children.
We would give our lives for them, I think, all of us mothers. Yet sometimes all the love in all the worlds might not be enough to save them.
Morning comes, and it is Cloud-Marie who finds me slumped awkwardly in my chair. For a moment I think I must have dreamed it all, but then I see Yssa is behind her.
‘Let’s go,’ she says. ‘I can’t bear to wait any longer.’
So we walk together, the three of us, Yssa who is the sister of my heart, and Cloud-Marie who is the daughter of my heart, to find out if the Princess Chamber has made a princess of a red dog.
Both Yssa and Cloud-Marie stand back to let me grasp the doves, and when I open the doors, I gasp, for the room is red as blood, red as fire, red as the petals of a million roses, and the scent of them! Oh, I remember, in this moment, the wonder of my own awakening in this same room, in this same sea of intoxicating crimson.
‘Look!’ whispers Yssa, and I look and see on the bed, where once I lay, a young woman. Long and slender and naked she is, with skin as white as milk and a great wild mop of red-gold hair. There is not a mark on that white skin as she sits up and stares about her in bewilderment. I see her grow still. She is looking towards the fire and I look there, too.
And I see him lying in the petals before the hearth, even as my prince once lay, waiting for his princess to wake, my son the wolf prince, his pelt white save where it is laid open in red wounds, head unmoving upon his paws.
Yssa catches me as I sway.
‘Wait. Wait and see,’ she hisses, for now the girl slips down from the bed and runs lightly through the red petals towards the white wolf, utterly unselfconscious in her nakedness. She kneels beside him and strokes him from his head to his tail. Her touch is sensuous, and to my everlasting relief, he lifts his head to look at her. She bends to kiss his muzzle and, all at once, he is not a wolf but a man, naked and white and perfect as she. But when she lifts her head he is again a wolf. Yet she does not seem dismayed by his transformations. She strokes his pelt and strokes it and he is a man again and rolls back against her knees, his eyes languorous with desire.
‘I don’t understand,’ I murmur.
‘I don’t either,’ says Yssa. ‘But he lives and she lives, and perhaps this is beyond our part in their story. Perhaps the time for the power of mothers and aunts is over. Now they must write their own story and seek their own ending.’
Yssa draws me from the room and closes the doors slowly. I have a last glimpse of the tawny princess reaching again to kiss a wolf and of a powerful young man with hair as dark as his father’s reaching up to draw her into his arms. Then the doors are closed.
Yssa puts one arm around Cloud-Marie and another around my shoulders, and she ushers us away from the Princess Chamber. She kisses Cloud-Marie and says to me, ‘You have raised my daughter for me, and you have done all you can for your son. Now you must think of yourself.’
‘Myself?’ I say the word as if I do not know its meaning.
Indeed I do not know what I can be, for if I am not wanted as wife or mother anymore, what am I? As if she reads my thoughts, Yssa stops before a mirror and turns me to look at myself. I see a woman who is not young, nor is she old. There are secrets in her eyes, and lines about them, but her mouth is full and warm and softly red and the silver is only a glimmer of the frost on the dark golden tresses that fall over her shoulders.
Yssa says, ‘Your story is not only their story. He will be king and she will be his queen. But what of you?’
I think of going to live with those other queens in the palace of tears, growing old as they mirror my ageing back to me. I think of sending word to try to draw my husband back to me. I loved him and love him still, I realise, but he has