“But before I let this happen, I ask you again: Is this all? Did your heart bestow its great gift for no other reason? Does it want nothing else from me?”
“I might ask you the same question,” I replied, making a bold answer lest my heart read too much into his words and begin to hope too much. “You are a great prince. Why should you care what my heart wants?”
“The answer to that is simple enough,” Prince Jian said. “Though discovering it was hard. It is because I love you.”
How brave he is! I thought. For with that simple declaration, he had set all defenses aside and laid bare his heart. He had been unwilling to risk China, but it seemed that he would risk himself.
You must be no less brave, Mulan, I told myself.
“In that case, you are more powerful than the Son of Heaven,” I said aloud. “You have done what he could not. You have given me the first wish of my heart.”
“And what was that wish?” Prince Jian asked. “Please—I would like to hear you say it out loud.”
“That you love me as I love you,” I said. “But this was a gift that only you could bestow.”
Jian turned me to him then, mindful of my injury, and took me in his arms. “Mulan,” he murmured against my hair. “Mulan.”
“I know my name,” I murmured back.
I felt a bubble of laughter rise up within him, heard it burst forth before he could stop it.
“Yes, but I’m still getting used to it,” he replied. “You must give me a little time yet.”
“I will give you all the time I have,” I vowed, and felt his arms tighten.
“What?” he asked, his voice light and teasing even as he held me close. “No more?”
“Even this great hero of China has her limits, Majesty,” I answered.
He tilted my face up and looked down into my eyes. “No,” he said softly. “I really don’t think so. That is one of the reasons I love you so much.”
I reached up and laid a palm against his cheek.
“You have to stop this,” I replied. “You’ll make my head swell as well as make it spin.”
As our lips met, we were both smiling. Our first kiss was full of the promise of both our hearts. A kiss of true love.
“I cannot promise you an easy life,” the prince said when at last we broke apart. “But I hope that you will choose to share it with me anyway.”
“Tell me something, Your Highness,” I said. “Does anything about me tell you that I want an easy life?”
He laughed then, the cold night air ringing with the sound.
“No,” he answered honestly. “Nothing does. Will you marry me, Mulan? Will you make your life with me in China’s wild places, where our hearts may run as free as they desire?”
“I will,” I promised. “But first I must return to my father’s house. My stepmother is going to have a child. I would like to be there when it arrives.”
“I will come with you,” Prince Jian said. “I would like to meet Li Po’s family.”
“I love you,” I said as the tears filled my eyes. “I love you with all my heart.”
“I am glad to hear it,” Prince Jian answered. “For I love you with all of mine. Though I suppose I should have asked your father’s permission first.”
“I believe that he will give it,” I said. “For if there is one thing my father understands, it’s marrying for love.”
We were married in the spring, beneath the plum tree. Its blossoms were just beginning to fade and loosen their hold. Each time the wind moved through the branches, fragrant petals showered down around us. Neither the emperor nor either of Jian’s brothers came to the ceremony. But General Yuwen was there, and Zao Xing, holding my baby brother in her arms. He had made his appearance early, causing us all alarm. But he soon proved the rightness of his choice, for he was growing fat and strong. In honor of my recent exploits, and to encourage him to grow up big and strong, my parents named him Gao Shan, High Mountain.
The night before Jian and I exchanged our vows, I could not sleep. I lay awake for many hours gazing out the window at the stars. I heard a soft whisper of sound and turned from the window to discover that my stepmother had entered my room, my baby brother in her arms.
“I wondered if I would find you awake,” she said. “I don’t think I slept a wink the night before I married your father.”
“My own marriage will be all right, then,” I said as I patted the bed beside me. “Look how well yours turned out.”
Zao Xing chuckled as she sat. I held out my arms for the baby, and she placed Gao Shan into my arms.
“I won’t be here to watch him grow up after all,” I said.
“No,” my stepmother said softly. “It appears that you will not. But I hope you won’t stay away forever. Who knows? Perhaps you will return to have your own child.”
“For goodness’ sake, I’m not even married yet,” I exclaimed. Zao Xing clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing as the baby squirmed in my arms.
“Here, take him back,” I said. “I want to give him something.”
Zao Xing took the baby back. He settled peacefully in the crook of her arm. I reached around my neck and lifted the dragonfly medallion over my head. I held it out in one palm.
“Prince Jian gave me this,” I said, “the night before I rode away to fight the Huns. He said my father had given it to him when he was just a boy. I would like Gao Shan to have it, to remind him of Jian and me when we are far from home.”
“It’s a wonderful gift,” Zao Xing said, her eyes shining. “Thank you, Mulan. He is too young to wear it yet, I think, but I will save it for him. And I will tell him of his famous sister’s exploits. They will make fine bedtime stories.”
“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” I said. “He’ll grow up getting into trouble.”
“No,” Zao Xing replied. “He will grow up to bring the Hua family honor.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Your father and I are both glad to see you so happy, but we will miss you, Mulan.”
“I’ll miss you, too,” I said. I returned her embrace.
“Now,” Zao Xing said. “You lie back down. Gao Shan seems happy. I think we’ll just sit beside you awhile.”
The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was my stepmother cradling my baby brother in her arms. I fell asleep to the sound of her gentle voice singing a lullaby.
My father gave me his horse as a wedding gift.
“Ride up the streambed,” he said when at last the day arrived for Jian and me to depart. “It will take you through the woods to where our land ends and the rest of China begins, and you will understand why I chose that path to return home.”
“We will do so,” I promised. I swung up into the saddle. “Make sure you teach my little brother how to use a bow.”
“Come back and teach him yourself,” my father said.
“I will do that also,” I answered with a smile.
“Take good care of my daughter,” my father said to Jian.
“As you once cared for me,” he vowed. Then he grinned. “Though, truly, I think you may have things backward.”
The sound of laughter filled our ears at our departure. Jian and I rode up the streambed as my father had requested, the horses picking their way carefully among the stones.
“I wonder why your father wanted us to go this way,” Jian mused as we rode along.
“I can’t say for certain,” I said. “Though I think I’m beginning to guess. Wait until we reach the woods. Then we will know.”
Half an hour’s travel farther brought us to the first of the trees. Soon we had passed beneath their boughs.
“Look,” I said, pointing. “Oh, look, Jian.”
Here and there on the forest floor, now hidden, now revealing themselves, tiny white blossoms lifted up their heads.
Wild orchids.
DON’T MISS THIS MAGICAL TITLE
IN THE ONCE UPON A TIME SERIES!
Golden
CAMERON DOKEY
PROLOGUE
It began with a theft and ended with a gift. And, if I were truly as impossible as it once pleased Rue to claim, I’d demonstrate it now. Stop right there, I’d tell you. That’s really all you need to know about the story of my life. Thank you very much for coming, but you might as well go home now.
Except there is this problem:
A beginning and an ending, though satisfying in their own individual ways, are simply that. A start and a conclusion, nothing more. It’s what comes in between that does the work, that builds the life and tells the story. Believing you can see the second while still busy with the first can be a dangerous mistake, a fact of life sometimes difficult for the young to grasp. When you are young, you think your eyesight is perfect, even as it fails you and you fail to notice. It’s easy to get distracted, caught up in dilemmas and questions that eventually turn out to be less important than you originally thought.
For instance, here is a puzzle that many minds have pondered: If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound?
When, really, much more challenging puzzles sound a good deal simpler:
How do you recognize the face of love?
Can love happen in an instant, or can it only grow slowly, bolstered by the course of time? Is it possible that love might be both? A thing that takes forever to reach its true conclusion, made possible by what occurs in no more than the blink of an eye?
Yes, I think I know the answers, for myself, at least. But then, I am no longer young. I am old now. My life has been a long and happy one, but even the longest, happiest life will, one day, draw down to its close. Fold itself up and be put away, like a favorite sweater into a cedar chest, a garment that has served well for many, many years, but now has just plain too many holes to be worn.
Don’t bother to suggest that I will be immortal because my tale will continue to be told. That sort of sentiment just makes me impatient and annoyed. In the first place, because the tale you know is hardly the whole story. And in the second, because it is the tale itself that will live on, not 1.1 will come to an end, as all living creatures must. And when I do, what I know will perish with me.
Perhaps that is why I have the urge to speak of it now.
More and more these days, I find myself thinking back to the beginning, particularly when I am sitting in the garden. This is not surprising, I suppose. For it was in a garden that my tale began. It makes no difference that I hadn’t been born yet at the time. I listen to the sound the first bees make in spring, so loud it always takes me by surprise. I sit on the bench my husband made me as a wedding gift, surrounded by the daffodils I planted with my own hands, so very long ago now. Their scent hangs around me like a curtain of silk.
I close my eyes, and I am young once more.
ONE
Here are the things I think you think you know about my story, for these are the ones that have often been told.
The girl I would become was the only child of a poor man and his wife who had waited many years for any child at all to be born. During her pregnancy, my mother developed a craving for a particular herb, a kind of parsley. In the country in which my parents were then living, this herb was called “rapunzel.”
As luck would have it, the house next door to my parents’ home possessed a beautiful and wondrous garden. In it grew the most delicious-looking rapunzel my mother had ever seen. So wonderful, in fact, she decided that she could not live without it. Day after day, hour after hour, she begged my father to procure her some. She must have that rapunzel and no other, my mother swore, or she would simply die.
There was a catch, of course. A rather large one. The garden was the property of a powerful sorceress.
This discouraged my father from simply walking up the house next door’s front steps, ringing the bell, and asking politely if the garden’s owner would share some of her delicious herb, which is precisely what he should have done. The front doorbell even possessed a unique talent, or so the sorceress herself later informed me. When it rang, the person who caused it to sound heard whatever tune he or she liked best.
Not that it made any difference, for no one ever rang the bell. To approach a sorceress by the front way was apparently deemed too risky. So my father did what everyone before him had done: He went in through the back. He climbed over the wall that divided the sorceress’s garden from his own and stole the rapunzel.
He even got away with it—the first time around. But, though he had picked all the herb that he could carry, it was not enough for my mother. She devoured it in great greedy handfuls, then begged for more. My father took a satchel, to carry even more rapunzel, and returned to the sorceress’s garden. But this time, though the herb was still plentiful, my father’s luck ran out. The sorceress caught him with his hands full of rapunzel and his legs halfway up the garden wall.
“Foolish man!” she scolded. “Come down here at once! Don’t you know it’s just plain stupid to climb over a sorceress’s back wall and steal from her garden, particularly when she has a perfectly good front doorbell?”
At this, my father fell from the wall and to his knees.
“Forgive me,” he cried. “I am not normally an ungracious thief. In fact, I’m not normally either one.”
The sorceress pursed her lips. “I suppose this means you think you have a good reason for your actions,” she snorted.
“I do,” my father replied. “Will it please you to hear it?”
“I sincerely doubt it,” the sorceress said. “But get up and tell it to me anyhow.”
My father now explained about my mother’s craving. How she had claimed she must have rapunzel, this rapunzel and no other, or she would simply die. And how, out of love for her and fear for the life of the child she carried, he had done what he must to obtain the herb, even though he knew that stealing it was wrong.
After he had finished, the sorceress stood silent, looking at him for what must have seemed like a very long time.
“There is no such thing as an act without consequence,” she said softly, at last. “No act stands alone. It is always connected to at least one other, even if it cannot be seen yet, even if it is still approaching, over the horizon line. If you had asked me for the rapunzel, I would have given it freely, but as it is—”
“I understand,” my father said, before he quite realized that he was interrupting. “You are speaking of payment. I am a poor man, but I will do my best to discharge this debt.”
The sorceress was silent for an even longer time.
“I will see this wife of yours,” she finally pronounced. “Then I will know what must be done.”
Here are the things I know you do not know about my story, for, until now, they have never been told:
The woman who gave birth to me was very beautiful. Her skin was as white and smooth as cream. Her eyes, the color of bluebells in the spring. Her lips, like damask roses.
This is nothing so special in and of itself, of course.
Many women are beautiful, including those who don’t resemble my mother in the slightest. But her beauty was my mother’s greatest treasure, more important to her than anything else. And the feature she prized above all others was her hair, as luxuriant and flowing as a river in spring. As golden as a polished florin.
When my father brought the sorceress into the house, my mother was sitting up in bed, giving her hair its morning-time one hundred strokes with her ivory-handled brush. Even in their most extreme poverty, she had refused to part with this item.
“My dear,” my father began.
“Quiet!” my mother said at once. “I haven’t finished yet, and you know how I dislike being interrupted.”
My father and the sorceress stood in the doorway while my mother finished counting off her strokes.
“Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight …” The white-backed brush flashed through the golden hair. “Ninety-nine, one hundred. There now!”
She set
down the brush and regarded her husband and the stranger with a frown. “Who is this person that you have brought me instead of the rapunzel that you promised?”
“This is the sorceress who lives next door,” my father replied. “It’s her rapunzel.”
“Oh,” said my mother.
“Oh, indeed,” the sorceress at last spoke up. She walked into the room, stopping only when she reached my mother’s bedside, and gazed upon her much as she had earlier gazed upon my father.
“Madam,” she said after many moments. “I will make you the following bargain. Until your child is born, you may have as much rapunzel as you like from my garden. But on the day your child arrives, if it is a girl, and I very much think it will be, you must swear to love her just as she is, for that will mean you will love whatever she becomes. If you cannot, then I will claim her in payment for the rapunzel.
“Do we have a deal?”
“Yes,” my mother immediately said, in spite of the fact that my father said “No!” at precisely the same moment.
The sorceress then turned away from my mother and walked to my father, laying a hand upon his arm.
“Good man,” she said, “I know the cost seems high. But have no fear. I mean your child no harm. Instead, if she comes to me, I swear to you that I will love her and raise her as my own. It may even be that you will see her again some day. My eyes are good, but even they cannot see that far, for that is a thing that will depend on your heart rather than mine.”
My father swallowed once or twice, as if his throat had suddenly gone dry.
“If,” he finally said.
“Just so,” the sorceress replied.
And she left my parents’ house and did not return until the day that I was born.
On that day my mother labored mightily to bring me into the world. After many hours, I arrived. The midwife took me and gave me my very first bath. Exhausted from her labors, my mother closed her eyes. She opened them again when I was put into her arms. At my mother’s first sight of me, a thick silence filled the room. The sound of my father’s boots dashing wildly up the stairs could be heard through the open bedroom door. But before he could reach his baby daughter, his wife cried out, “She is hideous! Take her away! I can never love this child!”
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