Post by FaerieOfDoom on Dec 11, 2008 3:10:53 GMT -5
Rating: K
Catherine had never known secrets in her life. She didn’t keep any, never understood what darkness and lies were. She was an honest soul, simple, and happy. She was safe with what she was familiar with, she was safe in the world that didn’t include the darker things.
When Catherine was small, she had enjoyed roaming the meadows and fields of flowers that surrounded her family’s home. She still did, years later, but when she was a child, there had been a more simple joy in those days, spent in the golden sunlight, picking flowers and talking to the birds and the butterflies and the rabbits who had all played there with her.
Perhaps these days, spent so blissfully, were the only things she had ever kept to herself, were the closest thing she had to a secret – a place where she was happy by herself, and would rather not share with anyone else.
She always escaped her parents, and her nanny, who had later become her governess, so that she could play there, by herself without sharing her happiness, her fun. There was an old house, across the field that extended out behind the gardens of her home, and which was situated, alone and forlorn, at the bottom of a small hill, which she was particularly fond of.
“That house is as old as the mountains themselves,” Nanny used to tell her, on those nights when she couldn’t sleep. “It used to belong to the youngest son of a King, and the prince had loved that house as much as any man could love a house. It had been built shortly before the King had died, and was where the prince spent all his time after his eldest brother had taken the throne.”
Catherine could well understand why someone could be attached to such a place. It was more of a castle than a home, it was so large. It had to be nearly three times the size of her own home, and that was large enough as it was. One day Catherine had gone through the halls of the castle, up and down stairs, counting each room. She had lost count at about one hundred – and that was not including the larger rooms such as the ballroom and the kitchen.
That castle’s beauty had been intricate, once. The carvings, the statues, the elegance of the architecture and the more intimate details that every castle seemed to have seemed so detailed and life-like, that she thought they had to have been made by fairies. Though the castle was now in a state of disrepair, and Catherine had been small when she first explored its hallways and rooms, she had understood then, and understood even better now, just how amazing that place was.
“The gardens there were once the most beautiful in the kingdom,” Nanny would then say, as the candle burned lower, and Catherine grew more enraptured. “Everything that could ever grow in a garden grew there: flowers of all sorts, carrots, lettuce, potatoes, vegetables the likes of which you’d never have seen. Fruit, too – extensive vines and lanes and lanes of trees with the most juicy, sweet fruit you had ever tasted, grew there as well.”
Of course, there was little left now. But sometimes, when the season had been particularly kind, Catherine would wander through the rows upon rows of decayed shrubs, the weeds that grew over tumbled stone walls like the spindly fingers of an insidious creature, and perhaps see some life. Then she would pace up and down the lanes of half-dead fruit trees, and see something fresh and good and wholesome hanging from one branch that yet survived, and she’d pluck it from the offering tree.
Catherine had fond memories of those special days, when she found an apple, or a peach, just sitting there, as if it had been waiting for her all along – just waiting for her to find it and pluck it from its branch. Pluck it and carefully, carefully slice it down the middle. Those moments were always amazing, the glow she felt when she saw the fruit, and the feeling of contentment that spread through her, like the soft, warm glow of a fire in winter. The fruit was always so sweet, it was like liquid honey on her tongue.
When she had eaten exactly one half, she would take the seeds that she had spat out and put them in one of her mother’s carefully embroidered handkerchiefs, and place the seeds in the middle. She would then fold the handkerchief and very purposefully put it in her pocket. It sat in her pocket, and Catherine always thought that it was not unlike having something precious and irreplaceable there.
That task done, she would take a few steps away from where she had found the fruit, and kneel down at a bare patch of ground. With care, Catherine would then dig a hole in the earth. Inside this hole went the other half of the fruit, before she filled it in with soil once more – gifted in the earth like a present to the trees, and the castle.
She always shared her fruit with that place; it always seemed the right thing to do, an instinct so tangible, it was as though someone had whispered it into her ear.
Catherine never questioned the thoughts and impulses that made her do such things, she just thought of it as sharing what was given her, and was happy to do so. And not knowing what a secret was, she never told anyone, because it just simply was.
Some days Catherine would stay hours and hours under the shade of the trees. There, she was undisturbed. At home there was always a flurry of activity, maids running up and down corridors, menservants carting furniture and rugs and the like in and out doors, her mother making the activity organised, busily arranging flowers and instructing men at the same time, ensuring that her next party went perfectly to plan. It was as busy as a beehive there, and the stillness of the gardens was as refreshing as the wind at sea.
When she lay there, under one of the trees, soaking in the silence as if it were the sweetest of perfumes, Catherine would imagine how it was before the castle was abandoned. She liked to picture the son of the King, how he enjoyed his gardens and his grand home, before it all fell to wreck and ruin. Catherine often supposed that the prince had loved his garden, and had shared it with the earth, just as she liked to do.
Maybe, in the past, there had been animals who had lived in the trees, and the bushes that were once so lovely. Was the prince friends with them? Catherine imagined he would let them rest on his shoulders and lap whenever he sat in the shade of a tree, or walked leisurely down a lane, and let them eat straight from his hands.
One day, after Catherine had spent an unusually long amount of time inside the abandoned castle, she turned to Nanny with a particularly serious look in her eyes.
“Why did the King’s son abandon the castle?” she asked as Nanny was darning a pair of stockings by the fire. The room was warm and welcoming, and Catherine felt drowsy.
Her nanny didn’t reply at first, and continued darning the stocking, the needle flashing every time the light of the fire hit the metal. Finally, she set the work down and looked Catherine in the eye, a familiar blaze burning behind her hazel-toned gaze. It was fiercer than a tiger’s stare, Catherine always thought secretly.
Ever since Catherine was small, she had known that her Nanny took everything with a particular gravity that seemed excessive to everyone else, even Catherine sometimes. The story of the castle was a particular one, and while no one else talked of it or paid it the smallest heed, Catherine’s Nanny was sensitive to its nature. She believed where others didn’t. Catherine remembered the time when the cook’s young boy had been playing in her father’s orchids, and had stepped on some of the plants that were to be entered into the local fair. He had claimed that he wasn’t the one who was to blame, but he was sorry for his friend, who had been the culprit. No one had believed in this imaginary friend, except for Nanny, who had looked the boy in the eye, and nodded. He escaped punishment after that, once Nanny was on his side. No one argued with Nanny.
“The castle wasn’t abandoned,” Nanny said now, with that special brand of conviction that was all her own. “Not in the way you think. The prince never abandoned his castle, but rather, the castle abandoned the world. It broke away from the world, locked itself away at the bottom of the hill, and never again let anyone inside its walls.
“Of course, people were puzzled at first. But they soon forgot about it, as people do over time. My family never forgot, because our ancestors had helped build the castle, and knowing the castle so intimately, couldn’t understand why it would lock itself away like that.”
“Why did the castle lock itself away?” Catherine knelt by Nanny’s feet, and stared up at her in wonder.
“I think it was because of a spell – or more likely, a curse.” Nanny’s voice was hushed, and she looked far-away as she said her next words. “The castle went through such a sudden change, that it had to have been a curse, you see. One day the prince was seen outside in his garden, the servants working happily at their tasks, and the next, they were all sent away and the castle was suddenly walled in, the prince never seen again.”
Catherine had been confused, and remained unsure long after her Nanny wished her goodnight and left her in bed. Walled in? The castle had never been walled in, she came and went as she pleased, and had never been barred entry because of a wall.
Perhaps it was the curse Nanny mentioned. Perhaps there was something she didn’t know, didn’t understand.
But, as it was their wont to do, the thoughts that plagued her that night as she drifted into slumber fell away, and Catherine forgot about the curse and the mysterious wall.
It was the following summer before Catherine remembered.
The weather was breathtaking, the air smelled sweet and fresh, and it seemed almost as though some colour had bloomed in the withering orchids of the castle’s grounds. As Catherine walked down one of the many lanes, she spotted some colour out of the corner of her eye. Surprised, and delighted, she saw the orange dangling from a tree’s branch.
As she always did, Catherine picked it from the tree and handled it with careful reverence. It was always a present, a treat, to be given such a spoil from the gardens of this place. The fruit sat in her hand like a ball, and when she brought it to her nose to smell, it was sweeter than cook’s Christmas cookies.
Smiling, she reached for the small knife she kept with her whenever she visited the castle – only, when she dug her hand into her pocket, the knife wasn’t there. Aghast, she searched all her pockets, but it was a fruitless search. She had left her knife at home, and saddened that she had to leave her refuge – even if only for a little while – Catherine put the orange in her pocket and trudged home to retrieve her knife.
She cut the orange as she walked back to the castle, wrapping the second half in her handkerchief and putting it in her pocket, so that she could eat her half. The seeds she kept, like always.
Catherine was beginning to feel better as she neared the castle again; being away was always hard for her, when she knew what it was like there. It was more of a home to her than her actual house, however absurd that sounded even to her own mind.
When the castle came into sight, Catherine came to an abrupt halt.
There was a wall.
It was as though someone had ripped the joy right out of her smile. Suddenly, once the shock passed, everything crumpled around her, and she was filled with a deep well of despair.
With a quick burst of speed, Catherine raced towards the wall and placed her hands upon the stone that had never been there before, and felt the rough, unyielding texture of it against her skin. It was so big, so tall, so encompassing. Unable to give up all hope, Catherine followed the wall as far as she could bear, and found no entrance. She knew, instinctively, that the wall surrounded the whole of the grounds – castle, orchids, trees and all.
She felt like she couldn’t breathe, and thinking was hard. What had happened? Why couldn’t she get in? It felt like everything she knew and loved had been taken away from her in one inexplicable moment.
Taking a few steps back, Catherine stared up at the wall. It was tall – too tall not to be part of a spell or a curse… just as Nanny had told her. Catherine felt like banging her head against the stone. Somehow, she had forgotten that the castle was more than just a castle, and now she was forbidden, kept away by this wall that looked like it was taller than any house or building she had ever seen. Catherine was sure that if a giant had stood beside it, even he couldn’t have climbed over it.
Tears welled in her eyes as she silently asked herself, why? What did she do, what was different about today that made this happen?
As she stared at the grey, pitted surface of the wall, she felt the weight in her pocket. With a sinking heart, Catherine reached into the pocket, and pulled out the orange half.
“No,” she whispered the word, let the wind steal it away and leave her bereft. “No, no, no!”
The orange – she had taken it from the garden, had taken the whole thing, and not just half, like always. She hadn’t shared it, had broken the tradition.
She was being punished for her forgetfulness, for her selfishness, for her bad manners. She’d broken the unspoken promise.
Catherine’s hands shook as she held the orange in the palm of her hands. “But I was coming right back. I was going to share it, like always…”
But the castle was unrelenting, merciless, and unforgiving. She had broken the silent promise. She’d gone against that silent word - and now, she was forever barred like… like everyone else. Nanny’s story came back to her, and she remembered now that she had been the only one who had never seen the wall…until now.
“I’m sorry!” she cried out. Nothing answered her but the faint echo of her own cry coming back to her.
Now with tears falling silently down her cheeks, Catherine walked right up to the wall and knelt beside it. Still crying, and holding the orange half in one hand, she dug a hole with the other.
She placed the orange half in the hole, and added her seeds for good measure, as well. Then she covered it over again with dirt. “I’m sorry,” she said again, but this time it was in the most gentle of sighs. She knew that giving the orange back now wasn’t enough for the castle to forgive her, but she did it anyway. It soothed her, somewhat, to give it back however she could.
Catherine placed her hand over the patch of earth, silently willing a tree to grow from the seeds and be beautiful, and as she did so, a tear fell from her eye, and sunk into the dirt.
When Catherine returned home that day, Nanny saw that something had happened, but Catherine did not feel like talking about it. The wound was still too raw. But, she had to know, was there anything she could do? Would Nanny know how to fix her mistake?
“Nanny,” Catherine said, before bed, as Nanny brushed her hair. “Has anyone ever gotten through the wall – the wall around the castle, do you know?”
Nanny finished brushing her hair, and started plaiting it with deft fingers. She smelt like hazelnuts, the same smell Catherine had known all her life with Nanny, and it was comforting to know that not everything had to change at once.
“The wall is a curse on the castle. It’s not meant to be entered.” Catherine thought she felt something like ice pierce her breast as she listened to Nanny’s words. “No one has ever gone through, Catherine.”
“Oh,”
“But,” Nanny continued, and handing Catherine the basin to wash her face, she smiled at her. “That does not mean no one ever will. Spells and curses can be broken, Catherine, it just takes a little while.”
Catherine came back the next day, even though everything was different now. When the wall came into sight, she felt like bursting into sobs, but refrained from doing so by sheer will. She had known it would be there, that nothing had changed, but still, the hope had been there.
Something had changed since the day before, however. When she reached the wall, she walked beside it, and happened upon the place where she had buried the orange half and seeds.
In all the years before, she had never again found the places where she had buried the fruit. She never questioned it, never wondered, until that moment.
She stood, staring at the small tree. Trees didn’t grow that fast. Already it was as tall as her waist, the little branches reaching up, as though it were making itself grow so that it could touch the sky.
Catherine was mystified. She couldn’t understand it, but for some reason, it made her heart, so heavy with the grief of losing her favourite place, lift. A new resolution hardened in her breast, shattering the ice there. This was her tree, and she would help it reach the sky.
Catherine came back every day after that, and tended to her orange tree. It blossomed and grew like no other tree she had ever met. It was magical, Catherine thought. It grew faster and taller than even the trees she planted with the seeds she saved every time she’d had some of the castle’s fruit.
Under her care, the tree reached ever higher for the sky, until one day, she couldn’t even see its tip. She thought it must be as tall as the wall itself, and smiled.
Her orange tree was beautiful.
She didn’t eat any of the fruit that the tree bore, she didn’t feel it her right, instead she collected all the fruit that fell from the tree, and cut each in half, and buried each half beside the wall. Soon, many orange trees were growing against the wall of the castle. But none ever grew as fast or reached as high as her tree, the one she first planted.
One sunny day, after planting more of the oranges under the beating rays of sun, Catherine sat under her orange tree and stared up its branches, trying to fathom where it ended. But today gave her no answers, just as the day before, and the day before that.
But… it suddenly occurred to her that the branches reminded her of a ladder, or perhaps stairs. Feeling better than she had in a long while, Catherine managed, with some difficulty, to clamber onto the first, lowest-hanging branch. The bark was hard under her bare feet, and the air was thick with the scent of the fruit hanging from the branches. Not wanting to stop there, Catherine climbed onto the next, and then up to the next one. The spacing of the branches seemed perfect for her height, and it was an effortless climb up each rung. Something was guiding her passage.
Before she quite knew what she was doing, Catherine had climbed further and further, until the ground was far behind her and she was higher up in the tree than she thought should have been possible.
And then… she reached the highest branch, level with the top of the wall. Her heart beating wildly, Catherine reached out and touched the stone of the wall. It was just as rough as the stone at the ground. The wind whisked past her, making her hair fly wildly, freely, behind her. She stared down at the castle, on the other side of the wall, so different and yet the same as it had been since the last time she’d seen it, before the wall appeared, and she felt suddenly at peace.
Catherine was coming home.
A/N: The secrets thing might be a bit confusing, it really only becomes truly clear in meaning in the next part - it's all tied in with the castle and the curse.
The Safety of Secrets
Part I
Part I
Catherine had never known secrets in her life. She didn’t keep any, never understood what darkness and lies were. She was an honest soul, simple, and happy. She was safe with what she was familiar with, she was safe in the world that didn’t include the darker things.
When Catherine was small, she had enjoyed roaming the meadows and fields of flowers that surrounded her family’s home. She still did, years later, but when she was a child, there had been a more simple joy in those days, spent in the golden sunlight, picking flowers and talking to the birds and the butterflies and the rabbits who had all played there with her.
Perhaps these days, spent so blissfully, were the only things she had ever kept to herself, were the closest thing she had to a secret – a place where she was happy by herself, and would rather not share with anyone else.
She always escaped her parents, and her nanny, who had later become her governess, so that she could play there, by herself without sharing her happiness, her fun. There was an old house, across the field that extended out behind the gardens of her home, and which was situated, alone and forlorn, at the bottom of a small hill, which she was particularly fond of.
“That house is as old as the mountains themselves,” Nanny used to tell her, on those nights when she couldn’t sleep. “It used to belong to the youngest son of a King, and the prince had loved that house as much as any man could love a house. It had been built shortly before the King had died, and was where the prince spent all his time after his eldest brother had taken the throne.”
Catherine could well understand why someone could be attached to such a place. It was more of a castle than a home, it was so large. It had to be nearly three times the size of her own home, and that was large enough as it was. One day Catherine had gone through the halls of the castle, up and down stairs, counting each room. She had lost count at about one hundred – and that was not including the larger rooms such as the ballroom and the kitchen.
That castle’s beauty had been intricate, once. The carvings, the statues, the elegance of the architecture and the more intimate details that every castle seemed to have seemed so detailed and life-like, that she thought they had to have been made by fairies. Though the castle was now in a state of disrepair, and Catherine had been small when she first explored its hallways and rooms, she had understood then, and understood even better now, just how amazing that place was.
“The gardens there were once the most beautiful in the kingdom,” Nanny would then say, as the candle burned lower, and Catherine grew more enraptured. “Everything that could ever grow in a garden grew there: flowers of all sorts, carrots, lettuce, potatoes, vegetables the likes of which you’d never have seen. Fruit, too – extensive vines and lanes and lanes of trees with the most juicy, sweet fruit you had ever tasted, grew there as well.”
Of course, there was little left now. But sometimes, when the season had been particularly kind, Catherine would wander through the rows upon rows of decayed shrubs, the weeds that grew over tumbled stone walls like the spindly fingers of an insidious creature, and perhaps see some life. Then she would pace up and down the lanes of half-dead fruit trees, and see something fresh and good and wholesome hanging from one branch that yet survived, and she’d pluck it from the offering tree.
Catherine had fond memories of those special days, when she found an apple, or a peach, just sitting there, as if it had been waiting for her all along – just waiting for her to find it and pluck it from its branch. Pluck it and carefully, carefully slice it down the middle. Those moments were always amazing, the glow she felt when she saw the fruit, and the feeling of contentment that spread through her, like the soft, warm glow of a fire in winter. The fruit was always so sweet, it was like liquid honey on her tongue.
When she had eaten exactly one half, she would take the seeds that she had spat out and put them in one of her mother’s carefully embroidered handkerchiefs, and place the seeds in the middle. She would then fold the handkerchief and very purposefully put it in her pocket. It sat in her pocket, and Catherine always thought that it was not unlike having something precious and irreplaceable there.
That task done, she would take a few steps away from where she had found the fruit, and kneel down at a bare patch of ground. With care, Catherine would then dig a hole in the earth. Inside this hole went the other half of the fruit, before she filled it in with soil once more – gifted in the earth like a present to the trees, and the castle.
She always shared her fruit with that place; it always seemed the right thing to do, an instinct so tangible, it was as though someone had whispered it into her ear.
Catherine never questioned the thoughts and impulses that made her do such things, she just thought of it as sharing what was given her, and was happy to do so. And not knowing what a secret was, she never told anyone, because it just simply was.
Some days Catherine would stay hours and hours under the shade of the trees. There, she was undisturbed. At home there was always a flurry of activity, maids running up and down corridors, menservants carting furniture and rugs and the like in and out doors, her mother making the activity organised, busily arranging flowers and instructing men at the same time, ensuring that her next party went perfectly to plan. It was as busy as a beehive there, and the stillness of the gardens was as refreshing as the wind at sea.
When she lay there, under one of the trees, soaking in the silence as if it were the sweetest of perfumes, Catherine would imagine how it was before the castle was abandoned. She liked to picture the son of the King, how he enjoyed his gardens and his grand home, before it all fell to wreck and ruin. Catherine often supposed that the prince had loved his garden, and had shared it with the earth, just as she liked to do.
Maybe, in the past, there had been animals who had lived in the trees, and the bushes that were once so lovely. Was the prince friends with them? Catherine imagined he would let them rest on his shoulders and lap whenever he sat in the shade of a tree, or walked leisurely down a lane, and let them eat straight from his hands.
One day, after Catherine had spent an unusually long amount of time inside the abandoned castle, she turned to Nanny with a particularly serious look in her eyes.
“Why did the King’s son abandon the castle?” she asked as Nanny was darning a pair of stockings by the fire. The room was warm and welcoming, and Catherine felt drowsy.
Her nanny didn’t reply at first, and continued darning the stocking, the needle flashing every time the light of the fire hit the metal. Finally, she set the work down and looked Catherine in the eye, a familiar blaze burning behind her hazel-toned gaze. It was fiercer than a tiger’s stare, Catherine always thought secretly.
Ever since Catherine was small, she had known that her Nanny took everything with a particular gravity that seemed excessive to everyone else, even Catherine sometimes. The story of the castle was a particular one, and while no one else talked of it or paid it the smallest heed, Catherine’s Nanny was sensitive to its nature. She believed where others didn’t. Catherine remembered the time when the cook’s young boy had been playing in her father’s orchids, and had stepped on some of the plants that were to be entered into the local fair. He had claimed that he wasn’t the one who was to blame, but he was sorry for his friend, who had been the culprit. No one had believed in this imaginary friend, except for Nanny, who had looked the boy in the eye, and nodded. He escaped punishment after that, once Nanny was on his side. No one argued with Nanny.
“The castle wasn’t abandoned,” Nanny said now, with that special brand of conviction that was all her own. “Not in the way you think. The prince never abandoned his castle, but rather, the castle abandoned the world. It broke away from the world, locked itself away at the bottom of the hill, and never again let anyone inside its walls.
“Of course, people were puzzled at first. But they soon forgot about it, as people do over time. My family never forgot, because our ancestors had helped build the castle, and knowing the castle so intimately, couldn’t understand why it would lock itself away like that.”
“Why did the castle lock itself away?” Catherine knelt by Nanny’s feet, and stared up at her in wonder.
“I think it was because of a spell – or more likely, a curse.” Nanny’s voice was hushed, and she looked far-away as she said her next words. “The castle went through such a sudden change, that it had to have been a curse, you see. One day the prince was seen outside in his garden, the servants working happily at their tasks, and the next, they were all sent away and the castle was suddenly walled in, the prince never seen again.”
Catherine had been confused, and remained unsure long after her Nanny wished her goodnight and left her in bed. Walled in? The castle had never been walled in, she came and went as she pleased, and had never been barred entry because of a wall.
Perhaps it was the curse Nanny mentioned. Perhaps there was something she didn’t know, didn’t understand.
But, as it was their wont to do, the thoughts that plagued her that night as she drifted into slumber fell away, and Catherine forgot about the curse and the mysterious wall.
It was the following summer before Catherine remembered.
The weather was breathtaking, the air smelled sweet and fresh, and it seemed almost as though some colour had bloomed in the withering orchids of the castle’s grounds. As Catherine walked down one of the many lanes, she spotted some colour out of the corner of her eye. Surprised, and delighted, she saw the orange dangling from a tree’s branch.
As she always did, Catherine picked it from the tree and handled it with careful reverence. It was always a present, a treat, to be given such a spoil from the gardens of this place. The fruit sat in her hand like a ball, and when she brought it to her nose to smell, it was sweeter than cook’s Christmas cookies.
Smiling, she reached for the small knife she kept with her whenever she visited the castle – only, when she dug her hand into her pocket, the knife wasn’t there. Aghast, she searched all her pockets, but it was a fruitless search. She had left her knife at home, and saddened that she had to leave her refuge – even if only for a little while – Catherine put the orange in her pocket and trudged home to retrieve her knife.
She cut the orange as she walked back to the castle, wrapping the second half in her handkerchief and putting it in her pocket, so that she could eat her half. The seeds she kept, like always.
Catherine was beginning to feel better as she neared the castle again; being away was always hard for her, when she knew what it was like there. It was more of a home to her than her actual house, however absurd that sounded even to her own mind.
When the castle came into sight, Catherine came to an abrupt halt.
There was a wall.
It was as though someone had ripped the joy right out of her smile. Suddenly, once the shock passed, everything crumpled around her, and she was filled with a deep well of despair.
With a quick burst of speed, Catherine raced towards the wall and placed her hands upon the stone that had never been there before, and felt the rough, unyielding texture of it against her skin. It was so big, so tall, so encompassing. Unable to give up all hope, Catherine followed the wall as far as she could bear, and found no entrance. She knew, instinctively, that the wall surrounded the whole of the grounds – castle, orchids, trees and all.
She felt like she couldn’t breathe, and thinking was hard. What had happened? Why couldn’t she get in? It felt like everything she knew and loved had been taken away from her in one inexplicable moment.
Taking a few steps back, Catherine stared up at the wall. It was tall – too tall not to be part of a spell or a curse… just as Nanny had told her. Catherine felt like banging her head against the stone. Somehow, she had forgotten that the castle was more than just a castle, and now she was forbidden, kept away by this wall that looked like it was taller than any house or building she had ever seen. Catherine was sure that if a giant had stood beside it, even he couldn’t have climbed over it.
Tears welled in her eyes as she silently asked herself, why? What did she do, what was different about today that made this happen?
As she stared at the grey, pitted surface of the wall, she felt the weight in her pocket. With a sinking heart, Catherine reached into the pocket, and pulled out the orange half.
“No,” she whispered the word, let the wind steal it away and leave her bereft. “No, no, no!”
The orange – she had taken it from the garden, had taken the whole thing, and not just half, like always. She hadn’t shared it, had broken the tradition.
She was being punished for her forgetfulness, for her selfishness, for her bad manners. She’d broken the unspoken promise.
Catherine’s hands shook as she held the orange in the palm of her hands. “But I was coming right back. I was going to share it, like always…”
But the castle was unrelenting, merciless, and unforgiving. She had broken the silent promise. She’d gone against that silent word - and now, she was forever barred like… like everyone else. Nanny’s story came back to her, and she remembered now that she had been the only one who had never seen the wall…until now.
“I’m sorry!” she cried out. Nothing answered her but the faint echo of her own cry coming back to her.
Now with tears falling silently down her cheeks, Catherine walked right up to the wall and knelt beside it. Still crying, and holding the orange half in one hand, she dug a hole with the other.
She placed the orange half in the hole, and added her seeds for good measure, as well. Then she covered it over again with dirt. “I’m sorry,” she said again, but this time it was in the most gentle of sighs. She knew that giving the orange back now wasn’t enough for the castle to forgive her, but she did it anyway. It soothed her, somewhat, to give it back however she could.
Catherine placed her hand over the patch of earth, silently willing a tree to grow from the seeds and be beautiful, and as she did so, a tear fell from her eye, and sunk into the dirt.
When Catherine returned home that day, Nanny saw that something had happened, but Catherine did not feel like talking about it. The wound was still too raw. But, she had to know, was there anything she could do? Would Nanny know how to fix her mistake?
“Nanny,” Catherine said, before bed, as Nanny brushed her hair. “Has anyone ever gotten through the wall – the wall around the castle, do you know?”
Nanny finished brushing her hair, and started plaiting it with deft fingers. She smelt like hazelnuts, the same smell Catherine had known all her life with Nanny, and it was comforting to know that not everything had to change at once.
“The wall is a curse on the castle. It’s not meant to be entered.” Catherine thought she felt something like ice pierce her breast as she listened to Nanny’s words. “No one has ever gone through, Catherine.”
“Oh,”
“But,” Nanny continued, and handing Catherine the basin to wash her face, she smiled at her. “That does not mean no one ever will. Spells and curses can be broken, Catherine, it just takes a little while.”
Catherine came back the next day, even though everything was different now. When the wall came into sight, she felt like bursting into sobs, but refrained from doing so by sheer will. She had known it would be there, that nothing had changed, but still, the hope had been there.
Something had changed since the day before, however. When she reached the wall, she walked beside it, and happened upon the place where she had buried the orange half and seeds.
In all the years before, she had never again found the places where she had buried the fruit. She never questioned it, never wondered, until that moment.
She stood, staring at the small tree. Trees didn’t grow that fast. Already it was as tall as her waist, the little branches reaching up, as though it were making itself grow so that it could touch the sky.
Catherine was mystified. She couldn’t understand it, but for some reason, it made her heart, so heavy with the grief of losing her favourite place, lift. A new resolution hardened in her breast, shattering the ice there. This was her tree, and she would help it reach the sky.
Catherine came back every day after that, and tended to her orange tree. It blossomed and grew like no other tree she had ever met. It was magical, Catherine thought. It grew faster and taller than even the trees she planted with the seeds she saved every time she’d had some of the castle’s fruit.
Under her care, the tree reached ever higher for the sky, until one day, she couldn’t even see its tip. She thought it must be as tall as the wall itself, and smiled.
Her orange tree was beautiful.
She didn’t eat any of the fruit that the tree bore, she didn’t feel it her right, instead she collected all the fruit that fell from the tree, and cut each in half, and buried each half beside the wall. Soon, many orange trees were growing against the wall of the castle. But none ever grew as fast or reached as high as her tree, the one she first planted.
One sunny day, after planting more of the oranges under the beating rays of sun, Catherine sat under her orange tree and stared up its branches, trying to fathom where it ended. But today gave her no answers, just as the day before, and the day before that.
But… it suddenly occurred to her that the branches reminded her of a ladder, or perhaps stairs. Feeling better than she had in a long while, Catherine managed, with some difficulty, to clamber onto the first, lowest-hanging branch. The bark was hard under her bare feet, and the air was thick with the scent of the fruit hanging from the branches. Not wanting to stop there, Catherine climbed onto the next, and then up to the next one. The spacing of the branches seemed perfect for her height, and it was an effortless climb up each rung. Something was guiding her passage.
Before she quite knew what she was doing, Catherine had climbed further and further, until the ground was far behind her and she was higher up in the tree than she thought should have been possible.
And then… she reached the highest branch, level with the top of the wall. Her heart beating wildly, Catherine reached out and touched the stone of the wall. It was just as rough as the stone at the ground. The wind whisked past her, making her hair fly wildly, freely, behind her. She stared down at the castle, on the other side of the wall, so different and yet the same as it had been since the last time she’d seen it, before the wall appeared, and she felt suddenly at peace.
Catherine was coming home.
END PART I
A/N: The secrets thing might be a bit confusing, it really only becomes truly clear in meaning in the next part - it's all tied in with the castle and the curse.
