Gilt and Midnight. Megan Hart

her head and black as grief on the other. The child’s eyes were the same; one pale blue and the other a deep, midnight black. Two faces…yet one.

      “What do you want me to do with it?” asked the midwife quietly.

      “I don’t care,” said Pitor. “You can kill it, for all I care. Now go away, and let me bury my wife.”

      So the midwife crept away into the night, the bundle in her arms, and left the man to take care of the woman he’d loved so well.

      The midwife, who had already raised more than her share of babies, did not want to raise another. Not even one that cooed so prettily or waved its dainty hands in the air. One that didn’t cry like other babies, but wept only from its dark eye and never from the pale.

      The midwife’s husband, who was as good a man as the midwife was a woman, did not want to raise any more children either. “I’m too old to start over,” he complained. “We’ve done even with dandling our grandchildren on our knees and wait now only for them to bring us their children to love. Why do we need to adopt some ragamuffin child?”

      The midwife did not disagree. “I’ll take her to the noblewoman on the hill. She has long yearned for a child of her own and has had none. Maybe she will adopt this one.”

      So thus it was the unnamed babe with the mismatched eyes went to live in the large stone house on the hill.

      The noblewoman, who was not nearly as beautiful as Ilina but whose husband loved her just as dearly, called her new daughter Miracula because of the miraculous way in which she’d been brought to them. Never was a child more cosseted and pampered, or more loved, than little Mira was by her adopted mother and father.

      By the time she reached womanhood, Mira had become known as the most beautiful girl in all the land. Her hair flowed down to the backs of her knees in ripples of silver on one side and ink on the other. To any who looked upon her perfect features, the different colors of her eyes only enhanced the thick darkness of her lashes, the crimson of her lips and the sweet pink blush of her cheeks. Her body had grown lush and firm, with rounded breasts and buttocks, and hips just right for a man’s hands to hold.

      Her father’s fortune only made her all the more desirable, but though many sought the hand of the nobleman’s adopted daughter, none were allowed to court her.

      “She is a child, still,” insisted her father to her mother, who knew better but didn’t wish to disagree. “She’s not ready to be married, to go off and leave us.”

      “Someday,” said the noblewoman, patting her husband’s hand, “she will have to.”

      For though she loved her daughter very much, the noblewoman knew how it was to be a young woman without a suitor, and how her daughter must long for the time when she could be courted as all the other young women were.

      “They only want her money,” grumbled the nobleman. “They seek her fortune as much as they do her heart.”

      “That, too, might be true,” said the noblewoman. She looked out the window to where Mira walked in the garden, alone. “But someday, my husband, we won’t be able to keep her to ourselves any longer. Won’t it be better if we’ve chosen a husband for her? One who won’t take our beloved daughter too far from us?”

      The nobleman thought of this, but harrumphed and garrumphed and would not give in.

      And in the garden, Mira bent to smell the flowers, all alone.

      Winter stole across the world like an illicit lover, taking the light and leaving darkness behind. Inside the stone house on the hill, there was food and drink aplenty, and warmth and all manner of entertainments. The nobleman and his wife hosted friends from near and far to help relieve the lethargy of the cold season.

      Mira, no longer the child her father wanted her to be, wished the house were silent instead of filled with the shouts of cardplayers and the snuffle of hounds. She preferred the scent of snow to the savory smells of roasting fowl and baking bread. She even liked running through the now-dead garden, though it left her shivering, better than sitting in front of the blazing fireplace wrapped in a goose-down cloak. Only the year before she had longed for these long nights with a house full of company; the twelve months that had passed had turned her into someone new. Now, though her parents gestured for her to join them and their guests, she snuck away down dark and chilly corridors to find a place in the attic to sit alone.

      She blew on the frost-covered windows to look down to the barren gardens below. They weren’t empty, as she’d expected them to be. Footprints marred the smooth whiteness of snow-covered plots. And in the corner by the gate, a huddled figure clawed at the ground. Mira watched it scrabble in the vegetable plot. Perhaps seeking the remains of a gourd or something else? Had some poor vagrant stolen into her garden to look for food?

      Pity moved her, and Mira left the attic to sneak past the rooms full of merrymakers. She crept to the garden without shoes or even a cloak to keep her warm, so intent was she on finding out who she’d seen from her window above. The snow bit at her toes and the wind gnawed her fingertips, but it was nothing compared to what the traveler must have felt.

      “You must come inside,” she insisted to the scarf-covered face. She couldn’t tell even if the visitor was a man or a woman, so bundled and wrapped in layers was the figure. “Get warm. Have something to eat.” When they went inside, however, Mira’s father was not pleased at his daughter’s kindhearted gesture. There was no room at his table for a beggar, be it woman or man. Not even in his kitchen, not even to eat the scraps unfit for dogs, and he made the bundled visitor go back into the snow even before it had time to unwrap one of its many cloaks.

      “Father—” Mira protested, but the nobleman wouldn’t hear her plea.

      “I will go,” said the beggar, whose face was still hidden. “But you should know who you’ve turned away.”

      The guests who’d gathered around the scene gasped when the beggar pushed back its coverings to reveal the face of a beautiful, if cruel-eyed, woman. Everything about her was dark. Her eyes, hair, even the blush of her lips and tongue were dark rather than red. She looked around at them all before settling her eyes upon Mira.

      “Your daughter has far better manners than you, old man,” said the dark fairy. “She will be your salvation, as she tried to be mine.”

      The nobleman was too smart to try to beg forgiveness from the dark fairy. “Don’t take her!”

      The dark fairy laughed; in the garden the flowers shivered beneath their blanket of snow. “I don’t want her, old man. Just as you would like nobody else to want her either.”

      “Please,” begged the noblewoman, stepping forward. She was no less wise than her husband, but women know the ways to deal with one another and the dark fairy was still a woman. “Please don’t punish our daughter because of our foolishness.”

      The dark fairy laughed. “Worry not, lady. I won’t make your daughter hideous to the eye, nor make it so toads fall from her lips with each word. No, lady, I shall grant your daughter a gift, instead, for the generosity she attempted to show me. And in giving her the gift, I shall punish you.”

      The dark fairy clapped her hands and the guests drew back as one, each hoping not to draw her attention. The dark fairy smiled and waved her hand. Her veil of cloaks and scarves fluttered.

      “You shall be desired,” she told Mira. “And you shall desire.”

      “That’s it?” cried the nobleman, perhaps not so wise as he believed himself to be. “That’s the curse?”

      The dark fairy drew her hood back over her face and opened the door. Snow swirled inside and melted on the floor. The gathered company shivered in unison.

      “Until your daughter finds completion, old man, you will slowly lose everything you have. Pray hope she finds it before you are beggared and must rely upon the unkindness of strangers.”

      With that, the dark fairy was gone.