Authors: Cameron Dokey
You know about my christening, of course. Everybody does.
Or the bare bones of it, anyway. What went right. But mostly, what went wrong. Given the size and scope of the event, what seems most incredible to me is that my parents never saw the disaster coming ahead of time. It's been suggested they were dazzled by the gold of my hair. (Though, now that I think about it, I seem to remember that this suggestion came from Oswald.) What I do know—what everybody knows—is this: When the invitations were sent out, for the one and only time in her life, my mother failed to manage a social engagement to perfection, and her list was one person short. Not just anybody. Somebody.
By which, of course, I mean Somebody-Who-Proved-To-Be-Important, even if that wasn't how she started out.
Who she was has been greatly distorted. Most versions of my story say she was an evil fairy and give her some fantastic name, usually beginning with the letters m-a-l. Mal, meaning bad, which over time has come to mean the personification of evil, just as Aurore has come to be the personification of all that is beautiful, innocent, and bright. I am the candle flame snuffed out too soon; she, the years of impenetrable dark.
This is for the simple-minded, I suppose. An attempt to show that she and I were opposites right from the start. All pure nonsense, of course. Not only didn't people think she was evil, they didn't think of her at all. And that, I believe, was the true heart of all the trouble that followed.
Her name wasn't "mal" anything, by the way. It was Jane. Just that, and nothing more. (And, for the record, there are no fairies in the land of my birth. They prefer the land just on the other side of the Forest, la Foret, a place you'll hear much more about before my tale is done.)
After the big event, by which I mean my christening, people discussed Jane's life in great detail. Though I suppose I should say at great length, because there weren't really all that many details. Or none that anyone could accurately recall.
It was generally agreed that she was related to my mother, a distant cousin of some sort. And that she had been part of the entourage accompanying Maman when, as a young princess, she had come from across the sea to marry my father. There were 10
even those who claimed to remember that Jane had been a member of the actual wedding party, that she had followed behind my mother, carrying her train. But when I asked Maman about this once, she claimed to have no memory of whether or not this was so.
When I remarked, very curious and a great deal put out, that it seemed incredible to me that Maman should be unable to remember whether or not a member of her own family had taken part in her wedding—been assigned, in fact, the important responsibility of keeping the brides elaborate train straight and true during its long march down the aisle—my mother replied that she had been looking forward, not back, on her wedding day. In other words, her eyes had not been fixed on Cousin Jane.
They had been fixed right where they should have been: upon my father.
Not long after, she sent me to bed without any supper for speaking too saucily, which was her way of saying I was asking too many questions, and furthermore that they were uncomfortable ones. This was neither the first, nor the last, time this happened. Nurse often remarked that I owed my fine figure not so much to all the time I spent outdoors, but to all the times I had spoken saucily to Maman.
Regardless of whether or not Cousin Jane actually took part in the wedding, on one thing everyone concurred. After the wedding, Jane simply dropped from sight and was forgotten. Or, more accurately, perhaps, she found a way to blend so perfectly with her surroundings that she became someone others completely overlooked. Everyone, in fact, except (perhaps) for Oswald.
Now we come to some important questions, ones to which we're never likely to have answers as only Jane can provide them, always assuming even she knows. The things I've always wondered are these: Did Jane choose to become invisible, or did it happen on its own, because of who and where and what she was? It's pretty plain she must have been unhappy for a good long while. But was her invisibility a cause or a result? Was it her unhappiness's root or vine?
Here's my theory: It was both.
I don't know how the world works where you live, but the place where I grew up is steeped in magic. This actually explains why ours is a place fairies don't call home. They prefer a more 11
everyday place, where their own magic can have greater impact.
There's magic in the air we breathe, the water we drink. When we walk, magic rises upward from the ground and enters our bodies through the soles of our feet, even when we have our stoutest boots on.
In other words, it's everywhere. In the wind and the rain. The feather from a bird that you find in a field during a country ramble. The hard, uneven surfaces of city street cobblestones. If you've grown up here, you're used to it. It's just the way things are. Almost everyone who's a native can do some sort of magic, even if it's something simple like boiling water for tea in the morning while you're still in bed, instead of having to crawl out of your warm covers to stir up the coals.
If you haven't grown up here but come to live, one of two things can happen, of course: Either the magic leaves you alone, or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, it does the same thing to you as to the rest of us: It makes you more of what you are.
This is a thing about magic that is greatly misunderstood.
Magic isn't all that interested in change, which explains why things like love spells almost always backfire. And why those of us who grow up with magic don't use it nearly as much as people who haven't might think. (The boiling of tea water aside.) Nothing about magic is simple or straightforward, to be used lightly. And it's definitely not a substitute for what you can do just as well with your hands and your mind.
The people who end up with the strongest magic are the ones who are quickest to recognize this. Who see that magic's true power lies not in attempting to bend it to your will but in leaving it alone. Because if you do that, you'll discover an amazing thing.
The will of the magic becomes your will of its own accord. For magic is a part of nature. It, too, hates a void. And the voids magic most wants to fill are the spaces that exist inside a person.
It longs to strengthen that which is only waiting to be made strong.
Have you ever heard it said that somebody has shown her or his true colors? That's exactly what I'm talking about. The thing that interests magic is your true colors. Who you really are. And it can make you more powerful only if you first accept this. Which means, of course, that you have to be willing to accept yourself completely. Your virtues and your flaws. Most people shy away from doing this, another reason why magic doesn't get used as much as you might suppose.
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But not Jane. She must have looked at herself without flinching. Unlike my mother, who has no time for magic, thereby making sure it has no time for her, Jane soaked it up, like a stunted plant in freshly watered ground. And herein lies magics greatest danger. Remember what I said about the way it strengthens that which is waiting to be made strong?
If your virtues make up your true colors, that is well and good, for you as well as for the rest of us. But what about those whose true colors are comprised mostly of their flaws? These are the ones most likely to use magic for evil, even if they're not evil to begin with. For the things within them that the magic strengthens are like hunting knives: double-edged, wicked-sharp, and strong.
They stick deep, cut both ways, are honed by power and pain alike. Such things cannot be held inside forever. Sooner or later, they must be released or they will slice their own way out.
What better way to release pain than to take revenge on the people you believe have wronged you? An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. My power casts down your power, if only for a moment. Your pain replaces mine.
If Jane had been invited to my christening, who can say how much longer she would have held her pain locked up inside? Who can say what might not have happened? But she wasn't invited, and so something did.
"Little Princess, lovely as the dawn. Well-named Aurore."
This is what she is supposed to have said when, the last in a long line of wish-bestowers, she stood at my cradleside. By then, a horrible hush had fallen over my christening, a clotting sense of dread. Nobody recognized her, you see. Or (perhaps) nobody but Oswald. But her malice, that was an easy thing to recognize.
Nurse has told me that the very air turned hot and tingled, the way it does right before a thunderstorm. You just knew that something bad was about to happen, she said.
As it happened, she was right.
"Yet even the brightest of sunrises must come to an end. Tant pis. Too bad," Cousin Jane went on.
Then, before anyone could prevent her, she reached down and scooped me from my cradle, holding me above her head so that her face looked up and mine looked down. I reached for her, my small fingers working to take hold of something, anything, for I wasn't all that sure that I liked my present situation.
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At this, Nurse says, Cousin Jane smiled. As if I, myself, had provided the final inspiration for the pain she was about to unleash upon us all.
"Your end will come with the prick of a finger," she said, as she slid one of her own into my fist and I held on tight. Though everyone but Nurse has told me this is impossible, I swear I can actually remember this moment, what her finger felt like. Smooth and cool, but not the smoothness of skin. I know that now, though I didn't at the time.
Several years later, when I was judged old enough not to choke myself on it, I was given a chicken drumstick as a special treat at a picnic we were having on one of the many palace lawns. Any opportunity to get messy always delighted me, according to my mother, and all went well, until I'd gnawed my way down to the bone. At the first touch of it, I became hysterical, and it wasn't until several hours later that Nurse finally managed to calm me down enough to tell her what was wrong.
That's what Cousin Jane's finger had felt like. Not smooth skin, but the smooth caress of cool, hard bone.
"The prick of a finger," she said again, giving hers a little shake, as if everyone hadn't heard her the first time around.
"One sharp wound. One bright drop of blood. That's all it will take to cut your life down. Sixteen years, I give you, ma petite Aurore, lovely as the dawn. The same number I was given before I had no choice but to follow your mother to this gilded prison, so far from my home."
There was a moment of stupefied silence.
Then, "Jane?" my mother gasped out. A question, an uncertainty, even now.
At which point Cousin Jane tossed me high into the air and swept my mother a bow. "Well met, Cousin," she said. "You will remember me from now on, will you not?"
With that, she vanished in a puff of smoke, through which I plummeted straight down into my nurse's desperate arms.
Behind her, she left just the faintest tang of sulphur, and the ghost of a laugh that never quite died. It lingered in the air, like an elusive smell. Vanishing for days, for weeks, on end, only to creep around a corner and assault you when you least expected.
Haunting us all for more than a hundred years to come.
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Maman swooned, of course.
She always does what a lady is supposed to do, though, to be fair, on this occasion even I must admit her behavior had good cause. For many moments, all was pandemonium. But at last, I was restored to my cradle, Maman to her senses, and the guests to relative calm.
Interestingly enough, it is Nurses recollection that the person largely responsible for the return to order was Oswald. This in spite of the fact that he was only ten years old. Whether he performed this good deed out of the goodness of his heart, or from some other motive, I cannot say.
Though the goodness of his heart theory seemed doubtful to me for many years. Before you can act out of the goodness of your heart, it helps to actually have one.
But it was after order was restored that the next dreadful thing happened, because it was then that Maman said: "Do something, someone."
A thing which probably doesn't seem so bad, unless you understand that what she really wanted wasn't for somebody to do something, but to undo it. Specifically, of course, to undo what Cousin Jane had done. And even this probably makes perfect sense to you—why not do everything you can to undo a great evil? Why not just erase it if you have the power?
The thing is, you cant just go around undoing other peoples magic. In the first place, it's considered terribly impolite, not to mention impractical. If you do it to someone else, what's to stop them from doing it to you? Before long, you'd have absolute chaos.
There is a more important consideration, of course.
If you start undoing magic, any kind of magic, you run the risk of undoing everything else. That's how tightly magic is bound up in the way things are where I come from.