I adjust my clothes a bit, pulling the hem of my shirt down and fixing the spot where my left jeans leg always rides up. I stand in front of the closed wardrobe, debating between the comfortable, now magically clean, definitely Renaissance-improper jeans I’m wearing or a gorgeous, corset-requiring dress. My decision doesn’t take long; I set off for lunch in the garden looking very unlike any sort of princess.
Adele usually comes to my room in the early morning. I wonder if she came this morning and decided to leave me sleeping, or if she thought it better not to bother me after my unusual run through the village yesterday. Last night is a bit of a blur to me now; the running after the moment in the library seems more like a dissolving memory of a dream, while my dream is still vivid and real. Part of me wants to rush to the castle and find Shadow. Another part holds back, though, knowing that I didn’t actually go to him last night, hesitant after coming so close to seeing him for real. I’m almost glad I woke up when I did. That sort of moment should be lived, not dreamed, even if I can’t tell much of a difference between the experiences.
It takes me a while to find Adele and Louna, along with the rest of the villagers. I didn’t realize it was Sunday; they’re all just coming out of church and heading to the garden for lunch. I join them, spending the afternoon playing ball with delighted children and listening to their parents chatter in French. The children laugh every time I throw the ball and miss them, or hit them on the leg or the head. I can only see where they are if they’re holding the ball, but I’m a good sport about it. As long as the kids are entertained.
Louna is silent, of course, but she has her own ways of communicating. Every time she wants my attention, I can feel her little hand tugging mine or rubbing my arm. By shaping my fingers into a point and pointing them at various objects or people, she can let me know what she wants, although it takes a few minutes of her gestures with my hands for me to figure out what she’s trying to say. She seems to communicate well with the other children; I imagine she does something similar with them. I wonder if spending more time with her would make it easier for me to understand her, and if maybe the invisible people can see each other even though I can’t see them.
After maybe twenty or thirty minutes with the kids, Adele comes over to pull me toward the adults standing around the fire. Loud, rapid-fire French flies back and forth between maybe five or six people—three women, but I can’t tell if there’s only two or three men speaking. I’m surprised to realize I can understand almost every word they’re saying, though. The men discuss the sermon this morning, while the women talk about an amusing exchange between Jacques and one of the women’s daughters.
I can participate in their conversations almost like a native French speaker now. Shadow must have been wrong; there’s no way magic isn’t affecting my language. I think about possibly going off to find him, but I’ve spent so much time with him and away from the village that I feel like I should stay with Adele right now.
I stand next to her with her friends, adding a comment to the discussion here or there, but overall I have little to say. After a few minutes of this, Adele takes my hand and leads me away from the group, through the crowded center of the garden, to one of the little trails. We walk hand in hand, me only a few steps behind Adele as she leads. The foliage from the trees and bushes is less contained on the smaller trails than the wider paths or the main clearing. I wonder if it’s always been that way, or if this is another example of the magic slowly fading, like Shadow told me. Leaves brush against my denim-wrapped legs as I walk, matching Adele’s leisurely pace. Not until we’ve walked far enough that the sounds of the villagers begin to fade does she speak.
“Do you like the gardens here?” she asks me in French, speaking only the slightest bit slower than she did with her friends. She must have picked up on my new fluency, too.
“Very much,” I answer in French.
“I thought so. You’re less agitated when you’re tending to nature.” A flower a little up on my left bends down, and I imagine Adele gently pulling it down to sniff. It springs back up when she releases, sending a fine spray of watery mist at us both. “I wonder, then, why you spend so little time here.”
Just as it often does when she visits me in the mornings, Adele’s tone sounds more like a mother than a friend. I’d always thought maybe that was just her way of speaking, but her tone now seems different from the way she spoke to her friends around the fire. I wonder if she feels some sort of obligation to guide me as the new princess here.
She seems to be waiting for a response. I clear my throat and shrug. “I’m not avoiding it or anything. I just…end up doing other things.”
She lets go of my hand and stoops to examine the berries growing on a low bush, not yet fully grown. “Like what?”
Ugh. I should’ve thought my answer through better. There’s no way I can tell Adele, who clearly has some sort of standing in this place to be the one who tends the princess, that I’ve spent most of my time exploring off-limits tunnels and talking to a strange man who hides under a cloak in the furthest point from the village. I grab at the first thing I can think of that isn’t going to get me in trouble. “I’ve done a lot of drawing lately.” Most of it last night, but that does count as lately.
“Oh!” From the way her voice carries, I think she’s turned her head to face me. She sounds pleased, a little surprised, maybe. “What have you been drawing?”
“Um, well…I sketched out the rooms here, and some plants and stuff. Drew a few of my dresses, too. Everything’s different here.” I try to steer the conversation off me, but it doesn’t really work.
She stands, her unseen skirts brushing against my jeans, and takes both my hands in hers. “You must show me your drawings sometime. Soon. We don’t get much culture here, you know.”
I nod. “Sure, okay.” Her eager tone makes me feel a little guilty for neglecting her—and the other villagers—in my search for answers from Shadow. I decide to come back from visiting him early tomorrow. “I could come to your house tomorrow afternoon, if you want.”
“That would be perfect.” Her tone is pleased, but not as excited as any of the other villagers’ might be if they anticipated a visit from their beloved princess. Adele definitely has a different relationship with me than anyone else here, and a different position in the village. I wonder why that is. She drops my right hand and we continue walking slowly down the narrow trail in silence. It feels a little awkward to me, the silence and the way she’s been holding my hand this whole time. She doesn’t seem bothered by it, though, so I just follow her as she leads me through the greenery.
She’s right. I do love this place; I shouldn’t pass it by so quickly every day.
Adele and I spend about two more hours walking through the gardens. Some of it is spent in silence, but other times we run into another villager who stops to speak with us, and every so often Adele points out specific plants or asks what I know about a certain fruit or blossom. I’m surprised at how much she knows about the garden, and it’s odd how she seems familiar with my knowledge of plants. I do know more than the average New Yorker, having spent so much time with my mother at her garden…but thinking about that makes my head hurt again. I focus on the garden around me instead.
When Adele and I return to the center of the garden, the villagers are still gathered there. They’re preparing a big group supper of vegetable stew; Louna and Jacques, with some of the other children, were sent to get bread from the little bakery by my room for everyone. The place seems softer now, with voices lower and the light dimmer than before. The effect is only reinforced when people stop talking to begin eating and the dying garden sunlight signals night’s approach.
After dinner, the families all return to their own homes. I go to Adele and Louna’s for a little while before nightfall. Louna plays with a tattered rag doll on the bed. Adele and I sit in the two rough wooden chairs by the tiny table and watch her. The sight of the doll bobbing around
in thin air makes me think of how I would have reacted to seeing the invisible children play when I was their age, and I smile. I was a dramatic child, and loud; nobody would have missed hearing my display of shock and awe.
“So you’ve been drawing in your room. What have you been doing when you go out?” Adele asks, again in French. Apparently our conversation from the garden isn’t over.
I turn to face her—her chair, at least—and reply in French. “Just exploring, getting to know the tunnels. It’s a lovely place down here.” I try to downplay my recent adventures.
She nods, but the look she gives me clearly states that she knows I’m not telling the whole story. “Is it anything like your home?”
I shake my head and sigh, relieved that she’s changed her line of questioning, but not happy about the headache her new question brings on. I try to focus on how to describe the differences between New York and this place to someone who’s never lived outside a medieval village. “No, not really. The furniture is different, and we don’t have torches or fireplaces. I don’t live in a village, either. I used to live in a city, but my family just moved to the country. There’s a nice-sized town nearby, but towns where I’m from are very different than a village.”
“I see. What’s your home like? And this town near it?”
I rub my temples as the ache turns into a thrumming, pounding pulse in my head. “Well, we… we just moved there before I came here. But we lived there when I was little, and I guess I remember a lot from then. Our house has two levels, with the bedrooms up top and the kitchen and living area downstairs. A lot bigger than the rooms here, you know.” I drop my hands, since I don’t want Adele to notice any strange behavior. Rubbing my temples wasn’t helping, anyway. “Outside we have a double porch and balcony, and a swingset, and a big divided garden my Mom used to tend and teach me about. We had so much fun with that garden.” I look down at my hands resting in my lap. “There was an old tree stump my dad turned into a fire pit, and we’d light a fire in the fall and roast marshmallows and hot dogs over it for lunch—oh, those are foods, a type of sweet and a type of meat. In the winter the entire yard was completely buried in snow, and sometimes we were snowed in. I loved to eat the fresh snow.”
I stop talking for a moment, staring at Louna’s doll dancing in the air, focusing my thoughts on the here and now to relieve the headache for a moment. Adele is silent, waiting for me to continue. The odd, scratchy-throat feeling joins the strange headache when I speak again.
“Spring was really a time of waiting for the world to warm up, and then time for planting. In the summer the weather was great; we kids would play outside all the time. My brother liked to study bugs, and my sister loved our swing set, but my favorite thing to do was work in the garden with Mom. There were cow pastures and farmers’ fields behind our house. Summers never smelled very pleasant, but you got used to it. It was fun to wave at the famers driving by on tractors—those are big farming machines.”
I know Adele doesn’t understand what exactly tractors or marshmallows are, but she listens. We continue talking about our different lives, her day-to-day life in the tunnels and raising Louna, and my busy and very futuristic life in New York City. The longer I talk about home, and the less I think about the headache or scratchy throat, the less it bothers me. I explain things like gyms and Starbucks and condos, buses and taxis and tractors, marshmallows and hot dogs and burgers. She listens attentively, prodding me with questions when she doesn’t understand one of the many modern things I’m telling her about.
After a pause in the conversation, I look over at Louna still playing with her doll. The headache and scratchy throat have gone away, but they’ve left a weighty, tired feeling within me. As I watch Louna, I think of all the things I don’t know about Adele and her life. Although I can’t see her, I’ve been able to see and touch the objects and places she spends her daily life around. But I still don’t know much about her personal history, and considering how familiar she acts with me, I don’t think she’d mind my asking about it. “Adele, Louna’s dad…” I’m not sure how to say what I’m asking. “What happened to him?”
She sighs. “His name was Bellamy.” I can hear her fondness in her tone. She pauses for a long moment before asking, “Tell me, what do you know of the tunnels and their magic?”
The question surprises me, but I answer quickly. “I know the tunnels have existed for around five hundred years. They’ve been kept up and sort of frozen in time, I think, by the magic. The magic keeps the stores full and everything clean and repaired and put away each night. It also keeps the day’s time with the torches and fireplaces. That’s about it.” I don’t mention the possibility of the magic fading since my arrival, mostly because the only reason I’ve even noticed was Shadow, and I don’t want to drop any hints about him or his hiding place.
“There is a reason these tunnels were created, and a reason why our village was chosen for them. You’re right. Our village is stuck in time. We are all the same age and in the same physical condition we were when cursed. Before the curse, though, we were ordinary villagers, growing older each day and living out our lives. Bellamy was the town blacksmith—or rather, his father was, but he was to take over the family business when the time came. He was his father’s apprentice when we met. Our fathers were good friends, and our mothers acquaintances. Yet I was nine and he was thirteen by the time we first spoke.”
She pauses and takes a deep breath, grasping my hands across the table before continuing. I’m a bit surprised at how emotional she is. Would a story still affect me as much if I’d lived five hundred years later to tell it?
“Shortly after, scarlet fever took my parents. I had no other relatives, only my sister, who was not yet a year old. I was ten. I had to care for her. I worked in fields and kept a garden, and looked after our animals and our house.” Her sentences are disjointed and her breathing is a bit ragged, but she pushes on. I can’t imagine a ten-year-old being responsible for that much work, especially considering what I know from history class of what living conditions were like in her day. She doesn’t say anything more about it.
“Only old widowers would marry a girl with a child of her own, and there were few of those to be found. I had my sister to think of—my husband would be her father, his children her siblings. The man needed to be trustworthy, safe. With no dowry, I had nothing but myself to offer. My father did not die wealthy.
“Then Bellamy came to my life. His mother died many years earlier. His father died two months after my parents. Bellamy and I grew close quickly. I believed it was because he pitied me and my sister, or because he felt it was what his father would desire, or because he felt responsible for us—he was my only friend and old enough to be a man now. Maybe those sentiments were true at first. Yet he stayed by my side through everything. He spent so much time with me and my sister we began to feel like family. I was happy with him. He never took notice of others in the village, only worked and visited me. We married when I was seventeen. We had Louna the next year.”
I wait a few minutes, feeling her thumbs rub absently back and forth against the backs of my hands. Then I ask again, “What happened to him?”
She clears her throat, shifts in her chair, and leans forward. Pulling my hands a bit closer to herself, she says, “It was a long while after we’d been in the tunnels. We have little sense of time here, but I believe a hundred years had passed. In those earlier days, we took less care. Then again, the danger was less then, too.” Her voice catches, and I squeeze her hands in a feeble effort to comfort her. “The griffin… Bellamy never arrived home that night. He was not reckless, but the need for care was less then. Some nights the griffin never came out. When it did, it was never all night, not in those days. Some folks who stayed out passed the night without incident. Some were injured, but they all survived the night.” She pauses, taking in a deep breath. “Bellamy did not.”
“I’m sorry.” I’ve both hated and longed for those wo
rds of empty consolation. My experience after my mother’s passing hasn’t shown me any better way to comfort, as much as I know there must be one. I was deeply impacted by losing one parent. I can’t imagine losing both, and then a husband, too.
We sit in silence a few minutes. Adele continues rubbing her thumbs over my hands. Louna has fallen asleep and her doll hangs in a position that suggests being held tight in the sleeping girl’s arms. After a little while, I stand and let go of Adele’s hands. Her chair pushes back and she rises as well. I hate to leave Adele after sharing such a personal, tragic story, but from the look of the fireplace, I’ve already stayed longer than I should.
“I should go. It’s late. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yes, of course. Good night.” Adele steps forward and presses a kiss to my cheek. Still feeling sorry for what she’s suffered and sorrier that I can’t say anything worth saying about it, I kiss her back.
“Good night, Adele. Thank you for having me tonight.”
“Good night, dear one.”
I head to my room and change into a nightgown before climbing into bed. Sleep claims my mind just as the first roars begin to echo through the tunnels.
Silence fills the room. I wonder why Shadow always waits for me to speak first.
“Hi.” I’m not sure whether to feel awkward or not after last night. I’m not sure quite what to do or say, either. It’s not a feeling I enjoy, two nights in a row.
“Hello.”
I stand fiddling with my necklace for a few minutes before deciding to just forget about last night. It’s a new day, as the saying goes—or night. Same idea. I step closer to Shadow in his chair and sit on the floor. Instead of facing him and his mysterious cloak, I face toward the door like him and lean my back against his chair leg. It’s more comfortable this way. I can almost pretend he’s just another invisible villager when I can’t see his robed figure. “I have a couple of questions, and I think you might be able to answer these.”
World of Shadows Page 10