one into a beast). The highlight of her career was a pair of dissimilar sisters, where she had cursed the impertinent one with spouting toads and enchanted the polite one's words into diamonds.

There were also times when she just didn't like the look of someone. She'd sent a stray child after a truly obnoxious trio of self-satisfied bears once, and more than one woodsman had lost his sense of direction because of her.

"I think I might be cursed," she'd overheard one of them say to the other.

Think? Helga had cackled to herself. Perhaps that will stop him from doing favors for the Evil Queen.

But somehow, Helga hadn't noticed that, over time, her ability to do magic was slowly starting to wane.

Her first inkling was when a princess came to her door asking to be turned into a dragon.

"The last King was stupid, and this one is old and ugly. Why should I be at the mercy of my parents' political plans? Meanwhile, my brother does nothing but loll in the grass. I would rather be a predator than a pawn."

Helga quite agreed, but when she aimed her wand and unleashed her magic, the girl turned into a lizard instead.

How embarrassing, Helga thought.

She tried again, and again, and was just able to finally turn the lizard back into a princess.

Perhaps she had simply overestimated her abilities? She sent the princess on her way with a forgetting spell.

But two days later, a rat king came to her seeking an army's worth of sabers for an upcoming battle with a nutcracker (and what was it with animals and their obsessions with swords?). Helga only managed three tiny daggers before sending the rat king away without asking for payment.

The last straw was the day she was looking out her kitchen window and spied a familiar figure on the path.

Here comes that little girl in the red cape. Oh, she's a dim one! But she cleans better than most...

Helga watched the girl walk right past her delicious house without even glancing at it. To add insult to injury, a deer wandered into the garden and began gnawing on some of the lower-hanging gingerbread shingles.

Helga was about to zap the deer with her wand, when she thought better of it. She hardly even had a good whammy in her anymore, and she couldn't afford to waste what little magic she had.

"Shoo!" she told the deer, snapping a dish towel at it. .

This won't do at all, Helga thought. She had to get more power again. But how?

Helga thought and baked, and baked and thought. She'd just reshingled the damaged eaves with a row of superb molasses cookies when an idea came to her.

The Queen had power to spare. What if Helga could steal it?

It would be risky, but what other options did she have? She could become an herb seller like her cousin, Thistle. The thought of it made her shudder.

So, Helga turned to her spellbooks for the first time since school. She read each painstaking detail, jotting down possibilities and restrictions. Then she stared at her notes until a plan began to form.

Finally, she made a batch of her best cookies and went to visit the Queen.

The Queen's cook was a wizard with fish and meat, but hopeless at making desserts. As a result, Helga was always welcome at the castle.

The steward escorted her to the throne room, where she presented the Queen with the basket of cookies.

"These smell divine," the Queen said.

"Chocolate with crushed candy," Helga said.

The Queen bit into one of the cookies. "Mmmm," she said.

Helga's hand flew out of her pocket, and she aimed the wand at the distracted Queen.

"Colligo!" Helga said, gathering the Queen's magic for herself.

But the Queen was faster. "Reciproco!" she cried, holding up the magic mirror that always seemed to be wherever she was.

Helga felt all of her magic whoosh out of her, and could only watch as it enveloped the Queen in a sparkling cloud before disappearing inside her.

"Nice try," the Queen said, "but doomed to fail. Well, I can always use a little extra power."

Helga trembled in her crusty black boots.

"Begone, and be grateful I don't kill you," the Queen said. "And leave the basket."

Helga fled as fast as her tired old legs could carry her.

"Drat!" she said, when she'd reached the safety of her house.

Now she had nothing to look forward to but old age and a lifetime of doing her own cleaning.

Helga had a good, long sulk for several days. She drank hot chocolate and stared into the fire, preparing herself for the tedious work of gathering and growing herbs. She would have to spend the winter out in the cold and damp instead of sitting inside her cozy kitchen. Come spring, she would have to replant her beautiful garden! The thought of it was too much to bear.

Then one morning, she heard a rough sort of scratching sound outside. She looked out her window, and spotted one of those wretched deer eating into her eaves again.

She ran outside. "Off with you!" she said. "Why don't you find some nice leaves to nibble on?"

The deer's head drooped. "But this is so much nicer than leaves," it said. "Your house is the most delicious thing in the forest! You could even sell the right to eat it– it's that good."

"Sell?" Helga said.

"I have some leftover silver I've been saving since my antlers came in," the deer said. "What would you charge to let me eat this entire edge of the roofline?"

That gave Hilda an idea.

Opening a bakery required very little planning. Helga was entirely confident of her ability to make delicious treats– she'd been doing it for years. In just a few days, she'd set up a table in the garden with a sign advertising her offerings.

Once again, the busy forest path led customers to her wares.

"Splendid idea," said the gentleman frog, who came by on horseback with a lovely mouse behind him. "Have you met my bride?"

"Alluring," said the Swan Princes, who were flying south for the winter.

"A better business than spells," said the new rat king. "No other baking comes close."

Helga soon made more money as a baker than she ever had as a hag. In the winter, she moved her shop indoors, and learned that the forests' inhabitants were as fond of hot cocoa as they were of cakes and cookies. Many would stay and visit for a while, and Helga finally realized that friendship was more satisfying than fear.

But perhaps the most surprising discovery was that piles of cookies could entice little children to clean Helga's house for her as often as she liked, without any need for enchantment at all.

–/–

If you enjoyed this story, please vote for it along with any of your other favorites here.