Midnight's Song (24 page)

After the last paragraph there was an
eerie drawing of the King in the story. He was sitting at a table
full of food, a golden crown atop his head. He was of great size
and even appeared to be glowing. A smirking, wicked looking king
sat across from him, this one clearly mortal. A cloud of darkness
shaped as a sinister ghostly figure was looming all around the good
king, clearly about to possess him. It gave me chills as I read
on:

“
The Curse came into him, immediately possessing his thoughts
and actions. It directed him to take everyone else of his kind that
had come to the earth and return to their homes. The Curse came
into their king and their entire kingdom.

Greed overcame the royal
family, and the eldest son killed his father to steal the throne.
After many years of his reign, his own children were overcome with
greed and did the same. For hundreds of years this continued,
turning to be a family custom. Since their kings could not die
natural deaths, the next in line would have to take it into his own
hands; becoming the new host of this ravenous curse at the moment
of their predecessor’s death.

This prince, however
– was born with a tender heart. He would be raised alongside his
brother, always displaying a strong attachment to his father. When
the time would come for him to slay his father and take the throne,
he would not be able to bring himself to do it. So, the prince
would escape The Kingdom of Darkness
into
the forbidden world of the mortals. It was here that he would hide
among them as a secret prince…”

I suddenly stopped
to yawn before looking back down at the page. A strange observation
as it might have been – the words on the page seemed to be working
themselves into future tense. It began to seem as if this was
telling me about something that
was going
to happen
instead of some fictitious thing
that
already had.
For some reason it made me feel uneasy, maybe because they
stuck out to me in some odd, religiously-prophetic sounding
way.

“
The prince would be destined to hide among the modest
townspeople, disguising himself as one of their own…”
Once again, I had to pause.
My eyes were becoming heavy with each moment that I tried to
read on. “
…to fall in love with a fierce
and beautiful maiden…”
Now I felt my eyes
straining. I tried to keep on going for just one more paragraph,
but it was useless. “
…when they would
discover he was a descendant of the First King, the lovers would
have to flee…”

The next thing I knew, my
face was literally on top of my book. My eyes had quickly fallen
shut, but even more quickly than that they shot open to find the
gentle rays of the first morning light. They also shot open to find
a woman standing over me – someone I assumed was Emily but shocked
me with a deeper, less feminine sounding voice when she
spoke.

“Get up! It’s past 12 o’clock in the
afternoon ya foolish!” It yelped. I picked my head up confusingly,
and the woman soon came into full focus. It wasn’t Emily. It was
Beeti’s maid. Her voice was deep and gruff, almost like a man’s. To
be honest, the grumble in her tone was actually pretty
startling.

“Where’s Emily Berry?” I dazedly asked
her. “Is she sick?”

“No,” the maid replied
back in her startlingly gruff tone.

As I sat up and put a hand to my
aching head I temporarily whirled, forgetting about Emily’s growing
absences that had led up to this point. Regardless of those, Emily
had hardly missed a single morning. Ever since the very first day I
had been here she had been waking me up and laying my clothes out
for me and with her seemingly unending enthusiasm to tackle the
day.

“But she’s always here to wake me up
in the mornings. Where do you think –”

“Oh shush!” Beeti’s maid
sharply interrupted. Now I could see why she and Beeti got along so
well. “How’d ya reckon I’m supposed to know? And put that book away
when ya sleep from now on! Look at what ya done to ya own
face!”

The voice alone was enough to whip me
into silence. But, my face? I hurried to get out of bed and look at
myself in the mirror. There was a huge imprint engrained into the
side of my face, outlining the painfully digging corners of the
hardback that I had apparently fallen solidly asleep on.

“This is terrible,” I exclaimed in
shock, rubbing my hand cross my irritated cheek. “It even stings!
And tonight…tonight is the –”

I stopped, realizing
it in unison with every word I was speaking. Tonight was the night
of the ball! That meant that today was...October the
12
^th
.
It was my 17
^th
birthday! And I had certainly got such a
wonderful wakeup call along with it, hadn’t I?

It actually hadn’t occurred to me very
strongly before that the two were actually that closely associated.
I had worried more about the party than I had even wanted to think
that I was turning 17. But, here it was. Now I realized that
Emily’s help would be even more necessary for me. But, where was
she? Before another thought could pass, the gruff maid roughly
grabbed me by the arm and pulled me forcibly to my closet. This was
certainly not the kind of awakening I was used to.

“Oh, be quiet! It’ll fade ‘fore
tonight!” The woman threw a dress at me and ordered me to put it on
myself. “Ya might yer all high n’ mighty because today is yer
birthday – but I don’t care if yer birthday or the return of Christ
himself! Now put it on an’ go downstairs! Ya already missed
breakfast by a long shot. Lady Wren thought it best to leave ya be
on account of she thought ya needed your ‘beauty sleep.’ Ya got two
hours a’spare until ya must go into the baths, and yer grandmum
wants to see ya before then.”

Man, did this woman like to yell!
Despite clear class differences, she and Beeti had a lot in common.
I rushed to put on my dress and stand up straight. This woman’s
tone made me fear that she might start beating me if I didn’t obey
her every word. She left the room looking quite exasperated after
that and let me go off on my own. Today was going to be a very
trying day, but I tried to relax myself. All I had to do was
survive tonight and wake up in tact tomorrow morning.

I walked down the vast corridor to
Grandmamma’s room to see if she wanted to speak with me now. I gave
a small knock to the door, and it was accompanied by the weak
whimper of a woman telling me to come in. In my heart, I knew it
must have had something to do with books. I just knew it! But, I
didn’t know the capacity of what Grandmamma was really about to
tell me. Not by a long shot.

“Elissa,” Grandmamma’s voice piped up
as soon as I cracked the door open. She looked in my direction from
where she was sitting propped up in her bed with a stern, piercing
glare in her eyes. “Your time to appear before the Magistrate is
nearing, and it’s time that you understood something about this
all. Come sit down. You’re 17 years old today and that’s old
enough. I have something to tell you.”

“There’s something I’ve been meaning
to give you for a long while. Before I do, I must first tell you a
story.” Grandmamma told me, her words as gentle and wise as the
woman they were coming out of. I sat on my knees at her bedside,
listening attentively as she let out a weak, painful
cough.

“What is it, Grandmamma?” I softly
asked her in reply.

She then turned her head
toward mine and flashed me a look that said so many things I still
can’t even rightly describe what they were. But, I could in my
spirit that our exchange was something much deeper than words.
Grandmamma’s eyes met with mine, and I could see a truth that had
been buried in the very depths of her mind begin its journey into
my heart as it began to free itself from the prison of her human
body; starting by leeching out of her soft, discerning eyes. I felt
a sudden chill crawl up and down my spine; one that was quickly
followed by warmth.

“All of your life, I’ve wanted to know
you. I could never meet you – but I was always there.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her,
nearly stammering as I said it. She reached up and gently took one
of my curls and twisted it around her finger before she began
speaking again. The next thing she did was ask me a single, plain
question:

“Do you ever remember ever having been
troubled by the authorities as a child?”

“Of course I do,” I quickly replied.
Was this a rhetorical question? I thought she would know just as
well as I did that I had once been imprisoned for failing to comply
with them. It was part of the reason why I was now sitting here in
the first place!

“No, child. Disregard anything that’s
happened to you as a legal adult. I want you to think for a moment
before you answer. Can you remember any time at all when you were a
child that your family was disturbed by the Magistrate’s
government?”

The room fell silent
as I pondered the question. At first I was still convinced that the
answer was clearly “yes,” but after some thought I realized that I
actually couldn’t think of anything at all. As much as I searched
my mind for a time in my childhood when I had been directly
targeted because of who I was, but I couldn’t find
anything.
It was
strange, because I already knew that children of multi-caste
backgrounds were often taken from their families without reason
before they were 16 years old. Yet, until I reached the age of 16
our family had scarcely been touched
at
all.
I had lived such a quiet life as a
child that I never connected any of those happenings to
me.

“No…I can’t,” I told her in
astonishment.

“Elissa, the fact that no one was ever
able to harm you is no coincidence. Ever since I found out about
the fact that you were my granddaughter, I have been protecting you
from the authorities. And, I’ve known you were mine for a long
while. I’ve been shielding your name from the sight of the
Magistrate ever since you were three years old. Now you’re too old
to hide, and there’s nothing I can do to change that.”

“But – you were forbidden to see her –
how could you have known?”

“Elissa,” she softly whispered,
continuing to softly stroke my cheeks with her bony finger. “No one
else has ever known of this but your mother and I. You must not
tell another soul.”

She quieted, motioning for me to take
a seat on the bed at her feet. As I did so, I felt a burst of
warmth run through my veins that was so strong I had to take off my
robe and put it aside. I basked in it, in partial shock and partial
wonderment as she continued to tell her story.

“When your mother married your father,
the authorities wanted me to reject her with just as much coolness
as the law that would keep us apart. But, I could never
excommunicate her in my heart. She was mine, and I loved her too
much to let any law keep me from her. So, I broke it.”

“You mean…you
actually saw her?”

“Yes, but after she left…I
was only able to once. For many years afterward I kept on trying,
but it became too dangerous. After I saw her for the last time, I
could only see faint glimmers of her life and yours.”

I couldn’t help it. My body began to
tremble, and my eyes filled with tears. I opened my mouth to speak.
“When did you see her?”

“It was on her wedding day,” she
abruptly told me before she began to paint a picture of that day.
She soon launched into descriptive detail about their encounter
that morning, and I was brought back to that day in a way that was
as real as the bed I was sitting on.

She began painting a picture of what
the church looked like on that day; of its sea-worn outer walls and
dusty pews, along with its cobwebbed rafters. As she told me, the
room itself seemed to morph into the past. I was taken to that very
church by the sea, thrust into the small, dark room where
Grandmamma had hid as my mother prepared herself while wearing her
wedding dress. I was no longer in the Devereaux Manor; I could feel
it. This was where the tale had begun. I could feel every tiny
vibration in their whispering voices as my mother spoke to
hers.

“
Who’s there?”
My mother anxiously
whispered, hearing a small shuffle come from the darkened part of
the room that she had previously believed to have been alone in.
The shuffling stopped, and the hidden figure stood frozen without
reply. My mother breathed forth again. “
Please, show yourself! Step into the
light.”

The dim morning sunlight seeped into
the shanty of a changing room from in-between the wooden blinds
that lined the windows, and the figure slowly stepped out from the
shadows. As she came into the light, Mum could see her features
beginning to clarify in her view. When she recognized the woman,
her eyes welled with tears. Only one word could come from her lips
at that moment:

“
Mum.”

Grandmamma looked to her
daughter softly, and they both embraced each other as they tried to
hold back their tears. They must be quiet, they both realized. If
either of them were seen together, it would surely mean death for
both. But, even knowing this wasn’t enough to keep the emotions
from bleeding out of my mother. Tears flowed from her eyes, down
across her cheeks and onto the ground. Grandmamma lovingly took a
hand and wiped the tears from her face.