Midsummer Night

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  He thought of the prince who wandered the palace grounds as if he were already king. The young girl had the same sense of confidence as the young prince. Strange to find such confidence from a child born to the relative poverty that would accompany life on a farm.

  Arell shivered and looked up at the sky crowded with stars. No moon. The detail made him frown. Hadn’t there been a half moon just the night before when he’d been atop the wall?

  He was sure there had been.

  How could such a thing change in one night when the moon had been waxing and waning by marked degrees for millennia? How could it change in an eyeblink?

  It couldn’t. Arell knew it couldn’t. Yet it had. And the cold. The cold was a thing unbearable. Yet he knew from the position of the stars that it was still a season of warmth regardless of what changes had come over the moon.

  The summer months made a man shed clothing like the coming winter made a tree shed leaves. He’d only worn his jacket during the night watch because it was part of the uniform, and it showed others in the king’s employ that Arell was ranked and therefore had access to all the palace.

  Arell moved to wrap his coat tighter around his body when he realized he wasn’t wearing it.

  He grabbed at the clothing he wore, realizing he was in full dress uniform as if he’d been on his way to a ball.

  Being dressed in such attire confused him almost more than finding himself away from the familiar hills of his kingdom.

  Arell needed answers. He looked to the closed door of the farmhouse. The thatch sagged as though exhausted by years and weather. The light escaping from around the door and shutters had faded. The lamps had been extinguished, and the fire had died enough to be little more than the glow from the last embers.

  Had he really taken so long before deciding to knock and announce himself and get those answers he desperately needed? He was a soldier in the king’s personal guard. His position depended on him making decisions immediately. And it felt like he had been quick and decisive, but the light from inside told a different story.

  Time had passed.

  Well, no more time wasted. He lifted his hand and rapped his knuckles hard against the wood.

  And then he sucked in a deep breath.

  Because he no longer stood outside the door. He was inside ... in a woman’s bedchamber.

  He let out a curse, and the woman in the bed sat up straight.

  Grace

  Grace felt the presence as soon as it arrived. It brought with it a bone-shivering cold that sank through the many layers of blankets.

  “Who’s there?” she demanded to know.

  “I’m Arell of the king’s guard.”

  The voice splintered like ice, making Grace wrap her blankets more tightly around her.

  “What king insists on a member of his guard entering a woman’s bedchamber?” Grace felt pride at not letting the fear cause her voice to quaver. She squinted to try to see the owner of the voice but saw nothing aside from the darkness. The voice penetrating the darkness froze the room, every consonant like ice cracking, every vowel a slushy snowfall.

  Someone was in their home. Someone had entered uninvited and certainly unwanted. And that someone brought with him a stinging freeze.

  “No king sent me. I don’t know how I came to be here, but I must return to my post. I protect the king. My absence will be felt.”

  “Now, see here. Your absence is something I would very much like to feel. There is no reason for you to be in my home. I want you to leave.” Grace said the words as forcefully as she could manage without chattering her teeth with the brittle cold. Annabelle had said she’d seen a ghost. And Grace could no longer doubt the child’s declaration. For what, but a ghost, could turn her room into winter? What but a ghost could be a disembodied voice? “Where are you? Show yourself to me.”

  “I’m standing right in front of you!”

  The strength of his words and the frustration that obviously came with them felt like a wash of ice water over her skin. She gasped with the shock. “I see nothing. No one stands before me.” Her words were insistent, but she knew she was wrong. She felt him more vibrantly than she’d ever felt anything in her life. His presence was a riot of color and cold in her mind. “Show yourself to me!”

  Her demand was met with contemplative silence before he said, “I don’t know how to make myself clearer to you. Can you really not see me?”

  She focused on his direction, staring into the cyclone of space that seemed to belong to him and him alone. “I see nothing.”

  “How do you not see me when I’m here? I’m here!” His arctic frustration bit at her.

  “You’re making the room so cold!” She gasped again, the shiver working through her.

  “I am doing nothing,” he said. “I feel as though I’m entombed in ice. This place is wretched. How can you stand the cold of your land?”

  “Because I was warm in my bed until you woke me. And it seems that the air around where you say you stand becomes colder still when you raise your voice.”

  He stayed silent another moment. Grace believed that, whoever he was, he was not the sort of man to act without thinking first. And that was a quality she admired. Her father had been the sort to run headlong into action without ever thinking of what those actions might mean for him later—let alone what those actions might mean for his family. She was quite sure that her father’s impetuous determination to act recklessly led to his death and the family’s subsequent poverty.

  “You can hear me and feel my cold, yet you cannot see me?”

  “Yes.” She loosened her grip on her blankets. His calm demeanor warmed the room marginally enough to allow her to relax. That bit of warmth stirred something else in her—compassion instead of fear.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “You’re in my bedchamber of my family’s home—my father’s name was Blackstone. But I believe you’re meaning more generally rather than specifically?”

  “Yes. Thank you. I’m sure it seems odd that I’m uncertain of my own location, but it has been a very strange night. I have no memory of leaving the palace.”

  “That is strange,” she agreed, “but no stranger than my not being able to see you. Our home is located in the city of Daven on the western ridge of the southernmost part of the Tenali kingdom. Are you at least in the right kingdom? You mentioned being a member of the king’s personal guard. It makes me wonder which king you might mean.”

  He heaved a great breath, and with it, the air warmed again—not by a lot, but enough to show he felt relieved. “I’m in the right kingdom, but the western ridge of Tenali? That’s the farthest from the palace one can travel within our borders. I have to return immediately!”

  The frigid blast made her jaw clench. “Stay calm!” she insisted. “You’re freezing me!”

  “I’m sorry. I only—I just need your help.”

  The way he phrased his plea led Grace to believe he was not the sort of man who was used to asking for help. “How am I to help you?”

  “I need to return to the palace at once. Something has happened. Something—”

  “Be calm!” she insisted again. “Tell me what you remember. We can sort this out. But perhaps we should do it by the fire. I’m going to freeze, otherwise. Go to the fire. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Why are you meeting me? Why not come with me?”

  If he hadn’t already announced himself to be a member of the king’s personal guard, she would have thought him afraid. How could anyone in the king’s personal guard be afraid to step out alone into a different room? Yet his voice conveyed the curl of fear tightening around his vocal cords.

  “I’m in my nightdress, sir. If you’re any kind of gentleman, you’ll leave so I can put on a robe.”

  The room warmed a few degrees more, as though the ghost had blushed.

  And then he was gone. She was certain he’d left because the temperature rose immediately; the chill of him simply vanished.


  She waited a moment before finding the strength of mind to be able to swing her legs down to the floorboards and slip her feet into her slippers. She pulled on her robe and then, in a moment of decision, grabbed her wool shawl and wrapped it firmly over her shoulders. If she planned on meeting a frigid ghost, she planned on being prepared.

  It never occurred to her to go to the room shared by her mother and young sister to see if her mother could help her. Grace had spent too many years protecting and comforting them to feel that there was any way they could ever offer her protection or comfort. She considered going to her brother’s room and waking him but realized she had no desire to bring him into what her mother had called a fairy story. So little in her life belonged to her and her alone, and even if her sister had met the ghost first, Grace was the one he’d asked for help. Didn’t that mean he belonged to Grace?

  I should be frightened, she thought. I should feel dread and terror right to my toenails. But she only felt a sincere desire to help—a sincere desire to understand and to offer aid that might be in her power to give.

  She stepped carefully over the floorboards, avoiding the ones that groaned with the greatest agony to avoid alerting anyone else in the house. She stopped once she’d turned the corner to the parlor and the fire. The room should have held a lingering warmth from the hot coals, but all the warmth had been sucked away.

  The ghost was in the room.

  She steeled herself against the things she could feel but could not see and then hurried to the fire to coax it back into a warm glow. Her actions would require her to chop more wood later in the week when her brother had left, but she couldn’t be in the ghost’s presence and have no fire. She’d catch her own death, and then the household would have two ghosts to worry about.

  The thought made her smile to herself.

  “Do you think my situation is amusing in any way?”

  The voice startled her, even though she knew of his presence. “No. I was simply thinking my own thoughts.” She wondered if he understood the truth of his situation. Did he know he was dead? Did he understand that very likely at this moment, someone was mourning over his cold body and preparing it for burial? He’d likely be buried in a churchyard somewhere if he was a commoner, but as a member of the king’s personal guard, he might be given a place in the palace mausoleum.

  Perhaps he’d been dead for a long while and had already been interred. That would explain how he’d traveled so far. He said he’d been gone only a night, but that seemed unlikely. No one could travel such a distance so quickly. Besides, her sister had said she’d seen him in the feed shed earlier that day. However long it had been, Grace felt certain he required her guidance to understand and accept his situation. The sooner he accepted that he was well and truly dead, the better off he’d be.

  Once the fire was sufficiently roaring again, she turned to where the voice and the cold originated. It appeared he’d settled in her mother’s chair. She fixed her gaze on the chair, which prompted him to ask, “Can you see me?”

  “No. I’m sorry. I can only hear you and feel the cold. But why don’t you tell me everything from the start? What last memory do you have while things were still normal and what are all the events that led you to my room?”

  The tale he spun was rather disappointing. He’d been on the palace wall doing the night watch when he heard a noise, and then he was here on her farm, at her house.

  “But what was the noise?” she asked when he’d finished explaining everything.

  His silence told her he considered her question so he could answer to the best of his ability.

  “A door opened.” The words came out with an exhausted sort of triumph as if it had taken a great deal of energy to find his answer, but he felt immense pride that he had found it.

  “A door?” She felt marginally sorry that she sounded so incredulous. “Didn’t you say you were on a wall? Where is there a door on top of the wall?”

  He didn’t become impatient with her the way many people did when she asked questions. Instead, he explained that the wall surrounding the palace was several feet across and had passages that led up to it from within the wall itself. Doors marked each passage along the wall.

  “Was it another guard, perhaps?

  His answer to this question took much longer this time. “No. I wouldn’t be relieved from my duty until morning. No one would’ve been coming for such a purpose. And no other guard would’ve been on the wall who wasn’t already stationed there for the night.”

  “Do people usually visit the wall? Is it unheard of to receive a message from someone or another while you’re on duty?”

  “It’s not unheard of, but neither is it usual.”

  “Do you remember receiving a message?”

  His long silence provoked another shudder from her. His focus and his frustration at trying to remember sucked away the heat from the fire.

  “The king’s advisor!”

  He blurted the words with such force and so unexpectedly that Grace jumped.

  He continued. “The king’s advisor had come to the wall.”

  “In the middle of the night? It must have been an urgent message for him to have come at such a time.” Grace wished she could see this man, this ghost. She wished she had a face to put with the deep timbre of voice.

  “The message wasn’t for me.”

  “Then who?”

  “It was for Simmons, one of the other guards. Norton, the king’s advisor, whispered Simmons’s name and then thrust out something for me to take. He thought I was Simmons.”

  That was where the story finally became interesting. Grace leaned in closer to the voice. “What did you do?”

  “I took the package.”

  “And what was it? Something secret?”

  He groaned. “My head hurts from digging so hard for my own memories.”

  Grace frowned, wanting to explain to him that his head couldn’t very well hurt since he was dead, but who was she to say what did or didn’t happen when one died? Maybe heads could hurt. He’d already professed to being cold, and she’d felt enough of his ice to not doubt him. “I’m sorry for your pain. I’m only trying to help you, not make you unwell.”

  “I know. And I thank you for listening. Things feel clearer now with you listening to me than they did when I’d been alone. Norton told me to make sure the royal family all received a portion of the contents of the package he’d given me in their dinners.”

  Grace shook her head. “Well, that’s bad.”

  “Is it? Why? I can’t remember anything else beyond that yet. Why is that bad?”

  “No one delivers dinner instructions to a member of the family’s personal guard in the middle of the night under the cover of darkness. What does the guard have to do with the food served within the household?”

  His heavy sigh felt as though it had put the fire out entirely. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. I know I must seem terribly insufficient as a guard to not see that immediately, but I’m not exactly myself right now. Something has happened, and my thoughts have yet to catch up.”

  Grace checked the fire to see that it still crackled and burned. She added another log and pushed the coals around. Should she tell him that the something that had happened was that he’d died? Did he really not know?

  “It was a packet of poison for each family member, wasn’t it? That’s the only thing that makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  She felt sorry to have to agree with him, but really, nothing else made sense. The royal family had their enemies. She assumed all royal families did. Grudges from neighboring kingdoms or from family members more distantly connected to the throne or those who’d been titled and then stripped of their titles for some such or other reason. A royal family didn’t have to do anything wrong at all for others to be envious or poorly behaved. Grace nodded her agreement with him because it was the very first thought she’d had.

  “And if this man Norton realized you weren’t that other guard,�
� Grace started, trying to figure out how to say it gently. “Well, you would’ve been a liability at that point.”

  “Do you think they knocked me unconscious and then dumped me off here?”

  No. That wasn’t quite what Grace had been thinking. “I was thinking of how Norton might have wanted you more permanently removed.”

  “Do you think they’re coming back for me to finish me off?”

  Grace groaned inwardly. “Well, they might if they felt you hadn’t already been handled.”

  “Then they should’ve just killed me in the first place—” He cut off, and the room turned to a cold that made Grace ache. “You think they’ve already killed me. You think I’m dead and that’s why you can’t see me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Grace said. “This isn’t the best news for you to hear, but you should consider the possibility that perhaps you—”

  “I’m not dead!” the ghost shouted. The flames froze in the fireplace, and the air sliced her lungs to ribbons for the tiniest of instances before the room was suddenly intolerably hot and the flames popped and crackled out of their frozen encasement.

  She knew what that meant but waited a moment before trying to call to him. “Ghost?” She should have used his name and would have if she’d known it. Some part of her thought maybe he’d given her that information upon entering her room, but she’d been so frightened at the beginning, she couldn’t be certain.

  Regardless, he didn’t answer.

  Her ghost was gone.

  Arell

  Arell had been furious with the farm woman for daring to insinuate that he could be dead. Wouldn’t a man know if he were dead or not? Of course he would! Farm people and peasants in general were the worst, most superstitious, lot.

  But it truly frightened him to consider the haze of jumbles in his mind. The gap between what he’d managed to remember at the wall and showing up in a shed troubled him. Days’ worth of travel had to have existed between those two events. At least three—more likely four.