A Wish Made Of Glass (2 page)

A memory wriggles for attention at the edge of my mind, but I quickly shut it out. “I don’t remember any such thing,” I say as I cross my arms. But my anger has lost its steam and Hazel knows it. She draws me to the bed and makes me sit beside her.

“It was just after I came to your father’s household, a night soon after your mother died. Your father was not yet home from the war. You lay on your bed, weary from weeping. I went to draw the curtains, and down on the lawn near the edge of the trees they stood. The fey folk. They sang a lament that would break a heart made of stone. Well, it certainly made these old eyes cry, though they don’t often do so easily.” She touches one of her withered cheeks as though the ghost of her tears is still there. “The fey prince himself was there leading the rest of them with
dark, solemn steps. I could have sworn his eyes were on the window where I stood. I could feel the heat of them, even from such a distance.” She glances sideways at me. “O’course you didn’t see the folk, lying on your bed as you were. I know you heard them, though, for you grew still as death and your dark eyes were so bright I thought they had turned to burning coals. You didn’t move even a finger, yet your whole body changed when you heard their music, as if you had let go of a small piece of your sorrow.” Hazel pauses and her hand slides over to cover mine. “You understood they were singing for you, my girl. You knew they heard your broken heart weeping, and that they had come to bring you comfort.”

My chest is tight enough to burst. I do not remember this story, but its truth rings through me like a gong and leaves me trembling to my toes.

Hazel nods. It is clear she believes her words have consoled me. “Well, the fey folk will be with you even in the North.” She sighs, and her next words are so quiet I think she must be speaking to herself. “They are faithful, even if we are not.”

For one wild moment, I ache to believe her. Her words are fire and I am only a fluttering moth. It takes everything in me not to propel myself straight into their warmth.

Perhaps I should visit the glade once more, come sundown. The thought is unbidden, and it makes my heart leap like a hare frightened from its hiding place. Might I see them again, even after these years of silence? I imagine their faces and their bright, smiling eyes. I nearly hear their music which, after all this time, is still mixed in with my blood and marrow.

My shoulders stiffen as I remind myself that I am a child no more, but a girl who has put fairy stories aside and replaced them with graver things. No, I will not visit the glade. I will never visit it again.

Yet that night, in the dark of my room, a memory comes tapping at the door of my mind. Perhaps it is no memory at all, but only an imagining of something that never was. Either way, I do the unthinkable. I let it in.

The fey jig danced that night had been uncommonly swift and complex. I had already talked and laughed and played games the night through. What happened next was inevitable, I suppose. My young feet entangled themselves together trying to find the quick beat of the song, and I tumbled into the brush at the edge of the glade. Dancers eddied around me. None of them had noticed the small human child at their feet. In the chaos of noise and laughter, a hand reached to lift me. Its touch was gentle as mist, but I could never have mistaken the steely strength in it, too.

Angry tears ran down my round cheeks. My knee was bleeding. Worse, so was my pride. I only just had time to glimpse glinting eyes and the curve of a smiling mouth as I was whisked to my feet and tucked beneath the arm of the one who had lifted me. There I stayed until my eyes drooped closed into deep, childish exhaustion. I had awoken in my own bed the next morning, never having seen my rescuer’s face.

As soon as this memory floods through me, I know that is just what it is. A memory. A truth. Not an imagined story. The fey folk were there, living in the wood as surely as I am lying in my bed. Now they are gone, just as Mother is gone. Now they are silent, just as my heart is silent.

For all the sorrow these thoughts should bring me, I cannot help but remember the touch of the hand that lifted me and comforted me when I had fallen in the dance, sweet as any father would have done. I hold my own hand up before my face in the dusky light of my room, as if I
might be able to discern the mark left there from the fey touch. I clench my fingers into a fist and hold them tight against my heart beneath the covers.

Unaccountably, I feel my lips turn up into a faint smile.

CHAPTER TWO

Father tells me we are to leave the middle country. Our home is to be sold, its ghosts and memories given over to a faceless family who will never care for them. His new wife lives in the North, so it is to the North we must go to begin life anew.

At first I can scarcely stomach it. I thought I was angry before, but now I am snapping and spitting with a fury like consuming fire. One thing alone keeps me from locking myself in my room and refusing to leave my home. It is the thought of my father’s wife. At least she will not tread these floors, I think. At least she will not put her hands on my mother’s things and haunt the rooms where my mother lived and died. It is this thought alone which gives me any happiness in leaving my home.

Still, even the comfort of this thought hits me with something that feels close to pain.

The next weeks are a flurry of preparations as the servants pack and carry. Though I am only fourteen, I have taken charge of the details of my father’s travels many times before. However, this journey is one I cannot keep my heart from rebelling against, and I refuse to take part in organizing it. Father sees and says nothing. He has grown nearly as quiet as I these past days.

At last the final plans are laid and the day of our departure arrives. As our carriage rumbles down the lane, it pleases me to imagine a part of myself, broken off from who I am now, standing on the lawn beneath the sweep of willow branches. I can picture how she is waving
goodbye. And though I am leaving her behind, she is yet smiling. For she will stay to haunt the shadows of the empty rooms here and walk the wood and dance in the glade. She will never be troubled by sorrow again. I make a silent, solemn wish that she will one day come and find me.

Hazel holds my hand. Though I want to pull it from her and tell her I am not a child, I refrain. It comes to me that it would be foolish to push away even the tiniest bit of comfort, when I have so little left at all. My gaze is drawn to Father’s face. He sits across from us in the carriage, silent and grim. His head is turned as if he is gazing out the window, although instinct tells me his eyes focus only on empty space. He is pale and there are silver strands in the black of his beard I never noticed before. I realize with a jolt that his pain is as great as mine. Perhaps he just has a different way of showing it.

My hand flutters with the impulse to reach out to him, to say a word or offer a touch which might take some of the anguish from his eyes. But then I remember that he has offered me no such word or touch of comfort. Stubbornness flares in me, strengthened by the pain already there. My hand lies quiet on my lap and I close my eyes.

It is a long journey to the North, and it gets colder each mile of the way. Just as I begin to give up hope that we will ever arrive, we do. Father’s team of horses pulls our carriage past the square frosty hedges of a sprawling garden. I can see the pointy heads of dwarf evergreens, speckled here and there and tipped with snowy caps. At the end of the long drive, the house regards us like a proud white cat sitting on its haunches. It watches me as though I am the mouse it will devour for supper.

* * *

I told my father already, in no uncertain terms, that I cannot call this new woman
Mother
. He was quick to agree, and asked simply that I call her
Stepmother
. I cannot refuse him this small
thing. Besides, it will not inconvenience me so very much to call her this, for I plan on calling her nothing at all unless there is no help for it.

As we stamp snow from our shoes in the entrance hall, a woman sweeps down the stairs to greet us. It can be no one but my father’s wife, yet I am astonished to see that she is nothing like I imagined. She is hardly taller than I am. Her faded gold hair is piled plainly but elegantly on her head. The figure beneath her tasteful dress is plump and comfortable. In her bright gaze and in the shape of her face I see she was once a beauty. She forgets to offer me a smile in her rush to get to Father’s side. It is exactly the thing I have done many times before. When I see her do it, pain lurches in my breast, as if stone is growing around the edges of my heart.

“Stepmother.” The curtsy I sweep is over-deep, just bordering on mockery.

“Isidore.” She nods, but shows no indication of understanding the irony of my display. Indeed, she is finding it hard to tear her eyes from my father. I must take a slow breath to keep myself from shouting at her to release him.

At last she turns, a slight flush on her face, and says, “And my daughter, your new sister.” One of her white hands goes out to indicate a figure who is standing at the edge of the shadows in the corner of the hall. I give a little start. I had not seen her there.

“This is Blessing,” my stepmother says, and I hear the whisper of slippered shoes as Blessing steps from the shadows.

I freeze when I see her face. For a moment, I think madly that she must be one of the fey. I have never seen such perfection in anyone’s features but theirs. Blessing’s smile is shy. Her eyes are like sapphires fixed upon my face. I find I cannot keep myself from smiling back at her.

She is of an age with me, but that is where our similarities end. Where I am lumpiness and childish bulges, Blessing is slender elegance, budding already into delicate womanhood.
Where my hair is coarse and dark as a raven’s, Blessing’s is fine liquid gold streaming over her shoulders.

Her curtsy to me is light as air and, as I return it, I suddenly feel as awkward as the performing bear in the circus Mother and I once visited. But when I look up, Blessing’s smile has grown into a grin and her large eyes sparkle. It is a blast of warmth on the chill at my core.

“Well, girls, you run along and get acquainted with one another,” Father says. “We shall see you at dinnertime.”

I feel a fleeting stab of betrayal that Father would think to leave me like this, awkwardly, with a stranger and in a strange place. And not just any stranger, but someone he insists I call sister. Not just any place, but this cold, vast house he insists is to be my new home.

Blessing’s warm hand wriggles into mine. “We could get you unpacked,” she says, and my face falls, for I am bored just thinking of it. Then I notice the gleam of mischief in her eyes as she continues, “But I’d much rather show you the hideaways in the house. There are even one or two Mother doesn’t know about.”

I am unwilling to smile, yet somehow there is one slipping onto my lips. I am unwilling to accept so swiftly what I have raged against for weeks, yet I am nodding before I can stop myself.

“Hideaways?” I say. “Truly?”

Blessing’s golden curls bob as her head moves up and down. “Of course! This fusty old house has plenty. I’ve lived here my whole life and have had lots of time to find them. You must promise not to tell anyone when I show you. Swear?”

“Yes!” I breathe. I am utterly drawn in. The worry of these past days falls from my shoulders. Even the lingering sadness from Mother’s death is not so sharp in this moment. I am once again a child, ready to play childish games.

“There is time to show you one before dinner,” Blessing says, tugging me along up the stairs. “It’s behind the attic stairwell. We must wait to see the other hiding places, but there will be plenty of time later.”

I follow her willingly. I do not even look over my shoulder to glance at the resentment I leave behind me like a cast-off rag.

By all rights I should hate her, this beautiful creature who is everything I am not, who is everything I should be. Yet a cord has been woven between us at this crucial moment, in these fragile seconds. Cords like this one often prove strongest.

Just like that, we are sisters.

* * *

Father and his new wife leave on their wedding journey three days later. They tell us they will be gone two months. Again I feel the sting of betrayal. I wonder that Father is marrying this woman of necessity, yet spending two months of pleasure far from me. Has he not told me many times I am the one who holds his heart? I begin to doubt I have ever had it at all. I begin to wonder if the closeness I felt between us these years was merely a cruel mirage.

Yet Blessing is with me in the swirl of snow on the wide front stairs as we bid our parents farewell. And when I see the pain in her face as the carriage disappears from sight, I tuck her arm against mine with a squeeze. My father has left me alone here on the verge of this new and strange life. Her mother has done the same.

It is another cord woven between us.

CHAPTER THREE

The North is cursed cold, I soon learn. Yet a frosty garden proves a perfect place for young girls to amuse themselves. We run along the stony, twisting paths and through a maze of hedges in a game of chase and find. When we tire of that, we sit on the icy iron bench nestled beneath the branches of a fir tree and do our secret-telling.

The whispered confidences of two girls of fourteen are doubtless laughable to most. But Blessing and I know they are sacred. We know they are merely a way of promising, a swearing of our newly found sisterhood. Boys spit on their palms or cut their fingers and let the blood run together. Girls tell secrets. So we tell ours, and before a week is gone there is almost no corner of my heart Blessing has not seen. She is my sister now, in truth.

When Father has been gone a month, the trees begin showing tiny green and pink buds. By the time he returns, the whole countryside will be awash with spring. It will come a full month later than our springtime in the middle country, true, but the North is almost a world of its own. It wears its frost as a queen of snow might wear her royal cloak, proud and white. The North is so different, in fact, I catch myself wondering if the fey folk are here as Hazel claimed they would be. The prick of homesickness, sharp and thin as a needle, reaches my heart at the thought of that. Not merely a longing for my homeland and the house of my childhood, but a longing for the folk themselves, the fey who used to love me so.