A Wish Made Of Glass by Ashlee Willis Read Free Book Online

broken pieces together in a frantic attempt to salvage them. Speaking, weeping, sharing this grief with her in this moment may destroy me. Blessing must see that I will not come to her because her lovely face distorts with tears and turns ugly for the first time since I have known her.
    She does not know. She does not understand. How can she? She was not the daughter who broke his heart. She was not his daughter at all.
    * * *
    A strange hollowness grips me in the following days. I pray it will relinquish its iron hold when Father and his wife are laid to rest. Yet after their bodies have been buried and prayed for andwept over, the emptiness is still there. I think it has come to stay. It has already chiseled out a corner of my heart for its nest, seeped into my bones to mix with the marrow.
    Hazel sings to me most nights and tells me all the old stories as my eyes stare at nothing. I know it is her way of pleading with me, of coaxing me from this shell she believes I am trapped within. What she cannot know is that I am helpless to come out of it. I would scream and rant if I thought it would help. But nothing can be the same now, and I cannot forget it was I who made it so. I begin to see Father’s face in my dreams, his dark eyes full of pleading sorrow. I remember, too, how I turned away from him time and again.
    Days turn to weeks. One night Hazel alights at last upon a tale which spreads light into a small corner of my mourning. It is a tale of the fey folk and, as she tells it, my old nurse’s voice is as soft as the moonlight that streams across my pillow.
    “There was once a young fey boy who loved a human girl,” it starts, and I begin already to sink into the warmth of this story. I let this one word,
loved
, spread its smooth balm through me as I have allowed nothing else to do for so long.
    Hazel’s voice drones on and my eyelids begin to grow heavy as the tale comes to an end.
    “She went to live with him in his country, in the fairy realm itself. She gave up everything for him, and when she arrived at her new home it was to discover he was none other than the fey prince himself. His royal cloak was made of fireflies, his crown woven with sunbeams. Though he was glorious, the girl knew she would not have cared if he had been the humblest of servants in the fey kingdom. Her love for him burned bright and forever. It made her the perfect princess of the fey, and they ruled together for age upon age.”
    I hear the words of the story, but they are mere sound washing against my ears, for sleep holds me in his arms already. I give up the fight and allow his sweet, dark hands to pull me down.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Autumn is so slow to seep into the North country that I do not notice summer leaving until it is gone altogether. I am not sorry to see it go. It held only heartache for me.
    I return to the wood, the only place I have ever felt truly at home in this land. My feet find the hidden pathways day after day, and each step I take puts a tiny piece of my heart back into place. Rich colors sing all around. The forest’s cloak is flushed with crimson and gold and green. I cannot help but reach out and touch it.
    I run my hand along a low-hanging branch as I pass beneath its sweep. The leaf I pluck is whorled with color. Its surface is smooth beneath my fingertips. My lips curve upward. It is the first time I have smiled in an age.
    Sadness chases it from my face in the next instant.
    The sun sinks beneath the rim of the world, and the forest is hungry to soak in the last of its rosy glow. I grow still in these brief moments of in-between, and clasp my hands in something nearing reverence.
    “Nothing dies as beautifully as autumn,” I breathe, arching my neck to gaze upward.
    The leaves on every branch shiver as if acknowledging my words, then give up the last of their colors to the descending night. Sunlight snuffs out like a candle and in mere seconds I am left in the dark. I had forgotten this is the night of the