At first, the miller’s daughter wasn’t sure what she was seeing. The dimensions of this new place were beyond her comprehension, and for a moment all she and Lorabeth could do was gape like dumbstruck fish. Then they felt an indescribable liberation of their souls, a floating sensation that baffled them until they observed that they were rising through an amorphous column of fog, damp and sweet-smelling. It must be that they were flying.

Their heads came up out of the cloud, lightly drizzled with unfallen rain. The miller’s daughter asked herself where they might be, and a surprisingly firm voice in her mind answered that of course they were in the sky, though the sky above what place she did not know. Around her she saw others, white-haired grandmothers smiling beatifically, middle-aged women analyzing their surroundings, and very few younger girls, perhaps as young as nine summers. A panic seized her as she considered the possibility of having died and come to the after-place. Yet the countenances of all those there did not match the shock of a quick death. And there were no boys or men—and as far as she knew they did have to die sometime. They must have come on the same train as her and Lorabeth, she decided.

A citadel, at once austere and welcoming, seemed to appear as if being shaded in by an artist’s charcoal stick. The miller’s daughter had always loved the way a piece of charred wood was given a second chance and was used to draw the world it had grown strong in. Everyone began to gravitate towards it, not really aware of where their feet were taking them. The doors beckoned to them and the miller’s daughter suspected a trick.

As they entered a cavernous hall, she thought that this castle was much like the Grand-Palace she had imagined in the capital city of her own kingdom. But as a girl whose life had been fraught with taunts, despair, broken, promise, false friends—all of this had made her distrustful. This was too good to be true. Time was in a muddle, and as for space? Distance had become irrelevant. Maybe she had simply slipped out of one dream and into another.

Nevertheless, her careful steps echoed on the marble floor. At the far end of the hall (which looked to be quite a long way, distorted space notwithstanding) she could barely make out a throne, gleaming in the soft light of the fog-land. It was ethereal and somehow ominous, a blatant dichotomy just like this world she lived in. Lorabeth seemed oblivious to any possible suspicion and the miller’s daughter debated with herself about whether Lorabeth was real. She would be quite saddened if she wasn’t; the distantly cheerful merchant girl had become her first new friend in too long.

The hall seemed endless and walking was slow going, and normally, the miller’s daughter thought, people would have picked up their pace by now. A tinge of rotten seemed to permeate the whole setup and the silence was nerve-wracking. She began to march forward with exaggerated urgency to instill, possibly, a sense of direction in her surrounding peers. The littlest saw her advance and saw a leader, a sister, a surrogate mother. They thronged around her and that motley crowd of girls headed determinedly for the silver chair. The older ones—and Lorabeth—still stared as they walked in a hushed procession, sometimes reaching out to stroke the wall with an otherworldly reverence. As they slowed more and more they seemed to become part of the wall.

They actually looked as if they were steadily becoming ghosts, and the miller’s daughter couldn’t part with Lorabeth. Wildly she took hold of Lorabeth’s arm and dragged her away. The force seemed to sever a link and she looked about as if awakening from a dream.

Rushing to the front of the little girls’ clump, the miller’s daughter saw the throne come jarringly close and they stopped. The enduring silence turned into awkward time-killing. The monster that seemed to reign here was laughing at them, she was sure of it. It was a raspy cackle, a nightmarish sound.

They waited for it to show itself. The fluid-time took over again and the youngest of the group fidgeted. The miller’s daughter felt impatient, a hidden fire now giving out smoke inside her. This cowardly thing was lurking, whatever it was, and it angered those girls.

“Come out, you!” the miller’s daughter cried. “You, whatever you are! We’re here!” The others nodded their assent vigorously. Some of the young women had reached the mass of girls. Horrifyingly, their skin was translucent. A thing film of light lined their bodies and ringed their heads. There was a definite feeling that something in them was leaving. The miller’s daughter brought them into the center of the huddled throng and led the girls in clamoring for the appearance of the unknown master of the house.

Spurred on by the smaller voices around her, the miller’s daughter shouted boldly. Lorabeth was becoming steadily more opaque and the pinkness was returning to her face. She gripped the miller’s daughter’s hand with instinctive warmness. Soon peer pressure had her shouting as well. The solemn hall was chaos as a growing crowd shouted at the empty chair and the half-women frantically tried to block out the noise. They seemed disturbed in their wonderful little world, trapped inside their own minds and the lure of the hall.

From behind the throne several drum-like booms sounded. A figure materialized on the throne, flickering in and out of existence. The miller’s daughter jumped back, suddenly, inexplicably afraid. The woman—for she was, unmistakably, a woman—commanded a powerful respect and some of the more transparent women began to grovel at her feet. She possessed some sort of ancient might, an all-seeing, all-knowing entity. The miller’s daughter shivered; her penetrating gaze made her feel like cornered prey.

Then the woman on the throne smiled, and it was here that the entire hall was struck by the knowledge that she could not be anything but a queen. It was like sunlight breaking through a fog, and indeed, the miller’s daughter saw, the fog outside was clearing.

“Welcome,” the queen said. Her voice was sonorous, mellifluous, and hearing it was like being in the forest again. “You are all hungry. Come, let us eat.” The miller’s daughter thought it perplexing that she said they were hungry as a fact rather than an assumption. She had felt neither hunger nor thirst on the train. In response, her stomach growled loudly, arguing that she was still human and therefore needed food. The older women had already rushed to the long stone table that had been set before them. She hesitated, but her stomach gave in. Soon she was seated beside Lorabeth and savoring the heavenly aroma that wafted out from a room to the left of the throne. Something clattered and glass could be heard breaking. The queen’s features grew stormy and she swept out of the room.

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The goose gave a great honk and alighted on a grassy knoll. The miller’s daughter slid off its enormous, feathery back and walked to the little table that was laid out neatly before her. A pretty, sharp needle and spools of gossamer thread waited as if expecting her, arranged beside a towering pile of diaphanous, almost invisible fabric. The giant goose flapped its wings to set off on another journey in that magical land with sweeping whooshes and a call like a carved horn. She reached for the needle, but it dissipated in her grasp—

She blinked rapidly as her eyes fluttered open. It had been a dream, which of course it had, since all the nice things she saw lately were dreams. Yet she heard something outside, very near now, that made her stop and hold her breath.

She could hear the honk and flap of the goose.

Acting on excited impulse, the miller’s daughter scrambled into a comfortable dress and climbed through the window. She thanked the springtime for making the ground soft and her steps padded. No telling what the miller would do if he caught her now. There was still a slight nighttime chill in the air, but she forgot it in her eagerness to find the goose. As quietly as a girl of thirteen summers can be, she stole around trees and bushes. The goose-sounds seemed close.

Her heartbeat quickened and the brilliance of the moment heightened. She knew she would come upon it now, just a little farther—

She stumbled into a clearing that she had never found before in all the hours she had spent wandering the woods. She swore that the last time she had checked, there had been an impenetrable mass of brambles here, but there was no time to wonder. A wall of metal rose up to above her head. Strange rectangular chinks with rounded corners appeared at intervals throughout its length. It was a dull gray, a lackluster color. The miller’s daughter swallowed her disappointment and turned to trudge home. Just as she did, one of the rectangles was pulled back to reveal a well-lit opening. An inviting aura emanated from it and she was drawn to it despite herself. Caution vanished and in its place was an anticipation that was entirely new.

The structure started to hum and the miller’s daughter felt distinctly that it was about to leave without her on its way to some wondrous dreamland. Suddenly she knew that she belonged on the other side of that wall, inside that room. With a renewed urgency she half-ran to it and found herself inside. The rounded rectangle closed behind her like it had been waiting for her to board the metal box.

Smoothly, it shifted into movement, a sleek, well-tuned machine. Everything inside the moving room seemed oddly angular and it felt natural to sit on a box attached to the wall. The seat seemed to shape to her body so that the hard material was comfortable. Handles hung from the ceiling next to poles that connected to the floor. It was almost completely white, the atmosphere sterile. The miller’s daughter craned her neck around to look out the wide window behind her and gasped. The metal snake had risen into the sky and she could see the beginnings of a springtime sunrise beyond mountains that were coming closer with unbelievable speed.

After a few minutes she became bored of admiring the view outside the window and wished for someone to talk to. John would have loved this mysterious, thrilling ride and she wondered, with a little pang, how she would get home. She would never miss the miller’s cottage but John, what about John?

The metal box seemed to have been reading her mind, and a tall, slim girl walked into the room wearing a confused expression. She was really quite lovely in a faded sort of way. Her face was pale, but it was offset by striking, lively green eyes. Wispy, ash-blonde hair cascaded down to her hip. She looked around, rather like a bewildered doe the miller’s daughter had seen on one of her water-fetching trips. Then her eyes settled on the miller’s daughter and lit up.

“Oh, good, someone to talk to,” she said brightly. She hovered uncertainly for a bit before sitting down on the white box. Evidently she had wanted for conversation for an unbearably long time—in the space of five minutes, the miller’s daughter had learned the girl’s name, where she had come from, and about a dozen things that she had been thinking about on this unfeasible nighttime ride. Somehow the miller’s daughter found her sweet rather than exasperating.

Finally finished, Lorabeth sighed deeply and turned to her. Something like nostalgia clouded her face. She looked, the miller’s daughter thought suddenly, like the vulnerable sixteen-summer girl she was, far away from home with her whole life ahead of her. She had had a home that she had loved, and in this aspect the miller’s daughter found it difficult to sympathize.

Lorabeth jerked back to reality, seeing the miller’s daughter, a girl younger than herself, reining in her feelings with what seemed like uncharacteristic grace. She could not know that there were no feelings to rein in. Somewhat sheepishly, Lorabeth summoned up her burgeoning maternal instincts to care for the miller’s daughter as time became meaningless and the gray metal strip of rooms rose higher up into the sky.

The minutes bled into hours, the hours bled into some sort of interminable fluid-time. Every so often Lorabeth and the miller’s daughter would turn and spend short moments in the fluid-time feasting their eyes of the magnificence outside the window. They became used to their pleasant, if monotonous, new life inside what they came to call “the white room”.   

The only thing the miller’s daughter found mildly disheartening were the vague, shadowy attacks of memory about her other life, in the village. They pointed accusatory fingers and whispered twisted words into her mind about lack of loyalty, about John, about the wives in town who needed mending done, as she and Lorabeth slept during what they thought was night. It was impossible to tell now that the train forged onward on its inexorable path in a deep forever-darkness, dotted with the tentative twinkle of what appeared to be stars.

The miller’s daughter had long since given up on counting the days when Lorabeth breathed in sharply, feeling the floor with her foot and pacing skittishly.

“Do you feel that?” she asked quietly. “We’ve stopped.”

It was true, she realized, and the two girls explored the newly stationary qualities of the cabin. They verified and re-verified that they had arrived at last at the destination that those lost souls had wanted for so long.

They clambered to the window but were disappointed to see a thick mist on all sides. The place they had visualized was many things, but it was not misty. Lorabeth and the miller’s daughter sat down heavily, chiding themselves for getting their hopes up.

For the first time since they had boarded, a voice crackled from a grate that materialized in the ceiling. “We have arrived and will be disembarking shortly.”

In disbelief, the two girls stared at each other and started to laugh. It was a real laugh, one that filled their stomachs and their hearts and let all the confused joy and relief knotted up inside them tumble out.

The rounded rectangle doors that had let them into the white room began to open with an almost theatrical slowness and a pfffff sound like the wind blowing long and hard. A shaft of golden light found its way inside and both girls, with a spontaneous naïveté, reached out to try and touch it. Their fingers met with nothing and they giggled.

Then the opening became large enough to step through, and Lorabeth and the miller’s daughter, exhilarated, prepared to confront this brave new world before them.

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I can't believe I haven't told you this before - I'm a 2012 NaNoWriMo participant! My novel is called The Universe Quilt and you can read more about it on the Long-Term Projects page. Here's Chapter One for my faithful readers :)

The miller’s daughter sat with a needle in her hand. Then, in, out, in, out, it flashed over and under the faded blue fabric. It was a silver serpent ready to do her command. With a needle and thread, the miller’s daughter could do grander things. But focus now, she thought to herself. Focus on mending the broken pieces that come to you.

A door opened in the next room. Startled, the miller’s daughter hid her sewing and flew into the room to greet her father. She hoped he hadn’t caught the sound of fabric on wood or a needle being hastily poked in to save a place.

No such luck. “Have you been sewing again?” he asked, pronouncing sewing with the same distaste that one would use for the word plague. His daughter hung her head. It was impossible to lie to the miller, whose sticklike shrewdness had earned him a reputation throughout the province. She knew better than to try and fool him.

The miller raised his hand and sent a resounding slap across his daughter’s cheek. The slight puff of flour dust made her cough.

It was unfair, she thought furiously. Her father didn’t say anything when she brought in the money from her mending jobs, but whenever he caught her in the act, his anger grew palpable in the air. He thought it was pointless, but he took her money anyway. She never got so much as a single copper coin out of anything she made. It seemed that he was trying to tangle her ever more tightly in an insidious, life-sucking web.

She dared not say anything aloud. The last time she had, he had burned all of her thread and fabric and sold her needles without telling her a thing. She had been forced to borrow and beg until a kind old widow who had been visiting that month gave her new supplies.

Another slap raced across her other cheek. Blinking back the tears that threatened to turn his fury into outright cruelty, the miller’s daughter turned and fled to her bedroom. It was here that not even the miller could touch her; here that she sat on her too-small bed and wished she was strong enough to defy her father. She wished she was brave. She wished she had a mother there to protect her from his harsh and terrible words that beat on her with all the strength of a blacksmith’s hammer. I wish, I wish, I wish…but the wishes died out into hopelessness as the miller snuffed the still-burning candle and she heard fabric ripping. It was a deadly, joy-killing sound, and its fatal rhythm and her tears slowly nudged the miller’s daughter into a sorrowful sleep.

***

The dawn with its unwelcome grayness woke the miller’s daughter just when her sleep had become dreamless and her breathing even. She wondered what crime she had committed to deserve the hatred of even the kind morning, the morning that supposedly helped to heal all wounds.

She found her father where she had expected him—at the table, throwing ashes out the window that were once the scraps of the baker’s tablecloth, a special work of mending that had been passed down in their family for generations. Undoubtedly he would go out to market later and buy a new one for the baker’s wife so that she couldn’t possibly think of missing it. He would use the money the baker’s wife had given his daughter so that his own reserves of coin would be untouched. It was why the village gossips never talked of his liability to storm and rage, especially at his daughter.

Silently, she watched from behind as woodland birds hopped out to examine the debris landing on the fresh forest floor. The miller’s cottage was on the outskirts of the village, one of the few things she liked about living in it. It was no fault of the little house’s no—but as her father grew more controlling as time passed and her limbs grew longer and more energetic, it had begun to seem like a cage.

The miller turned abruptly and saw his daughter gazing at the birds, now pecking, pecking, pecking. She looked up and him with a sad, bitter smile, at once achingly young and tiredly old. With a wordless step she picked up a large bucket and slipped out to fetch water.

The miller’s daughter sighed with heartfelt relief as the healing essence of the forest buoyed up her spirits. In spring the sunlight spilling through the canopy and dappling the ground put life into the frozen earth and into the waking trees. Her nose tingled and she sneezed gently. She laughed a little, knowing that the flowers had started their sniffling game again.

Having reached the well and the brook, babbling merrily now that the frost had gone, the miller’s daughter set her bucket down and sat to drink in the calm, wise air of the forest. The water could wait a few moments. Birdsong washed over her, and its carefree simplicity was both heartbreaking and reassuring. If only she had been born a bird. She thought of all the hours she could have spent in the bracing blue sky and bemoaned her existence as a girl. A stray tear followed a meandering path down her thin face. She wiped it away, feeling defeated.

“Did the old man catch you again?” The miller’s daughter whirled around to see who was causing the unwanted disturbance—and then showed one of her rare genuine grins to see John walking towards her. John was one of the only people, no, the only person she could speak to without feeling constricted. Of course he was the only one to know of her troubles, and his easy way of referring to the formidable miller as “the old man” was funny in a ridiculous sort of way. He sat down next to her on the rich soil, not minding the dirt, and put an arm around her shoulder, looking up at the trees thoughtfully.

They had been quiet companions for as long as anyone could remember. There was no miller’s daughter without the chandler’s boy. A strong resonance had always existed between the two. John saw her thinking and patted her shoulder. She lifted her tearful, gray-blue eyes to his twinkling ones in unspoken thanks for the comfort of today and all the days past. His eyes smiled just the slightest bit more and the miller’s daughter lowered her head, remembering. She had fancied herself in love with him once, but all that burned inside her heart now was this clinging desire to be free.

Pointing to her bucket and nodding to the well, John reminded her of what she had ostensibly come to do. She stood with that weariness that characterizes those rare people who know more about life than they’d like to, and John felt a fresh wave of an ineffable emotion that he had frequently felt about his friend—wanting to help her but finding her stranded and lonely in a faraway place where he could not reach. There was something about her, he decided, that no one would ever understand.

The clear, pure tone of well-water sloshing about in her bucket gave the miller’s daughter a small glimmer of ephemeral happiness. Before making her way to the dreaded cottage and her father, she waved a goodbye-for-now to John. His expression seemed to say, whenever you need me.

The remainder of the day passed in drudgery, further worsened by her father’s irritability. If there was one thing the miller’s daughter feared more than the miller’s terrifying tantrums at night, it was the ominous thundercloud that would loom over the whole cottage the next day. Part of her thought he was simply taunting her, lording over her the power he held throughout the insignificant life she led.

Thankfully, there were no eruptions of temper that day. The miller’s daughter, glad that she had gotten off so well, even bought vegetables and meat at the market to prepare a hearty stew for her father’s dinner. It was received with surprising goodness by her father, and she realized that the new tablecloth she had seen draped over a chair that afternoon was gone. The baker’s wife must have promised him a favor, perhaps a free loaf of bread. Her hunch was confirmed by the three small, soft rolls he gave her before she went to bed. He even said “good night”, albeit gruffly.

The miller’s daughter made her bed, drowsy from the happy bustle of the day. The last thing she heard before drifting off into contented sleep was a vaguely annoying blare in the far distance.

If only it had stayed that way.

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