Welcome to my tower. Would you like a tour? I’ve got a basket made of human hair, a shelf of books that I’ve basically memorized, and some clothes for when its cold. I’m not supposed to show you the room below this one, but it’s full of treasure that need to be hidden so no one will steal it, just like me.
They sat on the bed again. I was getting really cramped. I was just starting to wonder if maybe I should slide out when the girl said, “Someone lives here.”
And the man said, “Yeah.”
My heart started racing a million miles a minute again. What if they were here to find me, and hurt me, and kill me? What if they took my treasure?
They sat and talked about traveling the world, seeing things. I had never thought of traveling the whole world. I just wanted to step on solid ground. This girl had a whole valley, and she wanted more. She was telling the man about how much she wanted it. Something strange happened to me then. It was like something inside me connected to something inside her, almost like when Mother Dear sent herself into another body. Except I was still in my body, and so was the girl. But her words slid into my heart like a knife. There was so much wanting in her, just like in me. She voiced the yearning in my own heart that I’d always been afraid to speak.
And instead of telling her she was stupid and ungrateful, that she was too weak to face a single valley let alone the whole world, the man told this girl that she could do it. My heart beat so loudly in my chest that I was sure they could hear. It was swelling inside me, cracking, growing bigger by the second, their words stuffing it with wonder and sadness and anger all at once. And then the girl stopped speaking, and I was sure she had felt the pull of my anguish as surely as I felt hers.
Her foot landed in a pile of my hair that I hadn’t pulled under the bed, and I almost screamed with shock. She was going to lean down and look under, finding me at last.
Instead, she kicked my hair under. They weren’t even looking for me. Reality snapped me back into my body. I wasn’t connected to this girl. She was a stranger, and strangers were bad. Maybe they were trying to lure me out, waiting for me to show myself so they could pounce and trap me like an animal, the way they wanted to. They’d take me away and exploit my magic, strip away all I’d learned from my mother about chants and charms, and then they’d take my shifter crown and beat me until I cried so they could collect my tears. That’s what Mother Dear said would happen if anyone found me.
Thank the stars, she came back into the body of the old woman before they found me. She could move between bodies much more easily when the bodies were right next to each other, but she was a talented sorceress and could do it even from far away. She took great pride in this fact. I wished I could do it, if only to walk around inside someone else for a day and see what the world looked like from ground level. But I knew that one day I would. I just had to be patient, and I’d live to see the whole world.
When Mother Dear lured them out the window, I closed my eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. A shudder wracked my body when I thought of how close I’d been to being discovered. Mother Dear was right. Next time, I would go through the trap door and disappear when someone came close to the tower. I stayed under the bed until the voices outside died away. I didn’t know what had just happened. My brain could not make sense of the conversation that had taken place in this very room.
I went to my bookshelf and pulled out the World Atlas. I flipped through the pages, wondering what the girl wanted to see. The drawings were neat, and I had memorized nearly all the tiny words on every single one. Mother Dear had told me that they were places, and she’d even shown me the place where my lighthouse tower stood. I knew that the maps only represented places in the world. But I didn’t really understand what the world was, how there could be so many places. The valleys I could see below looked infinite to me.
But not to other people. Today, I had been in the same room with some of these other people, people who had gone places and done things. Real, human people. Shifters who I would one day rule. It was almost like I’d talked to them. I mean, I could have, so it totally counted. They were practically my friends now. Everyone in the books I read had friends, and now I did, too. Sometimes, I saw people come into the clearing below and look for things, and I’d spend days making up stories about their lives. And this was even better!
So much better. It might last me for years. I could make up whole lives for these people, even pretend that they’d come to visit me. When I was quilting or painting or cooking, I could talk to them and pretend they were still sitting on the bed just behind me.
I had gotten so busy daydreaming about all the daydreaming I was going to do that I’d forgotten to move once they were gone. Now I scooted out from under the bed. My clothes were coated in dust. Oh, well. Now I had no need to sweep under there. I peeled off my dress and tossed it in my basket of dirty clothes. I didn’t bother to get dressed again, though. Laundry took water, and a whole day of work, so I didn’t do it often. Long ago, Mother Dear had enchanted the tower to stay at a comfortable temperature. Otherwise, I would have frozen as a baby, since the window didn’t close.
I heard voices coming through it again, and my heart stutter-stepped in my chest. But I knew that in human form they couldn’t fly up here, so I ran to the window to look. I hadn’t seen so many people in my life. Just the random passerby in the field below. Today, I’d already seen the feet of the bird-man, the girl, and another man. Now I saw four more boys in the clearing below. They stood in a tight circle, gesturing and talking.
I leaned out a bit more, knowing they wouldn't look up. I knew because I studied every person that came into the clearing with complete devotion, memorizing their every move. Sometimes they dug around looking for things in the ground or in the trees, and some of them even circled my tower looking for a door that didn't exist. But no matter who they were or what they'd come for, they all did two things without fail.
When they came into the clearing, they let their heads drop back as they stared up at the tall tower where they couldn't go. After they'd looked at it, they never looked up again until they were ready to go. Then, sometimes they'd look up and sometimes not. But no one ever looked up while they were doing whatever they'd come for. That's when I could study them.
The four boys came close to the tower. One of them knelt just a few feet to the right of the window and dug his fingers into the dirt. He opened his palm and tilted it over the hole he'd made, covered the hole, and patted it with his palm. From up high, I couldn't make out their faces, but I could see that two of them had hair like Mother Dear's, the beautiful color. Theirs was a bit darker, a gold color that shone in the sun. The other two had darker hair, a brilliant shade of brown that gleamed like a wet leaf in autumn.
Something rose up inside me, tingling along my spine and spreading through my limbs. I couldn’t name the ache, the longing so deep within me that I hadn’t known it was there. I wanted to talk to the boys. I wanted to call down to them and tell them I was here. That’s all I wanted, it really was. It wasn’t like I wanted them to sit on the edge of my bed and tell me all the places they wanted to go, like the girl had done earlier while I lay safely hidden away beneath her. It wasn’t like I wanted that much. Just for someone to know that I existed, that I mattered.
But I knew I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t let them see me or they’d come up here like that bird-man. Still, I stood at the window, not stepping back to hide when they turned to go.
Look up, look up…
Maybe, if I didn’t call to them but they saw me by themselves, Mother Dear wouldn’t be too angry. I could say it had been an accident. It wasn’t, though. I wasn’t even hiding. I was standing in the window in plain view. For the first time in my life, I didn’t just want to see someone outside a little closer, to know about them. I wanted them to know about me. As they walked away, I felt something inside me tightening, and I had to stifle the urge to cry out. I couldn’t do that, though. That wasn’t an accident.
Turn around, just one of you…
When they disappeared along the path, I sank to the floor in defeat. They probably couldn’t see me from way down there, anyway. And if they did, they wouldn’t want to come up and talk to me. What had I been thinking? They weren’t boys I would roll in the grass and fight with. They were strangers, probably shifters, probably up to no good. What had they put in the ground, anyway? Would it break open a door in the side of the tower?
I should tell Mother Dear.
Instead, I went to the shelf and pulled out an encyclopedia. I looked at the faded grey pictures, trying to find any of the boys I’d seen below. I couldn’t tell, so I pulled out a few of my story books and looked at the princes in the fairy tales. Maybe one of them was my future husband, a prince coming to rescue me. But it was no use. I hadn’t seen their faces, so I couldn’t match them to the boys in any of my books.
At last, I gave up and went about my daily tasks, singing as I cleaned and sewed, played music, and danced at an imaginary ball. Mother Dear said I had to know how to do all these things to charm my prince. She said I had the voice of a siren, and she would know, because she had once been one. When she was younger, she said, she could make anyone in the entire world fall in love with her with just a song. Mine wasn’t as good as hers, though.
Mother Dear came the next day to tell me her plans had been foiled, but we weren’t giving up yet. She was more determined than ever that I should be the shifter queen. I didn’t know anything else, so life went on pretty much as usual for a few days. I was sitting on the windowsill singing and combing my hair as usual one day when I looked down and saw something bright green bursting up from the earth below my window.
My heart did a little flip. I ran to the shelf, pulled out my sketchbook, and rolled up a sheet of paper. Making a tube from it, I held it to my eye and examined the plant below. I couldn’t tell much about it, but it had grown pretty big in the past week. It must be a few feet tall already. It wasn’t in Mother Dear’s way, so she wouldn’t stomp it out like a weed.
“What are you thinking?” I asked myself aloud. “You should tell her. You should definitely tell her that some strange boys came and planted a rapidly growing vine that’s climbing your wall.”
I turned and paced back to the shelf, flattening the paper and placing it back in my sketch book. “But what if they’re not coming to break a hole in the wall?” I asked. “What if they’re the prince?”
When I was thoroughly confused, I decided to calm myself with painting another scene of the Ozark Mountains as seen from above. As always, I added peace eagles soaring in the sky. They could go anywhere, see anything. I sang as I worked and cleaned up. When I heard Mother Dear approaching, calling for the basket, I ran to the window. Below me…the vines had climbed at least a quarter of the way up the tower! Even though it was a warm spring day, and it had rained in the night, there was no way any plant could have grown ten feet in just a few hours. Not any normal plant, anyway.
Mother Dear wouldn’t miss that. She would chop it down and demand to know who had planted it. And I should tell her. I should.
Instead, I whispered a quick disguising spell. It didn’t make the vine invisible, exactly, just made it uninteresting. Mother Dear ignored it completely as she reached the bottom of the tower, even though it stretched far above her head on the wall just a few feet away. For a moment, I felt a smug satisfaction that I had done so well. I wasn’t great at magic, despite being the daughter of a powerful sorceress. I was lucky if I could make a rock look like the shiny things Mother Dear collected downstairs. A more skilled witch could actually change a rock into one of them, though I didn’t really understand why that was better.
All night, I waited for Mother Dear to mention the vines, but she didn’t say a word. I should have said a word to her, should have told her that a vine was coming up to break into my room. But something had happened to me when that girl came to my room. She had wanted more than an entire valley, and now I wanted something I’d never wanted before, too. I’d always looked forward to the day I could leave my tower, but now I wanted more. I wanted to see the world—not the whole world, like she’d wanted, but the real world, where other people lived and laughed and planted seeds and wrestled in the grass. And I wanted the world to see me.
Every day after that, I reached as far as I could out the window and dumped a bit of water on the vines and sang to them. Maybe I couldn’t make a boy fall in love with me with my song, but I was sure I was making the plant grow. Every day, they grew higher, until they were a wild tangle that threatened to encroach on my basket’s path. Mother Dear wouldn’t be able to ignore them then. The thought made my heart race with panic. What would I do then?
One warm morning I asked Mother Dear for water to do laundry. As I sat on my heels sloshing them in the tub, I sang to pass the time. Gathering an armload of sodden clothes, I headed to the window to hang them out to dry. I set the pile on the windowsill and leaned out, shaking the wrinkles from a skirt.
“Hello up there,” a voice called.
I screamed, flinging the skirt high into the air. It sailed down like a soggy shroud and wrapped around the boy perched in the vines reaching halfway to my window.
Chapter Six
William
By the time I struggled free of the clinging wet sheet the girl had hurled at me, she was gone. I hadn’t even known she was there. It was my turn to water the plant, so I’d come up to the mountain. The moment I’d heard her voice, I knew I had to see her. The voice was the purest, most beautiful sound I’d ever heard, a voice straight from the mouth of an angel. There was no other explanation. So, I had started climbing the vine. Maybe it led to heaven. It was obviously not of this world, so why not?
I tossed the soggy sheet aside and climbed the rest of the way up the vine, until it started pulling free of the wall. That’s when some sense came back into my head, and I realized I was fifty feet above a layer of unforgiving rocky Ozark soil. I really hoped this wasn’t some kind of poison ivy on steroids, because I was butt-ass naked after shifting into human form.
“Hey,” I yelled. “I won’t hurt you. I heard you singing, that’s all.”
For a minute, no sound came from the tower, and I thought she wouldn’t answer. But then a little voice drifted down. “Really?”
“Yeah, really,” I said. “You scared me. I didn’t know anyone was up there.”
A head of coppery hair appeared slowly over the windowsill, the face appearing inch by inch, stopping when her huge eyes were exposed. “I scared you?”
“I mean, you startled me,” I said. “I’m not afraid of a girl. You just surprised me. How’d you get in there?”
“I—I’m not supposed to tell.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Why not?”
“Because you’re a stranger,” she said. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”
“Too late,” I said, offering her a grin. “You’re already talking to me.”
She clapped a hand over her mouth, rising up a little more so I could see her whole face. She was pretty, but there was something else about her, something that went beyond pretty. She looked delicate and new somehow, like a newborn fawn.
“I’m William,” I said. “Who are you?”
“I’m not supposed to tell you that, either.”
“Okay,” I said. “How about a name? Can you tell me that? A name doesn’t really tell me who you are. It doesn’t really tell me anything, does it?”
She squinted, her eyes suspicious. “How do I know you won’t hurt me?”
“With what?” I asked. “If I let go of this vine, I’ll fall. I have no weapons. In case you can’t see past all these leaves, I’m actually not wearing anything.”
I was pretty glad for the leafy coverage. I’d climbed the mountain in animal form, and I hadn’t expected to run into anyone, so I hadn’t stashed clothes anywhere. Now that I knew someone lived here, I’d be bringing clothes for my next visit.
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“Me, neither,” the girl said. “I was washing my clothes, not wearing them.”
Now I was really, really glad for the leafy coverage. I would have thought she was teasing me, but she nothing in her face hinted at a joke. Any other naked girl would have thrown her wash water on my head if I told her I was also naked. Unless she was a shifter. Shifters usually weren’t super modest, since we spent a lot of time shifting and finding ourselves without clothes around. I figured it was a pretty safe guess, so I went ahead and asked.
“You’re a shifter?”
As soon as I said it, I regretted it. Her face changed, the innocent openness slamming shut and a guarded expression taking over.
“Sorry,” I said. “Uh, don’t tell me. You don’t have to tell me anything. But since you know my name, we’re not strangers anymore, so we can talk. Right?”
I couldn’t think of another explanation for her nakedness, but I knew I wasn’t done talking to her. Something about her fascinated me, though I didn’t know why. To be real, it was probably just the nakedness.
“What’s that plant?” she asked, nodding at the vines I clung to.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We kinda stole it from the witches at the wedding.”
“Witches?” Her eyes widened. “Wedding? Who got married?”
“Some redheaded witch,” I said, trying to study her without staring and totally freaking her out.
“Are you married?”
A snort-laugh escaped me at the thought. “No,” I said. “Are you?”
“No,” she said. “Mother Dear doesn’t want me talking to anyone, so I can’t get married unless I meet the prince.”
Caged: A Twisted Fairytale Retelling Page 3
