Golden by Cameron Dokey

that I passed it,” I went on, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. “How many more are there to be, or don’t I get to know until they’re all over?”
    â€œEnough, Rapunzel,” Mr. Jones said. I shut my mouth with a snap and pressed the tip of my tongueagainst the back of my teeth. “Let the sorceress tell what must be told.”
    â€œUpon a market day, as I have said,” Melisande resumed her tale, “my daughter and I went to town. There she saw a bright ribbon for her hair. She had eyes for nothing else. I had eyes for no one but my child. On that day, I, whose gift it is to see into the hearts of others, failed to see that my daughters heart was not the only one filled with desire. She had that ribbon for her hair, while another woman’s child had none.”
    â€œOh, but surely—” I began to protest, then stopped. We were never going to get anywhere if I kept interrupting every other sentence. Not only that, I was contradicting myself. A moment ago I had been ready to use my words to lash out. Now here I was, jumping to Melisande’s defense.
    â€œYou are exactly right,” she said at once, precisely as if she understood the objection I had planned to make.
    â€œThe act was simple and unintentional, not deliberately cruel, but merely thoughtless. I thought only of myself and what I loved. Everyday people do this all the time, though I suppose it could be said the world might be a better place if they did not. But I am not an everyday sort of person. I possess a gift, the gift to see what lies inside another’s heart.
    â€œOn that day, I did not look. I let myself be blind. It was this fact more than any other that weighed against me in the end. That made the wizard whosaw my actions decide I needed to be taught a lesson in the uses of power.”
    â€œBut
why?
“ I cried.
    â€œMy gift is not simply a skill I
may
use, it is a skill I
must
use,” Melisande replied. “Not that I am required to act on what my eyes discover. My gift, my responsibility, is to see and nothing more. I am free to choose my own actions. Indeed, like everyone else, I must be so. A good act that is compelled is not goodness at all, but merely force.
    â€œIt might even have been better if I had been deliberately unkind. A will to be unkind is like a sickness. It can be healed or driven out. But to be unkind because you are thoughtless is the worst kind of blindness: difficult to cure, because you cannot see the fault even as you commit it.”
    â€œAnd that’s why the wizard put a curse on you?” I asked.
    â€œIt is,” Melisande replied. “Because I failed to look for what another held in her heart, I would be unable to see what I held in mine, for a time. It would not wither. It would not fade away. But neither would it grow. It would remain just as it was, as if in a dream of life, until I found the means to awaken it and set it free.”
    â€œWhat is it about wizards?” Mr. Jones remarked. “They expend so much effort to say so little.”
    â€œI couldn’t agree more,” Melisande replied, with a slight smile. “If the wizard had been less fond of the sound of his own voice, he might have realized hewas making a mistake of his own. Power was what he held most closely in his own heart, so he assumed it was the same for mine. He therefore hoped to teach me a lesson in the uses of power by depriving me of it. Instead he deprived me of a thing I loved much more.”
    â€œYour daughter,” I said suddenly, and felt my pain and anger begin to drain away and be replaced by something else, though I wasn’t sure quite what.
    â€œMy daughter,” Melisande echoed quietly. “The wizard did not mean his curse to touch my child, any more than I meant to be unkind to the child of another. But, like my own thoughtless action, once the wizards curse was uttered, it could not be undone. And so I kept