My mother was a reluctant queen.
That much is clear from the stories I’ve heard about her, stories I have collected and coaxed from friends, loved ones, even enemies (I’ve certainly learned through my life that the fullest truths always come to you, if you’re ready for them, from enemies). Early on in my own reign, once I had also become a reluctant queen, I began to get serious about my mother’s legacy, and began a serious search for who she had truly been. By then, it was clear to the most advanced of Arcadian scientists that stories about ourselves, stories about our shared past, were the key to changing those selves, for good or bad. I knew, of course, that my mother Lily’s short life as queen had been devoted to restoring to Arcadia the happiness and harmony it had known before the Great Megalopolitan Invasion. I knew she wanted that in a real, unsentimental way, and that she believed it could happen with all her heart.
I started collecting these bits and pieces of my mother’s past when I was about twelve years old, five years after her death. When it was my turn to be queen, I began, with Wilder the Bard, to put together some kind of epic…well, maybe not an epic, but at least a tale, a foundation story for us Arcadians to tell ourselves and pass down to our children. I really think we have a need for that, we Arcadians. You can’t have a community without a shared story.
Wilder and I have enjoyed ourselves. At least, I have, and the signs are that Wilder, no matter how much he moans, has a pretty good time, too. Discovering the different shapes and sizes and colors of stories about Lily, bringing my booty back to Wilder’s room in the Tower for us to exclaim over (even if his exclaiming is a bit in spite of himself, dear, melancholic Wilder), laying them out, piecing them together, pacing back and forth declaiming them, laughing together (me always laughing harder than Wilder), and crying, of course (there was lots to cry about, Goddess knows)—these have been my deepest pleasures.
To every other ruler, of every kind, I give this free advice: find yourself a poet you can talk to about the story of your realm. Have lots of good talk, long into the winter night, by a real wood fire. Talk your way into your own people’s story. Weave it in good faith for your own good, not just theirs. It’s an unbelievably relaxing activity, particularly at the end of a day of listening to petitions and granting justice. Take my word for it.
Mind you, the fairy tale we stitched together of Lily’s life and her death, that really is Wilder’s work and not mine. In that project, I was the enthusiastic sous chef, as it were. The one who shopped for the ingredients, being careful to only pick out the choicest of the facts (and I really believe that the most beautiful are the truest, and the truest are the choicest, in spite of Aspern Grayling’s arguments). I was the one who laid out all the bits and pieces for Wilder to work into a whole. I was there to comment and admire and exclaim…and sometimes suggest a little change here, a little addition there…a little more salt, Wilder, it does need just a bit, come on, don’t be mean, you want to make that flavor pop if you want them to pay attention. And we want them to pay attention, don’t we, Wilder? It’s not so easy to get them to follow us without that, Wilder, is it? We need good smells and tastes to coax them onto the right road, because it’s so awfully easy to get off that road, isn’t it, Wilder? Don’t groan and put your head in your hands, Wilder, I didn’t mean anything personal by that. But isn’t it true? It’s so easy to do evil, so hard to do good, to try to do good, to try to help others do the best good they can. It’s so hard to stick up for Truth and Beauty and Kindness. It’s so difficult, Wilder, I would say on those days where he would throw himself face down on the blue and red and green and gold carpet I’d given him specially, the one with the twining pattern that reminds you every time you walk on it (or lie on it, sulking) of the beauty of a true story. It is so difficult, he would mutter, pulling at the carpet’s threads with those dirty fingernails of his. (And how did they get that way, with him always in his tower? I’ve always wondered. Never asked.)
“Difficult,” he would mutter. “And think how easy it is, Snow, to… to…to do the other.” Here he would groan again, and my heart would hurt a little to think I had hurt him, no matter how little I’d meant it. Then Wilder would shake his head. “To build up a good life, or even a story on which to rest a good life—that, Snow, is hard.”
You’ll see that Wilder the Bard, at least in private, never calls me ‘Queen Sophia,’ as does everyone else in the court, or ‘Sophia the Wise,’ as everyone does who views me from a desirable (to them, anyway) distance. Wilder doesn’t even call me ‘Sophy,’ which has been my nickname since I was a little girl. Devindra, who was my mother’s own Chief Counselor, and is mine as well, calls me Sophy. And Clare, my oldest friend. Of course, it was what my own nurse called me, my own dear Kim the Kind.
In our researches, long before I’d ever told Wilder about my most secret times alone with my mother, I did tell him of her private name for me. She called me ‘Snow,’ which was, she whispered, short for ‘Snowflake,’ and Wilder, delighted for some unknown reason with that, took it over for himself. I let him, of course. There’s no lèse majesté involved in one artist acknowledging another as an equal. And I can tell you, one of the most exasperating aspects of being on stage as a Great Queen is that there aren’t too many fruitful friendships on offer. You take what you can get.
Lily found it really hard, taking what you can get. She found it not just hard to be alone, as Goddess knows I do—alone in her particular courage and hopes, both of which were so much greater and more visionary than my own. Her loneliness was to her like a harsh and endless wind, pushing against her, no matter how determinedly she braved it, no matter how hard she tried to get past it uphill to her goal. It pushed her back two steps for every one and a half that she managed to win.
But she was a shrewd woman, and her judgment always led her to aim for the possible—which is amusing to me, who has discovered the many impossibilities of her life. Still, being a queen, she used to say, was the art of the possible.
I can still hear her voice, as she bent over me while I lay in that little trundle bed next to her own vast queen’s bed: “Snow, always remember: you can’t tell someone a truth they’re not ready to hear. It’s dangerous.” And she reached out, smiled, and took my hand in hers. I held it, feeling cautiously, the way I always did, for her missing finger. When I felt the place that finger should have been, I knew, even in the dark, that my mother was with me. And I would sigh with happiness, with content, and listen to her advice with all my small child’s heart.
She meant, if I remember that particular evening right, a loving correction of my babyish habit of impertinent frankness. I think that time I’d gotten in trouble for innocently commenting on how much I liked the Lord High Chancellor’s characteristic stammer. Pompous old Michaeli took offense, even though it was obvious I meant the sound was beautiful to me, the way he called me, “P-p-p-pr-pr-princess.” It was, truly, my favorite version of my title. But, of course, he hated me for calling attention to what he thought of as a shameful defect, and I always wondered later if it wasn’t a large part of the barrier that grew between us in later years. He was always so sensitive, Michaeli. They say he started out the owner of a sweet shop in Cockaigne, but that he came to prominence during the Invasion. Anyway, he was always careful of his dignity, much more careful than I ever have managed to be of my own, and I think he always disliked me for that. As a child I couldn’t see the need for silence about the truth, about truths of any kind.
My mother had been right, though. Innocence was no excuse. You can’t tell people what they don’t want to hear, no matter how true it is. How much is that a fact about countries, as well as people!
Of course, that was one of the problems at the heart of my mother’s short reign, people not wanting to hear what they all agreed was best forgotten. But she stood up to it as well as she could, because she was (she had learned to be) a brave woman.
She really was. I’m proud to say that about my own mother. She was brave to try to better a world that seemed so determined not to be better. And her goal was always love. Always, always, Love.
But Love was not enough. Is that only true of Arcadia? No. I don’t believe that now. What was, and is, true for Arcadia, I know now, is true for all of the other worlds.
The Arcadia of my mother’s childhood was a gentler one than it is now, a more hopeful community, untroubled by any thoughts of a guilty past, smugly confident that its modern version of traditional village ways would continue, if not forever, than at least long into a prosperous future.
Then, as now, Arcadia was what we call a ‘necklace’ of towns, each with its own governance and special features, divided by a fertile countryside of allotments and larger, mutually worked fields. The whole of the queendom was surrounded on four sides by mountains: to the east, the Calandals, with their dry, high desert climate; to the north, the mysterious Samanthans; to the west, the impassable Donatees; and to the south, the Ceres Mountains, most beloved of all. The Juliet River runs in a rough diagonal across our valley, striking off into two smaller tributaries, the Gems and the Deerspring. All three of these fall, finally, into the marshlands at the foot of the eastern part of the Ceres. We have no port. We have no rivers, even, that run to the ‘outside’ world, which has historically meant Megalopolis on the eastern, southern, and western sides, and even now, in the days after the Great Flood, still means the Megalopolitan territories, its vast administrative region. This, of course, has always been both a blessing and a bane, a source of protection, but also of much hardship and loss.
Of the Arcadian towns, I won’t have much to say in this story, so I’ll just briefly list them here, both for the record, and for the great pleasure it gives me. ‘New’ Eopolis, known for its practical know-how. Wrykyn, home of St. Vitus’s College, teasingly called ‘abstemious Wrykyn’ for the great care its inhabitants take to have a comfortable life! Flower-covered Amaurote. Market-mad Walton. Ventis, gathering place of thoughtful farmers. Amana, known as the center of Arcadian healing, both human and animal. Paloma, famous for its artistic, and frequently snobbish, leanings.
Mumford, called ‘Learned Mumford,’ the seat of Juliet College, the first college of the entire Otterbridge University system. The royal town. My own home.
And Cockaigne. Famous as the most beautiful of the many beautiful gems in the necklace of Arcadia. The pearl that is the pride of all the rest. And Lily, at fifteen, was the most beautiful girl in Cockaigne…
LILY WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN ALL OF ARCADIA
