by Anna Mendell
She wandered to the cloistered garden adjacent to the castle hall. It was enclosed by pillars and pointed arches, and, though most of the blossoms had long ago flowered and shed their petals, there were thick growing bushes and roses whose blooms lasted until the winter frost. With a pang she missed her godmother’s garden and the magical wood she had left behind. Forlornly, she knelt under the bushes and pretended that she was back in the forest with her godmother and the Silver Wolf.
Rosa remained there with her memories until she noticed that someone else was in the garden with her. A boy, just a few years older than her, was lounging on a stone bench and observing her through the bushes with a mocking half smile. He was tall and pale, with thick, dark hair that curled around his neck.
Rosa recognized her cousin Edmund with surprise. She had not known he was visiting the castle and had only unpleasant memories of him. In the past, he had enjoyed teasing her to set her off on her wild tempers and would then laugh at her with the same mocking expression he was wearing now. But Rosa reflected that Edmund only knew her as the naughty princess she used to be and could not entirely be blamed for the bad memories. Besides, she wanted to make new friends, and here was an opportunity. So the princess crawled out from under the bushes and made her way to her cousin.
“Good morning, cousin Edmund,” she said.
Edmund rose from his reclining position and returned a languid bow.
“Good morning to you, princess Rosamund. I see that you enjoy playing in the dirt.” His smile grew larger and even more condescending.
Rosa felt mortified, but sniffed, “Yes, well, I’m having a nice time. I would suggest you try the same, but I am sure you wouldn’t want to get your clothes dirty.”
Edmund gave the princess a sharp glance.
Rosa pointed down to the bench. “Shall we sit down, so you can tell me why you are here?”
He sat down beside her, and she caught him giving her a sidelong glance.
“I came with my father on matters of state,” he said after a pause, “but I think the real reason was that he was disturbed by the news of your disappearance. No one was supposed to know, but very little escapes his ears.” Edmund gave Rosa his most disarming smile. “So where were you, Princess Rosamund?”
“Oh, I was staying with my godmother in her home in the forest… It was a very nice house,” she hastened to add, since her parents had seemed to so object to her previous accommodation.
Edmund was silent for a moment and then became engrossed in a leaf he plucked from a nearby bush. When he spoke, it was in an offhand manner. “When you say that you stayed with your godmother, do you mean that you were staying with a faery?”
“Of course,” said Rosa, “all of my godparents are faerie.”
Edmund picked up a stick by his boot and became absorbed with drawing in the dirt. When he spoke again, it seemed merely an afterthought. “Did you see anything curious? Learn anything strange?”
“Oh, yes!” Rosa beamed with excitement. “I think that my godmother wished me to learn to care for myself. I’ve been doing my own chores, and made friends with the Silver Wolf, and danced with the faerie.” She did not mention the fountain on the island; that seemed somehow harder to explain.
Edmund dropped the stick and looked directly at her. “A silver wolf… what do you mean? Chores and dancing? Is that all?”
“No,” said Rosa, confused, “I’m supposed to learn about my gifts and make friends.”
Edmund nodded slowly. “And have you?”
“Have I made friends?”
“No, learned about your gifts.”
“Yes… a little… not really,” she stammered.
“What about magic or spells? You spent a summer with the faerie. You must have seen some magic.”
Rosa shook her head. “I didn’t learn any spells. Faerie magic isn’t like that. They simply are magic.”
Edmund gave a dismissive laugh. “Well, princess, I can see that you only wanted to learn what you were told.” He began to rise.
“Wait,” said Rosa, “If you are so interested in magic I can show you my mirror, it’s magic.”
She drew the mirror from its pouch and held it out to him. Edmund’s eyes latched onto its smooth surface, and he could not mask his fascination. He was about to take the mirror, but paused, his hand hovering over it, and whispered, “What does it do?”
“It shows you your inward self.”
Edmund’s hand recoiled. He gave the princess a hard stare and then looked away. He said in a sneering tone, “So you are trying to be good and make friends. What a little girl you are! No one thinks in that silly manner anymore. I’ll wager that you came up to me because you wanted to be friends.”
“Oh!” She sprang up from her seat. “Who would want to be friends with you?” She spun around, ran blindly back towards the castle, and nearly collided with her uncle, the king’s younger brother, Prince Stefan.
“Princess! What a delight to see you.” Prince Stefan beamed a smile down at her.
Rosa shifted nervously. Her uncle’s smile was different from Edmund’s, but it made her feel just as uncomfortable. Whenever Stefan visited, she felt that he was always watching her with calculating, grey eyes, and whenever she caught him staring, he smiled the smile he gave only to her.
Now he was saying, “It seems you and my son were engaged in an animated discussion. We should come to the capital more often, he and I, and you must visit us as well.”
“Yes, indeed, but I am afraid I was just leaving,” Rosa stammered before she stumbled inside.
THE NEXT MORNING Rosa woke early and dragged Alice down to the library to accompany her to her morning lessons. She was curious about the man her father had appointed as her tutor. When they arrived, he was already waiting for her by a table in an alcove tucked away near the bookshelves. Rose found his looks disappointing. He had a medium sized build, limp brown hair, and a short-sighted squint. He was the most plain and unremarkable looking man she had ever seen.
Clearing his throat, he gave a deep bow. “I am your tutor, Mercurius.”
Rosa returned a curtsey.
“I hear that you can read and write and do simple geometry,” he said.
“Why, yes, I had lessons when I was a little girl, and I found it easy enough.” She couldn’t keep herself from bragging.
Her tutor did not appear impressed. “It is no surprise that the princess is a quick study. But can you read that manuscript on the table?”
He motioned to the table on which were laid out pen, ink, and leaves of parchment. Above these was a rolled-up scroll, yellow with age. She unrolled it and saw that it was illuminated by bright blue and vermilion letters written in a long and elegant script, but the words were strange and made up of symbols she had never seen before.
“No.” Rosa shook her head. “I cannot make it out. What language is it?”
“It is an old language, almost forgotten. There are few who can read this manuscript. I am one of them.”
“Oh, is that what you are going to teach me,” she asked, “how to read these old letters?”
Mercurius pried the scroll from her hands and replaced it with a sheet of parchment full of the same strange ink symbols.
“Copy these letters until the sheets on the table are full, front and back. And mind you make your letters small and neat,” he instructed.
She gazed at the parchment in her hand. “You want me to copy these?” she asked, mystified.
Mercurius raised his eyebrows. “Yes, is that not what I just said? I am not in the habit of repeating myself.”
“But wouldn’t it be better if you taught me what the symbols meant first?”
“I want you to copy them exactly. And you have made me repeat myself for the third time.”
“But it doesn’t make any sense!” she exclaimed.
“Precisely.”
She glared at her tutor and then glanced desperately about for help from Alice. She saw that the nursemaid ha
d settled herself comfortably on a chair near the door and had nodded off to sleep.
“If you must, look at it as if you were practicing your penmanship,” her tutor said unhelpfully.
Rosa bit her lip, but then thought of her godmother. She sat down and obediently began copying the symbols.
Mercurius soon looked over her shoulder. “No, stop!” he cried, “Did I not say small and neat? These are behemoths!”
“But it will take me forever otherwise!” Rosa wailed.
“Lazy creature, are you trying to avoid hard work?”
Rosa could hardly believe her ears. He dared call her, a princess, lazy! She bit back the retort on the tip of her tongue. She was not going to let her temper get the better of her, even though he was being terribly unfair. Clenching her teeth, she continued to copy the symbols. This time she wrote them smaller, but the copying seemed endless, and her hand started to cramp. She squirmed and fidgeted in her seat and looked up to find her tutor watching her, and his eyes darted back to the book he was reading.
Finally she finished her task and stood up with relief. Mercurius came over to her side and examined her handiwork.
“You may go. Your lesson is finished. But I expect you the same time tomorrow.”
WHEN Rosa was seated at her desk the next morning, she was aghast to discover that her tutor had unrolled the old scroll full of unintelligible symbols on the table and that he expected her to copy out the entire manuscript.
“But I don’t understand what I am writing. How will I learn anything?” she complained.
“It is not necessary for you to understand—yet. There are only two such manuscripts left on record. You would be copying it for posterity’s sake. Is that not of itself a noble task?”
“But I will make mistakes if I do not know what I am writing.”
“On the contrary, when you are familiar with something, you become careless. This way you will look at each symbol closely and carefully consider what you transcribe. Copy up to this point here,” he said, pointing to a symbol that ended with a distinctive flourish, “and you will be finished for the day.”
Rosa looked at her tutor with suspicion. She did not believe that this was what most people would consider lessons.
“The sooner you begin the sooner you will end,” he said with catlike grin.
Rosa reassessed her opinion about her tutor. There was something distinctly unsettling about him. She dipped her pen into the inkwell and began to carefully copy the symbols. Her attention soon wandered, however, and Mercurius caught her nibbling at the end of her pen. The sharp rap of his rod against the table called her back to attention. She seethed at him.
After what must have been hours, Rosa finished the section allotted and was more than glad to leave. The princess, however, soon found that she was tired and bored. No one paid attention to her besides Alice, nor could she find Edmund, not that she wanted to see him anyways.
She climbed to the top of one of the tall towers and gazed through the window to beyond the city spires and out into the horizon. The castle seemed so small in comparison to the boundless freedom of the forest. Her old way of life in the castle seemed so empty. She wondered if she would be feeling the same ache of discontent in the pit of her stomach if she had never lived with her godmother and played with the silver wolf, if somehow she would be happy being who she used to be. She didn’t know the answer to that question, but she did know that she was lonely.
THAT night, Rosa gazed long and deep into her godmother’s mirror, as she always did, when Alice unexpectedly entered her room.
The princess dropped her mirror in surprise.
“I hoped you would let me brush your hair as you used to,” Alice said softly.
“But I’m supposed to take care of myself…” Rosa stopped short at the look of entreaty on her nursemaid’s face. Ever since she had returned from her godmother’s house, Rosa bathed, dressed, and combed her own hair. Alice had stood aside, looking longingly at what once were her own duties, and Rosa wondered suddenly if her nursemaid did not feel a bit useless.
“Very well,” Rosa sighed. “There will be no harm done if it is only once.” She glanced down at the mirror. “Oh, that’s funny!” she exclaimed.
“What is?” Alice asked.
“Nothing,” Rosa said, as she tucked her mirror under the pillow.
While Alice braided the long strands of her hair, Rosa gazed at her nursemaid’s reflection in the mirror. Alice seemed to glow in a joyful contentment. Afterwards she tucked Rosa into bed and blew out the candles.
When she had left, Rosa sat up and took out the mirror and gazed into it in the moonlight. Earlier, when she had let Alice have her way, Rosa’s face had shone with the radiance of the Green Lady’s fountain, but now her usual face stared back at her.
Rosa slipped the mirror again into its hiding place and lay awake in bed that night, trying to understand what had just happened.
AFTER another one of her boring lessons the next day, Rosa went for her usual walk in the garden. Her feet crunched against the autumn leaves as she knelt down to look at some late-blooming geraniums. Soon it will be winter, and we won’t have any more flowers, she thought.
She heard more leaves crunching behind her and, looking up, saw to her surprise that Edmund was approaching her.
He must be bored too, she thought.
Her cousin was standing above her now and seemed to be having a hard time trying to keep himself from laughing.
“What is it, Edmund?” she asked crossly.
He tossed his head and then pointedly glanced down. Rosa followed his gaze and saw a large mud stain streaked across the front of her dress.
“Still a little girl playing in the bushes, Princess Rosamund?”
Rosa shot up. “Better that than an insufferable prig,” she cried, storming out of the garden.
I could get as dirty as I wanted to in the forest, she fumed to herself, stomping up the tall winding staircase up to her room. She banged open her door, stalked across the room, flung open her trunk, and rifled through its contents, but she could not find what she was looking for. She could not find her blue dress from the forest.
Suspicion flooded her mind. She called for Alice.
“Alice, do you know where my forest dress is? I know I put it in the bottom of the trunk,” Rosa asked with a hysterical note in her voice.
“Oh, that old, filthy thing? The dress was unsuitable, so I got rid of it while you were sleeping.”
Something within the princess snapped.
“You got rid of it,” she whispered. “You got rid of it!” she cried. “How dare you throw away my dress! Do you know what this means? You have ruined everything. Everything!”
“Tut, tut,” said Alice. “You have many other dresses. Dresses much prettier than that ugly thing.”
Rosa threw herself onto the bed. “I don’t want another dress. I want my old one!” she shrieked, writhing and tearing at the sheets. She flung a pillow at Alice.
Alice raised her eyes heavenward and left the room. The princess thrashed and flailed until she lay in her bed panting from exhaustion, eyes smarting from hot tears. She slowly got up and pulled out her mirror from out of her pouch.
A sallow faced little goblin creature with gaping eyes grinned back at her.
Rosa shrieked, dropping the mirror. The goblin creature’s features had unmistakably been her own. She shoved the mirror under the mess of twisted sheets.
“She ruined it,” Rosa muttered. “It’s all Alice’s fault. I hate her.”
DURING the next lesson with her tutor, Rosa was still in a black mood. She went down to the library, but slumped in her chair, refusing to copy anything. Mercurius peered at her from over his book.
She glowered at him.
“What, child, is the matter?” he asked.
“I won’t do it. I will not write out these senseless words. You just want this manuscript copied out and are too lazy to do it yourself. Well, I will not.”
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“Is that what you think?” He gave her a crooked smile and returned to his book.
“I mean it,” she cried, incensed. With a swift movement she knocked over the inkwell, so that ink spilled and entirely stained her work.
“Stupid child!” her tutor cried. Swift as an arrow he darted across the room and rescued his ancient scroll before the ink claimed it. “Did I not say that this was a rare manuscript? One of the last of its kind?” For an instant his eyes glowed, flashing quicksilver.
Rosa blinked, and his eyes were their normal brown shade. She must have imagined it.
“Well, it’s your own fault. You shouldn’t have ignored me. And if it is so precious, you shouldn’t have left it with me to begin with,” she said through set teeth.
“I can see that,” Mercurius responded coolly.
Shamed and angry, Rosa felt herself flush and wondered if her goblin self was peeking out. “You are hateful, and I will not have you as a tutor anymore!” she screamed as she rushed from the library.
AFTER that, the Rosa’s anger was uncontrollable. She was back to her old self, but with a vengeance. She hated the little goblin creature inside of her, but now that she knew it was there, she intentionally brought it out. “See!” her insides were screaming, “See what I am! What you’ve made me be!
Edmund seemed the most gleeful whenever he watched one of Rosa’s seething tantrums, so she flew at him at every opportunity. Her parents must have thought it best for Stefan and Edmund to return to their own estate in order to separate the cousins, so the two of them prepared for their journey home, though Rosa could tell that her uncle was disappointed.
When it was time for their departure, Stefan bowed deeply before Rosa and kissed her hand. “We will see you again when winter has passed. Perhaps we can convince my brother to let you stay the summer with us.”
Rosa smiled weakly. As much as she wanted to leave the castle, she did not want to spend the summer with her Uncle Stefan and her cousin.
Edmund also smiled, but Rosa could detect the familiar tinge of mockery when he said, “We can become even better friends during your visit.”
