Golden Read Free Page B

“There’s no need for you to be sorry. You’re not the one who should apologize.”
    At this, she turned back to face the crowd.
    It’s hard to describe precisely what happened then. Later I realized that I had been given my first real glimpse of sorcery. As Melisande gazed upon them, many in the crowd cried out. Some fell to their knees and covered their faces with their hands, while others stood perfectly still, as if they had been turned to stone. In the end, though, they were all the same in one thing: Each and every one of them looked down.No person there assembled could hold the sorceress’s eyes with their own.
    Then she glanced down at me, and it seemed to me as if my heart would rise straight up out of my chest. All my fears were laid bare, and my hopes also. A voice in the back of my mind instructed me to look away or I would have no secrets left, but I did not. What had I to conceal? This was not some stranger, who saw only my own strangeness. This was the woman who had raised me since my birth. The only one I knew and trusted. This was Melisande.
    And so I held her eyes and did not look away. After a moment, she smiled. I smiled back, and at this, my heart resumed its proper place and all was right once more.
    â€œI thought so,” she said, as she turned back to the crowd. “This girl has more courage than any of you. Have no fear. We will not come amongst you again. But I think there will be many of you who will now come to seek me out.”
    Then she reached down for my hand, I reached up to place mine within hers, and, together, we made our way back through the crowd. It wasn’t until we were almost through it that anyone made a sound at all. And even then, it was just a single word muttered under the breath.
    â€œSorceress.”
    I stumbled, my feet abruptly growing clumsy, but Melisande’s footsteps never faltered at all, though she did stop walking.
    â€œFearmonger,” she replied. “Coward, I see what is in your heart. Be careful what you sow there, for it may prove to be your only harvest, and a bitter one at that.”
    She did not speak again until we reached our own door. But, though I stayed as silent as she, that single word,
sorceress,
rang in my head all the way home.

Three
    In the years that followed, some things changed.
    Others did not.
    The hair on Melisande’s head got a little longer and began to turn gray. I turned first nine, then ten, and finally, in their proper times and places, eleven, twelve, and thirteen, and all the while the top of my head stayed as bald as any egg I could find in our henhouse.
    I did blister it badly with sunburn the year I was ten, having refused to wear a kerchief or hat in a fit of pique over something I cannot now recall. But aside from that, it didn’t change a bit. Mine remained a head upon which no hair would grow.
    My eyes, however, functioned just fine, and I began to keep them peeled for additional signs of sorcery, watching Melisande when I was sure she didn’t notice (though of course she did—not because she was a sorceress but because she was a grown-up).
    She kept her eye on me; I wasn’t quite sure why. But I finally figured out that she undoubtedly saw me watching her, because I began to notice that
she
was watching
me
. Her face would take on a sort of considering expression from time to time, as if shewere weighing the image of me her eyes presented with one she was holding in her mind. Each and every time, at the precise moment I decided she had finally made up her mind to speak of whatever was in it, she looked away and said nothing at all.
    But the biggest change of all, I suppose, was that after that day in the town, we were no longer quite as alone as we had been before.
    Melisande had been quite right when she predicted that the fact that people knew there was a sorceress in their general vicinity would draw them to her, even if they were not always quite convinced