Broken Wish

by Julie C. Dao

  The willow drew her toward it. It wrapped loving arms of bark around her and whispered comfort into her ears with a voice that sounded like rustling leaves. Elva felt the earth-scented breeze of the North Woods brush against her face, and the smell of soil and rain and wildflowers seeped into her pores as she grew rooted to the earth. She laid her head upon the heart of the willow and closed her eyes, and her last waking, human thoughts were of Mama and Papa and Rayner, but especially Cay. She even thought of Willem as he had once been in her heart, and finally, Mathilda, strong and loving and proud.

  Their faces were the last images Elva saw as the tree swallowed her whole.

  Mathilda sat alone before the dying fire. Her diary lay open in her lap, but she couldn’t muster the energy to do anything other than flip through its pages. She closed it, running a hand over the spreading willow tree etched into the thick leather cover, then set it aside with a sigh. A gloomy, unseasonable chill had settled over the woods and hills as the sun went down, and she poked listlessly at the embers to draw out the heat. Yet another hearth, she thought. Yet another lonely night.

  The day before, she had gone straight to the cottage that had belonged to her aunt Louisa and Josefine. It was larger than any of the other homes she had ever lived in, with three spacious bedrooms and a bright kitchen wrapped in red brick, and when its owners had been alive, it had been full of love and joy and good cooking. Every corner held a memory: Here, Aunt Louisa had taught her how to churn butter and put it in a strawberry-shaped mold. Over there, Josefine had taught her about all the mushrooms they had gathered. “You can eat any one you like,” Josefine had said, her dark eyes twinkling, “as long as you don’t choose the ones you can only eat once.”

  In this house, Mathilda had learned to love magic. She had seen its beauty firsthand and so, too, had grown to understand its fickle, unpredictable nature. Aunt Louisa had loved her and fussed over her, and Josefine had made her mind and body strong. But now that they were both gone, the joyous memories were only that: memories. It was why Mathilda had decided never to live here again, even though she visited from time to time to pay tribute. A person could not live on the ghost of happiness forever, no matter how much she longed to.

  But I did have happiness, Mathilda thought. A spark of it, when Elva came.

  And now she had lost it forever, just as she had lost everyone else.

  She threw the poker back into its holder with a loud clang, startling the cat, which had been sleeping nearby on a cushion. Its eyes narrowed at her as she buried her head into her arms, sick with shame for the way she had behaved. She knew now that she had been stubborn and resentful, and that she ought to go back and beg Elva’s forgiveness. The girl had been terrified for her brother’s life, that much was clear. It wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t be with Mathilda, nor was it her fault that the councilmen had chosen to be so cruel.

  Not for the first time that evening, Mathilda glanced at her mirror on the kitchen table. It was the sister of Elva’s looking glass, forever connected by magical bonds, and if she looked into it, they might be able to see each other. But she might not want to see me, Mathilda thought miserably. Perhaps Elva had washed her hands of her, after the way Mathilda had spoken to her.

  All her life, Mathilda had blamed the world for pushing her away. But hadn’t she done the same to it? Hadn’t she built up a wall of thorns around her heart, constructed from hurts and resentments amassed over the years? And anytime someone tried to climb over it, she would find a reason to keep them out. It was her own curse, the punishment she bore for the gift of magic.

  What was the use of having such a gift if she couldn’t share it with anyone? What was the point of great power granted only in complete isolation?

  Mathilda looked at the hearth, where the final ember coughed out a dying breath, and decided to go to bed. Moping was best done on a feather-stuffed mattress beneath thick blankets and plush pillows, and Aunt Louisa and Josefine had stocked their cottage well. She got up, her bones crackling in protest, and went into the room that had once been hers. She slid into bed and closed her eyes, feeling the warmth of the cat as it followed and curled up beside her.

  “Everything always looks better on the other side of sleep,” Josefine used to say.

  But despite how comfortable she was, Mathilda couldn’t sleep. Not when her heart ached unbearably for her cozy cottage in the North Woods, for Elva to sit and talk with her by the fire, for her aunt and the woman who had loved them both, for the look in Alfred’s eyes before he had known who she was, and for a thousand other nameless things her soul could not describe.

  And underneath it all, there was a current of…wrongness.

  Something tugged at the strings of her consciousness, jarring her like an out-of-place note in a chord of music. Even the cat, which usually slept like a log, stirred restlessly beside her. She put a hand on its trembling back, her skin tingling with unease. The air felt charged, like an invisible bolt of lightning had shot through it, making it crackle with frightening dark energy.

  And then the sky lit up.

  Mathilda sat up, shivering, her eyes on the window. The night sky did not look right: It was black as jet, smothering the moon and stars. It swirled like a cauldron of poisonous soup coming to a boil, and any minute now, the steam would burn the earth to blackened rubble. A low, dark rumble of thunder echoed across the land, and then enormous raindrops pelted the roof. It was so loud and furious that Mathilda’s shaking hands flew over her ears.

  The cat got onto all fours, arching its back and hissing.

  “Hush, it’s all right,” Mathilda said, speaking loudly over the torrents of rain beating down. She climbed out of bed as another ferocious roar of thunder cracked open the night, and at once her mind went to the disaster Elva had predicted in her visions. This had to be what the girl had foreseen. Every nerve ending in Mathilda’s body felt charged and alert, for she could sense in her bones that this was no ordinary storm—it had been caused by magic. A very powerful magic, indeed, and from the intensity of it, it had come from not far away.

  There was only one other person Mathilda knew of who could have produced it.

  “Elva,” she whispered, as lightning scissored across the sky. Her shoulders shook with the force of her galloping heartbeat. “What have you done?”

  The rain came down so violently that Mathilda could not see the row of apple trees her bedroom window looked out on. The walls of the house creaked and groaned against the heavy wind, and a sharp crack sounded out as the gust smashed a branch against the roof.

  The anger and malevolence of the storm betrayed Elva’s state of mind. She had clearly been in immense distress and in almost certain danger. But what had she been attempting to do that had caused such a powerful act of nature?

  Mathilda ran out of her bedroom. She needed to use the mirror and communicate with the girl, or at least see what had happened so she could help. Her heartbeat seemed to cry, Elva, Elva, as she sprinted into the hallway with the cat on her heels. But no sooner had she reached the door to the main room than another gust of wind rocked the skeleton of the house.

  One by one, with a deafening crash, each of the six long glass windows in the main room shattered, pushed inward by an indescribable force. Mathilda dropped to her knees, gathering the cat to her heart and protecting it from the deadly whirlwind of glass shards.

  And then all was quiet.

  Breathing hard, Mathilda lifted her head. The storm had vanished as quickly as it had come. The boiling black clouds receded to reveal the moon, shining down upon trees drooping with exhaustion, several of them cracked and missing branches. The chill, too, had gone, and a warm, gentle summer breeze lifted the curtains as though it had been there all along. The moonlight illuminated the mess of broken glass, glinting on every surface.

  “Elva,” Mathilda uttered, hurrying through the shards, which crunched under her slippers.

  Her mirror had been destroyed where it lay, crushed by falling p
ieces of window glass and ground to a fine powder in some places. Only one jagged fragment was big enough to use. She seized it and held it up to her face, staring hard at the reflection of her right eye.

  The shard of mirror cleared to reveal images of Elva and herself: their last argument in the woods…the end of that horrid trial…the two of them sitting by the fire. Scene after scene, memory after memory floated by of all the time they had spent together, but with key differences—Mathilda recognized parts of their conversation that had changed, decisions she had never made, words Elva had never spoken. She frowned, uncertain of what she was seeing if not the exact past. And then she saw images of Elva’s sweetheart, Willem, flashing back to the two of them standing by the river, where Elva’s prediction about the fish had happened. Slowly, the answer took shape in Mathilda’s mind as a skinny, towheaded boy—Cay—appeared next. And when she saw Cay and Elva at the wishing well together, Mathilda reeled backward with the realization of what the girl had been attempting. Elva had been trying to redo everything that had happened in order to change the future, exactly as Mathilda had warned her never to do.

  “No!” the witch wailed, her eyes on the wreckage of broken trees outside.

  Elva had caused the very storm she had predicted.

  Such dangerous magic as playing with time would have created an unpredictable surge of energy…and also taken energy, in turn. Desperately, Mathilda looked again at the jagged shard of mirror in her hand, shivering from the effort of calling up the visions. Seeing into time had never been her gift, and it was taking too much from her, but still she tried. She needed to see what had happened to Elva.

  The looking glass showed a shadowed room. A slender figure lay on the floor, her eyes closed, gold hair spilling around her face, and lips slightly parted like a princess in a tale. But her chest did not rise and fall, and no breath fluttered the lock of hair over her nose.

  Mathilda screamed, the shard of mirror shaking uncontrollably in her hand. “It can’t be true,” she sobbed, as the vision flickered and wavered with her emotions. “She can’t be dead.”

  Elva lay crumpled by the window, and beneath her fingertips something shone in the moonlight. It was the other mirror, blazing as though a fire had been lit within it.

  Mathilda sagged against the table, and the fragment of glass slipped from her limp hand. It shattered into a million pieces on the floor, but she neither noticed nor cared. Because there was only one thing that could have happened to make Elva’s mirror glow like that.

  Long ago, Josefine had explained to her that the cost of magic could occasionally be so dear, so great, that it took parts of the self that the wielder would never willingly give. Mathilda had passed that warning on to Elva herself, never dreaming that it would actually be needed.

  Somehow, the girl’s attempt to change time had not only created the storm she had foretold, but it had also drawn something valuable from her, dearer than life, and locked it inside the very tool she had been using to work her magic.

  The mirror had taken Elva’s soul.

  Cay remembered a toy his parents had brought home for him once, many years ago. They had gone on holiday to Paris, just the two of them, leaving Elva, Rayner, and Cay in the Bauers’ care. Elva and Rayner hadn’t minded because they’d had Freida and the Bauer boys to play with, but Cay had been only six and had cried every night until Mama and Papa returned. They came back with a wagonload of gifts: books and paint for Elva and wooden toy soldiers for Rayner.

  For Cay, Mama had brought a small globe filled with water. One side of it had clear glass so he could look in at a miniature Parisian street of baked-clay cobblestone, porcelain shops and people, and neat gas lamps painted bright yellow. Whenever someone shook the toy, a thousand tiny snowflakes danced around the scene in a hypnotizing whirlwind. Despite the chaotic flurry, the tiny painted people stayed still, unaware that their world had been turned upside down.

  Now Cay knew what it was like to be one of them.

  He sat in Papa’s armchair, his broken leg propped up on a cushioned stool, motionless in a storm of activity. Neighbors rushed around him, all busy, all speaking in hushed voices as though Elva were only sleeping in her room upstairs.

  Not dead.

  A low, heartrending wail sounded out, so guttural that Cay barely recognized his own mother’s voice. “The price of breaking a promise…the price of breaking a promise,” she sobbed, before her words melted into something undecipherable. Mama had been crying like that since they had discovered his sister’s body early yesterday morning, but the sound still shocked him every time. Her deep, unabated grief was the only thing that made him sure this wasn’t an endless nightmare he alone was having.

  As soon as Elva had been found, Rayner had run to get help, bringing back with him the physician, Frau Bauer, and several neighbors. It had taken Papa and a few other people to hold Mama down as the others gently laid Elva on her bed, all bright golden hair and rosy cheeks like a cursed fairy-tale maiden. “Why are you carrying her?” Mama had screamed at them. “She can get up herself, she doesn’t need you to lift her like that. Elva, get up! Get up!”

  Downstairs, Cay listened as his mother’s wail went on and on. For a moment, the bustle around him quieted as everyone paused and looked upward with faces full of grief and pity. But soon they were hurrying around again, snowflakes swirling around a porcelain boy.

  “How’s your leg?”

  Cay looked up to see Rayner beside him. “It’s fine,” he said, surprised. He and Rayner had always been more like two boys who happened to live in the same house and less like brothers. Neither had ever made much of an effort to change that, but now Rayner cleared his throat and took the chair beside Cay’s, his eyes on the whirlwind of people.

  “I don’t know why there are so many of them here,” he said helplessly.

  Together, they watched as two women nearly collided, one sweeping the floor and the other dusting the table. Frau Bauer and Freida led the charge in the kitchen, where an army of neighbors kneaded bread, stirred soup, and made endless pots of tea they had to drink themselves because Mama wanted nothing. A constant procession of men came in and out of the house, for Herr Bauer and Papa had combined their farmhands to help clean up the wreckage of the storm.

  The disaster had ripped through Hanau at terrifying speed last night, uprooting farms and destroying buildings all over town before coming to an eerie halt just before dawn. The farmers had been lending animals or an extra hand to one another and anyone else in need, but even with a cooperative effort, the work seemed endless.

  “Why aren’t you out there helping Papa?” Cay asked. “Isn’t there still a lot of work?”

  “He insisted we take it in shifts and make sure to rest, so here I am.” Rayner shrugged. “We’ve mended our fences and cleared away most of the trees, and the crops and animals are fine, so we’ll go help those who weren’t so fortunate. Thank goodness we reinforced our barns.”

  “Thank Elva, you mean,” Cay corrected him, and Rayner nodded, his face falling.

  “What do you think happened to her? Did the shock of the storm really kill her?”

  “Of course not,” Cay scoffed. “That’s just a lie Papa told the neighbors. I think she was doing magic, because that mirror was next to her, but I don’t know what she was trying to do. She didn’t tell me anything.” He wished with all his might that he had asked his sister to stay with him last night. She would have slept in the chair by his bed, and she would still be here. Maybe she would have even talked to him and told him her secrets, the way she used to.

  “You all right?” Rayner asked, watching him.

  “Can guilt make your stomach hurt?”

  “Maybe. What are you guilty for?”

  Cay sighed and looked down at his leg, wrapped in a full inch of bandages. “For not being as understanding as I should have been to Elva. I was angry with her for keeping secrets with other people. That’s why I went into the woods by myself.”

 
; Rayner shifted in his seat, looking awkward. “I don’t think you should feel bad. You two have always been so close,” he said. “I…I think I’ve always been kind of jealous of that.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. You were always off in corners whispering and making up stories and imagining things. You’re a lot alike.” Rayner chewed on his lip, thinking. “Look, you don’t have to tell me your secrets, but since you’re so much like Elva, if you have an, um, ability or something, you could…maybe find out what happened to her?”

  Cay shook his head. “I don’t have Elva’s ability. Honest,” he said, and Rayner blew out a breath, looking both relieved and disappointed. “But I keep thinking if I had that mirror, I could look at it and try to figure it out. And she’s got a pair of red shoes, too, that Mathilda gave her. Problem is, Mama won’t let anyone into Elva’s room, much less touch her things.”

  “I can sneak in.”

  Cay stared at him. “What?”

  “I can sneak in,” Rayner repeated. He bowed his head, his eyes darting around the way Elva’s used to whenever she was thinking hard about something. “Mama’s got to be exhausted. She’ll have to sleep sometime. And I can get in there and get the mirror and shoes for you.”

  “Would you really?”

  “I’d better do it soon. Tonight, maybe. I heard Papa and Herr Bauer talking about burying Elva within the next day or so.” Rayner looked down at his folded hands. “Papa wants to get rid of all her things first, so they won’t hurt Mama so much.”

  “Burying Elva,” Cay echoed softly.

  He hadn’t cried once since they had found her. Her death didn’t seem real. Any minute now, he expected her to get out of bed, hug Mama, and explain that it had all been some mistake. His guilt was worse than he had let on to Rayner because he also didn’t feel sad the way he knew he should. Yesterday, Freida—who hadn’t been able to stop weeping herself—had sat with him and taken the time to explain that it was all right to just feel numb. “People can be sad in different ways,” she had told him. “It doesn’t mean you loved her any less.”