It is why he freed Ariel from the great pine and bound him to his service.
It is why he charts the skies, why he encouraged my budding talent for illustration, why I paint at his bidding. And today he bade me render an image of the Lady Venus herself, Venus who is the very Queen of Love among the seven governors.
I do my best to comply, but my thoughts are as scattered as a handful of petals tossed to the wind, blown hither and thither and yon. My hands shake and refuse to obey me as though I have been afflicted anew, and my brushstrokes, that had grown so sure and joyful, become clumsy and crude.
Why a love spell?
Even in the privacy of my own thoughts, I fear to speculate.
The initial lineaments of my Venus depict a poor, botched thing lacking all semblance of grace and beauty. Mercifully, Papa attributes my failure to the shock of finding all my prior work vanished beneath a thick coating of fresh white-wash.
“Forgive me, child,” he says at the end of the day. “I should have known you would take it amiss and thought to forewarn you.” He gives me a kind smile. “I’ll not be remiss the next time.”
I clasp my hands before me to hide their trembling. “Thank you, Papa. With your permission, I’ll take time to gather my thoughts and offer prayers to Lady Venus ere I begin tomorrow.”
Papa casts a wry glance at my ungainly strokes on the wall. “I think that would be wise.”
Papa.
Prospero.
It is as though he has become a stranger to me. Although my knowledge is far from complete, I now know secrets that he did not divulge to me; did not wish divulged to me. If ’tis true that any knowledge of his purpose on my part will taint our working, well, then, the damage is done, and I do not know if that should be a source of abiding shame or relief to me.
Both, mayhap.
One thing I do know, and that is that I have an urgent desire to speak to Caliban. When I first awakened from my affliction, it was his dear face I saw; my first memory is of Caliban seeing my confusion and reminding me of his name, oh, so gently.
Now I regret that I was short with him the other night, but it was a great deal to take in.
I did not want to believe.
But I do.
On the morrow, I manage to catch Caliban before he succeeds in evading me, and ask him nicely if he might procure fresh river trout for our supper. This he agrees to do with a curt nod, taking the pail with him as he leaves.
When Papa adjourns to his sanctum, I do not engage myself in contemplation and prayers to the Lady Venus. No, instead, I set out to find Caliban.
It is a beautiful spring morning on the isle, balmy and clear, the promise of afternoon’s coming heat alleviated by the lingering freshness of the night’s dew. The jacaranda trees are in bloom, great clouds of violet blossoms clinging to their limbs, and the tall rhododendrons offer up pink and white and purple clusters, such hues as make me long for my paints. In the courtyard where the sour orange trees grow, buzzing honeybees are already at work gathering the pollen of their delicate white blossoms that they might transmute it into golden sweetness. Papa says that bees are nature’s alchemists, and that as proof, honey is the only food that never spoils but retains the goodness of its essence in perpetuity.
The reminder of Papa gives me a pang of guilt, but I persevere, leaving the palace grounds behind me. The flowers that blossom in the wild are less spectacular, but no less lovely for it—myrtle shrubs with their pungent leaves, fields of scrubby yellow broom bright beneath the sun. A great fondness for the isle’s beauty fills me, and my heart aches to imagine that I should ever leave it.
There are two places where Caliban is wont to catch fish and I know them both, for I accompanied him thence on excursions many times in happier days. The first is a bend in the stream where the current slows as it rounds the reed-covered banks. In high summer or midwinter, the level of the water is no higher than the calves of his legs, but today the stream is swollen with snowmelt from the distant mountain peaks to the east.
It is at the second place, a place where the stream runs swiftly, but great rocks lying just below the surface break up its current and create eddying pools in which the speckled trout bask, that I find Caliban. He crouches low on one of the boulders, water running in a torrent over his feet. Translucent undines frolic in the stream around him, but he ignores them, crouching to gaze intently into the water, hands poised at the ready. The pail is perched precariously on another boulder nearby.