Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy Read Online Free

with a bow and arrow. I quite enjoyed that until I had to kill a rabbit, which was horrible. They showed me how to lay my hands on the Herald Tree, which was a very strange education.
    “You keep talking about a sword, yet I haven’t seen one,” I said in the wizard house. “Is it all make-believe?”
    They smiled serenely at that.
    “I mean, none of it makes sense,” I said. “This One Other, for instance, who is that? Shouldn’t you give me some details? Like what he looks like?”
    They smiled even more serenely, and it was a good thing they hadn’t given me the sword yet.
    Each night I went home, and my mother met me at the door and examined me to see if I’d changed at all. She had been very annoyed about my name in the beginning but had gotten used to it.
My boy
was what she had taken to calling me, and it was quite comforting.
    “What did you learn, then?” she asked me each day.
    All I could do was shrug.
    The morning I left the kingdom, I woke with the wizards standing above me, in our very own little house, without even having knocked. For three days the air had cooled, though it was still summer. The fruit had browned and fallen from the trees. Everywhere people were bundling their daughters onto horses and their grandmothers into wagons, and whole processions of people were leaving the city. The river was covered in a lacework of ice.
    That morning my mother didn’t say much but held my face between her hands.
    “I don’t want to go,” I said.
    “Hush now. It’s you that’s been chosen and there’s nothing we can do about it,” she said.
    “Will I see you again?”
    How she cried at that.
    “Please,” I said. “Tell me I’ll see you again.”
    And she said, “Yes, yes, yes, my boy, of course you will.”
    Petal had made me some biscuit men, and my mother placed some bread and cheese inside my satchel. The wizards gave me the compass, which they told me must always point south.
    “But I don’t know what to do,” I said. “You haven’t taught me properly.”
    It was true—all their months of teaching me and I still couldn’t make sense of it.
    For instance, how was I meant to know who this One Other was? Couldn’t they give me some sort of clue? But I dared not ask that again.
    “Can’t you write it down for me?” I said. “I mean, everything I’m meant to do, just in case I forget?”
    So the Great Wizard wrote on a piece of paper very patiently, folded it three times, and placed it in with the biscuits. There were a bow and a quiver with just one arrow.
    I said, “Is that enough?”
    And they said, “It is all you will need.”
    Then they brought the sword, which I hadn’t seen before and which was very heavy and very plain and not at all magical-looking. They tied it to my waist.
    “We, the protectorate of wizards from the east, west, and middle, have made this sword so that the Snow Queen may be defeated,” they said.
    They put a spell on me. They lay their hands on me, all five of them. You see, they coated me in it, this spell. It was a dripping ointment–smelling one, and they said I should not get wet or the whole lot would come off.
    “It will cover your scent, which the Queen will know,” they said, “and hide you from her wolves and her owls.”
    After that I wasn’t sure what I should do.
    “Now, my boy,” said the Great Wizard, “you should begin to run.”
    “I see,” said Ophelia. It was all she could think to say. She thought she’d been very patient listening.
    “You do?” said the boy behind the door.
    “I really have to get back to my sister. We might go ice-skating, you see. I’ll try and come back later,” she said.
    “Thank you, Ophelia,” he said, although she could hear the disappointment in his voice.
    She had the words
I’m sorry
on the tip of her tongue, but she didn’t say them. She stood up, chewing her fingernail, walked across the checkerboard floor, and tried not to think of the blue-green eyes watching her. She tried not