The king signaled across the way to Kirkin, who stepped forward to lead me back to my rooms. We’d only gone a few feet before I turned back around, having found my tongue and a bit of determination, too.
“Your Majesty?” I called.
“Yes?”
“Only if I never have to spin ever again!”
The king laughed, a deep, infectious belly laugh that pulled a smile out of me as well. Even Kirkin fought to keep his mouth straight. The fountain gurgled, and I was sure that Heaven chortled within it. I sensed, however, that it was the first time it laughed along with me.
Kirkin escorted me back to my room, where I stood against the closed door and replayed the scene over and over and over again. There should have been a lot on my mind then, new worries, new concerns, but fielding an unexpected royal proposal tends to sweep everything else out the door.
In truth, I didn’t need any time to think about it, because, really, who would turn down a king?
But there was something stronger at play then, something the king had certainly sensed which explained his unpretentious proposal, the choice of his straightforward words.
My father was a man who lived within the charade of his stories because he wasn’t strong enough to live his life without them. He needed them to face each day, but more importantly, he needed the aura, the sense of excitement and importance, the thrills and anticipation they created. There was nothing to life in a mill that could compete with even the simplest of Father’s tales. There was nothing to life in a mill that could compete with even the most mundane day at the palace. Was Father reason enough to hold me back?
As for Merlin, well, Merlin was my best friend and perhaps the only one who could ever keep me honest because he knew me too well, and that’s also just how he was. It wasn’t a conscious decision he made each day, but rather a fundamental basis to our relationship. When things weren’t said between us, it was either because they were already understood, or because they didn’t need to be.
The problem was that it wasn’t so simple to dismiss Merlin, even in consideration of a king. I always thought Merlin and I would be together the rest of our lives. Perhaps I never thought about what that really meant, but it’s obvious that would mean marriage. Having danced with many boys in the village, having never had occasion before to see much of the world beyond, I would have readily, and gladly, joined my life with Merlin’s. I even think we would have been happy. We would always love each other as friends, and perhaps we’d have been lucky enough to develop a love beyond that as well. Any charade in our lives would only have been any we made up together.
But life had surprised us, hadn’t it? It had halted what I always thought would be and ushered in the king. I’d watched him play his part in the initial charade and I hadn’t liked it. But in that moment in the throne room, I now understood, something really had changed, an understanding had really been shared. The king said as much just moments before. He was willing to put aside his pretenses for me, and hoped I would be willing to set aside mine for him.
I could very well respect a man brave enough to do that.
Going home was the second thing I asked for in considering the king’s offer. The king granted permission willingly, seemingly unconcerned with what my decision would be. Maybe he already knew what I was not yet ready to admit.
A fine carriage led by four dappled gray horses awaited me when I exited the palace into the front courtyard.
“Does this not encourage the type of behavior His Majesty wishes to protect me from?” I teased the king as he saw me off.
“Perhaps,” the king agreed, and his vagueness made me suspect it was intentional. “However,” he added with a chuckle, “there is the image of the Crown’s hospitality to consider.”
I forced myself to smile back. In light of the king’s proposal, I had grown more awkward around him, more self-conscious of every action, every breath.
Is this what he sees in me, I wondered. Or this?
For his part, the king had been faithful to his word that he would drop the charade in front of me. We didn’t have much time together, but I was beginning to see beneath the layers of a royal man who, though outwardly ordinary, was highly intelligent, acutely aware of others, and admittedly odd in certain ways. I preferred not to think of those oddities as simple nuances of his character, but as traits that distinguished him.
Kirkin was assigned to accompany me, and I was glad for it as I was learning to trust him, to take comfort in his stalwart presence always just a few steps away.
“Do you not wish to take your flower with you?” he asked when he came to collect me from my room that morning.
I grinned. I had almost forgotten about that little lie. “I can leave it here a few days,” I assured him.
Kirkin seemed puzzled a moment, his brow drew low in thought, then raised in question. “The purple, it’s magic?”
I nodded.
“The mage who came to the banquet,” Kirkin pressed, “that wasn’t the first time you met him?”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t the first time I met his apprentice.”
“Oh.”
“We grew up together. But,” I was quick to add, even though I didn’t need to defend myself, “even a mage can’t spin straw into gold.”
“Oh. Um. Of course.”
As planned, Merlin jumped in as we passed under the king’s gate and we made the rest of the trip home together. I purposefully made eye contact with Kirkin on his horse when he did, and the soldier simply smiled in return. Despite having three days alone with Merlin on the journey home, I couldn’t bring myself to talk with him about the king’s proposal just yet. For a relationship founded on honesty, I wonder that I so willingly shrank from it.
I should have known that would be the beginning. The beginning of the end.
A part of me really wanted to tell him, but the whole ride I could only think, not yet, or not here, or not now. It’s possible I was afraid to speak about the offer, that I felt something would permanently change between us if I did. Although, even if I had assumed we’d always be together, we’d never actually spoken about marriage, so I wasn’t exactly promised to him. However, there’s something to be said about a boy who sends magical butterflies and flowers to a girl while he’s away at school, about a man who holds her close while she drifts to sleep. I had been his Millie since I was six years old, this man, my best friend, the anchor of my youth. And now, well, and now the past few weeks had made it clear that my youth was over.
Was. It’s an odd word in thinking of Merlin. Those days were so vivid, so alive, even now they seem to have just happened. I suppose there are some things I will never get used to. I wonder if he ever feels the same.
If he ever thinks of me at all.
During the journey back to the village, the mood between us was light as we spoke more about home than the palace. Were it not for the carriage we rode in, it would have been easy to assume the events there had been nothing more than a shared dream, especially because crossing under the king’s gate felt as if we were traveling from one world to another. Which we were, in many ways.
I had thought long and hard about what to wear when I went home, debating between one of the fine dresses made for me at the palace and the shamrock-green gingham dress I’d left home in. I used to think it a nice dress, but that was before I had been shown what pretty really was.
I had finally chosen the gingham dress, if only because I wanted to return looking as much like myself as possible. My experience had changed enough about me already, not just in testing the limits of what I could withstand, not just in pitting me against a king, not just in showing me how much I valued my best friend, but also in ways much simpler than that. Unfortunately, I had learned that I was more like my father than I would ever care to admit. When the king had asked, I had perpetuated his lie, and when Lady Mulberry had inquired, I had expanded one of his on my own.
Once the carriage rolled up to the mill, it didn’
t take long for Father to come greet us. Merlin was already helping me out when I saw the top of his head trudging up the stairs from the mill below. When Father’s eyes found me, then the carriage behind me, they lit up like a blazing summer sun and he hurried over with the speed of a man half his age.
“Welcome home, Daughter!” he proclaimed with a broad grin.
And why not? I had brought a piece of his imagination right to his very doorstep.
I smiled back, even though I realized then that my perception of him had changed. Leaving the mill, finally getting out from under the spell of his stories, had altered my perspective of the world. For the first time, I noticed how small our cottage was, even if the bustling garden and overflowing flowerpots disguised it as quaint. For the first time, I thought about how common it was to be nothing more than a miller’s daughter. For the first time, I realized that I could be bothered by it.
After his initial greeting, Father’s eyes went back to the carriage, the four fine horses, and stayed there while he touched and petted and stroked all of it.
“I once be riding in fine a carriage as this—” he began, but he never finished the story he was surely making up on the spot.
I watched him curiously as he focused on every detail, down to the way the doors opened, the footmen stood, the way the spokes stretched their long arms within the confines of their wheels. Perhaps he didn’t yet have his lie ready for me, but I was certain he’d have it prettily polished by the time his next customer came calling.
I realized something then, understood something fundamental to my father and his compulsion to always stomp around in his tightly-laced sailor boots. Father wanted to live a fantastical life. If nothing else, his imagination was testimony to the adventures he’d wished to have. But as dreams and reality are two different things, as his life unfolded and his body adapted to live within reality, his mind had never quite given up the fantasy. There was only so much a simple miller could experience, only so many travels he could afford, so Father would never have the life he’d always wanted.
Unlike other men who shifted their dreams to their reality, Father never did. He couldn’t let go of the life he saw in his mind’s eye. So he gathered his experiences and spiced them up, his past as hidden as his strange accent was obvious, declaring that he was not from here, granting him liberty to alter what had been even as his future unrolled before him. The rest, well, the rest he just made up, creating memories he could vicariously live with each telling.
I left my father with his vices and slowly stepped up to the cottage, taking time to run my fingers over my mother’s flowers. My hand seemed bare without her ring, my neck felt light without her pearls, but nothing had changed in the way I felt about her. Even if I would never know if those pieces were ever really hers, or merely a desire for a connection to her.
Instead of walking into the cottage, I walked past it, following the water until I came upon the log splayed sideways across it, a bridge leading from this life of a home beside a river to another filled with little rivers running rampant through a home on a hill. Without hesitation, I stepped up and walked to the middle, standing there a moment, arms out for balance as I teetered on the edge of my current life. I watched the river rush away beneath me, wondering if all the rivers in all the realms were connected, or if only some were chosen for greater things. Rivers were much like people, I decided, some were left to water and feed and work the land, others were raised up to be part of something extraordinary. The latter needed the first to survive, the first needed the latter to live.
When I finally sat down, it was beside a purple-backed starling who blinked at me once before changing back into Merlin. We sat quietly together on our log, just the two of us the way it always had been, the two of us no matter how much we’d changed. The two of us for however long we had left.
I broke the silence. “Is Father still salivating over the carriage?”
“He’s talking to Kirkin,” Merlin replied, “who’s standing like a royal guard under the king’s inspection.”
I laughed envisioning it. Kirkin by the horses, back straight, expression rigid, while my father spewed forth a whole lot of nonsense that was hardly spectacular enough to rival the real-life experiences of a royal soldier. Especially one who’d been made guard of the girl who could spin straw into gold.
More than anything, I wanted to ask Merlin about what he planned on doing now that he was thought to be a mage, but lacked the powers of one. From the large rings under his eyes, I guessed he’d either spent nights wondering the same thing, or was using every second of the day to work on increasing his powers. Either way, the present moment seemed too peaceful to ruin with real worries about the future.
“It feels like a different world,” I said instead, “a different lifetime.”
Merlin nodded. “It’s difficult to reconcile the two.”
“I was rather beginning to like it there,” I admitted.
Merlin raised an accusatory eyebrow at me, then softened. “Well, I suppose anyone would like that palace,” he agreed.
“It’s absolutely wonderful,” I said wistfully, and this time Merlin’s eyebrows didn’t immediately lower.
“Are you forgetting why you were there?” he asked. “Did you already forget what happened?”
“Of course not,” I replied. “But not all of it was bad.”
“Not all of it?” Merlin almost screamed.
Merlin deserved his rage, because he wasn’t only indignant for me, but also for his master. I was sad for him, I really was, but there were other things that had happened to color my experience in brighter shades than his. Yes, I was given new dresses, an enviable room, and was even invited to dine with the king and his nobles, but those weren’t enough to outweigh the stress, anguish, and uncertainty of the days I almost felt cold steel against my neck. It certainly didn’t negate the thoughtlessness, the impulsive fancy of a man who would lock a girl in a room and demand she do the impossible not once, but three times!
Except it was all the things that had happened since that actually made me reconsider the entire episode. It was the strange encounters with a man who could see a world more beautiful than any I’d ever known, who had the power and vision to make it so. It was the same man who offered to share that world with me, and despite my surety that I had dreamed up the offer, I couldn’t help but be drawn to such a prospect.
Maybe that was why my stomach was clenching in turmoil, because I couldn’t quite believe that any part of me would consider that other life. And yet, even sitting in the spot that had been the safest, the most serene to me, with a friend who meant more to me than all the world, the palace still beckoned to me. As did the man within who was so sure of himself he didn’t care how the world viewed him. He didn’t need fanciful stories to draw attention to himself. He made fantastical things happen and left them for those who cared to notice.
Simply put, he was everything my father was not.
In that, he was also everything I’d always loved about Merlin.
In short, I was actually considering a future with him.
“The last weeks have been rather trying,” I conceded slowly, and that seemed enough to calm Merlin.
“And now?” Merlin asked, soon as his breathing steadied.
I thought about it a moment, thought about all the things I had wanted to do when I was still a prisoner of the palace, all the things I could do now that I had freely walked away from it. I wanted to see the different parts of my life and remember what I had left behind and so much wanted to get back to.
I had seen my father and our little mill and cottage, and that had gone tepidly well. But there had been other people in my life, and I wanted to see how my experiences tinted them, as well. I had my future to figure out, a future blindsided by a choice I never imagined possible for a simple miller’s daughter. And in truth, I was rather eager to make that choice.
I stood up and brushed off the back of my skirts. “Let’s go to the vi
llage,” I said.
“Should I call for the carriage?” Merlin asked.
I shook my head. I needed to do this with a clear mind, needed to remind myself of what I may be ready to say goodbye to, and rolling in on a very noticeable royal carriage was hardly the way to go about doing that.
We pushed through the forest and tumbled out on the main road just a few twists away from the village. We picked leaves off each other as we walked the rest of the short distance to the other place that had defined so much of our lives. For all anyone knew, we could have been walking to school together as we had so many times in the years before Merlin went away. But Heaven had laughed since then, derailed our plans then with Merlin’s schooling and now again with my royal summons.
I had only been away about three weeks, but it could have been three hundred from the way it felt that all, yet nothing, had changed. The same shops were still there, the same people, the same daily routines, but they had become distant to me, like a melody I was nostalgic for, but couldn’t quite recall.
Merlin and I wandered around without any real purpose, strolling from one store to another, sometimes only looking through the windows, other times walking in only to pick something up then put it back down again before leaving. Despite the bustle of life around us, the village seemed oddly empty and shallow, as if we were only seeing the outer façade and not the true life within.
Thinking about that day now, I know there was no reason for me to feel as I did. Perhaps it was only that something had been awakened in me during my time at the palace, something that told me this village, and everything in it, was never going to be enough. And because it wasn’t enough, it could hardly stand trial as proof for why I should choose its life.
Turning back toward the main road, we bumped into Samara Jade, the one-day mother of a son named Charles, and her gossiper friend, who squealed in uncalled for delight upon seeing me.
“Millie, how fortuitous to see you now!” she cried, purposely flapping a hand at me so I could catch sight of the sparkle on her finger.
Lies of Golden Straw Page 16