by Karen Foxlee
Ophelia looked out at the snow falling. When she looked at the boy from the corner of her eye, she was surprised to see how faded he seemed. His edges seemed indistinct, as though he were hardly there. Yet when she looked back at him, he was perfectly normal again. She thought she’d better not mention this to the boy.
“Let’s start,” she said.
“Yes,” said the boy. “Let’s start.”
Ophelia and the boy tiptoed through Mesopotamian Mysteries, which contained a large papier-mâché ziggurat. They walked through A Day in Roman Life. They looked in the Customs of Marriage, Religious Embroidery, and A Quaker Kitchen. They picked their way through History of Toys. There were teddy bears and train sets and china dolls lined up to the ceiling, but there were no swords. They searched in Taxidermy Treasures, which was a vast hall filled with nothing but gloomy stuffed animals. Stuffed tigers and stuffed bison. Stuffed rabbits and stuffed lambs. Stuffed cats and stuffed dogs. It seemed there was nothing that had not been killed and frozen in time.
They went through Napoleonic Wars, Colonial Expansion, Chinese Empires, Egyptian Artifacts 3000–2000 BC, and Life on the Frontier. There were no magical swords. They visited Men’s Clothing Through Time, Japanese Ceremonial Dress, and History of the Incas. No magical swords. Where swords had once been, there were only slips of paper, carefully typed: THIS SWORD IS ON LOAN TO BATTLE: THE GREATEST EXHIBITION OF SWORDS IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD (OPENING 6 P.M. SHARP CHRISTMAS EVE, WHEN THE WINTERTIDE CLOCK CHIMES).
They entered Lives of Women in the Nineteenth Century on a whim. There were commodes and potbelly stoves, fans, colorful clogs, hairbrushes, baby bonnets, and perambulators, but no magical swords.
“The problem is,” said Ophelia, “that it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“It is hidden somewhere, I’m sure of it,” said the boy.
Ophelia stopped walking.
“I can never, ever go to the seventh floor again,” she said firmly. “And I’ve glued all the doors shut so we wouldn’t be able to open them anyway. Also, what about this One Other? Maybe we should try to find him or her. Maybe he or she knows where the sword is.”
It felt good to be organized.
“We need to find the sword first,” said the boy. “Trust me.”
“Trust me,” he said again when Ophelia looked unsure. She pulled down on her braids hard.
“I’ve been trying to think of your name,” she said as they began to walk again. “I thought if I said some names to you, one of them might mean something. You might feel something.”
The boy smiled at her, uncertain.
“Here, let’s try E,” said Ophelia. “Ernest. Engelbert. Ebenezer. Edmund. Edgar. Feel anything?”
“Not really.”
“Elvis. Elton. Elijah.”
The boy shook his head.
“Ernie?”
“No.”
“Elliot?”
“I’m not sure it works like that, Ophelia.”
“But maybe you just haven’t heard the correct name.”
“That’s true, I suppose,” said the boy.
“I once had a teddy bear called Elliot,” said Ophelia, which made him laugh.
She was cold. She could feel a wheeze beginning in her chest. They found a re-created Edwardian parlor. There was a comfortable settee, and a fireplace with painted fire that gave the illusion of warmth.
“We should rest awhile,” said the boy.
“We should keep going,” said Ophelia.
“Just for a little while.”
“How did you know I would help you?”
“It was in your eyes. I knew it right away. I knew it was you who would.”
“Have many children come into that room and found you there?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the boy. “Over the years.”
“But I still don’t understand,” said Ophelia, and her voice faded off. “My mum believed in everything. All sorts of stuff. She’d know what we should do now. She died, you know, not that long ago.”
“Do you miss her?” asked the boy.
“Yes,” she said.
“I miss my mother too.”
That made Ophelia shiver, to remember how far away from his home he was.
“Here, have this,” said the boy. He removed his long embroidered coat and placed it over her shoulders.
“Won’t you be cold?”
“I’ll be fine.”
She lifted her sleeve to check on her magical snow leopard wound. It still ached, although it was only a tiny scratch. The boy touched it gently with his fingertip.
“It will heal,” he said. And he sounded very certain.
They sat for quite some time, neither of them talking. The boy raised his hand. Ophelia saw immediately the jagged scar where the missing finger should be. Her small wound was puny beside it. She looked down at her own hands in her lap.
“Did it hurt?” she whispered.
“Yes,” said the boy.
“How did you do it?”
“I held it out like this for the great magical owl to eat.”
“And he gave the charm in return?”
“I’ll tell you,” said the boy.
I held my finger out just so, and the great magical owl snapped it off like a twig. He swallowed it whole, closed his eyes, looked like he enjoyed it—the taste of it, I mean. Me? I screamed and moaned and held my bleeding hand and ripped a strip of cloth from my tunic hem and bandaged it as best I could and crouched on the ground until the first wave of pain subsided. He watched me the whole time with his cooling eyes.
The great magical owl’s magic comes from his travels and his ruminations. He witnesses a sorrow, and then he thinks and thinks and thinks, and he combs his head with his claws, preens, and remembers, sometimes for days, sometimes for years. And the charm he put on me? He told me it came from his memories of the darkest of midnights, the emptiness of a palace after a plague had come, the loneliness of cemeteries, a singular wind he had once met moaning on a plain, the empty hearts of princesses who danced all night. He made this charm in the blink of an eye, placed it inside a feather. The feather drifted free from his wing, fluttered to my feet.
I know you’ll wonder how a blessing might be made, but there is no equation for it, Ophelia. You will not find it in your science books. All his remaining magic, every last ounce of it that he had left in his body, he put inside a feather and then said, “Child, eat of me.”
His breast heaved up and down where the arrow had pierced.
So I took the small feather, for it was really very small, and I put it on my tongue and I swallowed. I coughed. My throat was very dry. Apart from that, I didn’t feel so different.
“There, it is done,” said Ibrom.
“What will happen to me?” I asked.
“You will be safe now for a small while,” said the owl. “Three days, three hours, and three minutes. Enough for you to make it through the forest and into the belly of the mountain.”
But he was dying. Ibrom was dying, and he didn’t know the charm he put on me was much more concentrated than could be imagined. I did not know it either, not for many years. The charm he bestowed upon me was grossly miscalculated.
His eyes were no longer fiery. By giving me the charm, he had broken rank. What did it matter now? He would tell me one more thing.
“The One Other has a name,” he whispered.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I know her,” he hissed. “Have seen her. Have heard her name spoken.”
“What is her name?” I said, and leaned closer, right beside the owl’s head.
Ibrom committed one more act of treason and whispered the name to me.
Already winter was coming behind me. There was a thin gray frost spreading over the leaves. Millions upon millions of icy splinters. There was a low, chill wind. The water in the streams grew milky skins. I stood up, Ophelia, held that name close to my heart, and began to run again.
&n
bsp; “Well?” asked Ophelia.
“Well, what?” said the boy.
He really was exasperating. He’d probably forgotten the name. It was exactly the kind of thing he’d do. If it were she who had been given the name by a dying great magical owl, she would have written it down carefully on a piece of paper and folded it three times and placed it in her pocket.
“The name?” she asked, trying not to sound angry.
The boy smiled at her slyly. “Can’t you guess?”
He really was too much. She refused to guess any more names.
“Honestly,” she said aloud, shaking her head. She pulled the boy’s coat closer. She looked at the Edwardian parlor fire, and from the corner of her eye, she noticed again the blurriness of him. It was worse now, as though he were only half there. He seemed exhausted from just telling that story.
“You should speak your heart,” said the boy, sensing.
But she didn’t mention his evanescence. It seemed too hard. She had expected magic to be simple and tidy, with people disappearing in puffs of smoke—not slowly, by degrees, in a lonely, aching way.
“The thing is,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “owls don’t really speak, not really. I mean, only in stories, perhaps.”
“The thing is,” he replied, “only the right sort of people can hear them.”
There was not a hint of anger in his voice. He smiled at her.
“If you do not believe in such things,” he said as they got up and walked again, “then it is best I don’t tell you of the troll mountain.”
Ophelia didn’t encourage him. She said nothing. She listened to their footsteps on the cold marble floor.
“Or how I met a giant called Gallant, who took me across the sea on his shoulders past the meridian, the point of no return.”
Ophelia stopped and looked very carefully at a display of medieval farming tools, pretending to be engrossed in a pitchfork.
“But across the sea was this kingdom, and it was here I met the King,” he said.
“And the Snow Queen,” said Ophelia, “who made you her prisoner.”
“Yes,” said the boy. “But that wasn’t straightaway. Many years passed first.”
“What were you doing for those years?”
“Well, mostly I played and ate sweets,” said the boy.
I’d never seen mountains like the ones in the new land. Jagged, rocky mountains, not wearing a stitch of trees. Or a city as big as the one I entered that day. The town where I came from was small, and the wizard house, with its tower, was the tallest building to be seen. But here there were giant houses everywhere, with bells in their towers at each corner, and the streets teeming with people.
I searched in my satchel for the instructions. I had to search with my left hand; my right hand, with its missing finger, still ached in its bandages. I found the list of instructions but didn’t read them. I’d spotted one of the last of the biscuit men that Petal had baked for me. I ate one while I thought.
After that I spent some time looking for the compass. To tell you the truth, I thought I’d lost it. I lose things easily. My mother always said so. I was always forgetting my coat in winter and my ink pen in school, and I was always leaving my shoes on the riverbank. It seemed no amount of apologizing could appease her. I had to wait until the storm passed. Forgetting things made me feel bad. But the shoes, for instance—they were nothing important when I played in the river, which was so wide and still. The fish you could almost catch with your hands, and the blade of grass was sweet in my mouth, and every stone I skipped skipped perfectly.
Yes, it is strange that the wizards chose me.
But the compass was very important. I eventually found it in my tunic pocket, and I followed it south through the streets. Now remember, the wizards had told me in the other world I must find the just and kind ruler. And as it would happen, south took me exactly to the palace gates.
The King duly heard of my arrival. He was seated beside his nanny, who was folding his underpants very neatly. She was telling him how a walk in the garden would do him good and relieve him of his melancholy.
The King was not old as you’d expect, only a boy, much like me. He was prone to bouts of misery. There was always someone knocking on the palace door, trying to cure the King of his sadness. There was an herb man, and a man with glass jars filled with smoke, and a man with powder vials kept inside a magnificent velvet bag. And if they could not cure him, there was always someone trying a new trick. A man who juggled daggers or men dressed as women who danced in a bawdy way, or a terrible, wizened old man who charmed large green snakes.
That day he was in the throes of melancholy when the chamberlain shouted, “Your Highness!” causing the nanny to drop a whole stack of folded underpants. “There is a boy with a divine message who carries a mighty sword handed down from the angels. He says a great invasion is on the way.”
The King sighed loudly. “Perhaps, Chamberlain,” he said, “you would bring this boy to visit me.”
When I was before the young King, he looked me up and down and sighed even louder. “They tell me you have come from a distant land, perhaps from beyond the sea,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, and being truthful, I still felt wobbly on my feet, because it had been a very long way. I forgot everything I was meant to say.
“And has this land got a name?” said the King, who plucked a blade of grass and began to chew it.
“Take that out of your mouth this very minute,” said his nanny.
The King obeyed and put the grass down.
“Yes, it is called the Kingdom,” I said. “And I come from a place called the Town.”
“This is the Kingdom,” he said, waving his arm around him. “My Kingdom, to be precise.”
“It’s a very nice kingdom,” I said. “And very large and very grand.”
The King looked pleased. “And your name?” he asked.
“I don’t have a name,” I said. “It was taken from me by the protectorate of wizards from the east, west, and middle to keep me safe.”
“No name?” said the King. “That’s very unusual. Still, tell me how you came from such a faraway place. Am I to believe you walked the whole way?”
“I ran in the beginning. In the forest and the valley and through the belly of the mountain and then across the ocean.”
“In a boat?” he asked, looking very bored.
“A type of boat, I suppose.”
“I see,” said the King. But I could tell that he didn’t. “The problem is,” he said, “that there is no other land across the ocean. That is only a place that exists in fairy tales. Isn’t it, Nanny? Across the sea is the place you speak of when you tell me those stories at bedtime. All of which are make-believe.”
The old nanny hobbled forward.
“Did you say something?” she said.
The King rolled his eyes at me. “I said, this boy here says he has come from a land across the sea and he walked the whole way here.”
“Well,” said the nanny, taking her glasses from her pocket and stepping closer to peer at me. “He must be very tired, and you haven’t even asked him to take a seat.”
He looked cross. He pointed to the grass in front of him and I sat down. “Tell me your message,” said the frowning King.
“Hello,” I said. “I come in friendship and mean you no harm.”
The King laughed very loudly at that.
“I am a boy,” I said when he had stopped laughing, “chosen by a protectorate of wizards from the east, west, and middle to—”
“Wait,” said the King. “Let me guess. You have come all this way to tell me the harvest will fail this year. You have special powers of foresight—I knew it as soon as I saw you. No, wait again, you have come all this way to tell me that a hole has opened up in the crust of the earth and we can crawl through now to the place where everyone walks on their hands.”
“No,” I said.
“What, then?”
“I have been chosen to deliver this sword so that the Snow Queen may be defeated.” I took the very plain magical sword from its scabbard and went to hold it in the air, but as usual my arm trembled so much with the weight of it that I couldn’t prize its tip from the ground.
The King was very amused.
“I have to give it to someone else, the One Other, who will help defeat the Snow Queen.”
“Who is this One Other?” asked the King.
“I am not sure,” I said. “The wizards said I would know the person when I found him or her. Although the great magical owl gave me a clue when he bit off my finger to put a charm on me.”
Now, to the King’s credit, he looked at me and tried to stop his mouth from twitching. But he lost the battle. He covered his face with his hands, and then threw his head back and roared with laughter. He grabbed his knees from the pain of it. He laughed and laughed until he wiped the tears from his eyes.
“Isn’t he wonderful?” he said at last. “What shall we call him, Nanny? Shall we call him Boy?”
“Oh, he is very lovely,” said the old nanny. “Should I make up a nice, soft bed for Boy, seeing he has come such a long way?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Nanny, I think that would be a good idea indeed.”
I cannot complain about the care I was given. The royal tailor was called that very first day and was told I should be attired in only the finest things: brocade velvets and coats embroidered with golden birds and the best silk stockings. The nanny combed my hair in the way that was the style. A man was employed to do nothing but wash my face with a warm flannel whenever it was required. I ate every type of food that could be imagined. The small room beside the King’s was made up with a new bed with satin cushions and covers.
“Whatever you want, you shall have,” said the young King, “as long as you stay and be my friend.”
“What of my message?” I asked.
“Oh, we will talk more of it later,” he said. “For now I command you to be my friend.”
Each time I spoke of leaving, the King grew petulant.
“I command you to stay,” he said. “I command you to play that game again. The one where you pretend to be a boy from another land. It’s ever so funny. Everything was so tiresome before you came.”