“I should ask you for a boon, it’s in the quest handbook,” the beekeeper said, and, lowering his golden-brown gaze, blushed inexplicably. “But I will tell you for free, because you were always kind to me.”
She did not puzzle over his words but pressed her bright blue parasol as payment upon him—no one should have to break the rules on her behalf—then, just as the round yellow moon the texture of ripe cheese rose in the skies, followed his directions to the dressmaker’s shop on the main square of a town across the river, where she spent a week weaving straw roses into bonnets and, in restitution, received an introduction to a gypsy horse thief who was passing through that night and in whose wagon she rode for the better part of the month, learning to cook fiery stews, wear men’s clothes, and shoe horses, until they came to the caravan ruled by the gypsy thief’s great-great-grandmother, who appeared more ancient than the mountains they had just crossed and who—once she had spent the balance of the spring braiding stars into the matriarch’s raven-black hair—gave her a Tarot card with the Queen of Swords and the address of a mighty sorcerer scribbled upon it in rooster blood. She stashed the card inside her shirt, close to her heart.
The gypsy thief put a ring of beaten silver, two hands holding a heart, on her finger, and kissed her in parting. They stood on a wild mountain peak, the sunset blazed crimson all around them, his sinewy arms smelled of smoke and hay, his dry lips tasted of pepper and freedom, and for one fraction of a moment she saw a different story, pure and fierce, unfolding before her. But when he pulled her against him, the Queen of Swords cut into her left breast, so she freed herself from his embrace, thanked him for his kindness, and, hitching up her britches, trudged down the mountainside already aflame with the vivid colors of summer wildflowers.
The sorcerer lived in a small valley on this side of the wind, but only barely. By the time she arrived, it was early autumn. Nights were growing chilly, leaves were turning red, and her cloak felt much too thin. She found the sorcerer in a neat little garden behind a neat little house, tending to a neat row of gigantic purple cabbages. A tiny old man with sad gray eyes in a furrowed gray face the size of another man’s fist, he listened to her with an anxious smile, then asked her to be so good as to speak louder, for he was a bit hard of hearing. She shouted her request, and the tall gray mountains around the little gray valley repeated her words many times over, until all the world boomed with her grievances and her hopes. When she finished and the echoes stopped, the old man shook his head.
“Sadly, my dear,” he whispered, “I am retired.”
“But you can’t be, that’s not how it works!” she cried. “I have come from afar to seek your counsel. I have borne amphibian insults, stabbed my fingers with needles and stars, worn out one pair of slippers embroidered with ladybugs, two pairs of sensible shoes, and three pairs of boots, turned my back on the young beekeeper, who blushed so sweetly, and the gypsy thief, who made wild winds blow through my blood. Has it all been in vain? Is there nothing you can do for me?”
The old man thought. The furrows deepened in his small gray face.
“I could give you a few of my cabbages,” he said at last. “Nice plump babies sometimes turn up in the patch.”
Aghast, she stared at him, then at the cabbages. Autumn was drawing closer to winter now; she saw the first traces of frost on the ground between the orderly rows.
“Thank you, but no, I don’t need a new baby. I fear I have not been the best mother to the two I’ve already had.”
And as she spoke, she suddenly knew this to be true. She had been away from the palace, away from her children, for much too long.
Her hand flew to her heart.
“I must get back at once.”
She turned to go, firmly, and was halfway to the nearest mountain when the old man caught up with her. He had been running.
“There… is… something,” he gasped. “I’ve… just… remembered.”
She waited for him to regain his breath.
“I did have a pupil long ago. Not the brightest of the lot, I’m sorry to say, always got his spells mixed up. Still, he may be able to help you—I hear he is a king’s magician now, so perhaps he’s become less muddled over the years. I must be honest with you, though, he lives a bit far. On this side of the wind, yes, but only just.”
Her hope stirred anew, even though she willed it not to.
“Please, where will I find him?”
He drew her a map on a cabbage leaf. She studied it, her spirits sinking. The world scratched into the leaf was broad and strange, bristling with snowcapped ranges, dotted with towns whose names she did not recognize. She thanked the little cabbage farmer, tightened her belt, and set off. As she walked, the eerie blue moon, such as could be seen only at the edge of the world, waxed and waned, winter came and went, hills rose into scraggly peaks and fell into shadowy dales. Her path took her by the gypsy grandmother’s caravan, where she stopped for a shot of whiskey and learned that the gypsy thief had taken up with a beautiful dancer and the two had ridden off into the wind on a stolen black mustang, singing raucous songs; she sighed, but not too deeply, for she had her cabbage leaf now. Again the moon waxed and waned, but now it looked less like a wispy blue boat ready to sail beyond the borders of all known things, and more like a head of ripened cheese; and as she continued to follow the map, the landscapes themselves slowly grew more familiar. At the melting of the snows, she arrived one morning in a town by a brown, stately river where merchants’ wives wore elegant hats decorated with straw roses. She visited a dressmaker’s shop on the main square, to trade her stained britches and crude riding boots for a proper dress and a pair of dainty slippers embroidered with ladybugs (their designs copied, the shop owner informed her proudly, from the clothes worn by a lovely princess who had once stayed there). She paid with the silver ring, two disloyal hands holding a faithless heart, then continued on, her own heart seized with a certain premonition. In the full light of an early spring day, she flew up the hill all abuzz with bees. She would not pause to chat with the young beekeeper who came out of his cottage when she passed by, but she did accept a parasol of faded blue that he begged her to have, and, calling out her thanks over her shoulder, hurried away, leaving him to stand empty-handed and stare after her with a pining golden-brown gaze.
She understood everything now. Her heart in her mouth, she followed the sorcerer’s directions past the pond, where the chorus of frogs begged her to kiss them, and around the mill, and across the park with its civilized maze of raked paths and marble nymphs, until the blue-and-white vanilla cake of a palace rose before her. It was marked on her map by a translucent star of the old man’s fingernails impressing themselves into the leaf’s fleshy pulp with an emphatic crisscross and a scrawclass="underline" “Here.”
All out of breath and radiant with anticipation, she burst inside at the hour when teapots were just beginning to serve afternoon tea, and dashed up to the nursery, and there were her darling children, Angelina and Roland the Sixth, sitting straight-backed and quiet in their little chairs, listening to Nanny Nanny bleat a nursery rhyme about a cow that flew over the moon.
She pressed them deeply to her heart, first the girl, then the boy, then both of them together. “I am so sorry to have been gone all this time!” she cried. “I have missed you so much, I love you, I love you!”