Once upon a time, there was a knight who failed in his task, but also succeeded in evading his fate. Although he could no longer protect his prince, he had ensured the prince's happiness and safety. Nevertheless, the knight felt lost; his purpose in life was gone, and he wandered aimlessly through the world, trying his hardest to find a new one.
One day, the knight came upon a secluded castle. Ah, a place where I can finally rest, he thought, and knocked at the gates. No one came to answer him, but the gates swung open of their own accord. The knight, who had seen many strange things in his life, shrugged and went in.
The castle had no master or mistress; there was only one sign of life—the castle pet, a small duck. It seemed very happy to see another living being and asked for nothing more than a bit of bread and some company. The knight wandered the halls of the abandoned castle all day, and when he was hungry, a meal appeared on the table, carried by invisible servants. When he grew tired, he found a huge bed made up for him, with new clothes in his size hanging in the ornate but dusty wardrobe.
When the clock struck midnight, he was suddenly aware that there was someone else in the room. The figure moved to the other side of the huge bed and climbed in. The knight was scandalized and more than a little afraid, so he quickly climbed out of bed and tried to light the lamp so that he could see his way out. But the lamp would not light. He could not strike a match to light a candle, and even the small spell to bring light that he knew flickered out.
"Do not be afraid," said the stranger. "I won't hurt you, but there can be no light here after midnight, natural or unnatural." The voice sounded feminine, and the knight, blushing furiously, nearly fell in his attempts to back as far away as possible.
"I'm terribly sorry, but I think there's been some mistake," he stammered.
"No mistake," the unseen girl replied with a laugh. "I only come here after midnight. It's part of my curse, you see."
The knight had dealt with his own fair share of curses, so he asked the girl what was needed to break hers.
"I can't tell you," she replied. "If I did I would turn into a speck of light and vanish."
She told him that she could barely remember the last time she had seen another living soul. She was curious about the outside world—for she could not leave the castle, although the knight had seen no trace of her there that day. She asked about his life, but he would tell her nothing. Despite her claim to be cursed, he did not trust strangers, and he stayed cold and polite. Finally he fell asleep on the floor, and in the morning she was gone.
He searched the whole castle, but all he could find was the little duck. That night, however, the girl returned. Again they spoke, and the knight began to open up a little. This became a pattern: during the day, the knight would wander the castle, or sit by a window and write, and at night he would talk with the mysterious girl.
He tried his hardest to get around the curse. He tried going to bed very early and leaving all the lights on, but no matter what, they were extinguished at midnight. He tried waking up very early, but no matter what, it seemed to be past dawn and she was already gone. He even tried staying awake all night, but no matter what, when the sun rose, he found himself asleep.
Gradually he befriended the girl, and he even began to sleep in the big bed with her, although they never touched. She could not seem to answer any questions about herself or where she came from, but he learned about her personality, her likes and dislikes, her cheerful, selfless nature. One day he realized that she and the little duck were one and the same. He wondered whether she were a girl cursed to be a duck or a duck cursed to be a girl, but she would not tell him.
He came to care deeply for the girl and wished more and more to break her curse, even if it meant that she would be a duck forever. One day he asked her permission to leave the castle for a day, saying that he missed the outdoors and feared he would go mad if he stayed cooped up any longer. This was part of the truth, but he also desperately wanted to go to a library in the nearby town and research her curse, since he had looked through every single book in the castle.
She reluctantly agreed, but warned him not to take anything from anyone, and not to forget about her. He thought these were very simple terms and easily agreed to them.
He researched all day in books of magic and folklore, but he could find nothing pertaining to the girl's curse. All he could find was a brief footnote in a book on local legends about the supposedly enchanted castle, which warned travelers not to go in for fear they could never leave. While he was poring over the books, someone came and started asking him questions, but he barely paid attention to who it was. He didn't even look at her and merely told her that he was busy and to leave him alone, please. He only realized later that she might have been what the girl had meant when she'd warned him not to forget her.
As he was leaving the library, he noticed another patron following him, a dark-haired man in a hooded cloak who seemed to have been watching him all day. Fearing that the man might be dangerous, the knight ignored him and hurried away. However, the man had come very close to him, so close that his cloak brushed the knight's own.
By the time the knight returned to the castle, it was already dark. Exhausted from a long day of walking and the mental effort of all that research, he collapsed onto the bed and fell asleep immediately. In the early morning, he was awoken by something pressing uncomfortably into his side. Confused and groggy, he searched his clothes for the offending object and found a candle in an outer pocket of his cloak that he did not remember having been there before. On a hunch, he tried to light it, and by some strong enchantment it stayed lit.
He raised the candle to look at the girl's sleeping face. He barely had time to register that she was beautiful before a drop of hot wax from the candle landed on her shoulder and she started awake.
"What have you done?" she cried. "Another two nights and you would have broken the curse, but now I must leave you forever." She sounded as if she were reading from a script, as if the words were not her own. Her eyes were wide and frightened.
The knight remembered her warning not to take anything and realized what the hooded man had done. He tried to reach for her, but she began to shrink, transforming into a duck again.
"Wait! Where can I find you?" the knight asked, for he was determined to follow her to whatever prison the curse created.
"Time will tell," she replied sadly with the last of her human voice, and then a wind pulled the little duck away from him and she vanished into thin air.
The knight searched and searched for the girl, but he could find no trace of her. At first he assumed that her last words to him had been a mere saying, but when he had exhausted all hope of finding her in the normal world, he began to believe it was something more. He became obsessed with the idea of time, taking apart everything clockwork that he could find and searching for lore on enchanted clocks and watches. One day, he managed to track down the hooded man who had caused his misfortune.
"Tell me where she is," the knight growled with his sword to the man's throat. "If you can take me to her, I'll consider not killing you for what you've done."
"I can show you how to get to her," the man said. He sounded momentarily frightened, but then he seemed to regain his confidence and spoke with an arrogant air. "The candle did what it needed to do. The man who created that spell would not have let her go that easily, and it would have been worse for you if you had never seen her. I saved you a lot of trouble, you know."
The knight almost chopped off his head right then and there, but he listened to the man's directions because they were the last hope he had of finding the girl who had given him a purpose again.
As the man instructed, the knight neither ate nor slept for three days and three nights. At the stroke of midnight on the third day, he said a certain spell over a certain enchanted clock, and when he next opened his eyes he found himself in a land of spinning gears, each as big around as a wagon wheel. Each gear was like a window, showing a different scene of beauty. Each was more enticing than the last, but the knight refused to be tempted and continued on as the mysterious man had told him.
He continued forward, looking only straight ahead, until he came to a huge ballroom. At first it seemed empty, but when he blinked it was suddenly filled with hundreds of identical girls dancing, all dressed in identical white shifts. One, he knew, was his duck-girl; the others were all automatons. As the man had told him, none of them would recognize him, not even the real girl, for her memory had been locked away until she was able to leave this place.
Instead, the knight danced with each one of them in turn, and each time he purposely made a misstep. Each time, the mechanical girl corrected herself and gracefully dodged his foot. When he came to the real girl, she nearly fell flat on her face with barely an effort from the knight, so he knew that she was the right one. Even as a duck, she'd been clumsy.
"I've come to rescue you," he said.
"Rescue me? I don't want to be rescued! I want to stay here and dance," the girl replied angrily, and she threw off his hand and began to dance again.
"Don't you ever want to see the real world again? To see the sun, or the stars, or feel the wind on your face? You may not remember me, but I know you. Yes, you love to dance, but you love many other things, too, and you cannot let this spell take all that away from you." The knight knew that this was not her real self. The girl that he had known was frightened by the spell; she hated to be controlled, and most of all she feared forgetting herself.
The girl's eyes widened, and he could see her true thoughts fighting the spell. Before she had a chance to resist again, he took her hand once more and started to walk toward the largest of the windows. The path shifted and changed under his feet, but he kept going, dragging the girl behind him. Sometimes it was a small yellow wing that he held and sometimes a human hand, but he never let go, and, as the man had warned him, he did not look back until they were through the window and into the outside world. As his head passed through the portal, he heard an inhuman shriek of despair, but still he did not look back.
As soon as his feet were on the ground, he turned to make sure that the girl had truly made it. She was there, still human, and as she saw him she gasped and said, "It's you!"
"I'm sorry it took so long," said the knight, looking down at the ground now that he knew she was safe. He could not meet her eyes. "Can you forgive me for what I did to you?"
"Forgive you? Don't be ridiculous!"
The knight, saddened but resigned, began to walk away. He had expected this, but as long as she was safe he would ask for nothing else.
"Of course I forgive you," she continued, laughing. The knight could not believe his ears. "You rescued me from that awful place, and you remembered me even when I had forgotten you. How can I ever repay you?"
The knight turned around, stunned. "Your happiness is all I ask for," he managed to say. "You saved me when I was lost. You gave me a purpose again, so the least I could do was return the favor."
"There is one part left to the curse," the girl said. "You must choose: am I to be human by day, or by night? Will you have a girl to dance with you and talk with your friends, or a girl to stay by your side at night and keep you from your nightmares?"
"It is not my choice to make," the knight said immediately. "You have had your choices taken from you for so long, but you deserve to decide your own fate. You are not mine or anyone's to control, so you and you alone may decide, and I will be happy with whatever you choose."
The girl's eyes widened as the red stone she wore about her neck began to glow. As they watched, the pendant dissolved into dust and its chain disappeared.
"You have freed me," the girl exclaimed. "By allowing me to choose, you have given me the chance to choose both. I choose to be human by day and by night. I will never again be trapped as a simple duck, unable to speak or to dance."
She embraced him, and the knight found that his heart was too full to speak.