A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham Read Free Book Online

daughter to be irresistible?) that he’ll forget about the absurd straw-into-gold story, after he’s seen the pale grace of the girl’s neck; after she’s aimed that smile at him; after he’s heard the sweet clarinet tone of her soft but surprisingly sonorous voice.
    The miller apparently was unable to imagine all the pale-necked, shyly smiling girls the king has met already. Like most fathers, it’s inconceivable to him that his daughter may not be singular; that she may be lovely and funny and smart, but not so much more so as to obliterate all the other contending girls.
    The miller, poor foolish doting father that he is, never expected his daughter to get locked into a room full of straw, and commanded to spin it all into gold by morning, any more than most fathers expect their daughters to be un-sought-after by boys, or rejected by colleges, or abused by the men they eventually marry. Such notions don’t appear on the spectrum of paternal possibility.
    It gets worse.
    The king, who really hates being fooled, announces, from the doorway of the cellar room filled with straw, that if the girl hasn’t spun it all into gold by morning, he’ll have her executed.
    What? Wait a minute …
    The miller starts to confess, to beg forgiveness. He was joking; no, he was sinfully proud, he wanted his daughter to meet the king, he was worried about her future; I mean, your majesty, you can’t be thinking of killing her …
    The king looks glacially at the miller, has a guard escort him away, and withdraws, locking the door behind him.
    Here’s where you come in.
    You’re descended from a long line of minor wizards. Your people have, for generations, been able to summon rain, exorcise poltergeists, find lost wedding rings.
    No one in the family, not over the last few centuries at any rate, has thought of making a living at it. It’s not … respectable. It smells of desperation. And—as is the way with spells and conjurings—it’s not one hundred percent reliable. It’s an art, not a science. Who wants to refund a farmer’s money as he stands destitute in his still-parched fields? Who wants to say, I’m sorry, it works most of the time , to the elderly couple who still hear cackles of laughter coming from under their mattress, whose cutlery still jumps up from the dinner table and flies around the room?
    When you hear the story about the girl who can supposedly spin straw into gold (it’s the talk of the kingdom), you don’t immediately think, This might be a way for me to get a child. That would be too many steps down the line for most people, and you, though you have a potent heart and ferocity of intention, are not a particularly serious thinker. You work more from instinct. It’s instinct, then, that tells you, Help this girl, good might come of it. Maybe simply because you, and you alone, have something to offer her. You who’ve never before had much to offer any of the girls who passed by, laughing with their boyfriends, leaving traces of perfume in their wake; perfume and powder and a quickening of the air they so recently occupied.
    Spinning straw into gold is beyond your current capabilities, but not necessarily impossible to learn. There are ancient texts. There’s your Aunt Farfalee, older than some of the texts but still alive, as far as you know; the only truly gifted member of your ragtag cohort, who are more generally prone to making rats speak in Flemish, or summoning beetles out of other people’s Christmas pies.
    *   *   *
    Castles are easy to penetrate. Most people don’t know that; most people think of them as fortified, impregnable. Castles, however, have been remodeled and revised, over and over again, by countless generations. There was the child-king who insisted on secret passageways, with peepholes that opened through the eyes of the ancestral portraits. There was the