Sunlight and Shadow by Cameron Dokey

wouldn’t,” she said. “I mean, I’m not. I always sort of envied you, if it makes you feel any better.”
    â€œEnvied me,” I echoed. “What for?”
    â€œBecause you had two fathers,” the Lady Mina said simply. “Yours, and mine, even though you didn’t get to know yours very well. Whereas I, for all the attention he paid to me, had none.”
    â€œYou had your mother,” I said.
    She nodded. “True enough. That was another reason I sometimes envied you. You look much more like her than I.”
    I stared at her, appalled. All my life I had heard tales of die Königin der Nacht, and none of them good.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I asked. “I don’t.”
    â€œBut you do,” the Lady Mina said simply. “You have dark hair, as she does. Skin so pale you can almost see right through it. You could be her daughter, except for the eyes.”
    â€œWell, but your hair is dark,” I said. I was soundingridiculous again and I knew it, but it was genuinely the first thing that came to mind. “You think so?”
    At this, she reached up and, with two quick motions, untied and pulled the dark scarf from around her head. Her hair came spilling down around her shoulders.
    I think I must have made some sound. To this day, I still don’t quite know why I didn’t raise a hand to protect my eyes. The only reason I can come up with is that I didn’t want to look away. As if, even as my mind went completely blank, it knew this was as close as I would ever come to gazing straight into the rising sun, for that’s exactly what color her hair was. Streaming over her shoulders in just the same way the sun spills over the horizon.
    â€œYou are beautiful,” I said simply. “Why doesn’t that make me hate you even more? It certainly ought to, don’t you think?”
    â€œOnly if what you felt was truly hate to begin with,” the Lady Mina replied.
    â€œYou’re doing it again,” I said. “Sounding all sensible and like you know everything. Statos isn’t going to like that, you know.”
    She did rise to her feet at this, the dark scarf falling from her lap, and all that mass of golden hair tumbling down, down, down, until it almost reached the floor.
    â€œI don’t care what Statos likes or doesn’t like,” she said, her tone forceful. “I don’t want him, Gayna. Idon’t want anything the Lord Sarastro has to give. I don’t want to take anything from you”
    I pulled in a breath. “Do you not even want a father?”
    Absolute silence filled the room, more complete than when the Lord and Statos had departed.
    â€œYes,” the Lady Mina said at last. “Yes, of course I want a father. One who sees me for what I am, or wishes to, at the very least. For only then may he see what I may become. I don’t want a father who steals me away in the middle of the night. Who breaks his word. Who sees me only as a pawn in some gigantic cosmic game of one-upmanship against my mother.
    â€œDo you think the Lord Sarastro can be that kind of father?”
    He has been a good one to me, I thought. But all my life I had known that I was not the Lady Mina, not the Lord Sarastro’s true blood daughter, and so I remained silent.
    â€œI’m not so sure I think so either,” the Lady Mina said, taking my silence for assent to her view that the Lord Sarastro could not be the father that she wanted. “As he’s the only one I’ve got, it seems simplest not to want him at all.”
    â€œYou will be very lonely here, then,” I said, then bit my tongue. “I’m sorry. Perhaps I should have offered words of comfort.”
    â€œNo,” the Lady Mina said with a quick shake of her head that had her golden hair rippling like theflames of the fire. “Not if they were false. I’d rather know the truth, however unpleasant.”
    â€œEven in