Into the Wild

by Sarah Beth Durst

  Instantly, her head felt better. It was much more pleasant not to question.

  She looked around her. Behind her, a staircase descended into shadows. Down you go, the fairy had said. Lifting the skirt of her feather dress, Girl started down the stairs. Her shoes clinked with each step. Stopping, she raised her skirt higher to peer over the feathers at her feet. She was wearing glass shoes instead of bright yellow sandals. They must have changed with the clothes. She twisted her feet, admiring them. They sparkled with the amber light of the candle flames.

  At the end of the staircase, she found herself in a forest of silver. Wide-eyed, she looked around her. The trees shimmered—the leaves and bark were solid sterling. Gone was the daylight of the huntsman’s forest. A fat, silver moon hung low in the leaves and bathed her and this forest in a pale light. It was beautiful. She’d never seen anything so beautiful. Had she? She reached for a memory, but it felt like trying to catch air. She abandoned the effort.

  She started walking down a smooth, white path. Silence wrapped around her. Even her steps were muffled. Soon, the silver woods gave way to trees of gold, then to trees all of diamond. She followed the path to the shore of a blue-black lake. The fat moon hovered over the horizon. Staring at the water, she felt déjà vu, as if she’d once looked across water like this, but no memory came, so she ignored the feeling. In a swath of moonlight, a flower-decked rowboat drifted toward the shore.

  As the boat came closer, she saw it was empty. Slowing, it stopped in front of her. It stayed there, as if waiting. Was it waiting for her? Girl looked to either side of her, but she saw no one. She looked back at the boat, patient in the water. Wondering if she should be worried, she stepped into the boat.

  The boat rocked underneath her as she sat at its helm. Leaning forward, she searched for oars. A wave tilted her toward the water, and she looked up. Without oars or sails, the boat was moving unerringly down the path of moonlight. She heard the sound of a trumpet.

  Ahead of her, rising over the horizon beneath the moon, she saw an island castle, lit with candles along the battlements. Laughter and trumpet music floated across the water. In the distance, slow waterfalls seeped down mountainsides. “Tears of unhappy lovers,” a voice said behind her.

  She turned quickly, and at the back of the boat, she saw the silhouette of a gondolier. With a black stick, he propelled the boat through the moonlight. She couldn’t see his face. “Who are you?” she asked.

  But he only hummed to himself, jarring with the trumpet solo from the castle. Girl shivered. It disturbed her that he hadn’t answered. He had to have a name. Didn’t he? Looking across the moonlight, she saw another boat. Two rounded people sat facing each other. Who were they? Did they have names? As they drew closer, she saw they weren’t people at all. An owl strummed a guitar. A cat with a parasol sat opposite him. Behind the gondola, the shore disappeared in darkness.

  She felt a bump as the gondolier pulled the boat into a candlelit dock. He gestured to the castle. Pale marble, the castle matched the moon’s glow. Spires stretched into the night sky. Roses and ivy wound halfway up their sides. A servant, face blank and shadowed like the gondolier’s, stood on the dock. He held his hand out to her. How elegant, she thought. Smiling, she took his hand and let him help her out of the boat. She followed him down the dock to shore. When she reached the foot of the castle, she looked back over her shoulder, but the flowered boat and its gondolier were gone. The owl and the pussycat drifted over the waves.

  The servant led her through an archway (WHITE CLIFFS RESTAURANT, she read on the arch) into an ornate hall. She craned her neck at tapestries on the walls, but they were so high and dimly lit that she saw only swirled colors and an occasional human or animal face caught in an almost-scream.

  The hall opened onto a balcony. Bowing, the servant left her there, and she walked forward. She was at the top of a spiral staircase that led down into a vast ballroom. Chandeliers with a thousand candles glittered from the ceiling. Mirrors, three stories high, decorated the walls between ivory pillars.

  Below was the ball.

  A single trumpet played. Laughing, lords and ladies and bears and lions and trolls swirled in a dance as colorful as a kaleidoscope. Silver and gold gowns sparkled in the candlelight, reflected countless times in the mirrors.

  “My lady,” a footman said, “I must announce you. What is your name?”

  She opened her mouth to speak, and no name came out. Her name . . . She pressed her hands to her forehead and tried to think. Who was she? What was her name? “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t remember.”

  She remembered the huntsman. She remembered the knife at her throat. But what came before the huntsman? Something had to have come before the huntsman. She had to have been somewhere before she was there. She hadn’t been born there in the woods with the huntsman and the knife. Had she? Of course not. She felt panic bubble up in her throat. The farthest back she could remember was the huntsman—the huntsman who called her “princess.” She clutched the footman’s arm. “Princess,” she said.

  The footman bellowed, “The mysterious princess from unknown lands!” She felt a surge of relief. She knew who she was now. For some reason that she couldn’t name, it had bothered her immensely not to know. Now everything was all right. She was Princess.

  The lords and ladies halted their dance. In unison, their faces turned toward Princess. Oddly, the trumpet kept playing, and the bears and lions and wild boars kept dancing.

  The lords and ladies began to whisper: “Beautiful.” “Exquisite.” “Who is she?” “Princess.” The words rose up to the balcony, and she felt herself start to smile. Instinctively, as if the whispers were a command, she laid her hand on the stair railing. The ivory stairs curved down to an inlaid marble floor. Slowly, just like a princess, she descended the grand spiral staircase. The lords and ladies watched her. Someone sighed adoringly. She straightened her posture. All those eyes, all on her! She felt as if she were floating.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the lords and ladies pressed toward her. One tentatively reached out and touched her feather dress. “Ooh,” the lady said, and the circle tightened. Shoulder to shoulder, they stared at her. Princess started to feel uneasy. It was nice and flattering, but now they were a little close . . . A lion began to growl as the trumpet soloist faltered.

  Red Sea-like, the lords and ladies parted. A sandy-haired boy wearing a crown and ballet tights strode between them. In front of Princess, he dropped to one knee and bowed his head. “Would you do me the honor of granting me this dance?”

  Before she could answer, the prince took her hand. He led her to the center of the floor, and the lords and ladies parted into a wide arc. The trumpet music resumed, and lions pranced around them. She thought she saw a unicorn.

  “You dance like an angel,” he said, and took a sweeping step to the left. Her dress caught around her ankles, and she wobbled on the glass slippers. Feathers stabbed into her waist as she stumbled. He held her upright and swept her across the dance floor. All the other dancers clapped in odd unison.

  The prince whispered in her ear, “You are the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.” His breath was warm on her cheek. She felt herself flush. A prince thought she was beautiful. Of course he did. She had seen herself: she was the beautiful princess.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Princess Test

  The trumpet stopped suddenly.

  Mid-step, the prince stumbled. Princess looked around, confused, as spinning dancers slowed like a dying music box. Around her, the lions and bears snarled and growled. She wondered if she should be alarmed.

  “I found you!” a voice rang out across the ballroom. Princess saw the trumpet player—a girl—wave. She seemed to be waving at Princess. Or perhaps at the prince. The prince put his arm protectively around Princess.

  The trumpet player lifted her trumpet to her lips and played a flourish, and the lions, trolls, and bears began to dance again. Laughing, the lords and
ladies swirled, and the trumpet player walked through them. “Knew if I played”—she trilled notes—“long enough”—more notes—“it would draw you.”

  In a wave, a stream of rats flowed after the musician. In their wake came a flood of laughing, dancing children. The prince began to draw Princess backward, away from the odd procession.

  “Did you find”—the trumpet girl played another set of notes, then finished the sentence—“your mom?” More notes. “Do you know how to stop the Wild?”

  Princess frowned.

  “I want”—more notes—“to go home.” Flourish of notes up the scale and down. She took a breath. “I’ve had enough adventure.”

  Home? Mom? Adventure? Wild? Princess felt as if small fireworks were popping inside her head with each word. And with each pop came a flood of questions: who was the trumpet girl? How did she know Princess? What did she mean, adventure? What did she mean, “stop the Wild”? What was “the Wild”? What was home?

  She opened her mouth to let the questions pour out, but the prince pulled her away. Quickly, the lords and ladies spun in dancing couples between them and the trumpet girl, as if attempting to deliberately part them. The river of rats and children clogged the open spaces. Princess wanted to cry: Wait! Who are you? But the prince was herding her too quickly back toward the ivory staircase.

  A woman in red velvet descended the staircase.

  “Mother!” the prince cried. “This is the Mysterious Princess from Unknown Lands. She is the one I love.”

  Love? He loved her? It was as if the trumpet girl had released a dam. More questions tumbled into Princess’s swirling mind: How could he love her? He barely knew her. She barely knew him. She barely knew herself.

  “Indeed,” said his mother, the queen. “Your brother said the same about the girl from the last midnight, and she was little more than a scullery maid with high-quality shoes, when all was said and done.” She fixed her gaze on Princess, and Princess felt like wilting. “Are you a true princess?”

  Was she? She didn’t know. If she wasn’t a princess, what was she? This time, when Princess reached back for a memory, it felt as if she slammed into a wall inside her head.

  The prince clasped Princess’s hand to his heart. “Surely she is a princess from some faraway land. Look at her grace, her beauty, her poise!”

  “We shall see,” the queen said. “She shall be tested.”

  Leaving the prince behind, the queen shepherded Princess down a tapestry-lined hall. Questions tumbled inside her: What test? Why? Who was this queen? Where was this castle? The queen pulled her faster and faster down the hall until the tapestries blurred into a mosaic of colors, and the glass slippers echoed and clinked like a dozen champagne flutes toasting.

  Abruptly, the queen halted and flung open a door. The scent of roses flowed out like a wave, and Princess saw a blond woman in a pink ball gown sleeping peacefully on a canopied bed. Roses climbed up the posts and over the canopy. “Who is she?” Princess asked.

  “Occupied,” the queen said. “Not your story. Come. We must find your story.” She took Princess by the wrist again and hurried down the hall. What did she mean? Princess wondered. Her story?

  Again without warning, the queen halted. Sliding on her glass slippers, Princess narrowly avoided crashing into the queen. The queen threw open another door. Princess peeked inside. In front of a mountain of straw, a girl was crying. “Is she all right? Why is she crying?” Princess started to ask, but the queen slammed the door shut and pulled Princess onward. “There must be a role for you,” the queen muttered. “You must fit one of them.”

  Princess didn’t know what she meant. Her feet ached in the hard shoes, and her skin itched from the feathers. Who were these people? What was she doing here? “Please, can’t we rest?” she asked, but the queen ignored her.

  The queen tried a third door, where an older woman studied herself in a mirror and chanted: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall . . .” The next room had another bed, but this time, it housed a woman and a fat, green frog. “Who are they?” Princess asked.

  “You should not be asking,” the queen said flatly. “The trumpeter will be punished for this.”

  “But I . . .”

  The queen opened another door. “Ah,” the queen said. “Here we are, and in you go.” She shooed Princess through the doorway.

  Princess faced a wall of cloth. She craned her neck. Mattresses, she realized. It was a pile of mattresses. Lots of mattresses. Why were there so many? The stack peaked near the top of the vaulted ceiling, twenty feet overhead. A ladder leaned against it. Princess heard a bolt slide into a lock behind her. She heard the queen’s voice through the shut door: “Sleep well.”

  Sleep? The queen was leaving her here? “Wait, please.” Princess tried the door handle. It didn’t budge. She knocked. “I don’t understand! You said there would be a test.”

  Behind her, within the room, a voice said, “This is the test.”

  She turned and saw only the mattresses. “Who said that?”

  “I did,” the voice said.

  She looked up. Poking its head over the top mattress was a cat. “Hello,” she said. “What do you mean, it’s the test?”

  “The queen has placed a pea under the mattresses that a true princess would feel while she slept,” he said.

  She didn’t think that sounded very likely. The ladder to the top was so long that it bowed in the middle. “A pea?”

  “It’s an unusually large pea,” he said.

  What did a pea have to do with being a princess? How could a vegetable confirm an identity?

  The cat disappeared for a moment and then reappeared to climb, humanlike, down the ladder. He wore boots on his hind paws, and he had a tan-colored cloak tied around his neck in place of a collar. A stick poked out of one of his boots. She wondered if it was normal for a cat to talk and wear clothes. It felt odd and familiar at the same time, as if a memory should be there, but of course it wasn’t. He landed neatly on the ground and stood upright on his booted hind paws. “Why does a cat need boots?” she asked. “And why wear them only on your back feet?”

  His whiskers twitched. “You’re too aware,” he said. “You shouldn’t be asking so many questions.”

  “Why not?” What was wrong with being aware? She didn’t feel particularly aware. She felt as if she were swimming in murk. She tried again to push at her memories, and she hit the wall in her head. Her head throbbed.

  “You must have found a reminder,” he said. “Something or someone must have sparked this.” He hesitated and then asked, “Do you know who I am?”

  She frowned, thinking of the trumpet girl—that was when the questions had begun to flow. The trumpet girl had sparked this feeling of . . . She didn’t know how to name this feeling. Absently, Princess plucked at the feathers on her sleeve. The peacock feathers tickled her arms, and the shafts poked her skin. It itched. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know.” She half felt as if she did know him, and she half felt as if she didn’t.

  “Oh, this is not good,” he said. “Not good at all.”

  She scratched her arms through the feathers and had a flash of memory: soft hands rubbing calamine lotion on her arms because she had followed a cat—this cat!—into a field of poison ivy. Excitement bubbled up. A memory! A real memory! “I do know you. Don’t I?”

  The cat flinched as if she had hit him.

  There were memories beyond that wall. Gritting her teeth, she tried to push. If she battered at it long enough, would there be a point where the wall broke?

  “You must climb into bed,” the cat said. He sounded oddly desperate. “If you don’t and you fail the test, the queen will kill you.”

  Her memories scattered. “Kill me?”

  “It’s the rules,” he said.

  “But . . .” she began as a dozen questions rushed into her head.

  “Please, climb,” he begged.

  He sounded so insistent that she obeyed without thinking. The ladder bent an
d swayed under her weight. At the top, she found a nightgown. How did it get here? Was it for her? She leaned over the edge to ask the cat. He was curled on the floor as if asleep. “Cat? Hello? Are you awake?”

  He didn’t answer. She sat for a moment, alone with her questions, and then she squirmed out of the itchy feather dress and into the soft nightgown. She kicked the feather dress to the bottom of the bed and lay down.

  She closed her eyes, but she didn’t think she’d fall asleep.

  She had to find . . . what? The dream was gone. She blinked around her at the ornate ceiling. She was on the mattress stack, she remembered. She hadn’t felt any pea.

  Guess I’m not a princess, she thought.

  Now that she was fully awake, her breath tasted stale and she needed to pee. Girl climbed down the ladder.

  Stepping over the sleeping cat, she found a door on the other side of the mattress stack. She hadn’t remembered it being there before she slept, but it led to a closet-sized bathroom with a marble sink and toilet. She rinsed her mouth. “Boots, have you seen my toothbrush?” She studied herself in the mirror.

  The cat ran into the bathroom. “Julie?”

  Her hair was matted on the left side. She tried to fluff it out. Obviously, she wasn’t a princess. Princesses didn’t have bad-hair days. “Sorry—what did you say?”

  He sank down to four paws. “I didn’t think it would be so bad to see you like this,” he said. “I’m a cat; you’re a girl—why do I care?”

  “What’s so bad?” she asked. Her hair? She wished the fairy godmother hadn’t coiled her hair. It might have looked exotic at the ball, but not anymore. She had serious un-princesslike bed head. Whoever she was, she was definitely not a princess.

  “You remembered my name,” he said.

  Hands in her hair, she froze. Yes, she had remembered: Boots. His name was Puss-in-Boots. She had reached for the name, and there it was. She hadn’t even realized she’d done it. “I know you,” she said. “How do I know you? How do you know me?” He retreated out of the bathroom, and she followed him. “You said a name. What was the name? Who am I?”