CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“O COME TO ME”

Later that day, the Princess Rÿna was playing house with her dolls in the Hanging Garden. The weather was perfect, the air warm and clear, with a breeze wafting through the trees, just strong enough to keep the earth from becoming overheated. She had seated her many playmates in three rows, all looking up at the central keep of Tighrishály Palace.

“It’s almost time,” she noted, and took her own seat of honor among them.

She gazed up at the Tower of Glass, so called be­cause several of the windows at the top featured colored panes, a rarity in such structures. Rÿna had visited the tower a number of times in recent years, making the long, winding climb to the top to see the Silver Bird, a robin sculpted by the great artist Rüssadir as if it was about to take flight. Why he had used the image of a robin, and for what purpose the image had been commissioned, and why it was posed in that position, no one really knew. He was known to have created many enigmatic works of art, and to have left them scattered at many different locations for the hoi polloi to admire.

At the very top of the tower was an open platform from which one could observe the sights of the city, espe­cially at night. Now there appeared a woman dressed all in white, her pale face lifted up to the faint daytime image of the crescent moon. She climbed onto the lip of the low stone railing, and danced around the edge, singing merrily of youth and lost love and the tragedy of life. At one point she stopped, stripped off her shift, and let it drop over the edge. It twisted and turned in gay abandon as it drifted ever lower, a sprite upon the wind, like a ghost suddenly becoming visible where none had been before.

The woman’s naked body gleamed brightly in the late afternoon sunlight. Rÿna thought she saw an aura of gold developing around it. She knew suddenly how to reach out with her own mind, and she touched the woman’s pretty eyes and face. The gold ring on her finger glowed red.

“Come to me,” the girl whispered, gently blowing the words one at a time into the air.

“O come to me,” she said, watching them drift away on the wind.

And still the woman danced, ever faster, ever more frenzied, ’round and ’round the lip of the tower, until she abruptly twirled to a stop, right on the edge, shaking with laughter, her glorious hair a-tousle, just above the point where Rÿna and her friends watched.

“You are my chorus!” the woman cried. “You are my jury! You are my glory!

“O whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lass,” she added.

“Come to me,” Rÿna said, putting her lips together and blowing.

And so she did.