When Edna was still a young girl, a miller came to their village and set up his millworks along the stream that meandered through the sunset side of town. His young son, Eugene, was only a year older than Edna and no more to look at than she. Eugene was a frail child, weak-eyed and bespectacled. He was molly coddled by his mother, and at the opposite end of the pendulum swing from being called strapping. His father longed to raise him in his own right, teach him to be a miller; turn wheat into flour, corn into meal, and oats into granola. But, fate had blessed the miller with a child better suited to science and reading than toting and grinding sacks of grain.

As children growing up, Edna and Eugene would often play together. It wasn’t really playing by most folk’s standards. Eugene would sit under a tree, reading theories on alchemy as Edna stared into the distance. Eugene contemplated turning flax into gold and Edna wondered where her prince might be. Reading and staring, dysfunctional playtime activities, but they did them together…always together.

Each autumn, the villagers would celebrate the harvest with a festival and cotillion that would debut nearly young adults that had reached the threshold of maturity. Each year a new crop completed the first stage of the growth cycle and reached the “Age of Ripeness;” the moment in time when children become adults.

The cotillion was a formal affair, held at the palace, given by the King and Queen as a gift to their loyal subjects. Tradition called for the children of “the Age” to pair up male and female, and enter the Grand Hall of the palace through a grape arbor; heavy with the fruit of the vine. Through this arbor, each couple would transverse the “Age of Ripeness” and ascended from children into adults. It was a magical event filled with pomp and circumstance.

It was the responsibility of each boy to ask a girl to accompany him through the grape arbor. Dressed in ceremonial silken robes, they would slowly enter the vine-covered trellis, walk hand-in-hand beneath the fruit-bearing passageway, and climax with their dramatic entrance into the Grand Hall as men and women. Pealing bells, trumpet blasts, and cheers from friends and family heralded the brief but meaningful event.

After this, the party started. It was, after all, a harvest festival.

Eugene and Edna reached “the Age” at the same harvest, even though Eugene was a year older. It was a darker age and custom held that boys matured slower. On the “Day of Invitation,” seven days before the cotillion, Eugene asked Edna to accompany him on the walk beneath the arbor.

It seemed a logical choice for Eugene. Edna had been his constant friend through childhood and now she should accompany him into adulthood.

Edna turned him down.

This was the most important event in a young girl’s life and Edna was saving it for the handsome prince or knight in shining armor that was destined to break her free from the imagined evil spell that had been cast over her life. She was certain this year’s cotillion was the moment in time when all the good magic in the universe would converge within her. Her prince would come.

The “Day of Invitation” passed with no magical knight riding up on a shimmering stallion. No prince asked Edna to entwine hands on the walk beneath the arbor. However, Edna knew magic was not confined by the traditions of mere mortals. At the right moment something was bound to happen and a golden coach would appear, silken robes would be instantly woven, birds and butterflies would sculpt her hair with baby’s breath and laurel, and over the horizon a handsome stranger would appear.

The magic did not happen.

Eugene went to the cotillion, escorted by a cousin that had also reached “the Age.” It was an arrangement created by two frantic mothers.

Edna stayed home and stared, through tear reddened eyes, into her mother’s mirror.

Read part one here.