Modern Fairy Tale: Twelve Books of Breathtaking Romance

by Kristen Proby

  But the night I met the wizard, all of that was still in the future. At that moment, I was giddy and wound up from spinning in circles and sneaking extra plates of dessert from the winking waitresses. I was still spinning when my grandfather beckoned me to join him near the doors of the ballroom. I skipped over, expecting another of his usual friends—the Beltway wheelers and dealers or the snappish, bored businessmen.

  It was someone different. Something different. A tall man, only in his mid-twenties, but with crow-dark eyes and a thin mouth that reminded me of the illustrations of evil enchanters in my fairy tale books. Unlike the evil enchanters, he didn’t hunch over a cane or wear long, trailing robes. He was dressed in a crisp tuxedo, his face clean-shaven, his dark hair short and perfectly combed.

  My grandfather beamed down at me as he introduced us. “Mr. Merlin Rhys, I’d like you to meet my granddaughter, Greer. Greer, this young man is moving here from England, and coming in as a consultant to The Party.”

  The Party. Even at seven, The Party was a force in my life as strong as any other. A risk, I suppose, that came with having a former Vice President for a grandfather. Especially when that former Vice President had served in the White House with the late Penley Luther, the dead and revered demigod of The Party. It was President Luther who was referenced in all the speeches and op eds, it was Luther’s name that was invoked whenever a crisis happened. What would Luther do? What would Luther do?!

  Mr. Merlin Rhys looked down at me, his black eyes unreadable in the golden glow of the ballroom. “This seems a bit dull for a girl your age,” he said, softly but also not softly. There was a challenge in his words, lodged somewhere in those neatly folded consonants and airy vowels, but I couldn’t puzzle it out, couldn’t sift it away from his words. I kept my eyes on his face as my grandfather spoke.

  “She’s my date,” Grandpa Leo said affectionately, ruffling my hair. “My son and daughter-in-law are traveling out of the country for humanitarian work, so she’s staying with me for a few months. She’s so well-behaved. Isn’t that right, Greer?”

  “Yes, Grandpa,” I chirped obediently, but when I caught the frown on Merlin’s face, something chilled in me, as if a cold fog had wrapped itself around me and only me, and was slowly leaching away my warmth.

  I dropped my eyes to my shoes, shivering and trying not to show it. The glossy patent leather reflected the shimmers and glitters of the gilded ceiling, and I watched those shimmers as Merlin and my grandfather began discussing midterm election strategy, trying to reconcile what I felt with what I knew.

  I felt fear, the kind of creeping, neck-prickling fear I had when I woke up at night to see my closet door open. But I knew that I was safe, that Grandpa Leo would keep me safe, that this stranger couldn’t hurt me in a room full of people. Except I wasn’t afraid of him hurting me or stealing me away, necessarily. No, it was the way his eyes had bored into mine, the way his disapproval of me had enveloped me so completely, that frightened me. I felt like he knew me, understood me, could see inside of me to all of the times I’d lied or cheated or fought on the playground. That he could see all the nights I’d been unable to sleep, my closet door open and me too afraid to get up and close it. All the mornings my father and I went walking in the woods behind our house, all the evenings my mother patiently taught me tai chi. All the fairy tale books I so adored, all of the treasures I’d gathered in the little treasure box stored under my bed, all of my secret childish dreams and fears—everything. This man could see it all.

  And to be seen—really seen—was the most terrifying thing I’d ever felt.

  “Leo!” a man called from a few feet away. He was also with The Party, and Grandpa gave my hair a final ruffle as he gestured to the man to approach him. “One moment, Mr. Rhys.”

  Merlin inclined his head gravely as my grandfather turned to speak to the other man. I willed myself to meet his eyes again, and then immediately wished I hadn’t. His eyes, I now realized, had been shuttered when speaking to Grandpa, and they were un-shuttered now, burning with something that seemed a lot like dislike.

  “Greer Galloway,” he said in that soft-not-soft voice. Something like a Welsh lilt emerged in his words, as if he’d lost control of his voice as well as his eyes.

  I swallowed. I didn’t know what to say—I was a child, and always my girlish demeanor had been enough to charm Grandpa Leo’s friends—but I sensed that it would do no good here. I could not endear myself to Merlin Rhys, not with smiles or dimples or twirls or childlike questions.

  And then he knelt down in front of me. It was rare for the adults in Leo’s world to do that—even the women with children of their own preferred to stand over me and caress my blond curls as if I were a pet. But Merlin knelt so that I could look him in the eye without craning my neck, and I knew despite my fear, this was a sign of respect. Merlin was treating me as if I were worthy of his time and attention, and even though it was tainted with disapproval, I was grateful for it in my own young way.

  He reached out and took my chin in his long, slender fingers, holding my face still for inspection. “Not ambitious,” he said, dark eyes searching my face. “But often careless. Not cold, but sometimes distant. Passionate, intelligent, dreamy…and too easily hurt.” He shook his head. “It’s as I thought.”

  I knew from the stacks of books beside my bed that the words of an enchanter were dangerous things. I knew I shouldn’t speak, I shouldn’t promise him anything, agree to anything, concede or lie or evade. But I couldn’t help it.

  “What’s as you thought?”

  Merlin dropped his hand, and an expression of real regret creased his face. “It cannot be you. I’m sorry, but it simply can’t.”

  Confusion seeped past the fear. “What can’t be me?”

  Merlin stood up, smoothing his tuxedo jacket, his mind made up about whatever it was. “Keep your kisses to yourself when the time comes,” he said.

  I didn’t understand. “I don’t kiss anyone except Grandpa Leo and my mommy and daddy.”

  “That’s your world now. But when you are older, you will inherit this world,” Merlin said, gesturing around the room, “the world your grandfather helped create. And this world hangs on a thread, balanced between trust and power. Powerful people have to decide when to trust each other and when to fight each other, and those decisions aren’t always made with the mind. They’re made with the heart. Do you understand this?”

  “I think so…” I said slowly.

  “Greer, one kiss from you would swing this world from friendship to anger. From peace to war. It will destroy everything your grandfather has worked so hard to build, and many, many people will be hurt. You don’t want to hurt people, do you? Hurt your grandfather? Undo all the work he’s done?”

  I shook my head vehemently.

  “I didn’t think so. Because that’s what will happen if your lips touch another’s. Mark my words.”

  I nodded because this was logic that spoke to me. Kisses were magic, everyone knew this. They turned frogs into princes, they woke princesses from deadly sleep, and they decided the fates of kingdoms and empires. It never once crossed my mind that Merlin could be wrong, that a kiss might be harmless.

  Or that a kiss might be worth all the harm it caused.

  The regret in his eyes turned into sadness. “And I am sorry about your parents,” he said softly. “Despite everything, you are a sweet girl. You deserve only happiness, and maybe one day you’ll learn that’s what I’m trying to give to you. Hold tight to the things that make you happy, and never doubt that you are loved.” He nodded towards Grandpa Leo, who was now walking back toward us.

  “Don’t be sorry for my parents,” I said, puzzled. “They’re just fine.”

  Merlin said nothing, but he reached down and touched my shoulder. Not a pull into a hug, not a pat or a caress, just a touch. A moment’s worth of weight, and then nothing but the feeling of air on my skin and worry settling into my small bones.

  Grandpa Leo scooped me into
his arms as he reached us, planting a big mustached kiss on my cheek as he did. “Isn’t my granddaughter something special, Merlin?” he asked, grinning at me. “What were you two talking about?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but Merlin cut in smoothly. “She was telling me how much she enjoys staying with you.”

  Grandpa looked pleased. “Yes. I love Oregon as much as anyone, but there’s nothing like New York City, is there, Greer?”

  I must have answered. There must have been more conversation after that, more words about politics and money and demographics, but all I could hear were Merlin’s words from earlier.

  I am sorry for your parents.

  In my overactive imagination, it wasn’t hard to conjure the worst. It was what always happened in the stories—tragedy, omens, heartache. What if my parents had been killed? What if their plane had crashed, their hotel caught on fire, their bodies beaten and robbed and left to die?

  I am sorry for your parents.

  It was all I could think of, all I could hear, and when Grandpa Leo tucked me into bed later that night, I burst into tears.

  “What’s wrong, sweetie?” he asked, thick eyebrows drawn together in concern.

  I knew enough to know he wouldn’t believe me when I told him that Merlin was an enchanter, maybe a bad one, or that he could somehow sense my parents’ deaths before they happened. I knew enough to lie and say simply, “I miss Mommy and Daddy.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” Grandpa Leo said. “We’ll call them right now, okay?”

  He pulled out his phone and dialed, and within a few seconds, I heard Mommy’s light voice and Daddy’s deep one coming through the speaker. They were in Bucharest, getting ready to board a train bound for Warsaw, and they were happy and safe and full of promises for when they returned home. For a short while, I believed them. I believed that they would come back. That there’d be more long forest hikes with my father, more tai chi in the evenings with my mother, more nights when I fell asleep to the sound of them reading poetry to each other with logs crackling in the fireplace nearby. That the warm sunshine and tree-green days of my childhood still stretched out before me, safe in the cozy nest of books and nature that my parents had built.

  But that night as I tried to fall asleep, Merlin’s words crept back into my mind along with the fear.

  I am sorry about your parents.

  I barely slept that night, jolting awake at every honk and siren on the Manhattan streets below Grandpa’s penthouse, shivering at every creak of the wind-buffeted windows. Dreams threaded my sleep, dreams of tree-covered mountains in a place I’d never seen, broad-shouldered men crawling through mud and dead pine needles, my parents dancing in the living room after they thought I was asleep. A train steaming across a bridge, and the bridge collapsing.

  My parents danced, the wind blew through the trees, men crawled through mud. The train plunged to the valley floor.

  Dance, trees, mud, death.

  Over and over again.

  Dance, trees, mud, death.

  And when I sat up in the weak sunlight of morning to see my grandfather standing in the doorway, his eyes blank with shock and horror, his phone dangling from his hand, I already knew what he was there to tell me.

  Like King Hezekiah, I turned my face to the wall and prayed.

  I prayed for God to kill me too.

  Chapter Two

  Eleven Years Ago

  God, as he often does, chose not to answer my prayer. Or at the very least, chose not to answer yes.

  Instead, my life went on.

  My mother’s parents were aging and frail, and while I had an aunt and uncle in Boston, they already had a daughter my age and they made it quite clear that they weren’t willing to take on another child.

  But it hardly mattered. From the moment Grandpa Leo got the phone call, from the very second the reality settled over us, it was never in question that I would live with him. He was only in his fifties, healthy and energetic, with plenty of room in his house for another person. He was a busy man, busy with The Party and his thriving green energy empire, but Grandpa Leo was never the kind of man to say no to anything other than sleep. He moved my things into his penthouse, enrolled me in a small but academically rigorous private school in the Upper West Side, and folded me into his life as best a widowed grandfather could.

  I remember crying before and after the funeral, but not during. I remember hiding inside myself at the new school, so different from the airy Montessori classroom back in Oregon. I remember Grandpa Leo buying me stacks of books to cheer me up, and I remember reading late into the night. I remember missing my parents so much it felt like someone had scooped something vital out of my chest with a giant spoon. I remember hearing Merlin’s words about my parents.

  Merlin’s prophecy.

  If he’d been right about their deaths, was he also right about the other things? He’d told me to keep my kisses to myself—was it a warning I had to follow?

  I was certain it was. I was certain now that Merlin could see the future, that he could predict doom, and in my grief and terror, I promised myself at seven years old that, no matter what, I would never kiss a man or woman so long as I lived.

  Never, ever, ever.

  * * *

  When I was fourteen, Grandpa Leo asked me whether I’d like to continue going to school in Manhattan or if I’d like to enroll in a boarding school overseas. My cousin Abilene was being sent there in the hopes that she would settle down and focus on her schoolwork, and Grandpa thought I might like to go as well. I was already an excellent student—there were no worries there—but I think Grandpa worried that I was too isolated living alone with him, only going to environmental fundraisers and party events, spending my evenings immersed in gossip and speculation about politicians and businessmen, and spending my weekends as Grandpa’s secret weapon, observing and reporting back to him.

  “You’re young,” he said, sitting at the dinner table as he handed me the booklet for the school. The pictures seemed almost calculated to lure me into saying yes—thick fog, old wooden doors, gold and green English summers. “You should see the world. Be around other young people. Get into a little bit of trouble.”

  Then he laughed. “Or at the very least, keep your cousin out of trouble.”

  And that was how Abilene and I ended up at the Cadbury Academy for Girls the autumn of my fourteenth year.

  Cadbury was an impressive place, a large and sprawling complex of stone and stained glass, with towers and multiple libraries and an honest-to-God Iron Age hill fort right in its backyard. I loved it immediately. Abilene loved only its proximity to the boys’ school a mile down the lane. Almost every night, she would crawl out of our ground-floor window and creep across the soft green lawn to the road. Almost every night, I would go with her, not because I wanted to see the boys, but because I felt protective of her. Protective of her safety, of her future at Cadbury, of her reputation.

  We crept into dorm rooms, met in the back gardens of pubs that didn’t bother to kick us out, joined illicit parties on the massive flat-topped hill where the Iron Age fort once stood. We weren’t the only girls most of the time, but Abilene was the constant, the leader, the instigator.

  By fifteen, she had the tall willowy body of a model, with soft budded breasts and long red hair. She was loud and vivacious and pretty, she drank more than the boys, played lacrosse like her life depended on it, and always, always had a circle of people around her.

  In contrast, I was a thing of shadows and corners. I spent most of my free time in the library, I often ate alone on the grounds with a book resting against my knees. I ignored sports but chose dance and creative writing as my extracurriculars instead. I was shorter than I wanted to be, my body lagging behind Abilene’s in the things boys liked to see, strong enough for dance but not quite slender enough to look good in the leotard. My chin had the slightest hint of a cleft, which Abilene and I would spend hours trying to hide with makeup, and I had a beauty mark on my cheek that
I loathed. My eyes were gray and felt flat compared to Abilene’s lively blue ones, and all of this would have been fine if I had even one ounce of the charisma Abilene so effortlessly exuded, but I didn’t. I was quiet and spacey and dreamy, terrified of conflict but sometimes thoughtless enough that I accidentally caused it, fascinated with things that my peers cared nothing for—American politics and old books and coral reef bleaching and wars fought so long ago that even their names had all but turned to dust.

  The one thing I liked about myself at that age was my hair. Long and thick and blond—golden in the winter and nearly white in the summer—it was the thing people noticed first about me, the way they described me to others, the thing my friends idly played with when we sat and watched TV in the common room. Abilene hated it, hated that there was any one thing about my appearance that showed her up, and I learned within a few weeks at Cadbury that her sharp tugs of my ponytail weren’t signs of affection but of barely controlled jealousy.

  Despite the hair, Abilene was still the monarch and I still the lady-in-waiting. She held court and I anxiously kept a lookout for teachers. She shirked her homework, and I stayed up late typing out assignments for her so she wouldn’t fail. She partied and I walked her home, balancing her on my shoulder and using my phone for light as we stumbled down from the hill, her hair smelling like spilled cider and cheap cologne.

  “You never kiss the boys,” she said one night when we were fifteen, as I guided her down the narrow lane back to the school.

  “Maybe it’s because I want to kiss girls,” I said, stepping over a patch of mud. “Ever think of that?”

  “I have,” Abilene drunkenly confirmed, “and I know that’s not it, because there’s lots of girls at Cadbury who would kiss you. And still you never kiss anyone.”

  Keep your kisses to yourself.

  Eight years later, and I could still see Merlin’s dark eyes, hear his cold, disapproving voice. Could still remember the eerie feeling of portent that came over me when he predicted the death of my parents. If he believed people would suffer if I kissed someone, surely there was a good reason.