Golden (4 page)

For I have learned, since that day in the village green when I first discovered its presence in the world at all, that the workings of sorcery are not universal. They have to do with the individual who performs them. Sometimes her powers exist to fill a
great need in the land in which she lives. Other times they exist to fill a need within the sorceress herself. More often than not, of course, it's likely to be both. For sorcery is no simple thing, though simpletons often think it so.

The gift of sorcery that Melisande possessed was this: to see into the hearts of others even when they themselves could not, and to show them what she saw.

That was what she had done that day on the village green, what had caused every single person present to drop his or her eyes. She had looked into their hearts and seen their fear of me, of what I looked like, and their desire to cast me out because of it. And she had done more. For she had both seen and revealed the villagers' deepest, most secret fear of all: that my presence among them might prove infectious, bringing down upon their own heads the fate they wished for me, regardless of whether the heads in question had hair on them or not.

Some were horrified to discover their hearts could hold such feelings and fears. Others knew they were there full well and were horrified at having been found out. In the end, though, it made no difference: Not one was able to meet the message of her or his heart as seen within the sorceress's gaze. Each and every person dropped their eyes.

After such an inauspicious beginning, you might think no one would want to come to see us. But this was far from true. There were many, or so it seemed,
who were willing to brave the sorceress's gaze to catch a glimpse of the innermost workings of their own hearts, never mind that it might be said they should have been figuring out a way to do this for them-selves.

“Why do they come?” I finally asked one day, after a particularly disastrous departure.

A young woman, one of the loveliest I had ever seen, her beautiful features streaked with tears, had come barreling out the back door just as I had been on the point of coming in with a basket of apples from the orchard. I stepped back quickly to avoid her and lost my footing, which sent me to the ground and the basket and its contents flying.

Well I guess I'll be making applesauce instead of pies tonight,
I thought.

“What did you show her, the end of her beauty?” I asked crossly as Melisande appeared in the doorway. Together we watched the young woman hurry away, the sound of her sobs drifting back over her shoulder. “I recognize that look. It's disappointed hopes. A few more years of that and no one will remember she was beautiful in the first place. What on earth do they expect you to do for them, anyhow?”

“That is a very good question, my Rapunzel,” answered Melisande. She knelt beside me and began to help me retrieve the apples, the bruises already showing on their skins. “And one I wish these fools would ask themselves before they come.”

Her words startled me, I must admit. She rarely
spoke of those who sought her help, never passed judgement on them. I stayed quiet, gathering up the apples. I'd asked more questions than usual, but I knew that, sooner or later, she would answer them all, and answer them honestly. That was the way things worked around our house.

“They come,” the sorceress said at last, “because they confuse seeing a thing with understanding it, and they believe that my true power lies in the bestowing of this shortcut.”

“Then they are idiots, as well as lazy,” I snorted. “For the first lies within your power, it is true, but the second may or may not. And either way, it makes no difference. A shortcut may be fine if you're walking through a field, but it hardly seems in order when you're dealing with the heart.”

“Well spoken on all counts,” Melisande said, and at this she smiled. “I had not thought to have you follow in my footsteps, but perhaps I should reconsider. With thinking like that, you have all the makings of a first-class sorceress.”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I think I'm odd enough.” A quick silence fell.
Oh, excellent, Rapunzel,
I thought.
That was nicely done
. “Not that I think you're odd,” I added.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Melisande said. “Of course I am. I'm a sorceress, aren't I?”

“I have heard that,” I said. “Though I haven't felt the need to test it for myself.”

I saw the considering expression come into her face then.
Aha!
I thought.
Perhaps now I will know.

But the sorceress simply picked up the basket, got to her feet, and said: “I'll peel the apples. The peelings will make a nice treat for the pigs. Perhaps there will be enough for pies tomorrow.”

And so I learned no more on that day, and the very next, Mr. Jones came into our lives.

I have told you that I learned many things from Melisande, the exception being sorcery itself. But here I must confess one failure. No matter how hard or how often Melisande tried to teach me, I could never learn to tell one plant in the garden from another, let alone what they were called.

I was not entirely hopeless, of course. I could do the large and obvious things. I could tell an apple from a raspberry; cauliflower from corn. But when it came to knowing things by the shapes of their leaves, by what they smelled like when you plucked them and rubbed them between your palms, even whether a plant was a weed or whether it was not, these things I simply could not keep straight in my mind.

On the day that Mr. Jones came into our lives, I was working among the rows of vegetables where, insteading of ridding the carrots of weeds as I should have, I rid the weeds of carrots by pulling up every single seedling, carefully and methodically, one by one. When I realized my mistake, I sat back on my heels with a sharp cry of dismay, which caused Melisande to appear at the back door. It was open, for the day was warm and fine.

“What is it?” she called. She didn't actually say,
“this time,” but then she didn't need to. I could hear it in her voice like the chime of a bell.

“Carrots,” I admitted, and saw her wince, for car-rots were a highly useful vegetable, good in summer, autumn, and winter alike.

“All of them?” she inquired.

“All of them,” I nodded.

Even at the distance from the garden to the back door, I heard her sigh. She came over to hunker down beside me, surveying the damage.

“Perhaps it is to be expected,” she murmured after a while. More to herself than to me, really. I think this may have been what finally broke open a place inside me. A place I had always suspected, but been not quite certain I wished to acknowledge, for it was a place of anger and confusion.

“You mean because I'm named for a plant in the garden?” I asked tartly. “In that case, why didn't you encourage my mother to name me for something inanimate and impossible to kill, like a cutting board or a set of fireplace tongs?”

“You'd only have dropped them on your foot, or had some other accident,” Melisande replied. Her voice sounded calm, but I could see the surprise flicker across her face. “And it was not your mother who named you Rapunzel,” she continued. “It was I.”

Just for a moment, I felt the world tilt. This is what happens when something truly takes you by surprise. Not that I hadn't been asking about my parents, because of course, I had been. The sorceress
and I had carefully avoided the topic until now, which was as much my doing as hers. For, if I asked, I knew that she would answer, and answer honestly. This fact of life had made me very careful about what I asked, and what I did not.

“Why did you name me Rapunzel?” I inquired, after what felt like a very long moment.

Melisande was silent herself, for a moment that felt even longer than mine.

“Because it seemed the proper choice at the time,” she finally replied. “Your mother ate large quantities of it before you were born. I first met your father, in fact, when I caught him stealing great handfuls of rapunzel from my garden.”

“So my name is a punishment then,” I said.

“Don't be silly,” Melisande said. “Of course not.”

I stared down the row of carrots, their tiny green tops already wilting now that they were no longer in the ground.

“Why do I live with you? Are my parents dead? Didn't they want me?”

There. I had done it. Asked the three most important and difficult questions, the ones I'd hidden away within that space I hadn't even been certain was there inside me. And I'd asked them all at once. If I could survive the answers to these, I had to figure I could survive almost anything.

“You live with me because I love you,” Melisande said. “And your parents are still living, as far as I know.”

“You left one out,” I said, when she stopped speaking. “They didn't want me, did they? That's the real reason you took me in.”

“Ah, my Rapunzel,” Melisande said on a sigh. She looked up for a moment, her eyes on mine. “When you are a little older, you will realize that not all questions have such simple answers.”

“That doesn't mean I won't ask them anyway,” I said, at which she smiled.

“No. I'm quite certain it does not. Nor am I saying you should, just so you know. You'll soon learn for yourself that even the simplest question can be complicated, and the answer to it even more so. But very well, since you have asked, I will tell you what I know. Your mother was a very beautiful woman, but her heart was less lovely than her face, for it had room for only one.”

“My father,” I guessed at once.

“No,” Melisande answered in a quiet voice. “Your mother's heart had room in it for herself alone. When I saw this, I did the only thing I could. I made room for you inside my own heart. There you have stayed from that day to this. That is why you live in my house: because you lived first within my heart.”

I felt my own heart start to thump at this. Her words had brought me pain and joy. In all fairness, I had asked for both.

“It's because I'm bald, isn't it?” I asked. “That's the reason she didn't want me.”

“Yes,” Melisande said. I felt a great roaring start to
fill my head. “And no,” the sorceress went on, at which the roaring stopped. “When your mother looked at you, what she wished to see was a version of her own beauty. She could not see who you might become. It was this emptiness in her that caused her to turn you away. Your bare head is the true reflection of your mother's heart.”

“Well, that's not fair at all,” I said.

“No,” Melisande answered. “It is not. But you are not the first example of the faults of the parents being visited upon the children, nor will you be the last.”

“That's comforting,” I said. “Thank you very much. What about my father?” I asked after a moment. “Where was he when all this was going on?”

“Your father loves you as much as anything in the world,” Melisande replied. “But he could not interfere. He had done a thing that he should not have, and a bargain is a bargain.”

“Where are my parents? Will I ever see them again?”

“Those are questions to which I do not know the answers. I am sorry, my Rapunzel.”

Well that's that,
I thought. I'd asked, and she had answered. Now I knew, and life would go on.

“That's all right,” I said at last. “Perhaps I will go to look for them myself, for my father at least, when I am old enough. In the meantime, I think I will be content to remain what I have always been.”

“And what is that?” Melisande asked.

“Just what you have said I am. Your Rapunzel,” I replied.

“My Rapunzel,” Melisande said. And, for the first time that I could remember, I saw that she had tears in her eyes.

“What on earth is that?” I suddenly said.

“What?”

“That,” I said. “That sound.”

The sorceress cocked her head. The air was filled with it now. A noise that sounded like a set of pots and pans, doing their best to impersonate a set of wind chimes.

“I haven't the faintest idea,” Melisande said. “Why don't you go and find out?”

“At least we know one thing,” I said, as I got to my feet.

“And what is that?”

“Whoever it is, they haven't come for sorcery. They're at the front door.”

The sound of Melisande's laughter followed me all the way around the side of the house.

Four