Part XI: LIVIA

The servant ushered me into her rooms, and backed out bowing. He was afraid of her. Everyone was afraid of her.

She stood there, ramrod straight, staring at me. She closed her eyes briefly, as if remembering something or someone, then, opening them, stared again.

“Sit down,” she said.

“I’d rather stand.”

“Hmph,” she said. And then, “Where’s the rat?”

“He’s a lemur.”

“Rat, lemur,” she shrugged. “What’s the difference? The point it, he’s alive.”

“Yes.”

“She had one, too, you know. Did you know that? An animal…companion. A dog. He was gone before you were born, of course. He looked at me one night the same way as this one did just now.”

I was silent at that. It didn’t seem to call for a response.

“She was your mother, wasn’t she? Lily, I mean.”

I was still. She looked at me more reflectively now.

“Yes, I see it. You have my height, my hair, my beak of a nose. But her coloring. Brown. She was very brown. Not like the other one.”

By which she must have meant Rowena.

“But those feet!” she said, pointing. “Those never came from our side of the family.” Here she gave a snort of laughter.

I answered this, though I was pretty sure by now that she knew more about it than I did.

“A curse,” I suggested.

She gave a sharp laugh again. “A curse!” she said. “Fine curse that sets you on your true way. We should all be so lucky to be so cursed.” She sat on the open-backed bench set against the window, and grasped one of the dragon’s head armrests with both hands, leaning back against the glass.

“I do wish you would sit down,” she complained.

This time I obeyed, sitting on a turquoise velvet hassock at her feet, looking up at her.

“Wasn’t it a curse?” I asked, intensely interested now.

“A curse, Missy, comes from those who hate you and wish you ill. Your…er…costume for let’s not call it deformity, shall we?…has all the signs of being the work of someone who cared very much what would happen to you.”

I thought of Will the Murderer, who has become, since the time of the Lizard Princess, Wilder the Bard, the historian of Arcadia, and I knew she was right. Will would never wish me harm.

But here was the mystery: what gift had he intended?

“If you want a good curse, my girl, you come to me.” She gave another one of her short laughs.

“Do you hate me then?” I asked, more curious than frightened.

She shrugged. “Hate, love…it’s all the same to me. I left those opposites behind me long ago. There is only one opposition left to me, Missy. Only one goal.”

In spite of my silent vow to myself before I entered her rooms that nothing she said or did would frighten me, this made me catch my breath. For I knew what she meant. And it quite rightly frightened me.

She watched closely, and gave a small nod of satisfaction. “And what is that goal? Drat it, I’ve forgotten your name. What did she call you, that mother of yours?”

“Sophia.”

“Ah yes. Princess Sophia of Arcadia. Known throughout the universes by her secret name: Snow.”

Now I did shiver in earnest. What did she mean, my “secret name”? What did she mean, “known throughout the universes”? And how had she known that childish nickname of mine?

“Don’t look like that. I knew far more than anyone ever takes me for—more important, I remember far more. But tell me: what is your guess? What is my goal?”

I was silent again, struggling with my own terror at the enormity of the answer that came to me, like a bubble rising up from the depths.

“The One. You are in opposition to the One.” I looked around myself in horror lest someone else had heard.

Her cracked marble blue eyes shot sparks of satisfaction, and her thin mouth (so like my father’s, so unlike the generously crooked one of Joe’s, or the wide one of my mother’s, the mouth I have inherited) gave a tight little smile.

“That’s right,” she said. “Your grandmother, my dear, is not just a common witch. She is the Devil himself. How does that strike you, eh?”

I couldn’t answer. It had come too suddenly, this truth, like a jolt of a too strong drug injected into my innocent system, like a lightning bolt that struck the top of my head. It wasn’t as if I fainted, more as if all the nerves in my human and lizard bodies went into overload with the terrifying information.

I must have toppled over onto the floor. All I remember about the end of that first meeting is a flash of light, like an illumination from within, blinding me. For a while after that, I knew nothing more.

It wasn’t fear that made me faint. No, even though my grandmother is, it’s true, a most fearsome being. It wasn’t terror. It was an electric surge of recognition that simply overloaded my body, causing it to collapse, focusing all its energy inward to parse the information received.

What information? That part of my ancestry was the Devil. And not just mine alone. But Joe’s as well.

We don’t really have a strong tradition of the Devil in Arcadia. By which I mean, an idea of a Being that exists solely for evil and destructive purposes, hating humankind, hating the One from which everything is continuously born. Our beliefs are milder, softer. Tragedy is a fact of life to us, something to be mourned; it is not the sign of Evil in the universe. Death is powerful, but she is not our enemy. We are frightened of her, but we recognize, in our everyday lives and in our communal gatherings, that our fear is only our own weakness, our own partial blindness.

In Arcadia, the Devil would not be thought identical with Death. These are separate entities. The Devil in Arcadian theology tends to be a figure of fun. Children dress up in silly costumes representing him on our festival of The Devas, which celebrates the nature spirits who act in partnership with us to bring the harvest. This festival, one of my favorites, takes place on the first full moon after the autumn equinox, when the first chill of winter reminds us to be merry, and to gather up what we can for winter.

Even then, though, the Devil is not regarded as a cause of crop blight, or livestock death, or difficulties in life of any kind. These are part and parcel of our year; we do our best to allow for them and to make sure that they don’t fall disproportionately on one family or another. No, the Devil, in Arcadia, is an almost forgotten bogey used to frighten children. Though he doesn’t frighten them. And this is a fatal Arcadian flaw.

For I know he should. He should frighten them very much, children and adults.

In Arcadia, we don’t accept that Evil exists, and this is our blindness, our own form of arrogance and vanity. Evil, to an Arcadian, is simply the absence of Good. But I know that this is wrong, even cowardly, a denial of an enormous fact of the universes. Our denial labels us as children still, even though we think of ourselves as adults, for it is similar to the way a child thinks hiding her head in the bedclothes will change a danger that threatens her from without.

In Megalopolis, things are differently arranged. I will not say better arranged—my own opinion is that they could hardly be worse. Still, there are things we Arcadians could learn from that great empire.

In Megalopolis, Death is the enemy. Even more than the Devil…at least, when she is separated from him in the Megalopolitan mind. More often, though, Death is confused there with Evil, and much valuable energy is wasted in futile battles with her in this guise. To Arcadians, this is as if you were to attack a country potentially your ally, mistaking its strength for enmity, while your true enemy, pretending to be your friend, wreaks havoc from within.

Nevertheless, while the Megalopolitan image of Death is, in the Arcadian view, not just wrong, but potentially ruinous, its concept of a principle of active Evil opposed to active Good is one we can learn from. As long as we learn creatively. Only if we can transform the symbol into another larger, more generous one.

As for the symbol of the Devil, it was embodied here in the form of my grandmother. I found it particularly horrible that the Devil should have taken the form of a woman. To have the Devil now appear as one of my own sex, let alone my ancestress, was awful. That she was a woman and my own grandmother!

But what were the possibilities for women in Megalopolis? I thought of poor Rowena, her character as constricted as her bound waist and feet. The servants, the slaves. The preyed-upon girls of the Ruined Surface. Susan, my noble Susan, patiently, step by difficult step, trying to find another way.

Livia triumphing, isolated, over all.

“When you tell people your lies,” I said wonderingly in one of those dialogues—those duels—we had after that first meeting, “how can you be sure they will believe them?” For she had lectured me that evening on a ruler’s duties. The main obligation, she said, of a ruler to the ruled is to tell them the lies that will make it easier to rule.

Grandmother looked at me sideways with malicious smugness, and sipped at her tea. She seemed to be waiting for me to say more, but I had already learned that to blunder into one of Grandmother’s silences was to admit weakness. After a while, a brief shadow of annoyance crossed her face, and she said, “You’re missing one piece.”

I looked my question rather than asked it, and at that she laughed straight out as if acknowledging a hit. And I must say that Livia, my grandmother, was fearfully engaging in those moments where she seemed to float above the rest of us, buoyed by her lighthearted, malicious charm.

She threw up her hands and laughed, as if to say, “You’ve won that battle, Granddaughter, well done!” And she said reflectively, “A person, a people, a country, a world will believe any lie you tell them, under one condition.”

I arched an eyebrow in inquiry, but by now I knew what was coming. So when she arched her eyebrow to match mine, I threw up my hands in mock defeat, and said, “I know. You can tell any lie and have it believed if the person…the people…the country…the world you tell the lie to want to believe it’s true.”

Livia beamed at me. “You are much more like me than you know,” she said confidingly. “Your father could never have reached that kind of subtlety on his own.”

“And my mother?”

“Ah. Lily. (Did you know she wasn’t always Lily? No? Well, we’ll hold that story for another time.) No, your mother was too good, too true…too good to be true, if you like…to imagine an answer such as the one you’ve given. No, your mother believed in absolute innocence; that was her flaw. She had come from a place that believed in absolute guilt, and so she rejected that and went too far in the opposing direction. For Lily herself was not as innocent as she believed.”

At this, Grandmother stood up and stretched, rubbing her lower back, looking out of the star window, for we talked, this evening, in the inner chamber of her rooms, where no one else was allowed. This was the only window I had seen on the whole of the False Moon that looked out onto the unimproved lands, the desolate reality, and past that, to the star-ridden sky, that a viewer inevitably yearned toward, past the nullity of the landscape beyond the False Front of the False Moon. From here there was a view of the Moon Itself, shining across the faint sight of a strange silvery gleam. And the view beyond the Moon Itself was such as you could have nowhere else on the False Moon. Of the universe stretching out into eternity, of stars near and far, of comets streaking, worlds dying thousands of years before we were able to see their light.

Livia claimed dominion over it all. But I…I was not so sure.

She looked out toward the bright bursts of light in the dark sky. “You see those stars, Sophy?” I went and stood beside her, and she put her arm around my waist. I didn’t resist—she was my grandmother, after all, even if she was also the Devil Himself. I had known her long enough to know there was much truth in what she said. I was indeed like her. More like her, I was forced to admit, than like my beautiful, idealistic mother, or my feckless, charming and affectionate father.

“I see those stars, Grandmother,” I said, and I put my arms affectionately around her thin waist in return.

“Your mother could only see those stars. Lily couldn’t see the darkness they rose out of. She couldn’t see they would have no light without the darkness behind them.”

I nodded, for I saw the truth in what she said.

I know now that it was a half-truth, but this has taken me a lifetime to discover. The other half is this: if the entirety of the sky were flooded with light, there would be no need for the stars to shine. But this is not a young woman’s thought.

“Everything is a partnership, Sophy,” my grandmother said thoughtfully, and I started in amazement to hear it—this sentence I had heard so often from my mother, and from Devindra, too. “The partnership of woman and man, of truth and fiction, of the darkness and the stars.”

But then she went on. “Most people are too dull, too stupid, too ignorant to understand this. The universe as it truly is, that is beyond them, and will be beyond them to the end of time.”

At this her face darkened, and her eyes shone like angry stars. “That is what She will never understand. She believes a creature as contemptible as man can raise his consciousness up to where he sees reality as it really is.”

I didn’t have to ask who Livia meant by “She.” I knew this inadequate word was meant to encompass the One, who is neither “He” nor “She,” but both, in an eternal dance that we, so blind, can only see one half of at a time.

“You can’t lie to them about just anything,” Grandmother said absently, returning to her original topic. “It has to be something the fools want to believe. But if you stick to that—to lies they wish were true—you can make people do just about anything you want.”

“What if what I want, Grandmother,” I said softly, “is that the others should work with me to understand the truth of things? And working together, to learn how to restore the world to the garden I believe that it once was.”

I took my arm from her waist and reached out to touch the star window’s glass.

Livia looked at me, eyes narrowing, and gave her magnificent head a toss. “What do you think, Granddaughter?” she said, her voice harshly contemptuous. “Do you think the little fools you live among could ever achieve such a…,” here she sneered, “lofty goal?”

“I think that we have no deep desire that cannot, after many lifetimes, be fulfilled. And my deepest desire, Grandmother, is this….” Here I took a deep breath, for I knew what the inevitable response would be. “My wish is for the world to be the garden it can be. Not as it was (and I don’t know what it was, if it ever was such a thing), but the garden it could be, tended by ourselves fully conscious of our methods and our goals.”

She stared at me then, and the malignant cloud that had been gathering around her as I spoke flowed into her eyes. I knew she hated me in that moment (and what a thing to be hated by the Devil!), she who had been so proud of me a few moments before. I shuddered, but then defiance straightened my back. Was I not the Lizard Princess, whose warm blood mingled with cold?

“And what goal is that, granddaughter?” she said dryly.

“Joy.”

At this, I heard a timid scratching at the door, and I went and opened it. Leef scampered in. I bent down and he swarmed up my arm, staring with his round eyes at Livia, who he had always seen more clearly than I.

“Joy,” she spat contemptuously. “What a stupid, piddling goal for a granddaughter of mine to have.”

She turned on her heel and stalked to the opposite side of the room, where a wall lay curtained. She pulled the shade, and revealed the False Moon’s False Front—that sterile, airless pleasure ground with its inhabitants grimly giving themselves up to lifeless pleasures.

“Joy,” she repeated with a kind of glittering relish. “You think any of those”—she pointed as she spat the word—“understand the first part of what you mean by that word?”

We stood and looked out at the doomed landscape, at the laughter on faces that was nothing but a contorted imitation of the real thing, at the misplaced gestures meant to indicate enjoyment, at the artificial aids set to mimic a fool’s idea of a ‘good time.’

The three of us watched all this in silence, a silence like a challenge from the universe itself to the three of us: Livia. Leef. And the Lizard Princess.

“Well, granddaughter?” Livia said, and her tone was a threat.

Leef cried out in distress.

“Joy,” I said firmly. “Life that knows Death. Death that follows Life. Seasons felt in depth. Changes flowing in and out again. Joy.”

And Leef spoke now in his small, squeaky, determined voice, “Who can tell the dancer from the dance?” he said quietly, and I knew by the strangeness of his tone that he quoted poetry from another world.

“If this is so,” Livia said dreadfully. “Then we are enemies, you and I.”

“No, Grandmother,” I said firmly, for I knew I spoke the truth. “Not enemies. Friends. Partners. Family.”

But she shook her head, her eyes bleary, her shoulders stooped, and she said, “No. Not as long as your heart is set on a fool’s project.”

I didn’t give up. “Really, is that what you want, Grandmother? Do we have to be enemies?” I ignored the frightened cheeps of Leef, who clearly thought me wrong to give her the last word in this argument.

Maybe I was wrong. But I wanted to be sure. I wanted to know that I’d left no tactic untried. This was my arrogance, my vanity. It amuses me to think of it now: that in my youth, as the Lizard Princess, I thought it possible for me to bring joy into the world. For this is not something that can be done by a single hero, or even a string of heroes, one after the other. This is only something that can be done by the heartfelt wish of every human being. In a world so often mean, ignorant, and heartless, how is this to be achieved? Maybe the most that can be achieved is for those who love joy to practice it, in and out of season. And maybe that was why I insisted on reaching out now to my grandmother…my family.

She looked at me with a rapidly aging ferocity—this change to her features from a collected elegance to malevolent decrepitude was perhaps the most frightening sight I had experienced on the surface of the False Moon.

I looked at her, and my fright dissolved, and transformed into a kind of pity. How lonely for grandmother, I thought, in a sudden rush of true feeling. That she would push her own granddaughter away—the only person, perhaps, in the immensity of the universe, to understand what she had to say. What she was.

It was that pity I felt for her that changed everything. But not at first.

She whispered, “Yes. It must be so.”

I let her have the last word, then. And I turned, Leef clinging to my shoulder, and walked out the door. As I went, I heard her hiss behind me, “Enemiessss…enemies…sssssss….”

Frantic, in my ear, Leef said, “Don’t turn around.”

But I had no need to turn to get one last glimpse, that first evening we spent together as grandmother and granddaughter (for despite what we both thought, there were to be many more). There was a mirror on the other side of the door, and in that mirror I could see Livia transform into an enormous, coiling, emerald-green snake.

“I come by my heritage honestly,” I said to Leef as we walked down the corridor. My heart was strangely lightened, my step firm, and it seemed to me that many things that had been obscure would become clear to me now.

Livia was not only my enemy. We were kin, she and I.

She was my grandmother. In this form, and who knew in how many others? When we met again, in the false daylight of the False Moon, she saw I understood this, and I saw, by the intelligent cruelty of her eye, that she understood it too.

No one else could pierce that understanding, that bond between us. No one else could see what we could see in each other: we two, the Snake Queen and the Lizard Princess.

This bond was a comfort, not a menace. I was no longer alone. Even with Joe I had felt a barrier, over which he could not see clearly into my soul.

But with Grandmother there was no such barrier. Like called to like, whether she and I liked it or not. I could see she was everything I hated and had been taught to hate: she was power-mad, the world to her was an object only fit for her manipulation. I could see she would shrink from no cruelty, no torture, no separation of mother from child, no misbegotten act, from nothing in order to have her own way. She was everything I had learned not to be.

And yet, in that realization, I felt neither afraid nor horrified.

No. To my surprise, I felt nothing but exhilaration. Now I knew from where had come my lizard half. It was an honorable descent. For the first time since that fatal moment back in my childish home in Arcadia (how far away! how long ago it seemed!), that moment when I had let Will the Murderer win a game I should have won myself in fair play, I felt at peace. More peaceful, even, than I had felt with Joe in the Enchanted Wood and the Bower of Bliss. More than with Susan by the Marsh.

As with Joe and with Susan, now with Livia I knew, in my heart, that my time on the False Moon was running out.

I looked thoughtfully at her when we met as she walked with the Council of Four around the False Lake, conferring on the policies of state, while I shepherded my brood of half-children in the other direction. She looked back, with a sharp, unblinking eye.

I laughed out loud.

“Who was that?” one of the Council said in a high-pitched voice. Livia said something in a low tone, and called to a servant, who followed me and the children until we came to the small play area, where he quietly told me that Livia hoped to see me in her rooms that night. I nodded. For now that I knew it was time for me to move on, I would strangely cherish those moments we spent together: she haranguing me; my taking in all that she had to give me, Devil or no.

A profound difficulty now confronted me. As Grandmother became more and more open about the intense interest she felt in the obscure marshland nanny, I watched my image change in the eyes of those around me. When I was nothing but a shadow, a simulacrum (and Leef along with me), whose only function was to serve, no one noticed me. But it was plain to everyone around me that Grandmother, she who scorned the highest of the high, she who had the Council of Four at her beck and call, had taken an interest in me. The walks we took together in the Jeweled Garden, her arm resting on mine; the questions she asked intently, attending to my answers—all of this was observed by her inferiors.

This was very dangerous. It is far more dangerous to be an object of envy, as I was fast becoming, than to be one of scorn.

My time was running out there on the False Moon. I had wasted time. I hadn’t found word of either Joe or the Key, though I tried to coax news of them both out of Livia.

“Where is Joe, do you know?” I asked one evening in a casual voice. For to show how much I cared about the answer more would have been to give her another hold on me.

She looked at me craftily and took another sip of tea.

“Joe? Hhmmm. Let’s see. Of course he’s your brother, you’ll want to meet him, won’t you? I’m afraid he’s not here. He never liked the False Moon, more fool him. I believe he’s off on a quest.” She gave me a long, satirical stare. “I believe he has gone in search of the Key.” This was said blandly. It was the first mention of the Key between us.

I wasn’t fooled by her tone. And I told her so.

Her face darkened and her open hand clenched slowly shut. “Don’t be impertinent, Missy.” She said, in a voice of forced casualness that told me more about its importance than anything else might have, “We need it of course.”

“Why?” I asked, and she looked annoyed.

“For our survival,” she snapped. “If you must know.” And with that, she rang for one of her frightened servants to escort me back to my room. She refused to say anything more that night.

But she had said more than she meant to. And in my anxiety about the time I saw slipping away from me there on the False Moon, so had I. Our meetings had shaken us, the affection we grudgingly felt for each other, and a bridge of feeling sprang up between us. I felt…open to her. She was my grandmother. I came from the same river as she. Her traits, her fate, flowed into mine.

Because I was open to her, I now realize at the start of my own old age, I flowed back into her as well. And this was to have strange repercussions later on.

I was a mass of inchoate feeling, conflicted and confused. Who was I? Who did I love? What was I meant to do? I know now that when this happens—when one day you know quite plainly who you are and what you are meant for, and then it hides itself away again—this means you are on the verge of another discovery that will send you plunging on to your goal.

I said good night to Livia. She made no attempt to embrace me, which was strange, for it had become our custom to put our arms stiffly around each other in greeting and in parting. She stood there, leaning on her ebony cane, her back to the vast window that framed the stars outside the False Moon, her eyes gleaming in the dark.

Neither of us, having acknowledged each other, would ever be the same again. For that is the way of it when you open yourself to someone and they to you. The boundaries shift, the river changes course, the familiar landscape disappears and returns in a new form.

We were connected. It was the image of the Key that, rising up between us, brought us together again.

With Leef curled up against my arm, I lay, that night, open-eyed, feeling I would never sleep again, electrified as I was by the connection. It was in this state that I passed into the kind of sleep where the sleeper falsely believes herself to be wide awake.

I dreamed. They were dreams of real places, with real friends and enemies, even if unknown to me in waking life. I dreamed—it was as if I were there, but wrapped in a cloud of unknowing, so that all outlines were blurred, and all sound muted.

It was a desert I stood in, in that dream. A parched, howling place, where some horrible deed had recently taken place, some massacre of innocents. There was a feeling of dread all around me, but mingled with an opposing feeling of strong determination that the fear be met. My body felt heavy, my arms reached to the ground, and one of them tapped at it, pushing dust away in a cloud. There was a heaviness between my eyes.

Livia was there. Livia—but, at the same time, not Livia at all. Livia in another guise, in the form of a young man, beautiful, arrogant, angry. With her same blue eyes.

Lily, my mother, was there, but a younger Lily than I had known, a girl. Like me, not yet a queen.

A voice said, “Father of Lies, Father of Lies from the beginning.” I knew that voice, but from where? It was the voice of the Centaur, and I tried to turn my head to greet him—something odd about my neck making the maneuver difficult—but the speaker stepped forward, and I saw, not the Centaur, but, of all things, a silly plush-stuffed bear.

Then I heard myself say this:

“There have been times when the Weak have conquered the Strong, oh Prince! There have been many such times.” I grabbed at the ground again with one hand, and something glittered there, as if all my fingers had fused and turned to silver. Like hooves. As if my hands were silver hooves.

I must have cried out in my sleep, for Leef, weak as he was—for he had been weakening steadily there on the False Moon—tapped me gently on the chest till I woke. When he saw he’d woken me, he looked into my eyes by the light of the full Moon Itself, then curled gently up against my shoulder and fell back to sleep himself.

As for me, I lay awake till the False Dawn, pondering my dream.

It was only later that day I realized why it was familiar, when I read to Gilda from a children’s book I had found in the library. The one that was her favorite.

I had discovered it originally in the dustiest reaches of the children’s library, a silly tale of an ugly, snotty little boy. It looked unpromising, but nevertheless I brought it, in a stack of others, back to the nursery to let Gilda choose. To my surprise, out of all the other books, she lit upon that one. It was leather and gilt bound, the gold tarnished, the leather torn.

It was her favorite book. She had come to know it by heart. “Snotty Saves the Day.” Horrible title, I thought, but Gilda was entranced by it, by Snotty’s falling down a rabbit hole, by his meeting with the pony—the unicorn, rather!—named Snowflake, his demi-god status with an army of Gnomes, his capture by a Teddy Bear Army, his discovery of who he truly was.

I found this last the only truly moving portion of what otherwise seemed a fairly childish book. Snotty (how I hated that name) discovers who he truly is…and that discovery changes his world.

I would read, watching Gilda for the first signs of drowsiness; once she had fallen into peaceful sleep, I would quietly close the book and steal away. I sometimes caught Leef looking at me sharply from behind his hooded eyes, which had lately, to my great worry, begun to film and darken. Seeing my look, he would turn away and pretend to busy himself: performing a somersault, which he found harder and harder to do as time went on, or eating an apple, which he did with less and less relish.

During one evening’s bedtime story, as I droned through the familiar part where Snotty realizes he has always been, not a snotty little boy, but a loving little girl, something tugged furiously at me. Gilda had by now fallen softly asleep, and my own voice slowed as I read aloud, “Snotty cried. She cried and cried. Sobs poured out of her. Her face twisted and quivered, and her nose ran with snot. She choked. She gagged. And still…” My voice faltered. I looked up. Leef, weaker than he had been that morning, stared at me, unblinking.

I started the sentence anew. I could feel him willing it.

“And still Lily cried.”

I shut the book and stared back at my lemur. “My mother,” I murmured. Closing his eyes as if with relief from some long held pain, he nodded.

I looked down at the book in my hands and knew, in a flash, that I held my mother’s very history. More. My own.

“My mother,” I said again softly. And after a moment, Leef opened his eyes and said, in his quiet way, “Yes, Snow.”

Snow. I was Snow. And Star, the angel….

I looked back at the page. Snotty realizes who he is while holding the Key, it said. The Key! Why had I never noticed the Key in this story before?

What did it mean?

It rushed on me suddenly, overwhelming, a whole new world, a whole new system, a whole new way of seeing. I put the book down, bent over Gilda, brushing her hair out of her closed eyes, kissing her forehead, and then, leaving the fairy tale behind, I lifted the weak, tired Leef onto my shoulder, my mind a roar of confusion, my legs buckling beneath me.

I went back to my own room, barely able to walk, and collapsed on the bed, immediately falling asleep like one exhausted, or drugged, or deathly ill.

And dreamed again.

This time, I was a unicorn battling a dragon. The dragon, triumphant, took off my horn with a slash of its claw. I screamed in agony, and the dragon’s eyes gleamed in triumph, and its eyes were the eyes of my grandmother. Of Livia.

I heard her voice in my sleep.

“What you need to understand, Sophia, is that your strength comes from me. Not from your mother. What energies you need, they are mine to give.”

I was no longer a unicorn with a dragon. I was myself again, swimming in a river of sleep, clutching at her words.

The more she spoke, the larger her words became, and the smaller the room, as I drifted along the tide of sleep. No swimming away, I told myself, groggy, bemused. No swimming away.

“You are me, Sophia, little as you might like it. Your goals are twined with mine. And your—our—children will inherit. Not just the earth, Sophia. But the Moon and the Stars and the Sun itself.”

How did I have the power to withstand her, my grandmother? Somehow I did. Somehow what she said made me hook my arms stubbornly around a passing tree trunk as I drifted down the stream of sleep, drifting on her words. I hung on for dear life and let the words drift by.

“No,” I said sleepily. “No.”

With that, I pulled myself out of the rushing, seemingly inevitable, stream of her words, panting, onto the dream beneath the tree that had saved me. I gazed up at it. It was green and lively, although beautifully gnarled, and hanging heavily from its branches were apples shining golden in the sun. In gratitude, I sank deeper into that sleep where I was vividly aware of just two things: my grandmother told the truth in telling a lie, and I had taken that lie, and changed it into a new truth. By virtue of the tree and my dream.

As I lay there, one of the apples ripened and fell—plop—into my right hand. I grasped it. Pulled my arm heavily up, lifting it laboriously to my mouth, and took one crisp, juice-filled bite. I swallowed. Smiled. And tasting it, I knew who I was.

And recognized in a children’s story the history of my much-loved land.

A unicorn’s history that was my own. A snotty little boy’s history that was the story of my own dear mother. A story of her discovery of who she truly was, of her transformation, and, through that, of the transformation of a part of Megalopolis into Arcadia.

And beyond that?

At that, my arm fell back and I fell even deeper into the world of dreams, as if into an endless hole, and when I woke, the whole world—all the worlds—had changed for me. And would never be the same again.

When I woke up, I saw more clearly than before. And what I saw was this: that Leef was dying.