Evelyn's Song

Now that witches are rarer than fish wings, most people don't know the first thing about magic. And the first thing about magic is that it hurts. When my aunt sent for the crone who lived at the edge of town, she meant only to scare me. So far as we villagers could tell, that foolish hag had never done more harm than give our night watchman a potion that made him mad for the weaver's widow. The object of his affections weighed at least twice as much as the poor man himself, yet their match was no stranger than many made without benefit of incantations or philters.

The marriage my aunt intended for me, I assure you, was far more ill advised and much more laughable. Yet she would have me wed Lord Brevington, a man forty years my elder. And she would have me curtsy sweetly before him, speak my little Latin, and play the harp. I, of course, would have none of it, and that is when the witch was sent for.

"You have humiliated me for the last time, my girl," Aunt Hazel scolded. "Nor will I permit you to demean the honest proposal of our dear guest." She nodded at this, toward Lord Brevington, who seemed less demeaned than sleepy. He sat over the remains of Aunt's tea and scones, his head sinking lower and lower on his hollow chest.

But I sat with the harp beside me unplucked, reluctant to play the song she had bade me sing for His Lordship. It was "The Turtle Dove's Lament," a ballad that had found favor first with the court and then with all the unwed ladies in our town. The tale of a young woman abandoned by her love, it told of her standing above the sea on a towering cliff. She searched for her lost sweetheart's ship, clasped her pale hands across her breast, and leapt into the waves. The chorus, repeated three times, began with the words "Your wild love has won me, now claim your prize."

I could not, you see, sing that refrain to the grizzled gentleman on our settle. I dared not, for fear I would burst into laughter as I played. Indeed, one look at the poor old soul, his withered legs crossed under orange garters, had nearly undone me. "May I not play Your Lordship a sprightlier tune?" I asked. "'Derry Down, Derry Down,' say?"

My ardent suitor, who seemed to be snoozing, made no reply. So I begged my aunt instead. "Oh, please, Auntie Dearest, let me choose a song less passionate, more in keeping with the—er, age and state of our visitor."

I could not keep from smiling as I pointed at the napping noble, and my aunt was in a rage straightway. She scolded me so loudly, I was certain Lord Brevington would wake, but I need not have worried. It turned out that the good man had gone to a deeper sleep than the two of us guessed, for when we tried to rouse him, we found that he was dead.

"Now see what you have done!" As if it were I who had caused the old man's soul to leave his body, Aunt Hazel grew angrier still. "All our prospects, all our high hopes—dashed by a willful girl's stubbornness." She paced our small parlor like a trapped animal, sighing and calling on my dead mother to witness her daughter's perfidy. At last, she summoned Lord Brevington's footman from the kitchen. And then she called the witch.

I was not afraid of Dame Meredith; I had grown up used to the sight of her bent form hobbling through the crowd at market, the sound of her nanny goat's bell when it wandered, as it often did, into our yard. So, after our noble visitor had been dispatched to his castle and Dame Meredith had arranged her musty skirts across the same settle from which Lord Brevington had taken leave of the world only moments before, I felt no alarm. Even when Aunt Hazel demanded an enchantment of the highest order, one that would ensure I learned my place, I never dreamt homespun magic could prove any more potent than the scolding I had just endured.

It required only a pinch of time, a trifling minute, to change my life. As soon as the dame had raised her arm and begun her chant, I felt the stiffness invade my limbs. "Ye shall not rule the roost, ye shall not call the tune." As she recited the words, the old woman spread her knobby fingers like a cap across my head. " But shall serve your master with nary a boon."

It happened so quickly that even as I smiled at such nonsense, my legs went numb and I closed my eyes against a sharp pain that filled my chest. "With a lively will, though it be not your own, ye shall do my bidding and make no moan." No sooner had the pain stopped than my aunt screamed and I opened my eyes. I found that, indeed, my chest had been ripped open and that a shining bone erupted from between my breasts. I suppose it is a testament to the crone's witchery that I now felt no discomfort. I was dismayed only that my dress was ruined and my flesh turned the color of the coins my aunt had fished from Lord Brevington's doublet as he lay beyond the cares of earth.

Stranger, or should I say more horrible still, I saw that from the golden mote which pierced my chest, in a formation I knew only too well from hours and hours of practice, hung twenty harp strings. And where were these strings fastened? Why, all along my body, which, as I have said, had turned to burnished gold. I wanted to scream just as my aunt had when I saw, at the place where each string pierced my shining flesh, tiny blood drops lined like buttons up and down my chest and belly and thighs. But I could no more scream than speak or make the slightest movement to free myself from the spell that held me fast.

"What have you done, you foul fiend?" Aunt Hazel was crying now, beating the old woman about her venerable head. "Bring her back this instant, bring her back!" When her tormentor stopped to wipe her eyes, the hag rushed for the front door, but Aunt yanked her by the apron strings and forced her to stand before me.

Dame Meredith, squirming like a pig in my aunt's grasp, seemed as surprised as anyone at her handiwork. "'Tis only a minding spell," she protested, staring at my strings, my golden limbs. "'Twill make dogs obey and keep horses from leaping the fence."

"My niece is no dog, beldame." Despite my peril, I was moved by Aunt's tears and would have comforted her if I could. "You have pierced her through and turned her still as stone."

"I meant no harm, mistress." Meredith reached out to touch me, then pulled her hand back as if she had felt fire. "No harm at all, I swear."

"Undo your spell, witch," Aunt Hazel commanded. "And be quick."

"I cannot." The fear in the dame's eyes made it all too clear she spoke the truth. "I do not know how." She explained to Aunt that no one had ever asked her to reverse the spell; every one preferred dogs that minded and horses that stayed where they were put.

But Aunt Hazel would not rest till the witch had tried to un-spell me. And tried. And tried. Finally, exhausted and hopeless, the old woman threw her apron over her head and wept as if her heart would break. "'Tis no use, my lady," she sobbed. "The child will not wake. She lives only to obey."

"Obey?" My aunt, nearly as tired as the witch, gathered the strength to shake our neighbor by the shoulders. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"Whatever you last wanted her to do, madam," Meredith told her, "is what she will do forever."

"I wanted her to play." Aunt Hazel looked at me now, her voice as small as a child's. "I wanted her to play a song."

"Then you have only to ask it," the witch told her, drying her eyes and making for the door. "Perhaps it is not so bad, after all." She sniffled as she lifted the latch, ducked her head at me. "You need not feed her, from the looks of it, and 'tis certain that way ward child has learned to obey."

Aunt Hazel, I suppose, had neither the strength nor the will to chase after the old woman. For she sat where she was, long after the hag had left, staring vacantly at the fire and only sometimes at me. "It was just one song," she said at last. "Not so much to ask." She shook her head and tears collected in the ridges under her eyes. "Not so much to give."

That was when she stood and faced me, holding up one hand as the horse trainers do at Tinley Faire. "Play," she ordered, and lowered her hand again.

I tried to run from the feeling that rose in me as she uttered her command. I found, however, that I was frozen into a crouch, my folded legs held fast by the longer strings of the fiendish harp. So there was no escaping the rush of song that filled my chest and wanted to force itself from my throat. I had seen wrens and doves trembling in the throes of their songs, their tiny bodies convulsed in the effort to set them free. And now here was I, equally in thrall to a melody I must release or die.

My mouth opened and the song poured out. My golden arms rose, without my willing it, to pluck the strings attached to my own breast. The pain and the joy I felt as the music echoed in my chest made me remember the smile on Our Crucified Savior in the church at Warwick's Ford. I marveled at the exquisite torture I was inflicting on myself, and would not have stopped it for all the world.

As I plucked and sang the very tune she had been unable to make me play a few hours before, my aunt stared at me in horror. Her mouth open, her eyes wide, she listened, as still as a statue, to "The Turtle Dove's Lament." When the last note had ceased shaking my poor bones, she woke as if from a trance.

"It is a beautiful tune," she said, staring into my unblinking eyes. "But I would rather die than hear it again!" Poor Aunt sank to her knees before me then, begging a forgiveness my frozen lips could never speak. "This is not what I intended," she cried, rending her dress and pulling her hair out in great fistfuls. "This is not what I meant at all!"

It was only a week before my aunt succumbed to the shock my transformation had caused her already tender constitution. Unable to help, I watched in horror as she grew ever weaker and finally, whimpering like a starving animal, let death put an end to her suffering. Nor could I call out to those who buried her and sold all her possessions to the scrap dealer. Except for the harp, the great golden harp in the shape of a kneeling girl.

None of the greedy folk who bought me (each paid a handsome sum, and then recouped it by selling me for even more to someone else) could make me play the way my aunt had done. It was only a monster, a murderer and thief, who was able at last to put the magic to work. I suppose he was accustomed to giving orders, to treating others like dogs, for once he had stolen me from my owner and climbed the mountain to his palace, he did not sit beside me and try to pluck my strings as the others had. Instead, he pointed his terrible finger at me and thundered, "Play!"

That was the first concert I sang for the giant, but hardly the last. Just as all the tales say, he loved to listen to his magic harp. In fact, it became a ritual for him each evening after supper. No sooner had the dishes, with their mess of gnawed bones and rejected bits of gristle, been cleared from the table than the huge fellow would count the money he had made off with that day, call for his magic pullet to lay a golden egg, and at last demand of his wife, "Where is my golden harp?"

I often wondered if the little russet hen were under an enchantment, too. Perhaps she was a young girl like me, or even a good dame who had offended some magician or spell-weaver. Perhaps it cost her the same pain and gave her the same throbbing joy to lay her eggs as I experienced when I sang my songs? Often, when the giant lifted the bird from her nest and commanded, "Lay!" I felt the same loosening in my throat, the same heat in my veins that accompanied my songs as they rushed, like air from a bellows, out of my chest.

The giant never went to church, and I doubt that he was acquainted with the Bible or with Our Sweet Lord. But I think he knew something of beauty and of holy sorrow. For when I sang for him, his dreadful face became composed, his eyes closed, and he acquired the devoted, worshipful expression of the parishioners back home. He never needed to tell me which songs to play, for as a result of my enchantment, I knew without words what melody he wanted to hear.

The giant loved most the plaints of waifs and wanderers. Perhaps because he was an outcast himself, feared and scorned by the folk he terrorized, he wept each time I sang of loneliness. "Ay, ay," he would say, nodding his frightful head. "That is the way of the world, is it not? The sorry way of our sorry world." Then, a tear as big as a pillow on his mighty cheek, he would close his eyes and soon be snoring.

You may be surprised when I tell you my life with the giant was not a bad one. It is true I could not move or speak, except to sing, and that at someone else's bidding. Yet though my songs were not my own, the way they sounded first in my chest and then in my master's heart made them almost like hymns. It was as if I had been born to bring this savage creature peace, to soothe that massive furrowed brow, and to put all to sleep in that perilous place, where our castle clung to the rocky cliffs above a patchwork of little towns.

In between songs, I suffered not at all, feeling neither hunger

nor thirst. Sometimes I watched the giant's wife mend her husband's endless leggings or listened to the pair chat over their supper. But most days I slept away the time, waking only to sing and then slip back into dreams of dancing and talking and running just as I had before my enchantment. Some wise men say our time on earth is but a dream; if so, my life had changed little. I woke from sleep to serenade my master, to settle his heart and his house, then slipped back into the past, where I could still speak my mind and my own two feet still took me where I wished to go.

I cannot say exactly when the boy first came to us, when he sneaked in to change the regular rhythm of our days. I know only that even after we discovered he had stolen some of the giant's gold, no one was much disturbed. The giant's wife blamed herself. The young man had looked so lean and meatless, she explained: no good for one of her husband's hearty stews, no good for much except fattening up. So she had fed him and hidden him, hoping to surprise the old man with a treat one day. But the boy had betrayed her kindness and run off before he could be cooked, run off with a bag of yellow coins.

"Do not trouble yourself, Wife," the giant told her. "The littie gnat took nothing of value, nothing I cannot get back twofold from his village below."

And it was true. So long as the hen was untouched and I played for him each night, the giant was content and life went on as it had before the stealthy boy's visit. The great man would stumble home each afternoon with more gold, more jewels and trinkets. His wife and he would place them in bags in a store-room, where they remained untouched. There was, after all, nothing for them to spend the coins on; the giant had long ago frightened away all the merchants and tradesmen in his domain. On rare evenings he would ask for a bag and run his fingers through the shining coins, but the pleasure he got from that was nothing beside the way his spirits lifted when the hen ruffled and squawked and lay, like a miracle, a perfect golden egg.

But when the boy stole the hen, everything changed. The giant's wife must have guessed how angry her mate would be, for at first she lied. She told him the hen had wandered away and must have fallen off the cliff beyond the castle walls. But her husband, whose large nose was more sensitive than ten smaller ones put together, knew the boy had returned. "I smell him," he bellowed. "I smell that pesky troublemaker. Where be he, wife?" He began to stomp around the rooms downstairs, the stones jumping in their places with his every footfall. He tore the tapestries from the walls, peered under the tables and benches, and opened the chests and drawers. "Be he live or dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread."

It was then that his wife, fearing for her home, pointed a shaking finger at me. "Play!" she commanded, and though she had never craved a song from me before, it was clear she needed one now. I felt it pour from my throat just as my fingers rose to find its notes. "There will never come her like again," the ballad began. "She was doughty and clever and true to the end."

It was a song of mourning for a dead lover, but the giant knew it was meant for his stout little hen. He stopped, sat in his great chair, and clasped his head in his hands. He wept as I had never heard him, openly, like a great, tree-size child.

When the boy came back for me, I must have been dreaming of dancing a jig or chasing the cat from the pantry. It was only after he'd hoisted me onto his shoulders and was carrying me out the door that I found my voice. In all the years since I'd been spelled, I had never been able to speak. But feeling him struggle under my weight, sliding to one side of his back and nearly tumbling from his clumsy grip, was shock enough to spill the words from my throat. "Help, Master!" I half crooned, half moaned. "Someone is stealing me away!"

You have heard what happened next; all the stories tell how the sad tragedy played itself out. How the giant woke from the slumber into which my tune had lulled him; how he thundered, "Stop, thief!" and then gave chase. How the boy tightened his grip on me and ran as fast and as far as his short legs would take him. How my master followed after, old as he was, taking one lumbering stride for every ten of the thief's. And how, as my master tired, the boy was able to gain a few precious paces and lower himself down a vine that clung to the crags where the giant's castle perched. How he reached the ground and chopped the stem of the plant in two, sending the giant, his huge hands reaching for a hold in the sunlit air, crashing to his death at the bottom of the cliffs.

When my master fell to earth, the whole world trembled. The boy who held me was knocked off his feet as the ground shook, and since he grasped me fast, the two of us tumbled and rolled together until we came to a stop at last, pinned under one of the giant's boots. The bells in the town were ringing nones by the time the young man's family and some villagers were able to bring a timber and pry the boot's toe high enough to set us free.

The boy and his mother had themselves a fine manor, though nowhere as big as my former master's castle. It lay at the end of a long road that snaked its way through green farmland and the humble cottages of their servants, field workers, and stable boys. Thanks to the money they had stolen from the giant, there was always a pleasant fire burning in the hearth of the great house. Nor was there any end to sweetmeats and pies and other delicacies, since the magic hen continued to lay her precious eggs at the lad's command. Settled in a place of honor by the hearth, she was fed as much corn as she liked and frequently pecked at the boy's mother if the woman raised her voice to him. Clearly, the bird felt her lot had improved, and she seemed not to miss the hilltop castle we two had left behind. As for me, I was glad enough to see my old friend, though her bright, unblinking eye betrayed no memory of the years we had spent under the same roof. I began to doubt she'd been enchanted at all.

I slept much of the day, just as I had in the giant's home, but when I woke there was no one to play for. My new owner was so busy showing off his costly clothes in church and at market, so eager to attend dances and to court every young maid in town, he seldom fancied music at home. Even if he had, he learned early that he might not have his way with me as easily as he did with the hen. The first time he'd brought me into the house and set me proudly before his mother, he had pointed his finger just as he had seen my master do. "Play!" he'd commanded me, but I could find no tune in him. "Play!" he repeated, anxious to show what a fine treasure he had stolen. But while the giant and his wife had nursed slow, shy songs in their hearts, this boy seemed to need no music at all. My head stayed bent over the strings, my golden arms rigid at my sides.

"Perhaps there is another trick to it, lad?" the boy's mother guessed. "Mayhap you missed some magic word that makes it sing?"

"No!" The boy pushed me from him so roughly that my strings shuddered and I felt a cruel tug in my chest. "I watched that great ogre careful as careful," he insisted. "'Play' is all he said, and point is all he did." Once more, he aimed his finger at me as if it were a musket. "Play!" he roared.

"Still, 'tis a lovely thing, my sweet," his mother said, study ing me as I sat, silent, where her son had placed me. "Tune or no tune, 'tis made of gold, I'll warrant. Mind how it shines and all." I sensed a timid ditty, the beginnings of a song, as she looked at me. But as she dared not command me, I fell back to sleep.

So they stood me next to the hen, then, and were pleased to have visitors praise their new harp, the very size and shape of a lovely girl. "The filthy monster placed a spell on that instrument," the young man would tell them whenever they asked if I might be played. He would pluck one of my strings, then let it fall back, soundless. "It may never be played by the pure of heart." That was enough, of course, to keep strangers from trying to coax a song from me, and the boy always boasted most of the hen, whose eggs he could be sure of calling forth. "Now look ye here, for a true wonder," he would say, lifting a glistening egg from under the uncomplaining pullet.

Though it was a lie and the giant had cast no spell to keep me his, it was the same as if he had. The lad and his mother no longer tried to play me, and, having no songs of my own, I remained silent. I sorely missed the times when my master's loneliness had pulled tunes from my throat. Alas, no one but me mourned his death at all. Until the villagers at last succeeded in heaping dirt over his great fallen body and constructing thereby a massive fortification outside the town's gate, my poor giant lay looking with unblinking eyes at an endless procession of curiosity seekers who traveled to see the slain monster. And, of course, to heap praise on "Jack, the Giant Killer," as they soon christened the boy.

Jack loved to meet a crowd of such travelers by the mountainous corpse and tell over and over how he had bested his fearsome enemy. "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum," he would howl, loud and gruff as the voice of Death in a Whitsunday pageant. "Those be the very words this hell-fiend screamed when he came after me." He would brandish an imaginary sword, swirling it in mad arcs around the giant's arm or leg. "But I was not afeared, you know. It required only a bit of derring-do to smash this clumsy oaf to kingdom come."

By the end of his tale, which grew and changed with every telling, young Jack had always made himself out the bravest, most courageous young man in all the world, one who richly deserved the coins and treasure he had pilfered from my master. And each time he recounted his glorious adventures, he was wont to bring folk home to gawk and make much of his hen and his golden harp. "Lest ye believe me not," he would tell them all, "here be the magic proof."

When the body of my old master was at last moldering under a vast hillock of earth and thatch, it was clear that the cocky young man who had killed him now had more time than he knew what to fill it with. There were no more travelers to listen to his tales of glory, and the prettiest of the village girls—the one on whom he had set his heart—grew tired of listening to her suitor talk about himself. (As he wooed her by the hearth, the hen and I were privy to most of their conversations and to her final announcement that she had decided to wed the mayor's son.) Suddenly, then, Jack remembered me.

"I shall take this magic harp to be restrung," he announced to his mother, only two days after his ringleted sweetheart had abandoned him. "Perhaps it was damaged when the giant fell. If I can make it play again, we will have some gay parties and mend my heart soon enough."

"But what of the giant's curse?" his mother asked. "I thought only the black of heart could play her strings." Her expression as she studied me was half sorrow, half yearning.

"That was just a tale I told, Mother," Jack said. "I wanted to keep her safe from prying hands."

"Ay," the woman said, still watching me doubtfully. But when she glanced again at her son, she was once more his doting mother. "Why, lad, 'tis a fine idea," she told him. "And then you might take up that flute your father left. He played it like an angel, he did."

Jack was already dragging me from my place at the fireside. "Perhaps, Mother," he told her, wrapping me in a dark cloth, shutting out the light. "But think of the seasons wasted while I must learn to put my fingers just so on the stops. This harp will play by itself."

"Or there's the viol," his mother offered. "Your uncle says 'tis the favorite instrument at court."

"Mayhap, good dame." The young man's voice sounded agreeable, but he tightened his grip on the bundle he'd made of me. "Yet that one will take even longer to master. Besides, they've nothing like my golden harp at court."

So saying, he juggled me to his back and trundled me down the street before his mother might think of another instrument for him to play. We wound around corner after corner, and though I could see nothing through my swaddling, the cries of vendors, the smells of fish and pies, and the stench of chamber pots poured into the gutter, brought memories of my girlhood in my aunt's village rushing back.

At one turning, where my owner stopped, I thought we had reached the studio of the musician who would fix my strings. But I was wrong, for Jack began to yell and curse at someone nearby. "Have you no better bed than the street, old pissant? Out of my way, I say."

Clearly the young man's anger had gotten the best of him, for I could feel that he was kicking whoever blocked our path. He kicked so fiercely and with such hatred, I fell from his back and lay on my side, the cloth that had covered me undone and my eyes staring into a deep puddle where rain had collected between cobblestones in the street. I hadn't far to search to find the object of my owner's scorn. An old man dressed in beggar's rags, with a face as red as fire, lay curled like a baby against the vicious kicks.

When Jack stopped to catch his breath, the old man lowered his arms and glanced toward me. His yellow eyes narrowed, and when he had assured himself he saw what he saw, that I was not an airy dream brought on by mead, a smile cut his face like a knife. He stared at me now and held my gaze even after my owner had resumed his savage attack.

"Move on, move on, you worthless carrion," Jack screamed. He stooped to retrieve the cloth in which he'd wrapped me and began to beat the man about the head with it. "Are you deaf, you old turd? Get up and let your betters by."

It was then, while the young man yelled and the old one stared, that I felt, as strongly as ever I had at the giant's castle, a song well up in me. Though he did not point and he did not speak, I heard the beggar's command as clearly as if he had been my dead master, leaning against a brocade pillow and bellowing, "Play!"

So I did. Right there, in front of my astonished owner, I reached out to pluck my strings. Once again, at long last, the painful ecstasy took me, and the words ran like a waterfall uphill, charging from my throat: "I once had a love that was truer than true."

The old man's knees dropped from his chest, and both he and Jack were still as stones while I played. "'Twas long ago when the world was new."

I could see the woman in the beggar's eyes, a dark gypsy with a hungry, heart-shaped mouth. "Kiss me once and kiss me twice and beg me thrice to stay."

The man's eyes closed now and he lay as quiet as a sleeping babe. "And keep me in your prayers tonight though I be far away."

When the song ended, Jack turned to me, triumphant. "You can play, after all. And here I was about to spend a pretty penny to put the music back in you, sly wench." He gave the nipple on one of my golden breasts a tweak, then stepped carelessly over the old man, who still lay unmoving in the street. "Wait till they hear your songs now! They shall be begging to dance to my tunes, all the beauties in town." He bound me up in the cloth again and headed back the way he had come. "And won't she be sorry, Miss Proud Heart who would have none of me? Won't Miss High and Mighty pine to be invited, too."

But, of course, it did not happen that way. For when we got back and Jack called his mother to come see, when he removed my covering and commanded me to play, he still had not a single song in his heart, and I remained silent.

"I fear the musician does not know his work, my boy." Jack's mother had settled herself on a chair for my concert but seemed little perturbed by its postponement. "You must take the harp back straightway and make him do it right."

"But I tell you, this harp played." Jack was yelling now, though his mother had done nothing to deserve his harsh tone. "Just by the miller's courtyard, right in the street, a song for all to hear." Jack would not rest until I played again, and two times, three times, he pointed at me and shrieked, "Play, you harlot! Play!"

Two times, three times, I felt no song to play and my head remained bent and unmoving above my strings. Even after his mother had urged him to come to supper, to forget about music until the morning, he ranted and raved and ground his rude thumb in my eyes. "You shall play," he promised at last, kicking me so that I landed on my side and clattered against the hearthstone.

"Look what you have done to the poor thing," his mother said. She stooped to set me right, took a handkerchief from her sleeve, and knelt down beside me. Making small clucking sounds like the hen when it settled to roost, she spat upon the cloth and used it to polish my head and shoulders. It is a sad thing, indeed, to put a name to something precious you have lost. So it was for me when the woman stroked and petted me. I felt, of course, neither the warmth of her hand, nor even the weight of her fingers against my golden skin. Yet the memory of touch—of embraces and holding hands, of strolling arm in arm, or jostling up against a market crowd—all this came back to me so that I was loath for her to stop. But stop she did at last, rising and standing back, arms folded, to check her work. She looked at me with the same self-satisfied smile my aunt had often bestowed on a gleaming goblet or platter, then followed her son to table.

That was not the last time Jack's mother picked me up and rubbed me to a shine. My surly owner saw fit soon enough to hurl me again to the floor in a fit of temper. One night when Jack and a companion came home from hunting, they sat by the hearth to eat a late supper and drink toasts to their own prowess with bow and arrow. After many boastful toasts and too much mead, Jack forgot that there was anything he could not do. And so he pointed his finger at me and commanded me to play.

I tried, you must believe, to find a song in that bleary-eyed lad. As I listened, two shadows, one tall and the other short, fell across his heart. The tall figure sang to the smaller one, but though I knew it would serve me to hear the words, I could not make them out. Like a fairy tune from a faraway wood, his song was lost and dim. I remained as quiet, then, as any other harp without a master to play it, and I dreaded what my silence might cost.

Instead of getting angry, though, Jack laughed and bade his friend try his hand, too, at making me play. But the other hunter, who had just toasted his own skill in felling a pregnant doe, had no more music in him than Jack, and so the two of them proposed at last to make their own songs. They laughed and roared tuneless ditties at each other till I dared to hope they would fall into a drunken slumber and leave me in peace.

It was not to be. For when the uproar woke Jack's mother, she came into the great room in her shift, her hair undone, and begged them be quiet. Perhaps because she had just been torn from a dream and a piece of it was still in her head, I felt how much she yearned for the earlier, simpler times she and her son had shared. Her despair at her laggard boy and her own regrets brought my arms to my strings: "If I had a cow, a large brown cow, a jug of milk I'd bring thee."

Even in their cups, the two friends were stunned by my newfound voice. Jack's companion looked as if he thought black magic was afoot, and Jack himself rose from his seat, startled from his stupor.

"If I had seeds and a patch of earth, I'd grow a sweet pear tree." I felt a small, warm pride as a dappled day half dawned in the woman's heart. "And all the lords for miles around would beg me for to try ... One small bite of that sweet pear, one glance from your fair eye."

But I had no chance to sing the rest of her song, for Jack came toward me, anger blushing his cheeks, so that even in the light of a single candle, his face looked like a Turk's. "You sing for a beggar, do you?" he snarled. He hauled me from the hearth and lurched for the door.

"And now you think to sing all by yourself, do you?" He opened wide the door, howling into the night air. "Go sing to the moon about cows and seeds. We'll none of your country airs!" With that, he shoved me outside, slamming the door so that I heard no more of his bluster and lay cradled in the grass till his mother tiptoed out to rescue and polish me, then set me again by the hearth. Once in the night, I thought I heard the trace of a song in someone's dream. It might have been the pale shadow tune I'd felt earlier in Jack. It was not bold enough to rouse me, though, and I slipped back into dreams of my own.

Perhaps my song had emboldened her, or mayhap she intended to dispose her son more kindly toward me. In any case, it was Jack's mother who finally carried me to the musician's house. She hired a fellow to hoist me onto a wagon and then drove into town herself. While she visited the baker and milliner, the sweaty little man to whom she'd entrusted me worked for hours restringing and tuning, yanking and tightening until I thought my chest would burst. At last he was done, and she drove home to set me proudly before Jack. "Now ye shall hear this harp play proper at last," she promised, pleased with herself and the pleasure I was sure to bring the spoiled young man.

"Are ye certain that fellow's done the job?" Jack asked.

"As certain as certain," his mother assured him. "For I stopped on the way home and commanded it to play."

Indeed, she had. And when she'd pointed and ordered music, I had felt a whole flood of tunes dammed up in her heart. They were fair to drowning us both, and I'd had a hard time choosing which one she wanted most.

"And?"

"And it played as lovely as you please."

"And sang?"

"Like an angel in the house of the Lord."

"Well, then." Jack's greedy smile made his face almost handsome. "We shall invite the neighbors and have that musicale at last." He bade his mother draw up a guest list, making certain she included the maidens he admired most. "I will go to the butcher myself," he offered, "and fetch back some venison and lamb."

The party was held three nights later, when it appeared that half the town had assembled to hear me play. Or rather, to hear Jack order me to play. Dressed like a peacock, in apricot and turquoise silks, my owner moved from dame to damsel, offering his hand and honeyed words. He looked and acted very differently, indeed, from the fellow who spent most of his days lying about the house, gaming or drinking with his friends. Inside, though, he was no different at all, and soon he was to prove it.

When all were supped and seated, he bellowed, nearly as loudly as the giant, "Where is my magic hen?"

A servant lay a brocaded pillow before him, then set the hen upon it. She was now as plump and proud as any fowl I have ever seen, and when Jack shouted,"Lay!" she raised her head and chuck-led serenely before stepping away from a glistening golden egg.

As always, all the onlookers gasped and begged to touch the marvelous orb. As it was passed from hand to hand, Jack kept his eye on this latest treasure. All the while, he smiled and stroked the careless, preening hen.

Too soon, however, he tired of this familiar triumph and called out as the giant always had. "Where is my golden harp?" he thundered, though all could see the servant had fetched me and was placing me upon a tassled rug at his side. When all was still, Jack made a great show of rolling up his sleeves. He pointed a ring-bedecked finger at me and stared imperiously from under his brows. "Play!" he commanded.

You have surely guessed what happened next, for the lad still had no song for me to play, no melody I could draw from his heart. After my silence came the usual curses, and the tantrums. Jack tried and tried but could not make me sing.

Finally, just as before, I was carried to the door. In front of all his gaudy guests, my master proclaimed that a harp which didn't play was not worth keeping. The door was thrown wide and the entire company drew back from the night. It seemed to me Jack struck a pose, holding me on his shoulders, like Atlas with the world. Time seemed to stop, several ladies tittered nervously, and someone gasped. At last, though, he mustered all his strength and hurled me with such venomous fury that the strings were torn from my chest and I lay, as if dying, under the eaves of his coachman's shed.

***

Spells are supposed to be broken with good deeds. Or with the answer to a riddle. Or with true love's first kiss. But that is not the way the enchantment that bound me was at last undone. I doubt the bandylegged giant-killer who hurled me from his house cared where I landed—but had he used only a little less arm or a bit more gentleness, the magic might not have been throttled out of me. And had his good mother rushed to retrieve me instead of giggling nervously and calling for more savories, I might not have fallen into that healing sleep.

When it was over, it was as if a dream had ended or a fever broken. I woke to the whickers and warm breath of a handsome bay, leaning from his stall to nibble my hair. I felt a tingling in my arms and legs, a ringing in my ears and skull, and the heady, dimly remembered rush of blood through my veins. Without knowing what I did, I raised myself onto one elbow and opened my eyes to the sight of my own two legs, my long-lost knees and shins. There was pain, yes. But nothing I could not endure, would not have suffered doubly, for the sake of what came next. I stood, sweet heaven, I rose up and walked.

Surely nobody noticed the poor girl who struggled to her feet by the stables. Who stood for a moment, eye to eye with the bay, then turned toward the open fields behind the great house. There were no words, only a rhythm in my head that moved my feet, that called my name, that drew me to the forest where the moon was setting.

When I passed the door through which I had been tossed—was it moments or days before?—I heard no voices and all was still and dark. Yet as I left behind that sullen house, there came again the shadow song I had felt in someone's dream—was it days or years before? The two figures in the dream were clearer now, and I could hear Jack's father laughing, see him hoist his small son to his shoulders. He sang a tune to the little boy, a tune I could have played, music I might have sung. For the time it takes a candle to smoke and then go out, I lingered to listen. The pull to soothe my master, to find at last the song that would bring him rest, held me. But then I heard again the pounding in my ears, the rush of my own blood.

My song. Though I had been so long bewitched that I barely remembered what it was to have a will of my own, I heard a new tune now. No one had pointed at me. No one had shouted, "Play!" Yet clear as a stone dropped in a still pond, loud as the call of geese across the sky, I heard the music of my own heart. It played a stream burbling in the shade of apple trees, and the warm, solid thrum of waking bees. I had no words for my song yet, but the scent of fruited boughs and the rush of wind against my chest were as real to me as my own two feet.

Those feet, no longer made of gold, climbed the pasture gate and set out for the woods beyond. I raced forward, trampling damp grass until I came to the top of a rise. I stopped for a moment to look back at the great house below. Inside its sleeping windows were old songs, music that was dead to me, other people's dreams. I tossed my head, like a mare slipping its bridle, and flew into the morning, running as if I would never stop.