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No one is better at understanding the world than Old Mathilde, at being able to see things for what they truly are. This is what makes her such a good healer, I suppose. For how can you mend a thing, any thing, if you cannot truly see what
is
wrong? Some things, of course, cannot be healed, no matter how much you want them to be, no matter how hard you try. Old Mathilde was not a magician. She was simply very good at helping wishes come true.

“Will you hear a wish?” my mother asked now.

Just for an instant, Old Mathilde closed her eyes, as if summoning the strength to hear what would come. For my mother was asking to bestow the most powerful wish there is, one that is a birth and death wish, all at the same time. Then Old Mathilde opened her eyes and gave the only answer she could, also the one that was in her heart.

“I will grant whatever you wish that lies within my power, Constanze, my child.”

Constanze d’Este. That was my mother’s name.

“I wish for you to be my daughter’s godmother,” Constanze d’Este replied. “Love her for me, care for her when I am gone, for I fear her father will do neither one. When he looks at her, he will not find joy in the color of her hair and eyes. He will not see the way that I live on. Instead, he will see only that she came too
soon, and that her arrival carried me out of this life.

“Besides, he is a man and a great lord. He wished for his first child to be a boy.”

“What you wish for is easily granted,” Old Mathilde said. “For I have loved this child with all my heart since she was no more than a dream in yours. As for Etienne . . .” Etienne de Brabant. That is my father’s name. “I suppose a man may be a great lord and a great fool all at once. What shall I call her, while I’m loving her so much?”

At this point in the story, Old Mathilde always does the same thing: She smiles. Not because the circumstances she’s relating are particularly happy, but because smiling is what my mother did.

“Call her by whatever name you think best,” she replied. “For you will raise her, not I.”

“Then I will give her your name,” Old Mathilde said. “For she should have more of her mother than just the color of her hair and eyes, and a memory she is too young to know how to hold.”

And so I was named Constanze, after my mother. And no sooner had this been decided, than my mother died. Old Mathilde sat beside the bed, her eyes seeing the two of us together even in the dark, until my mother’s lips turned pale, her arms grew cold, and the clouds outside the window parted to reveal A spangle of high night stars. Not once in all that time, so Old Mathilde has always claimed, did I so much as stir or cry.

When the slim and curving sickle of the moon
had reached the top of the window, then begun its slide back down the sky, Old Mathilde got up from her chair and lifted me gently from my mother’s arms. She carried me downstairs to the great open fireplace in the kitchen. Holding me in the crook of one arm, she took the longest poker she could find and stirred up the coals.

Not even such a storm as had descended upon us that night could altogether put out the kitchen fire—the fire that is the heart of any house. Once the coals were glowing as they should, Old Mathilde wrapped me in a towel of red flannel, took the largest of our soup kettles down from its peg, tucked me inside it, and nestled the pot among the embers so that I might grow warm once more.

As she did, I began to cry for the very first time. And at this, as if the sound of my voice startled them back into existence, all the other fires throughout the great stone house came back to life. Flurries of sparks shot straight up every chimney, scattering into the air like red-hot fireflies.

In this way, I earned a second name that night, the one that people use and remember, in spite of the fact that the name Constanze is a perfectly fine one. Nobody has ever called me that, not even Old Mathilde. Instead, she calls me by the name I was given for the coals that kept me warm, for the fires I brought back to life with the sound of my own voice.

Child of cinders.
Cendrillon.

Two weeks to the day after I was born, my father came home, thundering into the courtyard on a great bay horse ridden so long and hard its coat was white with lather as if covered in sea foam. Where he had been on the night of my birth, where since, are tales that, for many years, would remain untold. But he was often sent far and wide on business for the king, so Old Mathilde sent word of what had happened out from the great stone house knowing that, sooner or later, the news would find my father and bring him home.

Just at the counterpoint to the hour of my birth he came, full noon, when the sun was like an orange in the sky. Around his neck, beneath his cloak, he wore a sling of cloth, and in this sling there was a baby boy. My father pulled the horse up short, tossed the reins to a waiting groom, threw his leg over his horse’s neck, and slid to the ground. Even at his journeys end, my father’s desire to reach my mother burned so hot and bright that the heels of his boots struck sparks from the courtyard cobblestones. He tossed off his cloak, pulled the sling from around his neck, and thrust it and the burden it carried into Old Mathilde’s arms.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“In her garden,” Old Mathilde replied.

Without another word, my father took off at a dead run. Around the side of the house, he sped through the gate in the stone wall, and into the place my mother had loved best in all the world, aside from the shelter of my father’s arms: the garden she had planted with her own two hands. Surrounded by a high stone wall to protect it from the cold sea winds, it was so cunningly made that it could be seen from only one room inside the house: my mother’s own bedchamber, the same room in which I had been born.

Old Mathilde had buried my mother beneath a tree whose blossoms were pale pink in spring, whose leaves turned yellow in the autumn, and whose boughs carried tiny red apples no bigger than a thumbnail all through the winter months. It was the only one like it on all my father’s lands. My mother had brought it with her as a sapling on her wedding day as a gift to her new husband, a pledge of their new life. Now the mound of earth which marked her grave was a gentle oblong shape beneath its boughs, as if Constanze d’Este had fallen asleep and some thoughtful servant had come along and covered her with a blanket of soft green grass from her head to her toes.

My father fell to his knees beside my mother’s grave, and now a second storm arose, one that needed no interpretation, for all who saw it understood its meaning at once. This storm was nothing less than my father’s grief let loose upon the world. His rage at
losing the woman that he loved. The trees in the orchards tossed their heads in agony; the clear blue sky darkened overhead, though there was not a single cloud. At the base of the cliffs upon which my father’s great stone house sat, the sea hurled itself against the land as if to mirror his torment.

My father threw his head back, fists raised above his head, his mouth stretched open in a great O of pain. But he did not shed a single tear, nor make a single sound. He threw himself across my mother’s grave, his fists striking the earth once, twice, three times. As his fists landed for the third and final time, A single bolt of jagged lightning speared down from the cloudless sky. It struck the tree which sheltered my mother’s grave, traveled down its trunk, up into all its limbs, killing the tree in an instant, turning the new green grass beneath it as brown as the dust of an August road. At that moment, the storm ceased. And from that day onward, even when every other living thing on my father’s lands prospered, on the grave of my mother, Constanze d’Este, not so much as A single blade of grass would thrive.

At last my father got to his feet, turned his back upon my mother’s grave, left the garden, and went inside. He climbed the wide stairs, two at a time, until he reached my mother’s bedroom door. He pushed it open, slammed it behind him, turned the key in the lock with a sound that echoed upstairs and down. Then, for many hours, there was silence as he stayed in my mother’s room alone.

Just as night was falling he emerged, locked the door behind him (from the outside this time), then climbed a thin and winding set of stairs to the very top of the house. There, a stiff sea wind blowing in his face, he threw the key to my mother’s room as hard as he could. It was still flying through the air when he turned away, and made the climb back down. All the way to the kitchen and Old Mathilde.

“Show me the infant,” my father said, and, in spite of herself, Old Mathilde shivered, for never had she heard a voice so cold. The kind of cold that comes when the heart gives up on itself and abandons hope, a cold no fire on earth could ever warm. But Old Mathilde had not grown old by frightening easily.

“You may see both babes for yourself,” she said. “For there they are, together.”

And sure enough, in a cradle by the fire—for the soup kettle was not big enough for two, and besides I had outgrown it two whole days ago—the baby boy my father had brought with him from who-knew-where and I were lying, side by side. My hair was as bright as a copper basin; his, as dark as cast iron. My eyes, as bright and as green as fresh asparagus; his, a changeable and tumultuous gray, like the sea beneath the sky of a winter storm. For a time Old Mathilde did not even try to measure, my father stood motionless, gazing down at us both.

“She has the look of her mother,” he finally said, and the pain in his voice was as bright as a sword.

Old Mathilde nodded. “That she does.”

Etienne de Brabant exhaled one breath, and then another, as if his own body was struggling with itself

“I should have been here!” he finally burst out. “If I had been with her, things might have been different.”

“Some things most certainly would have been,” Old Mathilde replied. And now she inhaled one quiet breath of her own, for she knew my father would not like to hear what must follow. “But your presence would not have changed the outcome. Not even I could do that, Etienne. Some things are beyond my power to heal.”

My father spun toward her. “Your power!” he exclaimed. “You have none. What good is power if you cannot use it as you wish? You are nothing but a powerless old woman. You let Constance die.”

“Do you think I would not have saved her, if I could?” Old Mathilde asked. “If so, then you are wrong. And you forget that every kind of power has its own boundaries, Etienne. That is how you know its strength and its form.

“I cannot summon up things that must not happen. That which must take place, I cannot stop. All I can do is to help make the wishes that lie between come true. My power must stop at the boundaries of life.”

My father began to laugh, then, and the sound was bitter and wild. “A wish?” he exclaimed. “Is that what you want? You expect me to bestow a wish upon this child that has robbed me of so much?”

“It is what Constanze would have wanted,” Old Mathilde said, “and what she herself did. If you cannot
bring yourself to do it yet, try starting with the boy. You must have brought him to me for a reason. Therefore, there must be some wish you would bestow.”

But by now, father was nodding his head in agreement, as if Old Mathildes words had recalled to his mind a task that he had left undone.

“I wish the boy to be raised as a member of my household,” he said. “Give him no special honors, yet treat him fairly and well. But on pain of death, he is never to be permitted to leave my lands, not even when he is grown. Not unless I send for him.”

“By what name shall I call him?” Old Mathilde asked.

My father shrugged. “By whatever name that comes to mind. What he is called is not important.”

This is sheer nonsense, of course. If what we are called is not important, why bother with a name at all? But Old Mathilde had also not grown Old by being stupid. She knew when to hold her tongue and when to speak her mind. She had named one child. She could name another.

“And your daughter?” she asked softly. “You must wish something for her, Etienne. Constanze is dead, and it is your right to grieve for her. But you and your daughter are alive. With every beat your two hearts make, each of you wishes for something, for to wish is to be alive. This is a fact you cannot escape.”

“Not even if I wish to?” my father inquired.

“Not even then,” Old Mathilde replied.

“Then hear the wish I will bestow upon my
daughter,” my father said. “I wish that I might never see her again, unless the sight of her can give back the peace that she has stolen. As I imagine that day will never come, matters should work out well.”

“Matters often do that,” Old Mathilde said. Here she reached to tuck the blanket more securely around me for, at the sound of my father’s wish, as if struggling to be free of a burden, I had done my best to kick the blanket aside. “Though rarely in the way that men suppose. Still, you have wished, and I have heard you. I will do my best to see your wish is carried out in its own good time.”

My father turned away then. Away from the unnamed baby boy and me and toward the kitchen door. He put his hand upon the latch, then paused.