Free Keeping Holiday by Starr Meade

Clare looked all around, but the park was small and it was easy to see that they were the only people there. “It must be one of the trees,” Dylan muttered under his breath to Clare. He began examining the closest one.

    The voice laughed gently, a tinkling little laugh. “No, dear, not the tree,” it said. “I’m growing on the tree.”
    The children looked and saw a mass of dark, leathery leaves hanging from one of the tree’s branches, leaves that were clearly not the same as those of the tree itself. Dylan was thinking, I’ve seen that kind of leaf before; where was it? when Clare cried, “Mistletoe! You’re a mistletoe plant!”
    “That’s right, dear,” said the voice. “I’m Missy Mistletoe and I’m very pleased to meet you.”
    “I’m Clare,” Clare said, “and this is my cousin, Dylan.”
    Having already had conversations with trees, the cousins did not waste much time in amazement that a mistletoe plant could speak. “Are you sure it was the Founder who paid my fine and got me the new pass?” Dylan asked.
    “Of course it was,” Missy answered so firmly that it was impossible not to believe her. “Who else is that generous and who else could possibly have paid such a huge fine?”
    “Would it have been really big?” Dylan asked meekly.
    “Oh my, yes, way out of your reach,” Missy answered, “or anybody else’s for that matter.”
    “So he wasn’t mad that I lost my visitor’s pass?” Dylan pressed.
    “He very well might have been, but that wouldn’t have stopped him,” Missy said.
    “I didn’t mean to lose it,” Dylan tried to explain.
    Missy cut him short. “No one keeps his pass in that neighborhood. That’s the main reason that the road goes through there.”
    “Clare didn’t lose hers,” Dylan protested.
    “Clare’s different,” Missy answered. “She only had to come that way because she’s traveling with you.” Dylan started to ask why that would be so, but then it occurred to him that Clare’s experience in the cave had been different from his as well, and he said nothing.
    While Dylan puzzled over this, Clare had been thinking about something else. Now she said, “People decorate with mistletoe. They hang it in doorways and people kiss under it. Why is that?”
    Missy gave her quiet tinkling laugh again. “It is a bit overdone sometimes, isn’t it?” she said. “I’ll have to tell you a bit of a story to answer that question. Why don’t you have a seat on that bench?” The children sat and Missy began. “You know enough history to understand why Holiday exists, don’t you?”
    Dylan and Clare nodded. “A king got rid of the mean rulers it had, and the people who lived there turned the town into a kind of a monument to the king by making it as beautiful and happy a place as they could,” Dylan said.
    “Yes,” said Missy. “But it was the townspeople’s own fault that they needed to be liberated in the first place. The town had been ruled by a wise and generous Emperor, who lived in a faraway land and who supplied the town with everything it needed. The tyrants had come, pretending to have the best interests of the town at heart. They tricked the foolish citizens into rebelling against their rightful ruler, promising to take care of them and provide them with much better goods than the Emperor had ever given. When the good King came along, he showed the townspeople their mistake. They saw then that all the tyrants had given them was really bad for them. They realized they needed their Emperor. But the law was the law, and the law said that subjects who rebelled against the Emperor were cut off from him forever—unless they could pay a fine, a fine so huge there was no way in the world that the little town, devastated by years of oppression by bad rulers, could ever pay it. So the King, when he came, not only overthrew the tyrants and set the citizens free, he also paid the debt they owed the Emperor from his own purse.”
    “Was he that