He left me whole, happy, and carefree. When he returned, he was blind.

It was love of the girl in the tower that had blinded him. It was love for her that had transformed the glittering, altruistic prince into a bitter shell of a man with no hope.

He had left a year and a day before, dazzling on a golden-maned charger, his gold-green robe falling in ripples from his shoulders in a luteous waterfall. Imbued with his excitement I had stood at the gate, waving a silken handkerchief, calling aloud my farewells.

‘Goodbye, little sister,’ he had called back, turning to wave.

When he returned to the castle it was as one ashamed. He was on foot, with shoulders drooping and head hung low in defeat. He was thin with skin that had an unhealthy pallor that spoke of ill nourishment. His hair had grown long and hung limply over his shoulders, and when he looked up at me his eyes were glassy and unseeing.

He smiled as I cried out, and turned toward the sound of my voice. ‘Rae?’

To embrace him, as I had so often dreamed of doing before, became one of the most arduous tasks of my life. I could hardly stand to look at him, to look upon his ruin that was so complete. I could not help callously wishing he would go away and leave me to my own sorrow.

After a moment, as I stood frozen to the dusty ground, he sighed. It was as if he sensed the my aversion – even, perhaps, agreed with it.

‘Lead me inside,’ he said quietly. ‘I can tell you there.’

What he was to tell me, I did not know. Nor did I want to hear it. Whatever had brought the glorious prince I had bid farewell to just more than a year ago to such utter ruin I did not want to know, but I knew he would tell me. He told me everything.

So it was that I led him in, past the curious eyes of the guards, into my private chamber. He sat; I did not. I was too confused to sit.

In a quiet, steady voice (at least that much had not changed, I thought as I closed my eyes against his bedraggled appearance) he told me of his journey. As he told it, he went first to the village where the dragon had been reported, as was always the plan. A small dragon, he said with a wry smile. For the first time that evening I looked at him without censure, for that small smile brightened up his face and spoke of days gone before – days that I remembered perfectly.

‘The dragon was slain easily,’ he said, the smile still hovering on his lips.

Then why did you not come home, I asked silently.

He told then of the return journey, how they had stumbled upon a village revolution and he had been separated from his company. He had made his way back alone, on foot, for his horse had bolted in the battle and not come back.

‘Navigation on foot is very much different from navigation on horseback,’ he added dryly, and laughed. It was not the merry, carefree laugh I was used to – but still, the sound warmed me.

‘I lost myself in an expansive and very dark forest,’ he continued. ‘I made the mistake of thinking that I could easily find my way back home. I wandered amidst the trees for days on end. It was a nerve-wracking experience, Rae, every moment expecting one of the malicious imps skulking just out of sight to make chase. Finally, when I had decided to give up – to sit down against a tree and await my fate, whatever it turned out to be – I came in sight of a tower. It was tall and white, and seemed to have been dropped in the middle of the forest for no particular reason.’

My stomach turned uneasily. Though I had always preferred the sanctuary of the palace to wandering, I knew enough to distrust odd towers placed apparently randomly in strange forests.

‘Don’t squirm,’ he said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘There was no ogre lying in wait.’ He paused, and sighed. At once the laughter faded from his face and the strange bitter expression returned.

‘No, not an ogre,’ he repeated. ‘At first I thought it to be abandoned. It was a very tall tower – about five times the height of a man, or larger – made of smooth-cut, seamless marble. I had determined to investigate the room at the top, but I found no door, and I could get no purchase on the glassy surface of the tower. So I went away again.

‘I spent that night at the foot of a tree not a stone’s throw from the tower. I slept little. I hardly slept any night in that forest,’ he added, and the ghost of a smile crept back onto his face. But though his mouth smiled, his eyes remained blank and unseeing.

‘I woke that morning to a sound I had not thought to hear again,’ he continued after a long moment. ‘Singing. It was exquisite.’ He sighed. ‘I followed the sound, desperate now to find the singer…and find my way out of the forest.

‘The sound came from the tower. As I stood at its foot I could see no one, yet I could hear so clearly the voice. After a moment I hid myself behind a nearby tree. It was not a moment too soon, for just as I hid, there came into the tiny clearing another visitor: a bent, wrinkled hag of a woman shrouded in black. She carried a basket over one arm, full of I could not tell what. When she went to the foot of the tower she gave a hoarse cry and a moment later there appeared at the window a maiden…’ he stopped, seemingly lost in recollection. ‘She was most fair…indescribably beautiful. Nearly as pretty as you, little sister,’ he added with a trace of his old humor. I smiled. Faintly.

‘As the old woman cried out, the girl in the tower cast down a rope. I thought it was made of spun gold – perhaps it was. To my great astonishment the old one climbed it to the top and let herself in at the window. I had scarcely time to take in this remarkeable sight before both women disappeared, the rope was retrieved, and I was left marveling at this enigma.

‘Perhaps an hour later the old woman left the tower in the same way she had come, by way of the golden rope. This time she had no basket. Without further ado she sped from the clearing and disappeared into the forest beyond – where to, I have no idea. Nor do I have any idea how she came and went in that forbidding, twisting forest as easily as you come and go to the dining hall every evening.

‘When I was sure she had been gone for a long time, I stepped out from the tree and approached the foot of the tower, determined to unravel this strange mystery. As well as I could I imitated the old woman’s cry. For a moment I waited, wondering what stupid act I had committed. Yet my fear was without cause, for at that moment the glittering rope was tossed down. Drawing a deep breath, I clutched it tightly and began to climb.

‘It was surely a magic rope,’ he said softly, sounding as if he were very far away. ‘It was soft as silk, and as fine as if it had been woven of human hair. As soon as I touched it it began to carry me up the smooth side of the tower. Almost as soon as I had grasped it I found myself at the top, letting myself in at the long, low window as I had seen the old woman do. The woman I had seen in the tower cowered against the far wall, clearly startled at my sudden appearance. As I saw her then, she was even more lovely than I had guessed from below.’ He stopped. It was a long time before he resumed speaking; almost he seemed to have forgotten my presence. When he began again, his voice had none of the lightness or flippancy of before. He talked as if every word cost him, as if every sentence was weighted with lead.

‘Her fear did not last long. I explained quickly my plight, but offered no apology for my startling arrival, for I could think of none. In return, she told me her story.

‘She had once lived as the daughter of the old woman I had seen earlier. Yet when she had come of age, and come into her beauty, the old woman had grown jealous. She wished to keep Corinna – for that was the name of the girl – to herself always, though she was not her true mother. And so the white tower had become her cache, where none but herself could visit her foster daughter. Corinna told me that she led a life that was not unhappy, for the woman came frequently, and she had enough to do.

‘I did a thoughtless thing then, Rae.’ My brother stopped again, and this time his smile was sad. ‘I allowed myself to fall in love.

‘I spent the next night in the forest, and the next. Each day after the old woman had left Corinna let me into the tower, and we talked until the sun began to set. I learned that the old woman had raised her from infancy; she had never known her true parents, and did not know what had become of them. She spent a quiet life in the old woman’s home on the border of the forest, tending to her large garden and keeping her company. Then, when she had been confined to the tower, she had kept busy in other ways.

‘I determined to bring Corinna from the tower, to bring her here. I would have brought the old woman as well, had she wanted to come. But it was not to be.

‘On the fifth day the woman did not come to Corinna, nor did she come on the sixth. Wary of being found out by Corinna’s possessive guardian I stayed away as well, watching from behind a screen of trees. On the seventh day I decided to go up to Corinna anyhow. Yet when I reached the of the rope it was not Corinna who held the other end, but the old woman. She leered maliciously at me for a moment and then…let go of the rope.’

I gave a small cry; Philip seemed hardly to hear. He put his hands to his eyes as if in pain, and resumed his story after a long silence.

‘I was saved from certain death by a thicket of brambles,’ he said bitterly. ‘I fell into their tender embrace instead of breaking my neck on the ground. Yet I became tangled in their thorns and could not get free. They scratched at my hands, my arms, my legs…and my eyes.’

I resisted looking away as a look of intense pain crossed Philip’s face. ‘Why such animosity?’ I whispered after a moment. ‘Why should the woman hate you?’ Yet even as I spoke I knew the answer; for just as the old woman hated my brother, so I hated Corinna for stealing his love from me.

He shook his head, silently, his sightless eyes closed while his face was turned in my direction.

‘I wandered for many days – I do not know how many – after that fall,’ he continued after a long and painful pause. ‘I learned to see through my fingers. I lodged in whatever villages would have me, and discarded my identity as Prince in favor of beggarship. I could do – can do – nothing worthwhile. I never could, Rae, and even less so now that—," he gestured helplessly toward his eyes.

‘I let myself go completely. I cared only to find my way back here. And so here I will stay, and allow you to care for me as I should have all along,’ he said with a bitter smile.

But stay he did not. He had hardly been home for a year before he was seized by a frenzy of discontent. It was a dusky September evening when he came to bid farewell for the second time, this time with far less ceremony than before.

‘I cannot stay here or I will be driven mad, little sister,’ he said feelingly as I stood before him, mutely uncomprehending. ‘I do not know where I will go or what I will do. I will return someday, Rae, that I may promise. Look for me when the first flowers begin to open on the lady-trees, and I will come.’

I wept, but he did not see it, and they were silent tears. I could not advocate his decision, as much as I knew he wanted me to; I had already lost my brother once. I could not bear to do so again. This journey on which he set out was as completely unlike the circumspect, well-guarded expeditions that he had headed before the loss of his sight as was possible. I was sure that he would not return to me, however strong his promises.

I was wrong.

Those months of waiting were for me a bleak time, fraught with hopelessness. I beat down each tiny seedling of hope as it sprouted within me, never allowing the hope to be augmented by anything. It was better to be without hope, I thought, than to die again as I had when Philip first had not returned.

Thus I was shocked and delighted to the point of collapse when I saw him ride into the gates of the city exactly one week after the lady-trees had begun to blossom. He rode a dark bay stallion, not of royal breeding but with pride in its step, and he sat tall in the saddle, full of pride as I had not seen him since he had first left to slay the little dragon. Beside him was a golden-haired lady riding a grey mare.

I ran to him, and he stopped and reached for my hands. He was smiling – a full smile that reached even to his sightless eyes. He had not smiled that way, not even for me, for over a year. ‘Did I not promise, little sister?’ he whispered as he dismounted. ‘Did I not?’

Before I could so much as reply, he turned and helped the golden-haired lady dismount as well. They stood before me, smiling happily. I knew that this must be Corinna.

To my aesthetic eye, trained in a palace, Corinna’s purported beauty was not as grand as Philip had made it out to be. She was beautiful, to be sure, but her beauty was austere and rather cool, like that of a flower preserved in ice. But her smile warmed her, and I saw in my brother’s face that they were truly in love.

They told me, there in the courtyard of the castle, their tale: how Philip had traveled directionlessly for several months, devoid of hope and light; how he had to his surprise and exceeding joy found Corinna in a small village far from the palace; how events had coalesced to bring them together again when both thought they should be forever apart.

‘But your guardian,’ I protested. ‘She consented to your union, then?’

My mention of the old woman brought a momentary darkening to Corinna’s golden face. I remembred that Philip had said Corinna loved the woman, however selfish and unfeeling the woman may have been.

‘She is dead,’ Corinna said softly after a moment’s hesitation. ‘When – once she had found that your brother visited me, she sent me from the tower by means of chastisement. A few weeks later she joined me, but her health was poor. She did not live very long.’

Philip took her hand again, comforting her. I wondered at his action. Had he absolved the woman from all guilt? Did he not remember what she had done to him? But I held my peace.

We went inside then. I followed Philip and Corinna, knowing that they shared something that I could not, and wept silent tears.

They were married the following week, and continued to live in the palace. Over time I found myself growing to love the golden-haired Corinna, and while the part of me that had once lived most fully in my brother was empty, I began to be more complete than I had been for a very long time.

Thus we lived for many years. Corinna and Philip had several beautiful blue-eyed, golden-haired children, and were happy together as neither of them had ever been apart. I basked in the reflected glow of their joy, loving their children as my own. The people whispered amongst themselves that the prince’s sister had faded into the shadows, but the whispers did not hurt me. I did not mind living in the shadows.