Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy Read Free Page A

with the role. When my mother and I came home, it was well after dark and she thought we were safe. But there was the Great Wizard sitting at our small kitchen table, waiting.
    “He is the one,” he said.
    “How do you know?” said my mother, who wasn’t shy of a fight.
    You might think wizards are always casting spells and stirring cauldrons and changing tin into gold, and it’s true that sometimes they do, but mostly they are known for their trances and their thinking and their staring ahead until the future comes swimming into view. They can see the future in puddles and in dewdrops and sometimes even in shiny spoons.
    “Because it has been seen,” sighed the wizard. “And because he is so good. The Snow Queen will desire him, and he will lead her away from here to the other realm. And once there he will destroy her.”
    Good
.
    Not brave or strong or super.
    These were the traits the town folk thought the decision should have been based upon. But it was because I was
good
. Well, they didn’t like that. And no amount of explaining settled them down for some time.
    “The Snow Queen likes more than anything else to destroy good things,” the wizards explained. “She likes good things to become bad things, bad things to become sad things, sad things to become eternally frozen things.”
    But the town folk soon forgot. It was still summer, you see,and the threat of an invasion from the north seemed impossible. The wheat was waving golden in the fields and the roses were as big as dinner plates.
    “You’re just an ordinary boy,” my mother muttered as she got me ready for my first day of education in the wizard house. “You don’t know the first thing about swords and journeys. And you’re bone lazy and always forgetting things.”
    Yet she deposited me at the door of the wizard house and tried not to cry. She brushed down my hair with her hands, and told me to be good and listen to what was being taught.
    They took my name. That was the first thing they did. They took it from me with a spell, and one of the young wizard apprentices grabbed it and placed it in a scruffy velvet box.
    Now, you might say this is impossible, but only because you have never had your name taken. The King himself could not believe it when I arrived here. He told me many times that all I had to do was sit down in a quiet place and think hard about it. But no amount of thinking could get my name back. In my mind there was nothing but a clean space, like a freshly painted wall. And it was the same for everyone else who knew me—my mother, for instance, when she came to collect me in the afternoon. She went to say my name and stopped, and tears filled up her eyes.
    And you might think a name is just a name, nothing but a word, but that is not the case. Your name is tacked to you. Where it has joined you, it has seeped into your skin and into your essence and into your soul. So when they plucked myname from me with their spell, it was as heavy as a rock in their hands but as invisible as the wind, and it wasn’t just the memory of my name, but me myself. A tiny part of me that they took and stored away.
    It was hoped that if they kept that part of me when I crossed to the other world, then they would be able to help me back again. But they weren’t very sure. No one had been that way for a long time.
    When I realized my name was gone, I was angry as a wild boar. I stamped around in the upstairs school, which was just a bare room with a wooden floor and no seat and no table. I was made to stand there for hours and hours. I was made to listen to their lessons, which were all about being polite and standing still and listening to trees and about nothing magical at all. That first day I banged on the walls. I shouted, “Give me my name back!”
    The Great Wizard himself came and told me to stop making a racket. Wizards don’t much like noise, you see. Regarding the name, the Great Wizard said in his slow, calm voice, “Well, you’ll