Free Golden by Cameron Dokey Page B

even when used with the best intentions, the strongest magic can still go wrong.
    â€œLike 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.”
    â€œWait 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.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œWhat is her name?” the tinker asked quietly.
    â€œI 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. Formany 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.
    â€œWhat a terrible thing to be called,” I said aloud, before I quite realized I had done so.
    â€œI understand this must be difficult for you,” Melisande began.
    â€œOh, 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.
    â€œLet 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.
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said. “Please, go on.”
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œUpon 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.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œSo 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?
    â€œHow fortunate for us