Golden by Cameron Dokey Page A

sight of my power, but lost sight of the thing I valued most: my child.
    â€œThe wizard took her and placed her in a tower he used his magic to build in two nights and the day that fell between them. It is made of smooth, gray stone. Windows made of starlight ring the top. Its door may be seen and opened only by the power of a love other than my own. There my child has stayed from that day to this, waiting for me to bring the key, the means of awakening and freeing her heart.”
    â€œYou think it’s me,” I said. By now I felt so many different things, I was well on my way to deciding it might be preferable to feel nothing. “That’s the real reason you took me in and raised me. You need me to free your daughter. You don’t love me at all.”
    â€œThat’s not true,” Melisande said at once. “I tookyou in and raised you for the same reason I have always said: Because I loved you from the moment I first saw you, Rapunzel. But I will admit that there is more. When I gazed into your mother’s heart and found no room for you within it, I heard a sound, like the opening of a door. It seemed to me that her inability to look with the eyes of love could not be coincidence. At long last, perhaps I was being offered the chance to redeem the daughter I had lost.
    â€œBut only if I could take you in and love you truly, if I could teach you all the things my heart had learned in the days since Rue had been taken and locked away. And so I did what the woman who gave birth to you could not. I looked with the eyes of love, claimed you, and raised you as my own.”
    â€œAnd never mentioned your daughter once,” I added, finishing the list. “Until tonight, when I’m supposed to meet her tomorrow. Is this my final test? What happens if we can’t stand the sight of one another?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Melisande said, her own voice rising for the very first time. “I can’t see the future. That is not my gift. I don’t know what is to come. I’ve done what I thought was right, what I thought I must. That’s all I can tell you.”
    â€œWhat about what I want to do?” I asked. “Suppose all I want to do is turn around and go back home? Does what I want even matter? Do I have a choice?”
    â€œOf course you have a choice,” Mr. Jones said, hisfirst words for what seemed like a very long time. “The sorceress has said what she has done, but she cannot say what you will do. That, only you can decide.”
    â€œThank you,” I said. “I’m glad to see somebody’s on my side.”
    Mr. Jones knocked his pipe out on a stone without looking up. “It is not a matter of taking sides. It is what it has always been: a matter of the heart. You may think you are listening, but you’re hearing only what you want to hear, Rapunzel. What is in the heart cannot be forced. This, the sorceress has already acknowledged. If the heart bends, it must be of its own free will, or not at all.
    â€œPersonally, I think she’s right. Your heart is stronger than you know. But you may never learn how strong unless you put it to the test.”
    â€œI’m tired of being tested,” I replied.
    â€œNow that,” the tinker said briskly, as he got to his feet, “is a feeling I understand very well. I’m sorry to tell you that it may not make much difference in the long run, though.” He came over and kissed me on the cheek, an action he had never performed before. “I suggest we all go to sleep. I don’t know about any-one else, but I am tired. I’d put an extra blanket on if I were you, Rapunzel. Even summer nights on the plain are cold.”
    With that, he moved to the wagon, pulled his own bedroll from it, and went to bed down close to the horse. I went to lie in my usual position, wrappingmyself in an extra blanket as the tinker had suggested, my arms around my knees as if to make