Once Upon A Time (5) Before Midnight

by Cameron Dokey

“I cannot summon up things that must not happen. That which must take place, I cannot stop. All I can do is to help make the wishes that lie between come true. My power must stop at the boundaries of life.”

  My father began to laugh, then, and the sound was bitter and wild. “A wish?” he exclaimed. “Is that what you want? You expect me to bestow a wish upon this child that has robbed me of so much?”

  “It is what Constanze would have wanted,” Old Mathilde said, “and what she herself did. If you cannot bring yourself to do it yet, try starting with the boy. You must have brought him to me for a reason. Therefore, there must be some wish you would bestow.”

  But by now, father was nodding his head in agreement, as if Old Mathildes words had recalled to his mind a task that he had left undone.

  “I wish the boy to be raised as a member of my household,” he said. “Give him no special honors, yet treat him fairly and well. But on pain of death, he is never to be permitted to leave my lands, not even when he is grown. Not unless I send for him.”

  “By what name shall I call him?” Old Mathilde asked.

  My father shrugged. “By whatever name that comes to mind. What he is called is not important.”

  This is sheer nonsense, of course. If what we are called is not important, why bother with a name at all? But Old Mathilde had also not grown Old by being stupid. She knew when to hold her tongue and when to speak her mind. She had named one child. She could name another.

  “And your daughter?” she asked softly. “You must wish something for her, Etienne. Constanze is dead, and it is your right to grieve for her. But you and your daughter are alive. With every beat your two hearts make, each of you wishes for something, for to wish is to be alive. This is a fact you cannot escape.”

  “Not even if I wish to?” my father inquired.

  “Not even then,” Old Mathilde replied.

  “Then hear the wish I will bestow upon my daughter,” my father said. “I wish that I might never see her again, unless the sight of her can give back the peace that she has stolen. As I imagine that day will never come, matters should work out well.”

  “Matters often do that,” Old Mathilde said. Here she reached to tuck the blanket more securely around me for, at the sound of my father’s wish, as if struggling to be free of a burden, I had done my best to kick the blanket aside. “Though rarely in the way that men suppose. Still, you have wished, and I have heard you. I will do my best to see your wish is carried out in its own good time.”

  My father turned away then. Away from the unnamed baby boy and me and toward the kitchen door. He put his hand upon the latch, then paused.

  “I do not think that we will meet again, Mathilde,” he said. “For I will never come back to this place, if it lies within my choice.”

  “I imagine we shall both have to wait and see about that,” Old Mathilde answered, her voice ever so slightly tart. “I cannot see the future any more than you can, Etienne. The difference is, I am content in this, and you are not.”

  “I will never be content again,” my father said, “Not in this, or in anything else.”

  He lifted the latch, pushed open the door, and stepped out into the world without looking back, letting the door swing closed behind him. That was the last anyone in the great stone house saw of him for a very long time.

  THREE

  And so we grew up together, the boy whose first beginning nobody knew, and the girl who came into the world before her time. Old Mathilde named him Raoul, and it was easy enough to figure out why. More often than not he reminded us all of a grumpy bear, so it seemed only right that he should have a name to go along with it, one that sounded like a growl.

  Not that he was mean-spirited, for he was not. It was more that there was never a moment, except, perhaps, for when he slept, that Raoul did not carry the mystery of his beginning like a burden on his back, a mark upon his soul. Even I knew more about myself than he did, never mind that most of what I knew was painful. Sometimes it is better to know an unpleasant thing than nothing at all.

  We made quite a pair together as we grew. But then we always had, from the moment Old Mathilde first placed us side by side. Raoul with his dark, storm-cloud looks, I with my bright ones, the sun coming out from behind the cloud. I cannot claim that this meant I was always good-natured. My temper could run as hot as the color of my hair, and come on as suddenly as my unexpected entrance into the world. But I always spoke my feelings, right out plain, while Raoul often held his inside and left them to smolder.

  Old Mathilde honored the wish my father had made the night of Raoul’s arrival. He was always treated fairly and well, no differently from any of the rest of us, including me. I might be the daughter of the lord of the house, but nobody paid much attention to that fact. My father had made it quite clear he didn’t want me. I was hardly in any position to pull rank, even if that had been the way my nature was inclined. Besides, nobody who lived in Etienne de Brabant’s great stone house by the sea had any time to put on airs. We were too busy working to stay alive.

  The lands of my father’s estate were beautiful and fertile. But, as if the lightning bolt that struck my mother’s grave had somehow planted the seed of my father’s unrest within our soil, what our fields and orchards might yield could never quite be predicted ahead of time.

  One year, every single squash plant grew tomatoes. We made sauce until our hands turned red, then carried our jars to the closest town on market days to barter for what our fields had been unwilling to provide.

  Some years our apple trees actually gave us apples. But their limbs were just as likely to be weighed down by cherries or plums. For three years running we had pears instead, followed by three straight years of oranges, a fruit which had never been known to grow so close to the sea before. After that, things seemed to settle down, as if the earth and what my father had called down to strike it had reached some sort of truce. How long it would last, only time itself would show.

  And then there was the great stone house itself: huge, drafty, gorgeous. Rising straight up from the center of a great sheer cliff of stone so pale you could see your hand through it on a piece cut thin enough. Even in the darkest hours of the darkest night, the house seemed to give off its own faint glow. Veins of color ran through it, red and green, and a gray that turned to shimmering silver just as the sun went down. One bank of windows faced outward, toward the sea. A second, back toward the land that sustained us.

  We were not an easy place to sneak up on.

  This was fortunate since, for as long as even the oldest among us can remember, even on the brightest and sunniest of days, the country of my birth has lived under the shadow of war. In most ways, and on most days, we look like everybody else. We get up in the morning, wash our faces, put on our every day clothes. We till our fields, bake our bread, take afternoon naps with our cats or dogs when the sun grows too hot to work outdoors.

  But even as we sleep, we have one eye open, one ear cocked, to discover if trouble is coming, carried on the back of the sea, or stirring up dust as it marches down the road. The desire for peace fills our hands with purpose during the day; the fear of war haunts our dreams at night.

  There is one place, one land, we fear most of all. A place we do not even name aloud, for to do so is considered bad luck, as good as a summons for disaster to arrive. It lies two days’ hard riding on horseback to the north of the great stone house. One day’s sailing if the wind is right.

  Some say our conflict is only natural. That those with common borders always fight. Others, that it is personal, the result of an incident so bitter and terrible, to speak it aloud is as good as shedding blood. I do not know the truth of things, myself. But I do know this much: We watch the sea in the great stone house. For there is a prophecy that proclaims it is the sea that will carry our salvation, or our doom. In the helpful way that prophecies sometimes have, it further proclaims it may be difficult to tell the two apart.

  So I kept my eyes on the sea one autum
n afternoon, the day before I turned fifteen. I squinted a little beneath the brim of my straw hat as I worked my way down the first row of the pumpkin patch, for the day was crisp and fine, and the sunlight on the water quick and bright. I was hoeing weeds, trying, without much success, not to think about what might happen when my birthday actually arrived. For on that day, as was traditional, I would make the second most powerful kind of wish there is: the one you speak silently, to your own heart alone, on each and every anniversary of the day that you were born.

  For at least ten years now, my wish had been the same: that something I planted on my mother’s grave might thrive.

  Over the years I had tried many different things. Pansies that showed their brave faces through even our bleakest winters. Scarlet runner beans. Bee balm. Several times I had coaxed what I had planted into reluctant life, but none of them had ever thrived. No matter what I planted, no matter when I planted it, when I went to my mother’s grave on the morning of my birthday, it was always to discover that every single thing I planted there had died.

  It had absolutely nothing to do with the weather; of this I was certain. Nothing to do with what happened above the ground. It was what lay beneath that doomed my efforts to failure, year after year, time after time. There, the rage and grief my father had called down into our lands still held on and would not let go.

  I reached the end of the row of pumpkins, reversed direction, my back now facing the sea, and started up the row beside it. The pumpkin patch was in the farthest corner of the kitchen garden, at the very edge of the great cliff on which the great stone house sat. If I went too far, I could tumble straight off the land and into the ocean.

  I jabbed the hoe downward, slicing through the roots of a thistle. This year will be different, I thought. Tomorrow morning, I would awaken to find that what I had planted on my mother’s grave was still alive and well. Because finally, I had chosen a plant so sturdy and obvious, it was literally staring me in the face: pumpkins.

  Out of all the things that grew on our lands, the pumpkins were the most reliable. Though you might plant one variety and end up with another, you always got some sort of pumpkin. This year, we had the most abundant crop any of us had ever seen. Fat ones and tall ones, small ones and large. Pumpkins with skin as pale as ghosts growing alongside those with skin as vivid as orange rinds.

  But the most beautiful ones of all were the ones I’d planted on my mother’s grave. They’d come up almost at once, producing great curling vines. The pumpkins were squat and fat as if, each night, a family of well-fed raccoons had snuck into the beds and sat upon them. Their skin was an orange as bright as newly polished copper. Thick ribs curved down their bodies from top to bottom, some as wide across as my forearm. Surely pumpkins as bright and sumptuous as these would still be alive tomorrow morning. And if they were, then my wish had come true. I would have broken the curse my father’s grief had laid upon us. In which case, I would need to make an entirely new wish.

  The only problem was, I didn’t have the faintest idea what it should be.

  “You’re thinking about tomorrow, aren’t you?” Raoul’s voice suddenly broke into my thoughts. I realized that I was standing with the hoe straight out in front of me, extending into the air. I brought it back to earth with a thump.

  “How could you tell?” I inquired dryly.

  Raoul smiled. “I think it was the angle of the hoe,” he answered. He cocked his head. “Aren’t your arms tired?”

  “As a matter of fact, they are,” I said, and at this, he laughed aloud. Raoul hardly ever laughs. Its simply not the way he’s made. As if to make up for behaving in a fashion totally unlike his usual self, he snatched the hoe from my hands, elbowed me aside, and began to work on the weeds himself.

  “Why is it that a good crop of anything always brings a good crop of weeds as well?” he inquired after a moment.

  I gave a snort. “Please,” I said. “Remember where you are.” We continued moving along the row in silence for a moment. “Have you made up your mind what to wish for tomorrow?”

  “The same thing as always,” Raoul replied. He made the hoe bite deep, pulled it back with a jerk. All trace of laughter was gone from him now. “Unless some traveling storyteller arrives to tell the tale of my birth between now and midnight.”

  Raoul had wished for the same thing every year too: to know who he truly is, the beginnings of his story.

  “I’m sorry,” I said suddenly. “It was a thoughtless question. Give me back the hoe, Raoul. This is my job, not yours.”

  I reached to tug it from his hands. Raoul held on tight. “Leave it alone, why dont you? Its not a thoughtless question. Its a perfectly sensible one. It just should have been mine, not yours. You’re the one whose wish is about to come true.”

  “It’s not tomorrow yet,” I replied. “Now give that to me. You’re doing it all wrong.”

  “All I’m doing is killing weeds, Rilla,” Raoul said, using the nickname he’d bestowed upon me when we were both small. But he relinquished the hoe. I worked my way to the end of the row, started down the next one. Raoul kept pace beside me. We were facing the sea once more.

  “Do you remember the first year we made wishes?” Raoul asked.

  “I remember being tempted to wish you would go back to wherever you came from,” I replied with a smile. “Old Mathilde gave you every single day of the year from which to choose a birthday, and you selected the same day as mine.”

  “It wasn’t so unreasonable,” Raoul protested. “We’re so close in age we might have been born on the same day, for all anyone knows.”

  I gave a snort. We had been over this before. Ever since Raoul had first announced he intended to muscle in on my birthday, we had bickered with each other about it. Some years with good nature, other years not.

  “That’s not the reason you did it, and you know it,” I said.

  “No,” Raoul replied. “It’s not.”

  I stopped hoeing, on purpose this time. “Then why?” In all the years we had teased each other, we’d never quite gotten down to the reason for his choice.

  Raoul dug the dirt with his toe. “It’s simple enough,” he said. “So simple I would have thought you’d have figured it out by now. You had everything else I wanted, so I thought I might as well have your birthday, as well.”

  I let the head of the hoe fall to the earth with a whump. “What do you mean I had everything you wanted?” I asked.

  “Have,” Raoul corrected. “Not much has changed, not even in ten years.” He moved his arm in a great sweep, as if to take in everything around us. “You have all this. You know who you are and where you come from. You have a home.”

  “This is as much your home as it is mine,” I said, genuinely unsettled now. “Besides, I’m not so sure knowing who I am and where I come from makes me any happier than you are. It’s not a very nice feeling to know your father blames you for your mother’s death and plans to never forgive you for it.”

  “At least you know who he is,” Raoul answered. “His name, and the name of your mother. It’s more than I know.”

  “But don’t you see?” I asked. “The fact that you don’t means that you can hope. You could be anyone, Raoul. Your possibilities are endless, while mine are already sewn up tight. And even if you never find out, you’ll still be whatever you can make of yourself.”

  Raoul made A slightly rude sound. “You sound just like Old Mathilde.”

  I made a face. “I do, don’t I? I suppose it could be worse. She’s right more than half the time.”

  “Actually, I think it’s more like three quarters,” Raoul replied. “That doesn’t make this any easier, Rilla.”

  I put a hand upon his arm. “I know,” I said softly.

  Raoul reached up, put his hand on top of mine. Even in the depths of winter, Raoul’s hands are always warm. I think it’s because of all the fires he keeps, banked down, inside himself. He gave my fingers a squeeze, then let his hand drop away. I picked up the h
oe, ready to get back to work.

  “Rilla,” he said suddenly. “Look up.”

  Before me stretched the great blue arm of the ocean. The surface of the water flashed like fire. I sucked in a breath. Beneath the brim of my sunhat, I lifted a hand to shield my eyes.

  “What is that?” I asked, and I could hear the urgency in my own voice now. “Something’s not right. The sea glitters like . . .”

  “Like metal,” Raoul’s voice cut across mine.

  I let the hoe slip through my fingers then, never heard it hit the ground. I could think of just one reason for the sea to do that.

  “Soldiers,” I said. “Armor. How many ships are there, can you tell?” I could not, for my eyes had begun to water.

  Raoul took my hand in his, then our feet stumbled in our haste as he tugged me to the end of the row. Half a dozen more paces and we could have jumped right off the edge of the land.

  “Seven,” he said. “Five hulks and two galleons”

  “Five hulks,” I whispered, and just speaking the words aloud brought a chill to my heart.

  Though the double-decked galleons with their glorious sails were the undisputed masters of the sea, it was the ungainly, flat-bottom hulks with no sails at all we feared the most. These were the ships that could bring the greatest number of soldiers to our shores. Five may not seem like such a great number to you, but the ships were large and our land is small. And there had been no soldiers for nearly twenty years now.

  “What flag are they flying, can you see?” I asked, as I dashed a hand across my cheeks in annoyance, hoping to clear the water from my eyes. Maybe they’re not coming for us, at all, I thought. Perhaps they’re going somewhere else. Somewhere far away.

  Raoul was silent for one long moment. “A white flag,” he said at last. “In the center, a black swan with a red rose in its beak, and a border of golden thorns.”

  “No,” I whispered, as the earth seemed to sway beneath my feet, for this was the one we feared most of all. One not seen in our land since before I was born, since the marriage of our king and queen had taken place to put an end to bloodshed. “No.”