Heartless by Anne Elisabeth Stengl
PROLOGUE
Two children, a brother and a sister, played down by the Old Bridge nearly every day, weather permitting. None observing them would have guessed they were a prince and a princess. The boy, the younger of the two, was generally up to his elbows in mud due to his brave exploits as a frog catcher. His sister, though significantly more prim, was often barefoot and sported a few leaves and flowers stuck in her hair. She thought these romantic, but her nurse, when she brushed the princess’s hair at night, called them “common,” and said it with a distinct sniff.
This never stopped the princess, whose name was Una, from weaving daisies and wild violets and any other forest flower that fell under her hand into garlands and coronets, with which she festooned herself, thereby transforming from an ordinary princess – which was rather drab – into a Faerie Queen of great power and majesty. Felix, her brother, was never a Faerie. He, by dint of a few expert dabs of mud in the right places, made himself her gremlin guard instead and waged war against all her imaginary enemies.
The Old Bridge was the perfect place for these games for a number of reasons. Most important, none of their entourage of servants and tutors, not even Una’s intrepid nurse, dared follow them there, for the Old Bridge was located in Goldstone Wood, outside the boundaries of Oriana Palace’s seven-tiered garden. Plenty of stories were told about Goldstone Wood, and its history was strange enough to ward off most people. But Una and her brother liked the stories – the stranger and more superstitious the better. So they often made their way to the Old Bridge and did their utmost to disturb the ancient quiet of Goldstone Wood with their laughter and games.
Una was not so fond of mud as Felix; thus she would invent adventures to occupy him while she sat on the planks of the bridge and scrawled thoughts and ideas in her journal.
“Faithful gremlin,” she declared one fine afternoon as they made their way down the side of Goldstone Hill toward the bridge, “you must seek the fabled Flowing Gold of Rudiobus, lost somewhere in this raging river.” She indicated the stream that trickled down the side of Goldstone Hill. Raging river it was not, but facts never stopped the course of Una’s imagination. “You must bring it back to me before the sun has set, or all my kingdom will be lost in darkness without end.”
“Righto!” Felix hurtled headlong through the foliage and splashed into the stream. He grabbed a pebble and held it over his head. “Is this it, Una?”
“Does that look like flowing gold?”
He studied the pebble, shrugged, and tossed it over his shoulder before plunging on down the stream, wallowing with all the joy of a boy set loose in the mud.
Una wove a crown appropriate for her Faerie Queen status, placed it on her head, and took a seat on the middle of the Old Bridge. Removing her shoes, she dangled bare feet over the stream, turning up her toes so that they did not quite touch the cold water. Taking from the pocket of her full skirts a nub of pencil and a small journal, which she pressed open in her lap, she wrote a few scrawling lines, frowned, and scratched them out.
“Is this it, Una?” Felix bellowed from farther downstream.
She looked. Her brother held up a ragged handful of waterweeds, brown and dripping and slimy. “What do you think?” she called back.
“Well, it’s flowing!”
“Is it gold?”
“Bah!”
He tossed it away and continued his search, and his sister returned to her writing. She scribbled uninterrupted for some time, and the noise of her brother’s questing faded away as she pored over the little journal. At last she smiled, held up the page, and read her work.
Then she frowned and crossed it all out with vigorous strokes.
Sighing, she chewed the end of her pencil. A wood thrush sang somewhere far away in the forest, and Una allowed her gaze to wander to the trees on the other side of the Old Bridge.
The far forest began only a few steps away – two, maybe three at most. It looked much like her side of the bridge: stately trees, new spring growth, last year’s leaves damp on the ground. Perhaps the sun did not shine as brightly on that side, perhaps more shadows lurked along the ground.
Una had never crossed the Old Bridge. It was an unwritten law that had been imprinted on her mind: No one crossed the Old Bridge. Not once in all the years that she and Felix had escaped their nursemaids’ clutches and run to this very spot had either of them actually crossed the narrow wooden planks and stepped into the forest on the other side.
She frowned around the pencil nub.