Aurora

We were not like other girls. Other girls who sat and recited french irregular verbs, who painted bowls of fruit, who learned how to dance and the art of flirting. We were given bows and arrows and were told to shoot, and when we shot, we shot to kill. Other girls were taught to sit and be still, we were taught to run free and dance wild, to braid flowers in our hair, to bite our lips into a blooming red, to wear nothing but fur. Other girls were given the Holy Bible and Fourdyce's Sermons. We were given One Thousand and One Nights and read the entire thing out loud to each other, exaggerating with smirks the red hot lust. In that castle in a clearing of wildflowers, the matrons called to us, smiled at us, patted our heads and called us Daughters of Artemis.

They told us we were different, but I never was so sure.

Maybe it was because we stilled bathed regularly, combed our hair at night and cleaned our teeth. Maybe because we still practiced our smiles in front of the mirror and every Saturday when we went to the village, we'd flirt and laugh with the handsome young men; both villagers and travelers alike. Maybe it was because we worried over our appearance and gossipped and spit fire behind each other's backs. Maybe it was none of that. Maybe it was because every time I stood at the edge of the forest, looking out, feeling something I could not name, they pulled me back, looking at me as if I were a ghost. And maybe that's what I was. A ghost of a girl whose pale eyes looked to the woods, searching for something, something, anything...

"Aurora, Aurora." Someone was whispering my name. My head turned from the window where I'd been looking out the woods to the large, warm room I sat in now. An older woman called Delphine was looking straight at me. She wore high-collared dresses in drab colors and kept her graying hair in a tight bun at the nape of her neck at all times. She was the woman who had taught me everything I knew. She was also my mother. And she did not look happy. Whispering my name was my closest friend, Magdalena, who sat immedietely to my right. She was leaning in to me, trying to catch my attention before Delphine had noticed my eyes were wandering again. Too late. I shrugged my knees up to my chest and gave Delphine a sheepish look. "Do you plan on joining us, Aurora?" she bit. I nodded once, a slow, torturous nod. The five other girls sitting in the class sniggered under their breath. Because of my status as Delphine's daughter I was respected, never revered. The older girls enjoyed laughing at my mistakes and daydreams, enjoyed whispering about my latest punishment. "Good," Delphine said, her voice like a knife. "Let us continue..."

We sat around in a circle on the floor, not caring how high our skirts rose up. Maybe we were a school or maybe we were a family, I never was so sure. Delphine had been collecting girls from Orphanages for quite some time now. She took them in and she and a few other women reared us until we were old enough to go off on our own. At first the idea had been simple: create a place where girls could be free. No one lectured us. We discussed. Literature, art, science, mathematics, poetry...we discussed it all.

I was not like these other girls, though. I would never leave this place. I would grow up to take Delphine's place - she had told me so for seventeen years, ever since she'd had me on a night when the Northern Lights - the Aurora Borealis - flashed through the sky. In my head, I conceded that it was the fact that I knew I was trapped her that made me so wistful for the outside world. My heart, however, kept thumping a different beat. I felt too different for my own skin, so different that I'd asked repeatedly who my father was. If I knew him, maybe it would explain why I was the way I was. My skin was tan yet my hair and eyes were fair and pale, maybe I looked like my father, for I did not look like Delphine. She only shook her head, though, and told me she couldn't remember him.

At first the idea for the school had been just a school. Nearly twenty years ago, though, the moon stopped shining. It hid away from the world and no longer lit up the night. Delphine told us it was because the Queen of the Moon, Selene, had been kidnapped by the Liche Queen - Queen of Death and Hell. Selene was a beautiful woman, Delphine told us, beautiful and kind. The Liche Queen, a skeleton of a woman, had been jealous of her beauty. She'd kidnapped the Moon Queen and in that, she'd taken the moon from the sky. And the army of the Liche Queen were the wolves. The wolves who could change form to men at will. It was our duty, Delphine said, to kill the wolves. Kill the wolves and eventually kill the Liche Queen. Kill the Liche Queen and save the Moon Queen.

At times I believed her and at times I wondered if she made the story up. We'd hunted the wolves for years and only twice I'd seen them turn into a human. They were all dark haired, dark eyed warriors. The strange thing was that whenever I came near a wolf, I always felt completely safe. As if nothing could harm me. Which was idiocy. The wolves would eat me up. I'd never had neither the heart nor the courage to kill one, though. I could remember being inches from one once, one whose coat was a canvas of silver, brown and black, and not shooting, but it had not attacked me either. We were hunting on a grey January morning and I could see my breath in front of me for miles. That morning, the wolf and I stared at each other for a moment too long before running our separate ways, making a silent pact to pretend to never have seen each other.

If we killed one a year, we were considered lucky. Fighting the Liche Queen was a slow battle, Delphine and the other matrons told us. Saving the moon did not come without a price.

Focus, I chided myself. Stop letting your mind wander. Let your eyes go back to the page, let your thoughts go back to the discussion. Each second in that room felt like an eternity. We were to be well read girls, though, well read and well educated. Too educated, the villagers grumbled when they thought we weren't listening. We always listened, though. We must. And although they found us strange, they respected us for what we were doing. The men and women all believed in the story of the Moon Queen as if it were the absolute truth. We were the only ones who had enough courage to do anything about it.

I seemed to be several decades older by the time Delphine dismissed us. Outside, the sky was blossoming with pinks and oranges. It had been a clear, cold day without a cloud in sight. Tonight might be different. Tonight could be a storm. Weather was always unruly and unpredictable up here. Our castle, called Schloss Lunarenstein, lay at the base of a powerful and towering mountain chain and was surrounded by a dense forest of primordial evergreens. Ours was a castle of white beauty, it had once belonged to a Prince and would someday belong to me. It was a castle of cavernous halls and hundreds of rooms. At times I felt I could get lost within its depths, but we had made it into a makeshift home. The rooms - those we used - were all furnished with well loved furniture, rugs and tapestries. At one point, Delphine must have been a very rich lady, but she did not dress me any better than the other girls. The only distinction I had was my own room at the very top of the tallest tower. Like a Princess, I used to think.

The girls rushed out of the room, carrying their books under their arms. I went to follow Magdalena out into the corridor, but Delphine stopped me. Magdalena flashed me a sympathetic look before joining the others. I stayed back and looked at my toes, the way I always did when confronted with Delphine.

She put a hand to my pale hair and then cupped my chin, pulling my face up to look at her. She sighed at my appearance and rubbed away what I assumed was a smudge of dirt under my left eye. "Aurora, you are to be in charge here one day. Please remember that."

I almost replied the way I always did - Yes, Delphine, I will, Delphine - but instead hesitated. "What if...what if I don't want to be in charge? What if I don't want to stay here?" I felt the words slip out of my mouth before I had the chance to hold them back. Delphine's eyes went wide with shock but she did not hush me the way she sometimes would when I spoke out of line. And then because I'd already started, I knew I must finish. "It's just...the other girls are allowed to go off and make their own way and some of them never come back and I'm not saying I would be like one them, I would come back to you some day I swear, but, but maybe I do not want this life of castles and hunting. Sometimes I just feel as if I'm meant for something else. And maybe if I knew who my father was-" I was stopped abruptly by Delphine's hand biting sharply at my cheek with a sharp slap.

She pulled back and apprehension filled her eyes. I put my own hand to my stinging face, my mouth wide open. She'd never struck me before. "You will press no further into the matter of your father. If I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times. I did not know him. I cannot remember him. You will stay here. You will take my place." With that, she strode out of the room, leaving me to myself and my still burning cheek. My throat closed and my knees shook but I closed my eyes. I will not cry, I will not cry, I repeated in my head. I would not let Delphine get to me. She had always been this way. She'd only shown me the smallest form of affection once or twice in my life. It was for my own good, she told me. So I would not get a complex. The other girls didn't even have a mother. I should feel lucky to have some kind of family at all.

I didn't feel lucky, though, and that was the worst part of it. More than anything I wanted to be an orphan so that I would be just another girl to Delphine. Even more than that...I knelt down and squeezed my eyes shut. If I thought hard enough, I could make out a picture of what I thought my father looked like. Tan skin, a strong jaw, eyes that smiled even when his mouth did not. I imagined him kind, yet stern. I imagined a life of quiet and solitude in some far-off woods, living off the land and loving each other like a true family.

"Stop it," I whispered to myself, rubbing my face. "These thoughts are the stuff of fairytales and nonsense."

Standing up, I took a deep breath and smoothed out the bright red and orange fabric of my skirts. I dashed out of the room but to no use. Across the hall a gilded mirror hung. I saw my face in it, saw the angry mark where Delphine had hit me. My eyes were red with unshed tears, the pale blue (almost grey) of the irises looked crystal and my pupils were fully dilated with fear. I blinked a for a second or two and then went off in the opposite direction of the way Delphine, Magdalena and the rest of the older girls had gone. I did not wish to be with them right now.

Instead, I made my way to one of the large sitting areas where elk-antlered candelabras and chandeliers glowed a merry orange. Four small girls were sitting in the room and I smiled. I could usually find them in here this time of day. When they saw me, their eyes lit up and they dropped whatever they were doing, be it sewing a sampler (we were never taught how to sew, but some girls had picked it up for enjoyment) or drawing a picture or playing with a small toy and rushed towards me. They first attacked my legs and then stepped back to curtsy, the way I'd taught them. The younger girls, there were ten in all ranging from ages four to ages eleven, had begged me to teach them how to curtsy. I hadn't learned from Delphine or the other matrons, of course not, but one of the older girls had been taught how to do it by a friend down in the village and she'd taught me. I explained to the girls that curtsying was not one did while at Lunarenstein, however, when one left for the real world, curtsying was an absolute must.

I laughed at how well they tucked their left ankle behind their right and dipped down. "Brava, girls, brava. Now, it seems to me that yesterday I wasn't able to get to reading someone's story. Would you care for me to read it now?" I asked. Their eyes shone with delight and seven year old Sofia scrambled to the corner of the room and pulled out thin cloth bound book. Delphine had not bought any childrens books, this I knew as a fact. Any book with a child's story in it had been here when she'd purchased the castle. Sofia handed me the book and gave me a shy smile. I looked at the cover. "Oh, I see, today we shall be reading Jorinda and Jorindel, per Sofie's suggestion."

I sat on the large sofa and the girls sat either on top of me or at my feet. Opening the book, I told them the story of Jorinda and Jorindel...a fairy who changed all men to stone and who turned all women into birds...the two lovers who had been torn apart by the curse...how the man had been changed back and had gone and found an enchanted purple flower...how he'd broken the spell of the fairy and saved his lover and all the other young maidens inside the castle...how the two had lived happily ever after.... The girls sat wide eyed and staring at the story as I finished, their eyes drinking in the old, faded watercolored pictures on the page. It almost made me sick. Happily ever after. My three most hated words in existence. Happily ever after's were not for me. They were out of my reach.

As I closed the book, I saw their small faces blinking and yawning with sleep. I looked out the window, where the pink sunset was fading into dusky purple. "You'd better go off now, get something to eat and go to bed. It's getting dark out," I told them, my voice stern. The little girls, all nodded with fervency and trotted out the door, all except Sofia. She stayed planted where she was, sitting right next to me on the couch. She looked at me with her wide dark eyes. "What's on your mind, Sofie?" I asked, my voice quiet. Sofia was wise for her years, her eyes as fathomless as the sea.

"Will I ever live happily ever after?" she asked, her little voice hoarse, as if she was on the verge of tears. "I want to, but sometimes I'm afraid I won't."

I sighed. "Yes, Sofie, of course you will. You are smart and you are pretty and you are capable of being anything you want."

"Do you wish for a happily ever after?" asked she. I swallowed. "Because you are smarter and prettier than anyone I know and so you should get a happily ever after." Her voice and words made want to hug myself. Her little voice only spoke words of adoration, she knew only what she wanted to believe. Pretty and smart were two things I'd never been. Magdalena was pretty; pretty with her chocolate curls and big blue eyes and curves and dimples. My skin was too tan for my hair, as if body couldn't make up its mind. My pale eyes made me look odd and different, the way I'd always felt. I'd never thought of if I was smart. Maybe I was, but I hadn't ever really participated much in the discussions because I'd been too busy looking out the window at the world beyond.

I smiled to Sofia. "I don't know, Sofie, maybe I will. You should get along now. It's growing dark."

Sofia smiled and rose up to kiss me on the cheek. "Good night, Aurora." she said.

"Good night," I replied and watched as she ran out of the room. I curled my knees beneath me and opened the book. Running my fingers lightly over the faded pictures, I looked at the golden haired Jorinda and the handsome, blue eyed Jorindel. I hugged the book to my chest and stared at the fire as it crackled in one of the many fireplaces of the castle. Tonight, after we were all in our beds, ghostly maids would come and tend to them, their phantom hands turning over wood as they did during the day. I hardly ever saw them, they were silent and invisible.

Out of breath, fawn haired Ileana appeared suddenly at the entrance to the grand sitting room. She, at sixteen, was tall and always too thin. At her presence I stood up immiedetely and dropped the picture book. Her strangled look at this time of night could only mean one thing; an attack. Saying nothing, I rushed after her, towards the door. I stuffed my feet into my large boots and shrugged on a fur lined cape and hat. Last, I picked up my bow and arrow, although a voice in my head laughed. What do you need that for, coward? it asked me. Ignoring it, I followed her outside. "Niamh said she saw something in the shadows of the trees. Something moving," Ileana explained as we ran to join the others - Magdalena, Niamh, Lise and Rosalyn - who already stood calf deep in the snow that had fallen the night prior. All the girls above the age of sixteen were required to fight for the Moon Queen. And, as Delphine said, there had only been one death in all the time we'd been fighting. Still, that death was in our minds each time we took the bows in our hands.

"This close to the edge? Are they growing stupid?" I gasped as the cold air shot down my lungs. Ileana could only shake her head.

In the space between the castle and the forest, we stood, our bows grasped tightly in our hands. We did not shoot until we could see them clearly, for we did not like to kill the other creatures of the forest. We all stood, waiting, tense, sweat collecting at our brows. We pointed our arrows and kept an eye closed, waiting, waiting. This was the worst part. Knowing that if I saw a wolf, I would have to shoot. I would kill it, I knew I would. I'd never missed anything in all my years.

When at last whatever it was emerged from the forest, we all breathed a sigh of collective relief and put down our bows. What came from the forest was nothing more than a dog. Large enough, it had a black coat and an almost wolfish face and pointed ears, but much too small to be any of the wolves in the forest. It stood just out of the trees and the other girls laughed under their breath and began to trudge back inside where it was warm and where they'd eat Rehragout and drink Glogg and go to sleep happy and dream of nothing. I watched them go inside and only Magdalena looked back at me. "I just want to..." I scrambled for the words to explain that I felt some need to stay. "Look at something. I swear I won't go in the forest."

Magdalena sighed and her breath looked like the curling smoke coming out of the many chimneys on the castle. "Be careful, Aurora. For me, at least." With that, she disappeared inside. I turned to watch the dog, who still stood at the edge of the forest. I held out my hand.

"Come here," I murmured. The dog didn't move. I swallowed, turned around and cleared away some of the snow behind me. Then I sat down, making sure nothing bare was touching the ground. I brought my knees up close to me and wrapped my bright, colorful skirts around me. "I'm not leaving until you come here," I said, louder this time. Once again, I waited. This time was not so tense. Much colder, but not tense. I looked up as dusk deepened into twilight. The mountains rose all around me, and I studied the evergreens that crawled up their sides until not even they could stand the temperatures. After that it was all rock and snow and ice. Sitting out here, I could make believe there was no castle behind me and I was alone. It was not scary, nor was it lonely. Instead it made me feel calm. Looking up, I saw the stars painted on an inky indigo sky. They stretched on forever, but I did not feel sad or wistful. Instead I felt...alive. Purely alive, my heart thumping at my chest, my heart pumping blood along the rivers of my veins, tying me to the mysteries and the complexities of the Universe.

At my knee, I felt a nudge. I looked down to see the dog nudging my leg with his nose. My face broke into a wide smile. The dog stepped up to me and put his nose to my own. His breath was hot on my cold face. He did not lick me, but his sad eyes stared into mine. My arms came to hug him around the neck and I moved my face and buried it in his fur. He smelled of pine, sap, earth and woodsy musk.

Inside my chest, the feeling of elation faded and my cheek stung where Delphine had struck me.

And I finally, finally conceded to my tears.