again.
“Make me a promise,” the darkness said to the princess.
“Anything,” the princess answered and immediately regretted it.
“Bring her back when she is grown.”
The princess sighed and nodded and took the protesting child away from the castle, back down the mountain and to their small house.
In the years that followed the princess would sometimes think of her promise and sometimes forget it and sometimes wonder if it had all been a dream. Her daughter was not a bad-luck child after all, she rarely screamed once she was old enough to walk and no longer stared at empty nothingness and seemed luckier than most.
(The girl had a mark like a scar between her waist and her hip that resembled a feather but her mother could not recall where it came from or how long it had been there.)
On the days when the princess thought the memory of the castle and the promise was real she told herself that someday she would go back up the mountain and take the girl and if there was nothing there it would be a nice hike and if there was a castle she would figure out what to do when the time came.
Before the girl was grown the princess fell ill and died.
Not long after that, her daughter disappeared. No one in the town was surprised.
“She was always a wild one,” the women who lived long enough to be old women would say.
The world is not now as it was then but they continue to tell stories about the castle on the mountain in that town near the lake.
In one such tale a girl finds her way back to a castle she half remembers and thought she dreamed. She finds it empty.
In another version a girl finds her way back to a castle she half remembers that she thought was a dream. She knocks at the door.
It swings open for her, held wide in greeting by ghosts she can no longer see.
The door closes behind her and she is never heard from again.
In the most rarely told story a girl finds her way back to a castle she half remembers as if from a dream, a place she was promised to return to though she herself was not the promise-maker.
The lanterns are lit for her arrival.
The door opens before she can knock.
She climbs a familiar stair that she knows was not a dream at all. She walks down a hall she has traversed once before.
The door marked with the crown is open. The girl steps inside.
“You have returned,” the darkness says.
The girl says nothing. This part of what was not a dream at all has haunted her most, more than the ghosts. This room. This voice.
But she is not afraid.
From the darkness the owl-headed man appears. He is not as tall as she remembers.
“Hello,” the girl says.
“Hello,” the Owl King replies.
They stare at each other in silence for a time. The ghosts watch from the hall, wondering what might happen, marveling at the feather in her heart that the girl cannot see though she feels it fluttering.
“Stay three nights in this place,” the Owl King says to the girl who is no longer a girl.
“Then will you let me go?” the girl asks, though it is not what she means, at all.
“Then you will no longer desire to leave,” the Owl King says, and everyone knows the Owl King speaks only truth.
The girl spends one night, and then another. By the end of the second night she can see the ghosts again. By the third she has no desire to leave, for who would leave their home once they had found it?
She is there, still.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS follows Mirabel down passageways taking sharp turns between halls that he had not noticed before and through doors he had not realized were in fact doors. He slows as they pass over a glass floor, staring down at another hallway full of books below their feet but then hurries to keep up. They arrive back in the Heart in half the time that Zachary expected and Mirabel walks not to the elevator as he had anticipated but over to one of the slumped chandeliers where there hangs a faded grey leather jacket and a black messenger bag.
“Do I need a coat?” Zachary asks as Mirabel puts on her jacket, wondering if he should retrieve his paint-covered one from his room and realizing he forgot to send it down to the Kitchen to be cleaned.
To