“Alone,” the voice said from the darkness.
The princess hesitated but then placed the girl in the light and went back to the hall, waiting nervously, surrounded by ghosts she could not see, even as they patted her on the shoulder and told her not to fret.
Inside the tower room the small girl looked at the darkness and the darkness looked back.
From the shadows where the girl was staring came a tall figure with the body of a man and the head of an owl. Large round eyes stared down at the girl.
“Hello,” said the girl.
“Hello,” said the Owl King.
After some time the door opened and the princess went back inside to find the girl sitting alone in the pool of light.
“This child has no future,” the darkness said.
The princess frowned at the girl, trying to decide what answer she had wanted that was not this one. She wished, for the first time, that she had not left her kingdom at all and that she had made her choices differently.
Perhaps she could leave the girl here in this castle and tell the town that the wolves took her. She could pack her things and move away and start 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.