A Universe of Wishes

by A Universe of Wishes (epub)

  “It’s too dangerous,” my mother Lydia said.

  “Do you have a better plan?” my tía asked, knowing neither of them did.

  The thought had come to my tía the night we first heard about the ball. The kingdom that bordered ours would hold a great dance in honor of their prince’s coming of age. The king and queen would throw wide the palace doors, including to all young women who made the journey.

  It was, apparently, never too early to have their son think of marriage.

  Girls in our village spoke of all this as though it were some grand fairy tale, all jeweled gowns and candlelight. Something that had happened a hundred years ago, or a thousand miles away. Rather than a thing that would take place within days, in a land whose fields and forests ran up against ours.

  I believed so little in los cuentos de hadas that any mention of such fairy tales left the taste of ashes on my tongue. Of course they did. Lately, las cenizas were far more familiar to me, to all of us, than magic.

  But I had to have faith in my tía’s plan. Such a grand ball, one showing off a prince to a kingdom, would be full of girls who wanted to catch his eye, or whose families prodded them into trying.

  One more girl could go unnoticed. One more could slip into the palace, and near the king and queen.

  Despite the stories I’d heard of half the land having blue eyes, I knew there were girls like me in that kingdom. Brown-skinned girls with eyes as dark as our hair.

  The question was if I could act as one of them.

  “You’re talking about sending her off to a foreign kingdom,” my mother Lydia said to my tía. “A land we’ve never even been to.”

  “You would be sending her to the palace,” my tía said. “Not into the woods with the wolves.”

  “Los palacios have their own wolves,” my mother Alicia said. “Plenty of dangers disguise themselves in fine clothes.”

  “La corrección will reach this village any day,” my tía said. “That’s the greater danger if you ask me.”

  Any touch of color drained from all of us at once.

  My mother Lydia and my tía so closely resembled each other, their skin such identical shades of brown, it seemed as though one woman was watching her health drain in a looking-glass image of herself.

  La corrección.

  All it took was the mention of it, and we quieted. Even my tía, as though the word had weighted her tongue.

  La corrección had begun in la ciudad, with an order that all men who lived together “en pecado” and all women who lived together “in sin” be taken from their houses and matched, respectively, with suitable wives and husbands.

  La nobleza had the silver and copper to pay the king’s officers, and that meant being matched with men or women of their choosing, and being allowed to live close enough to carry on their midnight visits. We heard stories of wealthy couples setting up neighboring households and switching beds at night to be with their true lovers.

  But us, los campesinos, what did we have to pay them with? How much corn would it have taken? How many trees’ worth of lemons and fields’ worth of pumpkins would have kept our family together?

  “If you do nothing, she’ll be taken from you,” my tía said.

  The words were a shock of cold water.

  “You’ll each be given to men who’ll call themselves your husbands,” she said.

  The chill spread through me.

  “We’ll be lucky to see you for Nochebuena,” she went on. “Is that what you want?”

  “I’ll do it,” I said, blurting it out.

  They all looked to me, startled by the sound of my voice. I usually listened more than I spoke.

  I took my mothers’ hands, my mother Lydia’s right and my mother Alicia’s left.

  “Let me try,” I said.

  “If you fail…,” my mother Alicia said, worry passing over her face.

  “She won’t,” my tía said.

  I looked to my tía, and then to my mothers. “I won’t.”

  Within a day, my mothers and aunt had sold what little jewelry they had—an emerald ring, the ruby from an earring that had long ago lost its mate—to buy me las zapatillas de cristal. Glass slippers with enough enchantment to sweep me from our land and into another. It would be, las brujas told us, as though the mist was carrying me there.

  My mothers combed rosewater into my hair. My tía dotted color onto my lips and cheeks. They put me in the best dress they had, red satin as deep as our blood. Then they and my tía took me out into the night.

  My tía set las zapatillas de cristal on the evening-cool ground. The glass sparkled like cut jewels, drinking in the moon, reflecting back each wink of the stars.

  “Now, mija,” my aunt said.

  I lifted the deep red of the skirt and stepped into las zapatillas. Even through my stockings, the glass chilled my feet.

  As soon as my weight settled into the glass, as soon as I was as still as las brujas told me I would need to be, the mist came. It whirled around me, the slippers brightening like crystal catching candlelight.

  My mothers held hands, their faces pinched with trying not to cry.

  “Come back to us,” my mother Alicia said.

  “Lo prometo,” I said, just as the mist thickened so much I couldn’t see them or my tía.

  La niebla grew so solid I couldn’t even see the night through it. I could barely feel it, the slippers’ magic sweeping me over fields and woods and water. But when the mist finally cleared, I stood in a palace garden. Hedges shaped like swirling walls curved around me. Roses sweetened the air, damp with rain or dew.

  I took a deep breath and walked the smoothed dirt of the garden path.

  I paused before the stone steps that led up to the doors. The palace loomed over me in curls of granite and marble. Every buttress declared how far out of my depth I had waded. Every limestone scroll of acanthus leaves and layered flowers reminded me I was a stranger here. Even the warm spill of the garden lamps, splashing gold onto the sculpted hedges, seemed to whisper it.

  Yes, there were other brown-skinned women here. But as they took their promenades toward the ballroom, the distance between them and me seemed as vast as from here to my home. Their postures were so regal they seemed to float, borne along on columns of brocade. They had gathered their hair into elegant sweeps, or left it loose and adorned it with jewels that grabbed the light out of the air.

  My mothers had set mine in tidy curls, but among these women, even my carefully combed hair felt hopelessly out of fashion.

  I pressed my hands to my stomach, palms against the satin. I took as much of a breath as the corset would let me.

  I lifted my skirt enough to climb the stone steps and gave the smallest of curtsies to the men at the door.

  One smirked.

  My cheeks flared.

  This was probably a kingdom where proper ladies did not curtsy to men standing sentry. I hadn’t even entered the ballroom, and already I’d made a mistake.

  But the man’s smirk became an amused smile.

  Maybe they would take me for some foreign princess, unfamiliar with the customs of this land.

  I raised myself to full height, and the men opened the doors.

  The grand hall unfurled before me. The dip of the staircase and the whorled gold of the banisters opened onto a floor of swirling gowns and satin waistcoats. Floral perfume sweetened the air. Couples as posed as garden statues spun across the inlaid floor, dancing to the thin rhythm of soft music.

  With a pinch of recognition, I noticed the familiar lemons in the silver bowls. They were the smooth-rinded variety my village harvested in winter and sent off to wealthier kingdoms.

  That particular shade of yellow, how it was the brightest color in the room, tipped me toward the horror of realizing something else.

 
The gowns and tunics before me had all been cast in dove grays and blush pinks, pale golds and soft ivories. The brightest skirts had been stitched in cream mint, or the demure blue of the most delicate birds’ eggs.

  And here I was, in a gown as deep red as my painted lips.

  Back home, red was a favored color, alongside black. The dresses of any party or wedding seemed a sea of rubies and ravens’ feathers. But here, I looked as strange as a drop of blood in a bowl of sweets.

  Their Majesties themselves wore colors as subtle as the fondant on the cakes. The queen, her hair done up in a whirl of white, sat on her gilded throne in a gown of pale rose. The king, on his nearly matching throne, had donned a coat as silver as his hair.

  I set my hands on the bodice of my dress and breathed.

  All I had to do was beg an audience with them. Surely they would consider allowing a place in their kingdom for families torn to pieces by la corrección; they must understand our hearts a little. Their son, the prince, had been christened a princess at birth, but when he declared himself as the young man he was, his mother had taken on the task of choosing him a boy’s name with all the reverence of planning a mass. This very ball was meant to celebrate not only his age but his introduction to the kingdom with his true name.

  I raised my skirt enough to mind my feet, careful of las zapatillas de cristal.

  On the last stair, I eased my weight down slowly, as though too heavy a step might crack the glass.

  When I lifted my eyes, they found a gold waistcoat, the color of candle glow cast on snow.

  A young man with hair as dark as his eyes offered his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, stalling. “I don’t know these dances.”

  “If you don’t mind letting me lead,” he said, “I think you’ll find them easier than they look.”

  My eyes drifted to the king and queen.

  What good would it do to offend this young man? By the way he was dressed, he was probably the son of some favored noble family. Maybe by dancing with him, I could even make myself seem less a girl who came wrongly dressed and more a mysterious stranger. Someone who belonged here.

  Someone the guards would not throw out before I’d said my piece.

  I held my skirt and curtsied to the young man. I stepped close enough for him to take my waist, and he swept my red skirt into the whirl of cream and pale blue.

  He smelled so much like my mothers’ campanillas—the vines, not the flowers—that I had to try not to shut my eyes and fall into the scent. His lead kept me from colliding with the other girls. He took the cue of my body when I wanted to widen the distance between us, adjusting the frame of his arms, and when I drew in, each time pretending it was accidental.

  For the first turns of the music, I worried that las zapatillas would crack under our steps. But the glass felt light on my feet, and strong as diamonds.

  I opened my eyes just as we swept by another couple. They brushed so near that I startled, the bodice of my dress falling against the young man’s chest.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, instinctively looking to see if the red fabric had somehow left a stain on the pale gold.

  For the first time, the contour of his chest struck me, the shape beneath the heavy embroidery.

  “You’re worrying me,” he said.

  My eyes leapt up to his face.

  He glanced down at his front. “Have I spilled something on myself?”

  “No.” I lowered my head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stare.”

  His laugh was small but good-natured. “I’m used to it.”

  The heat in my cheeks rose to my forehead.

  His smile stayed. “Whatever it is you’re wondering, you can ask me.”

  I tried not to look at his chest. “You don’t bind yourself?”

  “Only if I’m riding,” he said. “And then only because it hurts if I don’t.” He winced, and I imagined the pain of riding out with my breasts free, the soreness afterward.

  “Is that the way here? For”—I stumbled as I tried to finish the thought—“everyone like you?”

  He laughed again. “There is no one way for everyone like me. Some of us bind; some of us don’t. Some wear one kind of clothing; some, all kinds.”

  Envy fluttered through me. I couldn’t imagine growing up in a kingdom where a single person would be allowed to wear a dress one day and trousers the next, where a boy like the one before me could let the shape of his chest show and still be acknowledged as the boy he was.

  I drew myself back to the present moment.

  “And you?” I asked, grasping at the easiest change of subject.

  “I mostly wear the clothes my father wore at my age,” the young man said.

  “Was this his?” I traced my fingers over his sleeve. I tried to make the gesture airy and flirtatious, like those of the women around me, but I only felt ridiculous.

  The young man nodded once. “From one of the first balls he attended.”

  As though to save me from my own attempts at charm, a tall figure in pale blue stopped alongside the young man.

  “Your Highness,” he said, “Her Majesty wishes a word.”

  “Forgive me.” My dancing partner—His Highness?—kissed my hand. It was quick and light enough that it seemed more out of custom, a habit of politeness, than any kind of overture.

  But I stood, silenced by that press of his mouth to the back of my hand.

  I had been dancing with His Highness?

  This was a kingdom where His Highness could choose not to bind his chest?

  I could almost imagine my tía pinching my arm, telling me not to show myself as una campesina. If I wanted to be believed as a girl who belonged here, I needed to stop gawking at everything. I needed to stop gazing upward at the blue-painted ceiling set with gold stars. I needed to stop staring like a girl who had never seen a handsome young man before, and worse, a country girl who didn’t recognize the royal cloth of the prince’s coat.

  And if I was going to gather myself enough to beg an audience with Their Majesties, I needed air.

  I set myself toward the garden doors. The pinprick nervousness of having been so close to the prince lingered.

  It mixed with the terror of holding my family’s fate.

  The air through the open doors washed the heat from my face. It brought the kiss of night flowers and the clean smell of the moon.

  “I suppose there’s no accounting for taste,” came a voice as tart as a green apple.

  My pride rose to meet her tone. It broke through the brittle shell of fear between my dress and my skin.

  “Do you mean my taste,” I asked, glancing first down at my dress, then into the ballroom, “or his?”

  A woman, younger than my mothers but not by much, stepped into the light of a garden lamp. The yellow of her hair matched the shade of her gown.

  She surveyed my gown, and suddenly it felt pieced together from scraps of ribbon.

  “You’re one of these country people fleeing into our kingdom, aren’t you,” she asked. It was worded as a question without being spoken as one.

  I lifted my chin, meeting her eyes.

  “Oh, calm yourself.” She let out a tinkling laugh as she set a wineglass to her lips. “I have a proposition I think you’ll like.”

  I didn’t reply.

  She seemed undeterred.

  “The first thing you should know is that the true currency of court is not money, but favors.” She took another sip of wine. “And I would call in a few I’m owed to ensure your family’s lawful place in this kingdom. That is, should you decide to do a favor for me.”

  My throat tightened. “What would you want from a country person?”

  I wanted my voice to match hers, as brisk and sour as an underripe plum.

  “The prince seems tak
en with you,” she says.

  I bristled at how wrong she was. The prince had chosen to dance with a girl who seemed ill at ease. He had been kind, not interested.

  “All you need do is dance once more with him,” she said, “let him say whatever ridiculous things boys his age come up with, and then”—she waved a ring-jeweled hand—“let’s say at midnight, when everyone is still here to witness it, flee from him, and the palace, and never see him again.”

  I should have been flattered that she was so threatened by a single dance that she couldn’t wait to be rid of me. Did they believe such cuentos de hadas in this kingdom? Stories of princes gazing across ballrooms and falling, instantly, in love?

  Maybe it was something smaller and sharper than that.

  Maybe this woman simply couldn’t stand having her kingdom’s prince near a girl like me.

  It was a tiny mirroring of la corrección.

  As tolerant as la nobleza seemed to be of a prince who had once endured a wrong name and now had a true one, a prince who did not bind his chest under his shirt, maybe that was all it was beneath the polite posturing. Tolerance. A begrudging acceptance. They probably considered him unusual enough (and they probably would have used a word like that too—unusual, said with a mild sneer). It would be too much for them to see the prince also show interest in a brown-skinned girl who did not know better than to wear a red gown.

  What this noblewoman asked was not meant to dissuade him from wanting me. It had little to do with me, and more with what I was.

  What this noblewoman asked was meant to show the prince that girls like me were inconstant, deceitful, cruel even.

  And it was meant to cure him of any interest in us.

  “But how would any of that help you?” I asked. There must have been more than her wanting to give the prince a morality lesson.

  “I don’t see how that’s your business,” she said.

  “It is if I’m putting my family’s survival in your hands,” I said.

  Something glinted within her, like the edges of the jewels at her neck.