Sunlight and Shadow

by Cameron Dokey

  “That seems to be the general consensus of opinion,” I said, and even I could hear my voice was bitter.

  She cocked her head to one side, just like a bird considering which way to pluck a worm from the ground.

  “How long have you loved him?”

  I opened my mouth to deny it altogether, then shut it with a snap. Why deny the obvious? I thought. There were days it seemed to me the whole world must know how I felt about Statos, even Statos himself.

  “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

  She considered for a moment. “In theory, I do, I suppose. Though not from personal experience. That doesn’t quite answer my question, though.”

  I sighed. “Since I was five. He entered the Lord Sarastro’s household the same year my father was killed.”

  “The same year the Lord Sarastro took you in to raise as his own,” the Lady Mina said, her tone thoughtful. And I realized with a start of horror that I had done the thing I’d sworn I’d never do. I had given her her name in my own mind.

  “He raised you,” she said again, “as his own daughter. But now he wishes to give the man you love to a total stranger. One who is a daughter by nothing more than a trick of birth. It must be very difficult for you, Gayna. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake!” I cried. “Stop it, can’t you? Just stop it!”

  I shot to my feet, unable to stay still a moment longer. I took several agitated paces away, then whirled back.

  “Why can’t you just be mean and nasty and ugly? Why must you be understanding and long-suffering? I liked you a lot better when you ranted and raved. It was much easier to dislike you. And nobody said that you could call me by my name.”

  I stopped, panting just a little, and we stared at each other. I half expected her to get to her feet as well. It’s what I would have done. Even the playing field so that we could really go at it. Look each other in the face, stare each other down, eye to eye.

  But she did not. Instead, she continued to sit in her chair, her hands folded in her lap.

  “You liked me better when it was easier to dislike me?”

  “Don’t you dare make fun of me,” I said, abruptly all too aware of how ridiculous I’d just sounded. I could feel the laughter swarming up the back of my throat. The trouble with being angry is that it not only makes you feel stupid, it encourages you to say stupid things as well. Stupid things that are hard to take back and impossible to erase. And suddenly, there you are.

  “I wouldn’t,” she said. “I mean, I’m not. I always sort of envied you, if it makes you feel any better.”

  “Envied me,” I echoed. “What for?”

  “Because you had two fathers,” the Lady Mina said simply. “Yours, and mine, even though you didn’t get to know yours very well. Whereas I, for all the attention he paid to me, had none.”

  “You had your mother,” I said.

  She nodded. “True enough. That was another reason I sometimes envied you. You look much more like her than I.”

  I stared at her, appalled. All my life I had heard tales of die Königin der Nacht, and none of them good.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “I don’t.”

  “But you do,” the Lady Mina said simply. “You have dark hair, as she does. Skin so pale you can almost see right through it. You could be her daughter, except for the eyes.”

  “Well, but your hair is dark,” I said. I was sounding ridiculous again and I knew it, but it was genuinely the first thing that came to mind. “You think so?”

  At this, she reached up and, with two quick motions, untied and pulled the dark scarf from around her head. Her hair came spilling down around her shoulders.

  I think I must have made some sound. To this day, I still don’t quite know why I didn’t raise a hand to protect my eyes. The only reason I can come up with is that I didn’t want to look away. As if, even as my mind went completely blank, it knew this was as close as I would ever come to gazing straight into the rising sun, for that’s exactly what color her hair was. Streaming over her shoulders in just the same way the sun spills over the horizon.

  “You are beautiful,” I said simply. “Why doesn’t that make me hate you even more? It certainly ought to, don’t you think?”

  “Only if what you felt was truly hate to begin with,” the Lady Mina replied.

  “You’re doing it again,” I said. “Sounding all sensible and like you know everything. Statos isn’t going to like that, you know.”

  She did rise to her feet at this, the dark scarf falling from her lap, and all that mass of golden hair tumbling down, down, down, until it almost reached the floor.

  “I don’t care what Statos likes or doesn’t like,” she said, her tone forceful. “I don’t want him, Gayna. I don’t want anything the Lord Sarastro has to give. I don’t want to take anything from you”

  I pulled in a breath. “Do you not even want a father?”

  Absolute silence filled the room, more complete than when the Lord and Statos had departed.

  “Yes,” the Lady Mina said at last. “Yes, of course I want a father. One who sees me for what I am, or wishes to, at the very least. For only then may he see what I may become. I don’t want a father who steals me away in the middle of the night. Who breaks his word. Who sees me only as a pawn in some gigantic cosmic game of one-upmanship against my mother.

  “Do you think the Lord Sarastro can be that kind of father?”

  He has been a good one to me, I thought. But all my life I had known that I was not the Lady Mina, not the Lord Sarastro’s true blood daughter, and so I remained silent.

  “I’m not so sure I think so either,” the Lady Mina said, taking my silence for assent to her view that the Lord Sarastro could not be the father that she wanted. “As he’s the only one I’ve got, it seems simplest not to want him at all.”

  “You will be very lonely here, then,” I said, then bit my tongue. “I’m sorry. Perhaps I should have offered words of comfort.”

  “No,” the Lady Mina said with a quick shake of her head that had her golden hair rippling like the flames of the fire. “Not if they were false. I’d rather know the truth, however unpleasant.”

  “Even in that case, I really hate to tell you this,” I said. “But I think it’s nearly dawn. The sky is that funny color that isn’t a color. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Mina answered as she turned to look over her shoulder. “I have seen the dawn. There is a moment when the sky goes blank, as if the world is trying to remember what it looks like in the light.”

  “That’s it exactly,” I said as I moved to stand at her side. She turned, and together we stood for a moment, gazing out the window. “You should get dressed,” I went on finally. “The Lord Sarastro will send for you soon.”

  “I should be well dressed when I go to be sacrificed? Why should I do anything to please him? Answer me that.”

  “Then don’t do it to please him,” I said at once. “Do it to please yourself, and do it for your mother. You speak brave words. Now match it with brave deeds. Show them what the daughter of die Königin der Nacht is made of.”

  At this, to my complete astonishment, she threw back her head and laughed. “Now you’re appealing to my vanity,” she said. “That is well done. All right, show me this finery.”

  “This doesn’t mean we’re friends, you know,” I said as I moved to a wardrobe tucked into an alcove on the far side of the fireplace and flung it open.

  “Of course it doesn’t,” the Lady Mina said, her tone calm. “I think I’m sorry for that. It would be nice to have a friend. I never really had one other than Lapin.”

  “Lapin?”

  She shook her head, as if sorry that she’d spoken. “Not now,” she said. “Perhaps another time. What do you think of this one?” she asked. And she pulled from the wardrobe exactly the dress I would have chosen had I been in her place, one made of cloth of beaten gold. “If the Lord Sarastro wishes me to make an impression on his subjects,
this ought to do the trick.”

  Without thinking, I said, “You’ll be absolutely blinding.”

  She laughed again, but it seemed to me there was sadness in the sound. “My thought precisely,” she said, and she carried the dress over to the bed and laid it out. “Who knows? Perhaps, while they’re hiding their eyes at the mere sight of me, I can make good my escape.”

  I felt the breath back up inside my lungs. “You would do that? You would try to run?”

  She turned her head, then, and those strange eyes looked straight into mine. I’m pretty sure that’s when it happened. A single thought, the same thought, appearing simultaneously in two different minds.

  “I would,” the Lady Mina said as she straightened slowly. “But I could not do it on my own. The dwelling of the Lord Sarastro is large, and I do not know my way through it. Help would most definitely be required.”

  “And if you had it?” I asked.

  “Then I would go and not look back,” the Lady Mina said. “Particularly not at any man with golden hair and bright blue eyes.”

  “I will help you,” I said.

  By way of answer, the Lady Mina smiled.

  At the sight of it, I felt my heart skip a beat inside my chest even as my determination strengthened. Statos must never see that smile, I thought. If he did, he would never look at me again, not that he looked at me all that often now.

  “But we must hurry,” I said, and I moved toward her. “The sun is nearly up. The lord will send for you at any moment.”

  To my astonishment, she laughed, as if the danger only added pleasure to the challenge.

  “I have an idea to buy us a little more time,” the Lady Mina said. “Give me your cloak, and I will give you mine.” Then she leaned down and swept up the golden dress, holding it against me. “Let us see how well you look in this finery, shall we?”

  The Outsider

  I’ll never forget my first sight of the Lord Sarastro’s daughter, standing fearful yet uncowed at her mother’s side. Nor my second one, for that matter, standing motionless and alone in her father’s great entry hall. Did not die Königin der Nacht say three times that the Lord Sarastro would regret his actions in stealing their daughter away? And did she not say that the third time pays for all?

  Well, I say this. That lady knows what she is talking about.

  I cannot say for certain whether the Lord Sarastro came to regret the actions he performed. It is a thing of which we never spoke. But I do know my third sight of the Lady Mina was the one that sealed my fate, assuming it hadn’t been sealed already, long before. Standing in the room her father had prepared for her, the hood of her cloak at long last pushed back, I could see her face clearly for the very first time.

  This is the picture of her that has never left me, the one that beats with my heart, runs with my blood, holds up my body right along with my bones. It will stay in my mind until my brain itself becomes as blank as a sheet of new-made parchment, a thing that will mean my heart has stopped.

  The simplest way of saying it is this: Even in her pain and defiance, the Lady Mina was beautiful. So beautiful she outshone the moon and the stars alike. Had it been in the sky at the time, I have no doubt she would have outshone the very sun.

  The fourth time I saw her, she wasn’t the Lady Mina at all.

  It was shortly before dawn when the Lord Sarastro summoned me to his study. I was ready, had been for hours. The truth is, I hadn’t gone to bed at all. How could I sleep when I knew that everything I’d worked so long and hard for could, should, would be mine with the rising of this single sun?

  “Ah, Statos, good. Come in,” the Lord Sarastro said when I had been ushered in. The servant who had summoned me bowed and departed, leaving me alone with my lord. My lord and master, I probably should say. For, as his apprentice, my master is precisely what the Lord Sarastro was.

  I know several of the others have told you their life histories, or something of them. Have no fear that I will follow their example, for I have no intention of boring you to tears with the many details of my life until this moment. For one thing, my life isn’t all that unusual or uncommon.

  Like many a younger son of parents rich and poor alike, I was sent to join the Lord Sarastro’s household as a boy, in the hope that I might prove worthy enough to join his order. This I did, and in time achieved an unlooked-for honor. I became his chosen apprentice, the one above all others to whom he revealed his thoughts.

  None of which may make much difference to you, of course. For I have not forgotten that your first glimpse of me was through the Lady Mina’s eyes. Don’t think I don’t know what that makes me: the villain of this story. I will say this much, though, and suggest that you remember it as you read along.

  My desires were, are, no different from the others’. All I wanted was precisely what they did: a place to call my own, a home, and a heart to share it with, to beat in time to mine. And if I did not always do quite what you would have done to accomplish these ends, let me ask you this: How far would you go to achieve your heart’s desire? If it was almost within your grasp and about to be snatched away, how much farther would you go?

  “You conducted yourself very well last night,” the Lord Sarastro said, and he gestured me to take a seat while he stayed beside the window. “You made me very proud. I am sure that, with the coming of the sun, my daughter will see reason.”

  I bowed my head, acknowledging his compliment which pleased me greatly, and showing that I agreed with him when, in fact, I did not. I was far from believing that the Lady Mina would change her opinion of what had happened to her simply because the sun was about to come up. That was nothing new, after all.

  And I think that this was the moment I first began to feel afraid. For, if the Lord Sarastro did not see the situation clearly, truly, then the fact that I was the one he had chosen for his daughter would make no difference. All might still be lost. But I did not speak my fears aloud. If there’s one thing an apprentice should never do, particularly one attached to a magician so powerful he is literally the living embodiment of the sun, it’s to let his master know that he has doubts about his judgment.

  “This morning, Mina will be presented to my subjects,” the Lord Sarastro continued, by which he mostly meant the members of his court, other magicians of our order, and the people of the nearest town. The lord looks after too many people for them all to be assembled in one place at once, even on so momentous an occasion as this.

  “After she has been made known to them, I will present you as her future husband. Then, in the grove most sacred to our order, the ceremony will take place at once.

  “Do you not think—,” I blurted out, before I could prevent it. I stopped and bit my tongue. Hadn’t I just finished promising myself I wouldn’t speak my fears?

  “What?” the Lord Sarastro asked as he came to sit beside me. “Don’t be afraid. Speak what is in your mind.”

  “Might it not be better to wait?” I asked. “To present me as your daughter’s intended husband?”

  Give her more time, I wanted to cry. Time for her to get to know me. Time for me to win her heart. You have control over her body. You’ve certainly proved that much. But do you think that’s all I want?

  “If she makes a public denial, her pride may make it difficult for her to take it back,” I went on.

  This was a thing I knew the Lord Sarastro understood: the power of pride. It had ruled his dealings with his own wife for many a long year.

  At my words, the Lord Sarastro’s eyebrows winged up, and I felt my stomach clench. Though I had not spoken all I might have wished, still, I had never contradicted him even this much before.

  “That is well thought of,” he said after a moment’s pause. “For she will certainly have pride, if she is anything like her mother.”

  He rose and returned to his former position, gazing out the window. Had he stood at his window all night, I wondered, as I had at mine? Had he watched as the night tore itself apart in grief, an
d all in perfect silence? How had he felt to know he was the cause?

  “I will not be governed by the pride of a sixteen-year-old girl,” the Lord Sarastro said at last. “Particularly not my own daughter. She is subject to my will, as are all who dwell within my lands. The sooner she is made to acknowledge this, the better. Therefore, all shall proceed as I have already spoken.”

  At this, I rose also and made a bow.

  “It shall be as you wish, my lord.”

  “Indeed,” the Lord Sarastro said. “Indeed it shall. Now go. Take those who are without and bring my daughter to the audience hall, Statos. The sun is about to rise.”

  And so I made my way to the Lady Minas chamber, the Lord Sarastro’s servants following the proper distance behind. Was I proud of myself as I walked along? As every step I took brought me closer to my desire, did I celebrate the fact that, in spite of what her own wishes might be, in a few moments more, the Lady Mina would be made to bow to her father’s will, and therefore, to mine?

  Surely, the answer must be yes if I am truly the villain you’d like to think I am.

  And so it pains me to tell you the truth. Mostly, I concentrated on trying to control my heart, which was suddenly beating high and fast, prancing inside my chest like a racehorse. I tried to figure out if it were possible to wipe my palms upon my pocket handkerchief without the Lord Sarastro’s servants noticing, for my hands were clammy and had begun to sweat.

  I wondered if I might simply throw up.

  I’m sorry if this destroys the image you have of me as a villain, but it is you who have cast me in that role. It is not one I took on for myself. And so, step by painful step, I made my way to the Lady Mina’s door.

  Upon reaching it, I stopped, pulled in a breath, then nodded for one of the lord’s retainers to knock and announce me. The Lord Sarastro is strict on matters of protocol. I was here as his emissary, his representative, and should therefore be accorded the same respect that he would be due.

  There was a moment’s silence following the servant’s brisk knock. Then, “Enter,” called a high, clear voice. The servant opened the door and threw it back. I advanced into the room, making a sign that the retainers should close the door behind me, then wait in the corridor.