Golden Child | ✓

1. Wishes and Wisps

Aurelie never knew who to believe—her father or her mother.

She crouched on the damp forest floor, carefully sweeping a layer of duff back over the spot where she'd unearthed a mushroom. Before deeming the delicacy safe to tuck in the grass-woven basket at her side, she held it up to a ray of sunlight poking through the leaf canopy above.

Her dirt-crusted fingers swept over its surface, loosening flakes of earth so that the soft white flesh appeared beneath.

After inspecting the gills and squeezing the stem between her thumb and forefinger, Aurelie sniffed the mushroom.

Aurelie's nose always knows, her father liked to chuckle.

She sucked in a breath, nostrils flaring. Earthy. No good.

She tossed the mushroom over her shoulder with a sigh. One lonely mushroom watched her from the basket. Her mother would call it a matsutake. Her father would call it a pine mushroom. Aurelie didn't know whose example to follow, so she just called it mushroom.

Maybe that was why it looked at her so sadly.

Not enough rain, Aurelie mused, leaning against the rough trunk of an ancient fir tree. Dreamy fluffs of clouds floated across the patches of blue canvas sky.

Sending her out to harvest was probably the only thing her parents agreed on. Her mother wanted her out of the house and away from the rest of the family, so she could work off her bad luck where it wouldn't affect them.

Her father believed—along with the rest of their village—that she was luckier than a pair of rabbit's feet or a four-leaf clover. They called her the golden child of Thesya, on account of her blonde hair taking after her father's and from inheriting pale golden eyes from her dark-haired mother.

Good luck meant faring well at mushroom-hunting, even if it hadn't rained that week. Bad luck meant her unnatural skills were because she wasn't fully human and so it was tempting fate and the spirits to keep her.

Aurelie dusted off her white dress with the backs of her hands—those parts were mostly clean, as opposed to her palms. Her father insisted that she wear white, impractical as it was for a mushroom hunter. Aurelie knew why. She had to look the part of a luck maiden.

When villagers paid to have her pet their sick cows or stand in a field of withered crops—golden eyes raised in appeal for rain and golden hair blowing like strands of silk in the wind—well, she couldn't be wearing tattered pants.

The tulle of her dress wasn't exactly whole either. The outfit was a gift—a hand-me-down Aurelie's mother would say—from the mayor's daughter. But if anyone caught her wandering in the forest in search of rare fungi, they'd see a bare-footed forest nymph, her flowing skirt only somewhat torn.

Picking up her basket, Aurelie tucked flyaway pieces of hair behind her ear. The next moment, she pulled the hair forward again.

A habit—to hide the pointy faerie-like tip.

With both hands, she held the basket and its occupant close to her face. Sniff sniff. Spicy is safe, she recited. She'd surprised herself by digging up anything today, but Aurelie knew her father would see a single, forlorn mushroom in a too spacious basket. "We're both lonely white mushrooms in the woods, aren't we?" she whispered to it.

It was stupid of her, talking to a mushroom that would be sliced up and thrown into the cook pot of the mayor's wife by tonight.

In that moment—with the mushroom as her only witness—Aurelie did something desperate.

She made a wish for herself.

Please let me have a new life. One where I'm not good luck or bad luck. I won't have to worry about doing too well at things and frightening my mother. Or being awful at something and disappointing my father. I can just be me.

Sitting quietly, hands clasped beneath her chin, Aurelie waited for the change to take effect. A slight shiver raced down her spine. Satisfied, she rose, ready for the walk back home when a cerulean glow arrested her steps.

A dancing wisp of flame peeked from behind rose-gold ferns, bobbing to the tune of an imaginary fiddler. Without thinking, Aurelie took a step toward the light.

A twig snapped under her foot and the blue wisp vanished.

Blinking to clear the fog from her mind, Aurelie leaped forward to sweep her free hand through the ferns and bushes. The light didn't reappear. Chagrined, she picked up the twig's splinters and threw them away from the narrow forest trail.

I'll come back, she thought silently to the spirit wisp. Home awaited her for now.

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