Golden by Cameron Dokey Page B

myself as small as possible. For the first and only time that I could remember, Melisande and I did not say good night.
    All through that night, the sorceress stayed beside the fire. What her thoughts were, as the fire died down to nothing more than cold gray ash, I cannot say. To the best of my knowledge, she never told another living soul.

Ten
    I did not go back home in the end, of course.
    You’ve heard the saying, better the devil you know than the one you do not? What a load of poppycock. In fact, if I had to make a guess, it would be that whoever came up with that particular phrase was never called upon to face any sort of devil in his or her life.
    What did I have to go back for, after all? I’d only be going right back into danger, the very same danger I’d just gone to such great lengths to avoid. It was hardly as if there would be anyone at the end of the road, or even anywhere along it, waiting to welcome me with open arms.
    It wasn’t all that likely there would be open arms if I went forward, either, but at least I would be going into the unknown. And here is a fact of life that those who are quick to speak of devils never mention: As long as a thing is unknown, it belongs to us in a way that well-known things do not. For we have the opportunity to fill the empty, unknown spaces for ourselves, and in them there is room for imagination and for hope.
    If I went forward, I might imagine that I couldsomehow pass this impossible test. Maybe my heart
was
stronger than I knew, and all would yet be well. So, on the morning of the fifth day, going forward was precisely what I did. On the morning of the sixth day, I saw Rue’s tower for the very first time.
    I might have guessed there was some magic at work in its construction, even if I had not been told this ahead of time. Surely any sort of structure should have been visible for miles away in that flat land. Instead, you could see the tower clearly only when you had actually arrived. It rose up out of the ground like a great tree trunk of hard, gray stone, its roots indistinguishable from the very bones of the earth itself.
    The tower the wizard had created to house the innocent victim of his curse was perfectly cylindrical, perfectly smooth. I could neither see nor feel one seam or chink to show that the stone had ever been cut. At what I thought of as the tower’s back, though this was merely my own fancy as a circle has no such thing, was the river. A dense forest held it in a great, green embrace on its other three sides. All around, just as wide as two carts abreast, ran a close-cropped greensward.
    If I leaned back and shaded my eyes, I could see a wrought-iron railing, intricately carved, running around the tower’s very top. Just behind it, a circle of windows caught the light. But no matter how many times I walked around it, three to be precise, I could find no sign of any door. At the end of my third circuitI stopped beside the sorceress and said, “How do we get up? I assume that’s what you have in mind.”
    Conversation between us was still stilted, at best. Among all of us, if it came to that. Even Mr. Jones had kept silent during the last day of our journey, as if wrapped in his own thoughts. Not that there was much use in talking. It would be deeds, not words, that would end the story and decide its outcome.
    While I walked around the tower and Melisande stood perfectly still, Mr. Jones unhitched the horse and let her wade into the river, which here was broad and shallow. As if he had no other care in the world, the tinker washed clothes at the river’s edge, then spread them out to dry. I knew what he was doing, of course. He was letting the sorceress and me sort things out on our own. Mr. Jones was hidden now by the bulk of the tower, for Melisande and I stood with our backs to the forest, and the river was on the other side, out of sight.
    â€œMore wizardry,” Melisande replied now. “There’s a