A New Home for Two Old Statues

Nobody on the Jueseafrute town council could hazard a guess as to why Queen Yarna should want the two statues. But her offer for them was ideally timed, since the council had only the previous week decided to have them removed. Now, not only would Yarna pay for their transportation to her castle across the border in Aquilaria, a considerable cost given the distance involved, but she was even paying fifty gold pieces on top of that. Everyone on the council thought that the statues were all but worthless, and that she must be mad, but they weren't going to reject an offer like that.

A few days later, Yarna was viewing the newly arrived statues. When her coach had passed through Jueseafrute a couple of weeks earlier, she had recognised one of the statues, in spite of its layer of muck. It was of her sister, Astra. She had made some discreet enquiries of the townsfolk, and had discovered that the statues had mysteriously appeared out of thin air, thirty years before. Obviously magic had been involved.

There were a couple of other interesting details. The date of the statues' appearance was only a couple of weeks after Astra had last been seen. And the statue of her bore an almost impossibly perfect resemblance. Putting all that together, Yarna concluded that what she had seen was not merely a statue of her sister; it actually was her sister. The identity of the other statue she did not know, and cared about even less. But she decided that it would be less likely to arouse suspicion if she bought the pair rather than just one.

1. Being a loving sister, Yarna summoned the royal sorceress, to see if Astra could be restored to flesh and blood, even though it would mean that her sister would become queen in place of herself.
2. Not wanting to risk losing the throne, in the remote eventuality that Astra would one day be restored to life, Yarna summoned stone-workers to cut the statues up into blocks, the blocks then to be ground down into rubble.
3. Being the gloating type, Yarna had the statues cleaned up and placed in the castle's throne room. She would say that the statue of Astra had been made before she disappeared but had only recently been discovered.
4. Being the gloating type, Yarna had the statues installed on an island in the middle of a lake in the castle grounds. She liked to think of Astra remaining under a layer of moss, muck and guano, which wouldn't be possible if she was installed indoors.

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