Sunlight and Shadow

by Cameron Dokey

  And so, for the third time, my father, the Lord Sarastro, spoke to me and I said nothing. But beside me, I heard the one who held me make a sound. In one ear and out the other before I could determine what it meant.

  “Statos,” my father said as if he’d understood precisely. “That will do. You must give her time.”

  Statos. The golden one, I thought. The one who had tried to trick me into giving him my hand. And I knew then what my father had in mind. There would be no parade of potential husbands. There would be no need. He already had the one he wanted.

  Without another word, my father turned and continued to the top of the stairs, a servant lighting the way before, Statos and I following behind.

  At the top of the stairs was a wide, curved corridor of white marble, gleaming like a river of milk in the light of the torches. Open to the air and bordered by a low balustrade on the left and by the stone wall of the mountain itself on the right. The Lord Sarastro moved down it at a brisk pace, so swiftly I almost had to run to keep up, an action which caused my hood to slip back. For the first time, I began to get a better look at my surroundings.

  A row of illuminated sconces lined the wall on the right. Between them were hung tapestries depicting the course of the sun across the sky. Like the stairs which I had climbed to reach this place, the background of each tapestry was dark. But the sun was embroidered in gold thread so that it flashed in the light.

  At the far end of the corridor, my father stopped. In front of him was a single door. At his nod, the servant knocked once, then threw it open and stepped inside. My father waited until I had reached him.

  “This will be your room, Pamina,” he said. “If not tonight, then one day soon, I hope that you will find it to your liking.”

  Then, with a gesture that I should go first, he ushered me inside. It was like walking into a jar of honey, warm and golden. The floor was burnished amber. Great swathes of gleaming silk just a shade lighter adorned the walls. A bright fire burned in a black iron grate, with a great overstuffed chair and matching footstool pulled invitingly in front. An enormous bed covered in ivory damask stood on a raised dais in one corner.

  But it was the windows that drew me most of all. One entire wall of lead-paned glass. How it will sparkle in the sun! I thought. Even now, the stars shone through, beautiful and hard as diamonds.

  “How many times must I tell you to draw the curtains at night, Gayna?” I heard my father’s voice say. And it was only then I realized that the room was already occupied.

  She was tall, dark-haired, and beautiful. But then I knew these things already, for I had seen her often enough. At the sight of her, my heart gave a strange twist. This was the girl my father had raised instead of me, the forrester’s child.

  He has given me her room, I thought.

  “I beg your pardon, my lord,” she said, and she moved toward the windows.

  “Why not leave things as they are?” a new voice proposed. Deep and smooth as the velvet drapes for which Gayna’s long fingers were even now reaching. Statos, I thought. His voice was like the color of the room, warm and golden as honey.

  “Your daughter is accustomed to the night, my lord. Perhaps seeing one thing which is familiar will make this transition easier for her.”

  He was right, of course. Not that I liked him for it. I saw the girl, Gayna, hesitate, as if uncertain which man she wished more to please.

  So that is the way things are, I thought.

  “Very well,” the Lord Sarastro said, though I could tell by the sound of his voice he wasn’t pleased. “But for this one night only. Pamina is my daughter, as much as she is her mothers. Not only that, she lives with me now. That is a fact to which she must grow accustomed. The sooner the better.”

  He talks about me as if I wasn’t even here, I thought.

  Gayna’s hand dropped to her side. The room filled with silence.

  “I will leave you now, daughter,” the Lord Sarastro went on. “Gayna will stay with you this one night, so that you will not be lonely. In the morning, I will send for you.”

  I laughed before I could help it. I didn’t mean to, but the sound rose up and out, quick and bitter, before I even knew that it was forming.

  “You’re worried that I’ll be lonely?” I asked, and I made no attempt to hide the derision in my voice. The disbelief. “Don’t you think it’s a little late to be concerned about that?”

  In the shocked silence that followed, I heard a piece of wood snap inside the grate.

  “So you can talk,” the Lord Sarastro said, his voice curiously mild. “I was beginning to wonder.”

  “You should not speak so to the Lord Sarastro,” Gayna burst out, as if she couldn’t hold back her outrage for one second longer. “You owe him your respect, your allegiance, and your love. He is the Mage of the Day. He is your father.”

  “He is an oath-breaker,” I replied.

  And then, as if her rebuke had broken a dam inside me, all the hot words I had been storing up came streaming forth.

  “An oath-breaker,” I said again. And now, at last, I pushed my hood all the way back, so that all could see my face clearly, though my hair was still bound up in its dark scarf. I heard Statos hiss out a breath through his perfect white teeth. Save for the fire, it was the room’s only sound.

  This is how my father, the Lord Sarastro, seemed to me now that I looked upon him without tears, and with my eyes wide open: He looked for all the world like a lion in his prime. A full beard covered the lower half of his face, exactly the same color as the chestnut hair which curled back from his forehead, then tumbled down to brush his shoulders. He wore a doublet of bronze velvet. Upon his brow was set a circlet of beaten gold the same color as his eyes.

  I felt a pain so sharp I feared my very bones would splinter and pierce my flesh. This was my father. All my life I had wanted him to know and to love me. The father whom, for all my life, I had wished to know and to love. If he had waited just a few more hours, who is to say what might have been possible between us? But he had not, and so I knew there could be nothing.

  “By his own act, the Lord Sarastro has forfeited my respect,” I said now, “and my allegiance, for one cannot pledge to serve where one does not trust. As for love …” I turned to face Gayna where she still stood by the window. I saw her eyes go wide as she looked into mine.

  “Let us hope you love him enough for both of us,” I said. “For that must suffice him, as I find I do not love him at all. I will never be governed by his will. Never marry a man of his choosing. I will never call him father.

  “And, for the record, my name is Mina.”

  “So it is true what the tales say,” Gayna whispered. “The daughter of the Queen of the Night bears the evil eye.”

  “Gayna!” the Lord Sarastro said sharply. “Enough!”

  But I simply laughed once more. “And which one would that be?” I inquired sweetly. “The gold or the silver? You’ll want to be careful how you answer, for you may reveal more about yourself than you know.”

  For this is what they all had seen, a thing I have not told you until now: My eyes are two different colors. One as silver as the stars, the other as golden as the sun. A daily reminder that I was a child of two worlds. Worlds who could not live without one another, yet could not get along.

  “In your grief, you speak things you should not,” the Lord Sarastro said, and, though I turned back to face him, I could not read the expression on his face, in his voice, or in his eyes.

  “For tonight, I will be understanding. But my patience will end with the rising of the sun. At dawn, you will be presented to my subjects as my daughter, whether you desire this or not, for not even you can deny who you are.

  “The life that you have known is over, Mina. The sooner you accept this fact, the better for you things will be.” He turned away then, motioning with one hand. “Come, Statos.”

  For a moment, I thought that Statos would protest. That he would speak to me directly, make some plea
. But he did not. Instead, he made me a formal bow. Then he followed my father out of the chamber, leaving Gayna and me alone.

  The thoughts of the Forrester’s Dark-Haired Child

  I didn’t want to like her. That much should be obvious. I didn’t even want to feel sorry for her, for sympathy is nothing more than the top of a steep and slippery slope.

  So what did I want, you are no doubt wondering? The truth is that my desire was twofold. Preferably, that the daughter of the Lord Sarastro had never existed in the first place. But, if she had to, what I wanted more than anything under the sun was really quite simple.

  I wanted to hate her guts.

  I even managed it, for most of the first hour after we had been left alone. My anger, my outrage over the way she had spoken to her father was enough to carry me straight through that. It was as my anger began to fade that I began to perceive that I had a problem.

  After her father and Statos’s departure, the daughter of the Queen of the Night—I had already decided I would not call her Mina, not even in the privacy of my own mind—the daughter of the Queen of the Night moved to sit by the window, to stare out at I couldn’t quite imagine what.

  For what is there to see in a night sky, after all? It’s nothing more than a dark blanket, stitched some nights with the moon and always with the stars. But, unlike the sun, which can pretty much be counted upon to do the same thing day after day, the night sky is as changeable as the one who governs it. Die Königin der Nacht.

  The moon alters its shape, day by day, month by month. The stars change positions, dancing to the passage of the seasons. Never mind that such things can be predicted, even plotted out. You cannot trust the night sky. It’s really as simple as that, in my mind. And in my heart, I know this truth: What cannot be trusted is difficult to love.

  And so I sat on the bed, and the daughter of the Queen of the Night sat in a chair by the window. I looked at her. She looked at the night. I’m not sure when I realized that she had changed position, ever so slightly. She must have done it the one time I moved to stir up the fire. For the room was cold with the drapes pulled back from all those windows. A chill had taken possession of the air even though it was high summer. Just another of night’s perversities, I thought.

  But when I resumed my seat again, I saw that the Queen of the Night’s daughter was resting her head against the cold windowpane, as if it had become too much effort to hold her head up. It was her only concession to the strain of what had happened to her this night.

  But she did not speak. Not one word since her outburst to her father. I might have not existed at all for all the attention she paid me.

  Perhaps that is her wish I thought.

  And with that thought, I made my very first mistake. For if she could make a wish, even if it was the opposite of anything I wished for, then she was not so very different from me, after all. I may be selfish. I admit it. But I am not stupid. And I’ve never been deliberately unfair, or at least I hadn’t been at that point.

  “What is that you see?” I asked, at long last breaking the silence. And this was my second mistake, a thing I probably don’t need to tell you.

  For, with this question, I had acknowledged many things. That I was curious. That I had let my curiosity get the better of me. But, most important of all, I think, I had acknowledged the fact that she might look upon the night sky and see things that I could not.

  “Come and look for yourself,” she said. She didn’t even bother to lift her head from the windowpane. I stayed right where I was. But after a moment, she sat up straight and looked around. The light from the fire fell upon one half of her face, lighting up her golden eye like a new-struck coin. The eye of silver, the one that belonged to the night, was closest to the window, indistinguishable from the light of the stars.

  “Unless you are afraid, of course.”

  There’s a reason that this is pretty much the oldest trick in the book, and that would be because it works almost every time. I could almost feel the spurt of anger that pushed me to my feet and across the room toward her, even as my mind urged me to stay right where I was.

  “I’m certainly not afraid of you,” I said.

  She turned back to the window as I approached, but not before I thought I saw the flicker of a smile. Not a smile that triumphed over me, just a lightening of her expression. I suppose it could have been a trick of the firelight, but I really don’t think so.

  “Then look,” she said, “and I’ll tell you what I see with my eyes, if you tell me what you see with yours.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. I nudged her feet from the footstool upon which they had been resting and sat down upon it so that, for all intents and purposes, we were sitting side by side.

  “Oh, my,” I said after a moment.

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” said the daughter of the Queen of the Night.

  “It doesn’t do this often, does it?”

  I heard, rather than saw her shake her head, for, now that I had dared to look, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the night sky. Never, not even on the clearest night I could remember, had I seen so many stars. Nor had I ever seen any behave in quite this way.

  They were falling from the sky. Each and every one.

  Some shot from one side of the window clear across to the other, as if chasing one another, racing around in circles, desperate to tire themselves out. Others arced up, like divers leaping off high cliffs, then shot straight down.

  Earlier, during the time in which I now knew the Lord Sarastro had first laid hands upon his daughter, there had been a terrible storm. Trees had writhed as if in agony. The wind had made so terrible a sound I’d wanted to crawl straight underneath my bed and stay there until morning.

  Frightening as that was, this was even worse, for it all happened without a sound. Below, the world was absolutely still, while in the heavens above, the stars committed suicide.

  It was the most beautiful, the most bitter thing that I had ever seen. For it seemed to me I understood its cause.

  The Queen of the Night was weeping for her stolen child.

  “It’s your mother, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “I think so, yes,” replied the daughter of die Königin der Nacht.

  “Do you think there will be any stars tomorrow?”

  Without hesitation, she nodded.

  “There will always be stars. There must be, just as there must be a sunrise. It is for this reason that the Queen of the Night and the Mage of the Day were joined. They cannot be parted, not unless the world itself is.”

  “But she weeps for you.”

  “Yes. I believe that she does.”

  I turned my head to look at her, then, and, for the first time, I saw that she wept also. Not from the eye of gold, the eye she had inherited from her father. That eye was as dry as ashes, and cold ones at that. But from the eye of silver there flowed one tear after another, exactly the same color as the stars in the sky. In so endless a stream I only barely stopped myself from glancing at the hem of my skirt, certain I would find it drenched with the tears that must, by now, have formed a great puddle around us on the floor.

  Though they had been separated, they wept together for what had befallen them, the Queen of the Night and her strange-eyed daughter.

  “Would she have brought you, do you think?” I asked. “Would she have kept the appointed time?”

  The daughter of the Queen of the Night looked down at me, and now I could see that, though the gold eye did not weep, it too was filled with unbearable sorrow.

  “I believe she would have,” she answered. “For I have never known her to go back on her word, not to anyone. But we’ll never know now. The Lord Sarastro has taken care of that.”

  “He is more than simply the Lord Sarastro,” I said. I knew it was foolish, but I couldn’t help myself. I had loved him too well, and too long. He had been everything to me. Father and mother both. Yet it seemed to me as if she threw him away, discarded what he was without a tho
ught.

  “He is your father.”

  Even in the dim light, I could see the way hot color flushed her face.

  Nicely done, Gayna, I thought. Who knows what she can do? What power she, herself, controls. If she turns you into a toad, it’s no more than you deserve for your stupidity.

  She pulled in a breath as if to speak, then flattened her lips into a thin and unattractive line. At this, I have to say my spirits picked back up a little. I’m only human, and it pleased me to discover that, even for a moment, she could be ugly.

  “More your father than mine, I should think,” she said. “Is that why you dislike me so much? Not that I would blame you, of course.”

  Of all the dirty tricks, I thought. She hadn’t turned me into a toad after all. Instead, she’d shown me how well I’d done that myself, all on my own.

  “Who says that I dislike you?” I asked. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. Not that I’d need a reason if I do.”

  This time, I was certain that she smiled, for I could see her face full on.

  “Ah, so there is something more,” she said. “Let me think.” She scrunched her face up in concentration, and it was then I realized that she had stopped crying. I wondered if the sky outside had done the same, but I didn’t want to turn my head to look. I didn’t want to break our strange tableau.

  “There’s really only one thing that it can be, of course. The golden boy Statos.”

  “He’s not a boy,” I said hotly as I sat up a little straighter on the stool. “He’s a grown man, and the Lord Sarastro’s apprentice.”

  “Is he indeed?” the daughter of the Queen of the Night asked softly. “The Lord Sarastro’s chosen apprentice?”

  “And what if he is?”

  “If he is, then he would make a fitting consort for the Lord Sarastro’s daughter.”

  If she’d shot a burning arrow straight into my chest, she couldn’t have hit the mark more accurately, nor wounded me more.