Seeing how it had worked so far for Natalie, they used the new key that Luna had produced to form another child.
They combined it with the one violin that the old woman had been able to afford.
Henry.
As he woke, as if from a long sleep, Henry told them all that he felt more like the real Henry than he had done for a long time. Despite his strange body that, to be honest, was nothing like the body he’d once had.
Even so, even as he complained, he laughed, glad to be alive once more.
Luna looked towards Rouger, placing her hope that the children would return to their remembered forms in the same way that he had gradually become more and more like the real Rouger.
As she thought this, another key appeared in her hands,
‘Another child; we must create another child, she declared eagerly.
*
Chapter 37
It was exhausting work, returning life to so many children.
They had to bring back the violins from the shop to the cottage. There were so many, this alone took the best part of a day. Particularly as they were being careful not to cause any damage to the precious instruments.
Of course, many of the violins had been sold.
Luna fretted that they wouldn’t be able to bring those children back to life. But at the insistence of a daffodil who believed his violin had been lost long ago anyway, they tried to revive a child using the bloom alone; and that too, amazingly, worked.
It took a few weeks before their work was completed. By that time, the earliest children were already taking on more human characteristics.
As soon as it was believed that the newly formed children were ready to return home, they were offered the use of the giant’s horse to take them back.
Each time the horse obediently returned, his back emptied of the multitude of children he’d originally set off with. It seemed that no child had been refused by his or her parents, despite their strange appearance.
The last child to stay with them was Natalie: for she not only enjoyed helping them restore life to the other children, but she also wanted to thank Luna by giving her the directions she needed that would take her to the princess’s tower.
‘Once you get within a day’s horse ride, you’ll be able to follow the beams of the Darkhouse,’ she said as she finished telling Luna and Rouger the directions.
‘Darkhouse? What’s that?’ Rouger asked.
‘It’s like a lighthouse: only it throws out vast beams of darkness.’
*
It was early one evening when Luna and Rouger reached what were the diffused edges of the Darkhouse’s sweeping beams of darkness.
As they curiously peered deeper into that darkness, it became more solid, until nothing within its confines could be seen.
The Darkhouse itself loomed over everything in the distance, its twin beams of pure blackness slowly, regularly turning.
Luna recognised the Darkhouse’s similarity to the Lantern of Darkness that had appeared in the tale of the king and the box he had been been made to foolishly hold onto for the rest of his life.
It was a story her mother had often told her, linking it with the way her father had wasted his own life searching for the meaning of the old key he had found.
Her mother had never told Luna where her father had found the key. She had dwelt instead on his relentless, all-consuming need to find out what his finding of the key could all possibly mean.
The effect of the darkness was far more profound than Luna could ever have imagined, however.
As they entered the reach of the swooping beams, they immediately felt much colder. For, naturally, the sun couldn’t penetrate such a solid blackness.
The woodlands and the fields of crops appeared to have suffered sorely from this life of a permanent semi-night, for they were growing weakly. Even what should have been great, towering trees were spindly and shabbily leaved.
As night itself fell, Luna noticed that the houses they passed, the villages they rode through, had lanterns constantly lit, both hanging outside their homes and lit within their dim rooms. When the dead darkness of the Darkhouse swept over everything, the flames within the glass of the lanterns remained; but they were now briefly little more than large seeds waiting to give a momentary birth to their inherent light.
When Luna and Rouger now slept in the woods, Luna realised that even the moonlight failed to make its way through the pitch black of the beams. She shivered as the beams passed over her. When she awoke in the morning, for the first time in ages she felt a little hungry.
As Natalie had promised, however, the beams were perfect directional aids when it came to leading them to their goal.
Then again, wasn’t a lighthouse there to warn you not to draw closer?
Did a Darkhouse carry a similar warning?
*
Chapter 38
They trotted past a farmhouse that seemed to have been oddly constructed, until Luna realised its builder had utilised a large section of the soaring tower that had landed here when it had fallen.
They passed more and more sections of the destroyed tower, ranging in size from what could be – and now quite often was – a house, to what was little more than rubble.
Rather than completely clearing up all the wreckage, which would have been a major task in itself, the local people had made the best of what had fallen around them, transforming what they could into barns, sheds, or merely decorative garden arches. The rest had been simply left for the woods and undergrowth to spread over and claim as their own.
The fact that the wreckage had fallen so far from the palace gave them some idea of how tall the tower had originally been.
Now very little was left of it, the toppling higher sections having obviously weakened the lower parts until most of these too had also crumbled away. The remaining part of the tower had been almost casually rebuilt, topped off with crenelated walls. It was no longer even the palace’s tallest tower. The only clue that this had been the infamous tower, in fact, was the way the wreckage stretched out from it like the spokes of a wheel leading out from its hub.
The darkness of the Darkhouse failed to reach the area around the palace. Its sweeping beams passed by harmlessly high above, the sun only briefly blocked from reaching the ground by a relatively narrow corridor of darkness.
Even so the palace was entirely silent. It seemed to have been deserted long ago.
Just as nature had claimed most of the fallen rumble of the tower as its own, here too it had spread wildly, colonising courtyards and even walls with fresh growth of grasses, shrubs and saplings.
Tethering their horse in one of the overgrown yards, where it could feed on the grasses, Luna and Rouger began exploring the palace. They were searching for the nailed up door, behind which the magic mirror stood.
Surprisingly, it didn’t take them long to find the room. But then again, it had of course once been the queen’s bedroom. Its great door would at one time have opened up onto one of the palace’s major hallways.
Now, however, it was securely nailed. It hadn’t opened up onto anything for what could possibly have been years.
It took them longer to find the tools they needed to remove the nails than it had taken them to discover the room. At last, though, every nail was wrenched free.
With a protesting groan of unoiled hinges, of wood that hadn’t been cared for and had warped and expanded, the door opened only slowly and unwillingly.
Inside the room, Luna could now see the magical bed.
And, standing at the bed’s very end, she could also see the glints of the magical mirror.
She would have to be quick, she told herself.
Otherwise, she might come out of the room as little more than a screeching baby.
*
Chapter 39
Rouger had offered to be the one who looked in the mirror.
Luan had refused: they couldn’t be sure that the mirror’s answer to his problems would be the
same as its answer to hers.
Yes, they both needed to know where they could find the Fay Queen. But the mirror might well conclude that the person really responsible for Rouger’s problems was his creator: that is, Luna herself.
All he might see in the mirror, then, would be Luna. A Luna standing outside the bedchamber’s door.
Taking a deep breath, preparing herself to get through with all this as quickly as possible, Luna sprinted into the room.
She dashed to the end of the bed.
She stood before the magical mirror.
The mirror that would tell her where to find whoever was responsible for all her problems.
She looked expectantly into the enchanted mirror.
But the only person staring back at her was a perplexed Luna.
*
Chapter 40
There was a crinkling of bedsheets, the sound of someone stirring in the magical bed behind her.
Luna whirled around.
As the bedclothes were thrown back, the old woman sat up in the bed, as if just awaking there.
She grinned warmly as she recognised the confusion on Luna’s face.
‘Well,’ she said, before Luna could gather herself together enough to speak, ‘when I heard Natalie speak of this magical bed of youth; well, I just had to give it a try, didn’t I?’
‘But…but didn’t you hear how Natalie also said it was dangerous?’
‘Oh, I don’t think it could possibly be all that bad, do you? And what of you, Luna? And your magical mirror? How are you faring with that?’
‘It doesn’t work!’ Luna said miserably. ‘All this way, and it’s just a normal mirror!’
‘A normal mirror? You must have strange ideas about what normal means, Luna! Perhaps, if you’re being entirely honest, it’s simply that you didn’t like what you saw there.’
‘It was me! I saw me! I’m not responsible for my problems!’
‘Aren’t you, Luna?’ the old woman said. ‘Perhaps you need to know a little more about this mirror.’
*
Chapter 41
The Mirror of Reflections
Two princesses of a certain kingdom once thought of themselves as being quite easily the most beautiful women in the entire world.
As such, an order from their father the king went throughout the entire kingdom, advising any pretty woman or girl that they should avoid feeling envious of his daughters’ great beauty by either permanently remaining indoors or going about their business covered in thick shawls.
Moreover, it was also firmly suggested that they refrained from utilising anything they believed might enhance their own prettiness, such as wearing lipstick, eyeliner, or regularly washing their hair.
Meanwhile, the rare beauty of his own daughters was to be celebrated in songs, portraits, poetry and even specially commissioned dramatic or humorous plays; for the one thing the princesses could agree on, of course, was that their extraordinary beauty must be recorded for posterity to appreciate and admire. And naturally, any playwright, painter, poet or musician taking on these flattering tasks had to be extremely careful how they portrayed the princesses in their creations, for each princess naturally thought of herself as being the most beautiful of the two, by far.
Royal processions had to be wider than they had previously been, allowing the two carriages of the princesses to ride alongside each other, with neither being seen to be given preference over the other.
When anyone was invited to a regal dinner, they found not only that the princesses were seated on similar seats, and placed in similar positions at the tables, but also that the mechanically activated seats would swap positions every now and again. In this way, neither could claim that the other was being favoured by being seated next to more interesting or more important people.
So assured were they of their towering beauty, however, that they eventually decided a painter should be commissioned to paint a picture of the most beautiful woman in the world, so that their own beauty could be compared against hers.
Such an important commission would require the world’s most talented painter. Ideally, it would also be a painter who had already toured the world’s courts, either painting or at least familiar with each kingdom’s reigning beauty.
Such a painter was at last found, a master of the arts who used fairy enchantments to achieve his ends. His brush was magical, his palette was magical, his canvas was magical.
The colours he needed appeared out of the ether onto his magical palette. The brush only had to be lightly daubed onto canvas for those colours to flow through it into a rapidly formed image.
Moreover, he required no subject to sit for him, as the canvases he used could simply soak up all the detailing and features of any person on Earth, drawing them all from the shared memories of everyone who knew them.
In this way, he produced the most lifelike, the most accurate portraits, anyone had ever seen.
He was perfect for the role, both princesses happily declared (with each secretly, of course, hoping that the portrait he produced would be of her!).
The painter was set to work in one of the palace’s most brightly lit rooms.
Through the doors to the room, the painter could be heard happily humming and hawing as he daubed his magical paint upon the magical canvas using his magical brush.
And, ever so impatiently waiting outside, the two princesses continually placed an ear to the door in the hope of detecting a cry of exultation when the painter declared his masterpiece finished.
What could be taking him so long? they both frequently complained.
He’s been in there at least an hour now!
They squirmed with excitement, with curiosity, with – at last, one of them needed the small room! She rushed off, warning the other not to take a peek at the portrait until she’d returned.
When she returned however, her sister was no longer waiting outside the door.
The door to the room opened, the sister appeared – and she was smiling happily!
*
As soon as her sister was out of sight, the other princess dashed towards the door.
Without knocking, without waiting to be asked to enter, she stormed into the room.
When the painter turned and saw her, he smiled!
She was aghast!
Was he really such a fool that he didn’t realise how much this would hurt her, humiliate her?
The painting was hidden behind a small curtain.
‘Does your majesty wish to see the results?’ the painter enquired of her innocently. ‘Does she want to cast her eyes upon the world’s most beautiful woman?’
The princess stoically resigned herself to go through with this odious task.
She nodded her consent.
Pulling on a small cord hanging to one side of the curtains, the painter drew them aside to reveal the portrait.
The princess gasped.
Gasped in awe.
In joy.
It was her!
It was a picture of her!
*
Of course, it wasn’t a picture at all that the two princesses had been shown.
It was a mirror.
Yet it was no ordinary mirror.
Indeed, in terms of magical enchantments, it was far more powerful than the painter’s accoutrements combined.
And strangely, the painter freely admitted this to both princesses: indeed, the mirror’s magic was so wondrous, he proudly proclaimed, that as beauty was their all-consuming passion, they would undoubtedly see whomsoever was considered to be the world’s most beautiful woman within it.
Naturally, he also assured each princess in turn that this wasn’t any form of trick – as they might be tempted to imagine it to be.
If they ever suffered any doubts about what they believed being beautiful entailed, then beware: for the portrait of the woman portrayed within the frame would indeed change.
And so of course, each princess trusted the painter and his
firmly expressed assurances.
For they could see that this was no reflection, as you might suppose.
The image of the woman appearing there was as motionless as any portrait. Unlike a mirror, it didn’t reflect each princess’s cry of joy on first sighting of the picture. Neither did it reflect any signs of doubt when they realised it was in fact – or appeared to be –nothing more than a mirror.
The mirror did indeed reflect a portrait of a woman.
The most beautiful woman in the world.
And it was her.
*
When the king heard of this ‘portrait’, he was furious.
He believed the painter had made a fool of them all.
A magical mirror?
A mirror that satisfied each of his daughters that only she was the most beautiful woman in the world?
That was a mirror! Plain and simple!
Admittedly, he was amused by the audacity of this fairy painter. He was impressed, too, by the way he had circumnavigated such a difficult problem: to grant each princess that which she most desired, without upsetting the other.
Secretly, he applauded the painter’s solution. And, he thought, he might even be able to take advantage of this situation; could he at last point out to his daughters how foolhardy their whole obsession with beauty had become?
But still; the painter had made fools of his, the king’s, daughters!
When brought before the king and his two daughters to answer the charges laid against him, the painter protested his innocence.
‘It is a magical mirror! It’s a reflection of their vanity, which is the source of all their problems!’
The king nodded sagely at this.
He looked to his two daughters, hoping this confession of the painter’s would perhaps at last begin to help them mend their ways.
Even so, the king still had the painter thrown out of his palace, out of his kingdom.
*
The princesses loudly declared themselves satisfied that this charlatan had been ejected from their kingdom.