Wild Orchid (21 page)

The night before Jian and I exchanged our vows, I could not sleep. I lay awake for many hours gazing out the window at the stars. I heard a soft whisper of sound and turned from the window to discover that my stepmother had entered my room, my baby brother in her arms.

“I wondered if I would find you awake,” she said. “I don’t think I slept a wink the night before I married your father.”

“My own marriage will be all right, then,” I said as I patted the bed beside me. “Look how well yours turned out.”

Zao Xing chuckled as she sat. I held out my arms for the baby, and she placed Gao Shan into my arms.

“I won’t be here to watch him grow up after all,” I said.

“No,” my stepmother said softly. “It appears that you will not. But I hope you won’t stay away forever. Who knows? Perhaps you will return to have your own child.”

“For goodness’ sake, I’m not even married yet,” I
exclaimed. Zao Xing clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing as the baby squirmed in my arms.

“Here, take him back,” I said. “I want to give him something.”

Zao Xing took the baby back. He settled peacefully in the crook of her arm. I reached around my neck and lifted the dragonfly medallion over my head. I held it out in one palm.

“Prince Jian gave me this,” I said, “the night before I rode away to fight the Huns. He said my father had given it to him when he was just a boy. I would like Gao Shan to have it, to remind him of Jian and me when we are far from home.”

“It’s a wonderful gift,” Zao Xing said, her eyes shining. “Thank you, Mulan. He is too young to wear it yet, I think, but I will save it for him. And I will tell him of his famous sister’s exploits. They will make fine bedtime stories.”

“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” I said. “He’ll grow up getting into trouble.”

“No,” Zao Xing replied. “He will grow up to bring the Hua family honor.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Your father and I are both glad to see you so happy, but we will miss you, Mulan.”

“I’ll miss you, too,” I said. I returned her embrace.

“Now,” Zao Xing said. “You lie back down. Gao Shan seems happy. I think we’ll just sit beside you awhile.”

The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was
my stepmother cradling my baby brother in her arms. I fell asleep to the sound of her gentle voice singing a lullaby.

My father gave me his horse as a wedding gift.

“Ride up the streambed,” he said when at last the day arrived for Jian and me to depart. “It will take you through the woods to where our land ends and the rest of China begins, and you will understand why I chose that path to return home.”

“We will do so,” I promised. I swung up into the saddle. “Make sure you teach my little brother how to use a bow.”

“Come back and teach him yourself,” my father said.

“I will do that also,” I answered with a smile.

“Take good care of my daughter,” my father said to Jian.

“As you once cared for me,” he vowed. Then he grinned. “Though, truly, I think you may have things backward.”

The sound of laughter filled our ears at our departure. Jian and I rode up the streambed as my father had requested, the horses picking their way carefully among the stones.

“I wonder why your father wanted us to go this way,” Jian mused as we rode along.

“I can’t say for certain,” I said. “Though I think I’m beginning to guess. Wait until we reach the woods. Then we will know.”

Half an hour’s travel farther brought us to the first of the trees. Soon we had passed beneath their boughs.

“Look,” I said, pointing. “Oh, look, Jian.”

Here and there on the forest floor, now hidden, now revealing themselves, tiny white blossoms lifted up their heads.

Wild orchids.

D
ON’T MISS THIS MAGICAL TITLE
IN THE
O
NCE UPON A
T
IME SERIES
!

Golden

CAMERON DOKEY

P
ROLOGUE

It began with a theft and ended with a gift. And, if I were truly as impossible as it once pleased Rue to claim, I’d demonstrate it now. Stop right there, I’d tell you. That’s really all you need to know about the story of my life. Thank you very much for coming, but you might as well go home now.

Except there is this problem:

A beginning and an ending, though satisfying in their own individual ways, are simply that. A start and a conclusion, nothing more. It’s what comes in between that does the work, that builds the life and tells the story. Believing you can see the second while still busy with the first can be a dangerous mistake, a fact of life sometimes difficult for the young to grasp. When you are young, you think your eyesight is perfect, even as it fails you and you fail to notice. It’s easy to get distracted, caught up in dilemmas and questions that eventually turn out to be less important than you originally thought.

For instance, here is a puzzle that many minds have pondered: If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound?

When, really, much more challenging puzzles sound a good deal simpler:

How do you recognize the face of love?

Can love happen in an instant, or can it only grow slowly, bolstered by the course of time? Is it possible that love might be both? A thing that takes forever to reach its true conclusion, made possible by what occurs in no more than the blink of an eye?

Yes, I think I know the answers, for myself, at least. But then, I am no longer young. I am old now. My life has been a long and happy one, but even the longest, happiest life will, one day, draw down to its close. Fold itself up and be put away, like a favorite sweater into a cedar chest, a garment that has served well for many, many years, but now has just plain too many holes to be worn.

Don’t bother to suggest that I will be immortal because my tale will continue to be told. That sort of sentiment just makes me impatient and annoyed. In the first place, because the tale you know is hardly the whole story. And in the second, because it is the tale itself that will live on, not 1.1 will come to an end, as all living creatures must. And when I do, what I know will perish with me.

Perhaps that is why I have the urge to speak of it now.

More and more these days, I find myself thinking
back to the beginning, particularly when I am sitting in the garden. This is not surprising, I suppose. For it was in a garden that my tale began. It makes no difference that I hadn’t been born yet at the time. I listen to the sound the first bees make in spring, so loud it always takes me by surprise. I sit on the bench my husband made me as a wedding gift, surrounded by the daffodils I planted with my own hands, so very long ago now. Their scent hangs around me like a curtain of silk.

I close my eyes, and I am young once more.

O
NE

Here are the things I think you think you know about my story, for these are the ones that have often been told.

The girl I would become was the only child of a poor man and his wife who had waited many years for any child at all to be born. During her pregnancy, my mother developed a craving for a particular herb, a kind of parsley. In the country in which my parents were then living, this herb was called “rapunzel.”

As luck would have it, the house next door to my parents’ home possessed a beautiful and wondrous garden. In it grew the most delicious-looking rapunzel my mother had ever seen. So wonderful, in fact, she decided that she could not live without it. Day after day, hour after hour, she begged my father to procure her some. She must have that rapunzel and no other, my mother swore, or she would simply die.

There was a catch, of course. A rather large one. The garden was the property of a powerful sorceress.

This discouraged my father from simply walking up the house next door’s front steps, ringing the bell, and asking politely if the garden’s owner would share
some of her delicious herb, which is precisely what he should have done. The front doorbell even possessed a unique talent, or so the sorceress herself later informed me. When it rang, the person who caused it to sound heard whatever tune he or she liked best.

Not that it made any difference, for no one ever rang the bell. To approach a sorceress by the front way was apparently deemed too risky. So my father did what everyone before him had done: He went in through the back. He climbed over the wall that divided the sorceress’s garden from his own and stole the rapunzel.

He even got away with it—the first time around. But, though he had picked all the herb that he could carry, it was not enough for my mother. She devoured it in great greedy handfuls, then begged for more. My father took a satchel, to carry even more rapunzel, and returned to the sorceress’s garden. But this time, though the herb was still plentiful, my father’s luck ran out. The sorceress caught him with his hands full of rapunzel and his legs halfway up the garden wall.

“Foolish man!” she scolded. “Come down here at once! Don’t you know it’s just plain stupid to climb over a sorceress’s back wall and steal from her garden, particularly when she has a perfectly good front doorbell?”

At this, my father fell from the wall and to his knees.

“Forgive me,” he cried. “I am not normally an
ungracious thief. In fact, I’m not normally either one.”

The sorceress pursed her lips. “I suppose this means you think you have a good reason for your actions,” she snorted.

“I do,” my father replied. “Will it please you to hear it?”

“I sincerely doubt it,” the sorceress said. “But get up and tell it to me anyhow.”

My father now explained about my mother’s craving. How she had claimed she must have rapunzel, this rapunzel and no other, or she would simply die. And how, out of love for her and fear for the life of the child she carried, he had done what he must to obtain the herb, even though he knew that stealing it was wrong.

After he had finished, the sorceress stood silent, looking at him for what must have seemed like a very long time.

“There is no such thing as an act without consequence,” she said softly, at last. “No act stands alone. It is always connected to at least one other, even if it cannot be seen yet, even if it is still approaching, over the horizon line. If you had asked me for the rapunzel, I would have given it freely, but as it is—”

“I understand,” my father said, before he quite realized that he was interrupting. “You are speaking of payment. I am a poor man, but I will do my best to discharge this debt.”

The sorceress was silent for an even longer time.

“I will see this wife of yours,” she finally pronounced. “Then I will know what must be done.”

Here are the things I know you do
not
know about my story, for, until now, they have never been told:

The woman who gave birth to me was very beautiful. Her skin was as white and smooth as cream. Her eyes, the color of bluebells in the spring. Her lips, like damask roses.

This is nothing so special in and of itself, of course.