Page 136 of Carousel

I’m in the maze in the palace grounds. It’s night. The hedges are shadowed. They seem thicker, taller, than I remember them, the paths between them narrower. I hear only silence.

I start walking. Turning a corner, I see a hole in the hedge. Through it is my old room in the palace.

I remember it. The thick, long drapes over sweeping windows. The woven rugs. The wallpaper of dainty, hand-painted pink roses. My bed with its embroidered covers. My mother, younger than I remember her, is sitting by it. Her light hair is braided elaborately, and her blue eyes are shining.

“You know that won’t be possible,” she says to the little girl in the bed, who can’t be more than five or six. There are tears in her eyes, which are identical to her mother’s. “Your treatment must go ahead today.”

Her words were spoken comfortingly, but they give the girl none. “But it hurts. So much.”

“It is the greatest of honours, Darling,” she insists. “For yourself, and for our family. And you will go through with it. Or you will go to bed hungry.”

The girl. I can feel her hunger. My hunger. This is the best way they can keep me in check. Keep me taking these treatments.

Footsteps. The doctor is coming.

The door at the far end of the room opens.

He’s a short Lartosi man, with greyish skin and spectacles. The needle he will put into one of my arms is centred on a plush red cushion.

I cry, harder.

“Please, Mother. Please.”

“The greatest of honours,” she repeats, lifting the plumed sleeve of my dress.

The puncture scars on my forearms are so red, so raw. I’m all bruises.

The doctor bends over. The needle is ready. It’s sharp. The liquid inside is a dark red.

The blood that will make me a queen goes into my skin.

The girl in the bed screams, and so do I, the woman she became.

That’s where the image ends. It remains stuck in time. Can’t move on from the girl just as the injection goes in.

And I know why. I don’t want to feel the pain she feels. The shooting up my arms. The way my head growls in reaction. Like the injection was awakening a monster within me.

A monster who would end me.

I hear Meg’s voice from somewhere beyond me.

“You’re in control, Ara. Move us along.”

Somewhere else. Where can we go?

I continue through the maze. Each turning seems to tell me a new story.

I see the grand funeral of the late king, held in the palace gardens. I remember it all now. The black horses dressed in feathers, the dramatic mourning clothes with high collars we had to wear, the harpists and the never-ending violin music. It was a loveless marriage between second or third cousins, to strengthen the magical bloodline, but you would never have known that from the nature of the affair. And the way the Queen howled into my mother’s shoulder.

There I am, dining on a meal of six courses, the most prominent members of court around me. The Queen and my mother are beside me. They are the two most powerful women in the country, and they look it. Immaculately dressed and coiffed. Formidable. Opposites in their looks – one so fair, the other so dark. But they share other things. Their ambition. An intensity.

Maybe, a little darkness.

Next, I find a hole where I’m older, twelve or thirteen. My tutor is teaching me and the Queen’s daughter, the young Crown Princess Faye, who must only be six or seven. I’d never realised I’d even spoken to her, let alone been taught privately with her. My tutor flicks through an enormous book of hand drawn portraits. We must remember who these people are, for when we meet them. We must know their likes and dislikes. How they would want to be addressed. The topics they would prefer to discuss, in the way of speaking they would best respond to.

He closes the book. Princess Faye is dismissed. And my tutor and I begin the most important lesson. A lesson I have had many, many times.

It is devoted to one person, and one person only. The person I am to marry.