gone now. I imagine remaining in the King’s Palace in my little rooms, working on my tapestry and sometimes walking in the mist garden, and in time, minding the children of my son and his princess bride. I think of laying myself down in a field of flowers where I would sleep forever, and dream. But suddenly that seems a mawkish, morbid vision.
‘I need to find a new dream,’ I say, and I am surprised by the brisk impatience in my voice.
‘I think you ought to go back to your own world for a time,’ says Yssa. ‘The boy and my niece will need time alone now, and if you do not mind, Cloud-Marie and I will join you after a little. There is much in the lives of mortals that immortals do not know and I would like to study it, and to see more of your world. In truth, I like the idea of a world where being a princess or a queen is not all there is. And Cloud-Marie will not want to be parted from you for long.’
‘I could go to the land where I was born and wait for you there,’ I say, the words forming on my lips even as they are forming in my mind. ‘It is a land surrounded by sea and I once lived on the very edge of it. When I sat up in my bed, I could see the waves rolling in. I always wondered how they did not roll over me.’ I fall silent, but the thought of going back crackles through me like an electrical current. I think of a beach where I walked as a girl; the soft, salted scent of the warm air that played over my skin like a caress. I imagine how it will be to lick my lips and find they taste of the sea.
‘Cloud-Marie will like the waves,’ says Yssa.
Cloud-Marie waves at her mother, and gives a chirrup of excited laughter, and suddenly we are all laughing.
THE MAN WHO LOST HIS SHADOW
I gaze through the windscreen at the unbroken, ornate facade of building after building, art nouveau and baroque details picked out delicately by the buttery gold of the streetlamps. It occurs to me that the thousands of tourists who travel to this city would feel they are stepping into the past, yet when this street was new, it would have looked very different. Night would have been an all-consuming darkness. The brash electric light that denotes the modern world and appears to have defeated and driven off that ancient darkness – from the streets, from corners, from the hearts of men and women – is an illusion.
Darkness is eternal and it will find its way, its crack, its vein.
The castle appears as the taxi driver promised, seeming to be lifted above the snarl of old town streets surrounding it on beams of light, to float in greenish illumination. He glances at me in the rear-view mirror and tells me in brutish English that the lights are switched off at the castle just before midnight. I imagine sitting somewhere, in a café perhaps, and waiting to see it swallowed up by the night.
‘You have business?’ he asks with a touch of irony that suggests he has some inkling of my affliction, though it is virtually unnoticeable at night. I consider telling him that the turbulent history of his country, the stony eroded beauty of this city that is its heart, fascinated me. But in the end I say only, ‘Yes, business’.
Thinking: a strange business.
I do not know how I lost my shadow. After the first shock wore off, I told myself it was freak chance. My shadow might not even have known what it was doing when it severed itself from me. I could easily envisage myself walking and hesitating at some slight fork in the street, my shadow going on, sunk in its own thoughts, failing to notice that it did so without me. Seconds later, I would choose the other way. Maybe after a time it realised what had happened and retraced its path, but by then I was long gone.
That was one of my earliest theories – hopes, you might as well say. One does not like to admit the possibility that one’s shadow has left on purpose. I consoled myself with a vision of my shadow, slipping frantically along walls and paths searching for me, wailing as forlornly as a lost child, occasionally plunging into pools of