Golden (10 page)

“Many
years ago,” Melisande said, “long before you were born, Rapunzel, the world was less afraid of magic than it is now. As a result, magic itself was more powerful. In this, I suppose it could be said that it was like a radish in our garden.”

“Better that than a carrot,” I said, and heard both the tinker and the sorceress chuckle. And with that, I felt the tension around our fire ease, as if, now that the story had at last commenced, we all understood we would stick with it till the close. What might happen then was anyone's guess, but for now, we would all be united in the telling and hearing of it.

“Though it could be any plant,” I went on, “assuming that I've grasped your point. If you give a plant room, it will grow and flourish. But if you crowd it, you may choke it out.”

“That is indeed my point,” Melisande agreed. “Not that magic has died out entirely in these days. But fear is strong. Fear of what is different, of what cannot easily be explained, particularly explained away. We've had proof enough of that recently, I think, you and I.”

“But this is not a story of these days,” I said.

“No,” Melisande agreed. “Or at least, the start of it is not, for this story is still ongoing. It has not yet come to its conclusion, though I hope that the day for that is not far off. It is a cautionary tale, one that shows how, even when used with the best intentions, the strongest magic can still go wrong.

“Like many such tales, it began innocently enough. One fine market day, a sorceress and her daughter, who was just the age that you are now, Rapunzel, left their home and went to the nearest town.”

“Wait a minute. Stop right there,” I said. I felt a shock, as if I had suddenly been plunged into cold, deep water.” You have a daughter. A daughter of your own blood.”

“I do,” answered Melisande. “Her father and I were childhood sweethearts. He died long ago. My daughter was once all that I had in the world.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, and still no sound came out. The numbness of shock was being replaced by a strange sensation, tingling in all my limbs as if my entire being was undergoing some great rearrangement of its very essence. All these years the sorceress had had a child, a daughter who was all she had in the world, yet not once had she ever spoken of her.

“What is her name?” the tinker asked quietly.

“I do not speak the name I gave her at her birth,” Melisande answered, matching his tone. “She lost it the same day as the events I am about to tell. For
many years now, she has been called Rue. She dwells in the tower we will reach in another day's time.”

Rue,
I thought. Another plant in the garden. A name even more bitter than mine. Rue for sorrow. Rue for regret.

“What a terrible thing to be called,” I said aloud, before I quite realized I had done so.

“I understand this must be difficult for you,” Melisande began.

“Oh, do you?” I burst out. “I don't think you understand anything at all. I know I don't.”

How could you?
I wanted to cry.
How can you say you love me and hold something like this back?

It did no good for my mind to insist that the sorceress had always told me the truth. She had not told me of her own, her other, child. An omission so large and strange that, in that moment, it felt no different than the telling of a lie.

“Let her finish, Rapunzel,” Mr. Jones said, his own voice calm. “There can be time for pain and outrage later, if that is still what you feel. But we'll never get anywhere if you indulge in them now.”

Almost, I did it. Stood up and left the fire. Almost, I walked off into that great, vast darkness that surrounded us. Walked off and kept on going. For it didn't seem like such a foreign country now. In the moments since the sorceress had revealed that she had a daughter, vast and dark and empty had become familiar territory. It was just the same as the inside of my heart.

I didn't move, though. Instead I took hold of my pain and throttled it down. Mr.
Jones is right,
I thought. There would be time for pain and outrage later. Later I could scream and weep to my certainly confused and maybe even broken heart s content. For the moment, however, only by being silent could I learn what I needed to know.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Please, go on.”

“I'm sorry too,” answered Melisande. “More sorry than you know. And so I will begin with two unkindnesses, it seems. One, tonight. The first, long ago.”

“Upon a market day, you said,” I prompted, suddenly eager to get the telling of this tale over and done with. “You took
me
to town upon a market day also, as I recall.”

“I did,” said Melisande. “And though what happened brought you pain, it also showed me that your heart was strong. Stronger than you knew then. Perhaps it is still stronger than you know.”

“So it was a test, then?” I asked, as the pain and confusion I was trying to master grew too strong and slipped their hold. Was my childhood nothing but a series of hidden checks and balances, not really what I thought I had experienced at all?

“How fortunate for us that I passed it,” I went on, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. “How many more are there to be, or don't I get to know until they're all over?”

“Enough, Rapunzel,” Mr. Jones said. I shut my mouth with a snap and pressed the tip of my tongue
against the back of my teeth. “Let the sorceress tell what must be told.”

“Upon a market day, as I have said,” Melisande resumed her tale, “my daughter and I went to town. There she saw a bright ribbon for her hair. She had eyes for nothing else. I had eyes for no one but my child. On that day, I, whose gift it is to see into the hearts of others, failed to see that my daughters heart was not the only one filled with desire. She had that ribbon for her hair, while another woman's child had none.”

“Oh, but surely—” I began to protest, then stopped. We were never going to get anywhere if I kept interrupting every other sentence. Not only that, I was contradicting myself. A moment ago I had been ready to use my words to lash out. Now here I was, jumping to Melisande's defense.

“You are exactly right,” she said at once, precisely as if she understood the objection I had planned to make.

“The act was simple and unintentional, not deliberately cruel, but merely thoughtless. I thought only of myself and what I loved. Everyday people do this all the time, though I suppose it could be said the world might be a better place if they did not. But I am not an everyday sort of person. I possess a gift, the gift to see what lies inside another's heart.

“On that day, I did not look. I let myself be blind. It was this fact more than any other that weighed against me in the end. That made the wizard who
saw my actions decide I needed to be taught a lesson in the uses of power.”

“But
why?
“ I cried.

“My gift is not simply a skill I
may
use, it is a skill I
must
use,” Melisande replied. “Not that I am required to act on what my eyes discover. My gift, my responsibility, is to see and nothing more. I am free to choose my own actions. Indeed, like everyone else, I must be so. A good act that is compelled is not goodness at all, but merely force.

“It might even have been better if I had been deliberately unkind. A will to be unkind is like a sickness. It can be healed or driven out. But to be unkind because you are thoughtless is the worst kind of blindness: difficult to cure, because you cannot see the fault even as you commit it.”

“And that's why the wizard put a curse on you?” I asked.

“It is,” Melisande replied. “Because I failed to look for what another held in her heart, I would be unable to see what I held in mine, for a time. It would not wither. It would not fade away. But neither would it grow. It would remain just as it was, as if in a dream of life, until I found the means to awaken it and set it free.”

“What is it about wizards?” Mr. Jones remarked. “They expend so much effort to say so little.”

“I couldn't agree more,” Melisande replied, with a slight smile. “If the wizard had been less fond of the sound of his own voice, he might have realized he
was making a mistake of his own. Power was what he held most closely in his own heart, so he assumed it was the same for mine. He therefore hoped to teach me a lesson in the uses of power by depriving me of it. Instead he deprived me of a thing I loved much more.”

“Your daughter,” I said suddenly, and felt my pain and anger begin to drain away and be replaced by something else, though I wasn't sure quite what.

“My daughter,” Melisande echoed quietly. “The wizard did not mean his curse to touch my child, any more than I meant to be unkind to the child of another. But, like my own thoughtless action, once the wizards curse was uttered, it could not be undone. And so I kept sight of my power, but lost sight of the thing I valued most: my child.

“The wizard took her and placed her in a tower he used his magic to build in two nights and the day that fell between them. It is made of smooth, gray stone. Windows made of starlight ring the top. Its door may be seen and opened only by the power of a love other than my own. There my child has stayed from that day to this, waiting for me to bring the key, the means of awakening and freeing her heart.”

“You think it's me,” I said. By now I felt so many different things, I was well on my way to deciding it might be preferable to feel nothing. “That's the real reason you took me in and raised me. You need me to free your daughter. You don't love me at all.”

“That's not true,” Melisande said at once. “I took
you in and raised you for the same reason I have always said: Because I loved you from the moment I first saw you, Rapunzel. But I will admit that there is more. When I gazed into your mother's heart and found no room for you within it, I heard a sound, like the opening of a door. It seemed to me that her inability to look with the eyes of love could not be coincidence. At long last, perhaps I was being offered the chance to redeem the daughter I had lost.

“But only if I could take you in and love you truly, if I could teach you all the things my heart had learned in the days since Rue had been taken and locked away. And so I did what the woman who gave birth to you could not. I looked with the eyes of love, claimed you, and raised you as my own.”

“And never mentioned your daughter once,” I added, finishing the list. “Until tonight, when I'm supposed to meet her tomorrow. Is this my final test? What happens if we can't stand the sight of one another?”

“I don't know,” Melisande said, her own voice rising for the very first time. “I can't see the future. That is not my gift. I don't know what is to come. I've done what I thought was right, what I thought I must. That's all I can tell you.”

“What about what I want to do?” I asked. “Suppose all I want to do is turn around and go back home? Does what I want even matter? Do I have a choice?”

“Of course you have a choice,” Mr. Jones said, his
first words for what seemed like a very long time. “The sorceress has said what she has done, but she cannot say what you will do. That, only you can decide.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I'm glad to see somebody's on my side.”

Mr. Jones knocked his pipe out on a stone without looking up. “It is not a matter of taking sides. It is what it has always been: a matter of the heart. You may think you are listening, but you're hearing only what you want to hear, Rapunzel. What is in the heart cannot be forced. This, the sorceress has already acknowledged. If the heart bends, it must be of its own free will, or not at all.

“Personally, I think she's right. Your heart is stronger than you know. But you may never learn how strong unless you put it to the test.”

“I'm tired of being tested,” I replied.

“Now that,” the tinker said briskly, as he got to his feet, “is a feeling I understand very well. I'm sorry to tell you that it may not make much difference in the long run, though.” He came over and kissed me on the cheek, an action he had never performed before. “I suggest we all go to sleep. I don't know about any-one else, but I am tired. I'd put an extra blanket on if I were you, Rapunzel. Even summer nights on the plain are cold.”

With that, he moved to the wagon, pulled his own bedroll from it, and went to bed down close to the horse. I went to lie in my usual position, wrapping
myself in an extra blanket as the tinker had suggested, my arms around my knees as if to make myself as small as possible. For the first and only time that I could remember, Melisande and I did not say good night.

All through that night, the sorceress stayed beside the fire. What her thoughts were, as the fire died down to nothing more than cold gray ash, I cannot say. To the best of my knowledge, she never told another living soul.

Ten