The Charmed Wife

The Scissors: Close to the Beginning of the End

Hate is a clenched fist in my heart. It keeps my nerves numb as I lie in the dark, pretending to be asleep, waiting for my husband’s breathing to grow slow and even. It takes some time; he tosses and mumbles before falling still at last. Once I know the draught I poured into his wine has done its work, I slide out of bed and dress as soundlessly as I can, and oh, I can be very quiet indeed—I am well practiced in silence. I do not light a candle. The room is pitch black, for the fire has long since died in the fireplace, but I have no need of sight to find my clothes, to skirt the perils of invisible corners: this has been my bedroom for the past thirteen years—thirteen and a half, to be precise—and I have measured its every inch in hours of wall-to-wall pacing. And a candle might wake Brie and Nibbles, who are such nervous sleepers.

The shoes, the lightest among a hundred ballroom pairs I own, are lined up by the dresser, and the borrowed cloak, the color of shadows, is waiting folded on the chair. As I put it on, I grope for the sewing scissors I slipped into its pocket earlier in the day, and the touch of cold metal reassures me. Ready at last, I tiptoe to my husband’s side of the bed—and at once, without warning, I am rattled by a memory of our wedding. The moon was enchanted that night, white as the richest cream, bright as the brightest candle, as is traditional on similar momentous occasions; once he slept, I stared at his profile, outlined by the moon’s brilliance against the pillow plush with the Golden Goose down, and cried tears of joy at my great fortune. But tonight, there is no moon, and all I can see is a pool of denser darkness in the dark. For a minute I stand unmoving, just listening to him breathe, until I become aware of the scissors’ edge cutting painfully into the palm of my hand. And now I want to cry again, if for a vastly different reason. I do not cry. I bend lower instead and feel amidst the moist swirls of satin sheets. When I alight upon his curls at last, the perfumed waviness of his hair is soft, so very soft, under my fingertips.

I swoop down upon him with the scissors.

The mice do not stir in their walnut-shell beds as I creep out of the bedroom, the snipped lock of hair tucked away in the pouch concealed at my hip, next to a few other things already there: a bunch of dried flowers tied with a fading lavender ribbon, a miniature portrait in a bejeweled locket, a sapphire brooch that I will hand over as payment when all this is over, and fingernail clippings from my husband’s left hand.

“It must be the hand he uses to shoot,” the witch told me the night I went to see her.

“Shoot?” I repeated, confused. “Shoot what?”

“How should I know?” she snarled. “Stags, swans, sirens, whatever it might be his pleasure to shoot. They all shoot something, dearie.”

I stayed quiet then, because the echo in the witch’s cave filled all words with a cold, hollow menace and I felt afraid of the treacherous sound of my own voice, and also because I never like to contradict anyone, but I thought: My husband doesn’t shoot, he just signs papers—still, as some of them are execution orders, perhaps it comes to much the same thing? And at dawn of the fall equinox, as instructed, I gathered the yellowing crescents of his left-hand nails off the floor of his changing room before the Singing Maids got to them, hoping it would be enough.

I carry my lantern unlit under the plain gray cloak as I hurry along the corridors. Out of the corner of one eye, I catch the reflection of an escaped blond strand and a pale cheekbone in the glass of a grandfather clock, and pull the hood lower, so no one will wonder where I am going at this late hour. But the hallways are deserted, which is just as it should be, for here, all things run on schedule. Every afternoon, at five o’clock on the dot, porcelain teapots bustle through the palace, knocking on doors with their gleaming spouts, splashing tea into dancing teacups wherever required, after which chandelier crystals begin to tinkle in all the ballrooms, chamber orchestras commence playing repetitive waltzes, and courtiers twirl, one-two-three, one-two-three, and gift one another with fatuous smiles, and dine on roasted quail and little cakes with apricot icing, and talk about the new fashion for pastel-colored gloves. Then the music winds down and they curtsy and part ways until breakfast the following morning, when the busy flock of teapots flits through the hallways once more, steaming with tea, not too strong, plenty of cream, plenty of sugar, every day, every month, every year, over and over again. At this late hour, so close to midnight, everyone is long since in bed. Only once do I meet a solitary candle sprite hurrying to an assignation with a candle burning somewhere, but it is too aquiver to pay my passage any heed; for love makes everyone blind, as simpering court storytellers are forever fond of intoning, quite as if blindness were a happy circumstance in which we all long to share.

Storytellers are dangerous fools, and my eyes are wide open now.

I sweep past dim expanses of reception chambers, past mirrored staircases leading down into multiplied shadows. As I near the Ancestor Gallery, I slow my steps, but the portraits are dozing, the kings snoring mightily, their beards rising and falling, the queens making thin, delicate noises through dusty smiles. No ancestors of mine, I tell them soundlessly as I slip by. In the Great Hall, candelabra are ablaze along the walls and two guards stand flanking the iron-bound doors. I freeze, my heart lurching, then see that they, too, are asleep, helmets drooping over ceremonial lances, the gargantuan visitor log book sprawling unattended between the ostentatious flower arrangement and the old-fashioned apparatus on the slumbering concierge’s desk. Sliding a little on the marble floor, I steal across to the doors, lean on them with my shoulder, gather all my strength, and push.

The doors do not creak. The guards do not wake.

I step over the threshold.

Light from the hall has fallen onto the ancient slabs of the terrace in a great rectangle the color of honey. Beyond it, autumn lies in wait, chilly and damp. I can just see the ivy-clad banisters of the Grand Staircase starting their descent into the garden and the stone arms of a nymph holding out a mossy basket of primroses, the rest of the statue lost to darkness. I pause to light my lantern, and now my hands begin to shake. It takes four tries and a burn on my finger before a tiny wild flame careens into being.

The lantern lit, I linger in the golden doorway for yet another minute. The night before me smells of leaves and rain—and something else, too, a troubling yet exciting smell I fail to recognize. The palace at my back smells of all things small and familiar—candle wax, cakes, parquet polish. This is all I know, all I have known for thirteen long years—thirteen and a half, to be precise—and I feel sudden fear at the thought of walking away. Then I notice my shadow lying on the ground, and the shadow is dark within the light, cut from the same cloth as the night beyond. All at once I say to myself: Oh look, my shadow is growing impatient with me, it wants to go home to its own kind. And somehow this poor little jest gives me courage, so I draw the cloak tight against the chill and push the doors closed behind me. They come together with a dull, heavy thud, like some massive volume slammed shut when the story is over.

The brilliant light is extinguished at my feet.

I am halfway down the stairs when the chiming from the clocktower overtakes me. At the first stroke, a swarm of memories dive after me like shrill, sharp-toothed bats. I cannot let them catch me, so I walk fast, faster still, then break into a run. I skip over steps, slip on stones, slide on leaves, trip over roots, until the palace is only a pale haze of lights shimmering behind me, until the rain-splashed park with its cupids and fountains falls behind as well, and, at last, I am through the gates.

The rutted road stretches before me, black fields on both sides.

I run. My lantern beats against my thigh, my pouch beats against my hip, my heart beats against my chest. Winds pick themselves off the ground in my panting wake, shake themselves off like enormous gray wolves, and lope after me howling. Their ferocity makes me feel brave. Side by side with the winds, I run all the way to the crossroads.

The witch is waiting for me, her cauldron already smoking.

The Cauldron: Closer Still to the Beginning of the End

The world is black and red—black of the night, red of the fire, black of the cauldron, red of the potion. The witch, all warts and hook nose, her eyes gleaming from within the sinister cave of her cowl, her fingers dark and agile like spiders, lurches around the cauldron in a jagged jig, flinging pellets and powders into the bubbling brew, muttering under her nose: “One horn of a poisonous toad. A pair of wings from an unhatched death’s-head moth. Eyeballs of a blind three-eyed newt. Four ground claws of a lame baby dragon. Five scales of a wish-granting pike…”

At midnight, the crossroads is a place where the skin of the world has worn thin, and great underground powers are pressing against it: a place of disorder and flux, an in-between place at an in-between hour. Untamed shadows crowd upon it from all sides, low clouds threaten rain, and the prowling pack of winds that have followed me here stalk it on heavy gray paws. Whenever one of the winds throws back its grizzly head and howls, dead grasses rustle in abandoned fields, and flames under the cauldron waver wildly. I wind the cloak tighter about myself. My courage, such as it was, has seeped away, little by little, until I feel trapped in an ugly dream from which I ache to wake up in my blue-and-white bedroom overlooking the park, with my collection of porcelain poodles lining the mantelpiece and the night kept at bay behind the lace of the curtains—yet I stay where I am, and the winds keep on howling and the frightful old woman goes on reciting her lists of strange poisons that fill me with dread.

“Nine tails of rats that met lonely and violent ends. Ten coals from the hearth of a freshly hanged strangler. Eleven drops of the essence of insomnia. Twelve words of venom that broke a woman’s heart. Thirteen lies that tore apart a kingdom. And, for the crowning touch…”

Her mumbling grows too low to hear as she drops the final ingredient into the potion. When she looks up, her cowl has fallen back, and the pupils in her deep-set eyes are two slits of molten fire.

“Your turn now, girlie.” Her voice is a cackle. “First order of business, a treasured piece of your childhood.”

My hands unsteady, I loosen the pouch, reach for the dried nosegay of forget-me-nots from my mother’s garden, tied with her hair ribbon, and hand it to the witch without speaking. She flicks it into the cauldron. As I watch the faded petals become consumed by the boiling turmoil, a dull old sorrow cuts my heart.

“And a smidgen of your blood. No need to get all pale and wide-eyed, duckie, it’ll be but a little prick, I’m sure you know all about those, most princes sport them… There, all over now.”

My ring finger stings where she has pierced it with a rusty pin, but her touch is surprisingly gentle. She squeezes one drop into the cauldron, and it falls with slow gravity, much heavier than a single drop of blood has any right to be.

“And the nails of your husband’s killing hand? Good, good. And now, his portrait. You did remember, dearie, it must be the most recent one you’ve got?”

I nod, my mouth too parched to speak. The witch does not know who I am. I came to her cave an anonymous petitioner, a wronged woman without a name, common as tears, plain as despair—and I myself am common indeed, but my lot is far from it. I fumble in the folds of my gold-tasseled pouch, pull out the locket. The initial R on the lid is inlaid with rubies, and as the light of the greedy flames falls upon the stones, it looks as if I have trapped a rivulet of fire in the palm of my trembling hand. The witch’s breath rasps in her throat, and when I see the hungry curve of her mouth, I am seized by the cowardly urge to close my fingers tight over the locket’s secret and cry that it was all a misunderstanding, an honest mistake, that I meant none of it—then run, run with my husband’s fate, with my old life, safe in the plush velvet nest at my hip, run all the way back to the palace.

It comes to me then that I always think “palace”—I never think “home.”

“Here,” I say, and click the locket open.

We look at him together.

The night is black and the fire unsteady, but even in the vacillating of shadows there is no denying how handsome, how incredibly handsome, he is. The strong lines of these cheekbones, the chiseled jaw, the easy set of his not-quite-smiling, not-quite-serious lips, the flight of the proud eyebrows, dark and glossy like strips of luxurious fur, over these narrowed blue eyes—so radiant is he with beauty, in fact, that the glinting circlet of gold in his chestnut curls seems merely an afterthought. The witch lets out a whistle, and her eyes jerk away from the locket and swoop onto my face.

My husband’s most recent portrait was done at his coronation.

“Well, now,” says the witch, “this is quite unexpected.” Her tone is dry and businesslike, all traces of cackling gone, her words stiffly formal, no more “girlies” or “dearies.” “It appears that someone was withholding vital information. Had I known who your husband was, madam, my terms would have been different. Queens do not pay in trifles like sapphire brooches. Queens pay in things of true value—their firstborn child or their youth or their voice. Surely you know the rules?”

And I do, indeed I do. We live by rules in our land, and the rules are exacting and many. Trials and wishes come in threes, glossy fruit should be avoided, frogs must never be kissed unless you are ready for a commitment, and princesses, at least the warbling kind, should be ever so mindful of their mood swings—it is sunny when we are cheerful, dreary when we are sad, and stormy when we are driven to consult heinous hags in furtive matters of maleficent magic. And stern justice binds us all, high and low, young and old, good and evil, as some invisible but ever-reliant presence keeps strict tallies of trades and exchanges, rewarding bashful boys’ kindnesses to small animals with beautiful brides, punishing laziness with slugs dropping out of shamed slatterns’ mouths. All magic indeed must be paid for—yet the payments do not always come as violent wrenches, as scourging stabs. There are gentler ways, there are kinder stories. My own life was transformed by magic once before, but nothing was torn from me in exchange for my sweet reward: I earned it instead, scrubbed floor by scrubbed floor, washed plate by washed plate, unvoiced grievance by unvoiced grievance, through many slow, industrious years of patience and misery. I have been hoping that my past stock of exemplary behavior would stretch to pay for this as well.

I see now I was wrong. This is not the same story.

My porcelain poodles, my palace, my park, my predictable past—all of it belongs to a life well thumbed with familiarity and repetition, and no longer mine; and in any case, my once-happy ending has proved to be only another beginning, a prelude to a tale dimmer, grittier, far more ambiguous, and far less suitable for children than the story I believed mine when I was young.

Silent, I stand at the crossroads, twisting and untwisting the hem of my nondescript cloak.

The old hag’s eyes are shrewd and flinty, but when she speaks, her tone is a study in indifference. “Madam, I am a busy woman, and there are few things more odious to me than my time being wasted.” She shakes her wrist out of her sleeve, glances at it. “As a matter of fact, I have another client, a spurned miller’s wife, coming shortly, so I must proceed to my office without delay if we are all finished here. I suggest you make haste to return to your husband before your absence is noticed and he grows incensed. Wives must be obedient. Good night to you, madam.”

The first drops of rain splash on my shoe, on my cheek. Turning her back upon me, the witch starts to gather her pungent satchels and gruesome bundles, sort them with fastidious efficiency, and pack them away in the crevices and furrows of her robe. In mere minutes, I see, the crossroads will cease to be the hallowed place howling with four-cornered winds and pregnant with the workings of destinies, and revert once again to a barren stretch of stunted land where a few gray brambles struggle in the desolate dust and one potholed dirt road runs across another, both leading from nowhere to nowhere.

I hear someone ask: “What do you want?”

And it is my voice, it is I who have spoken.

Instantly, the witch swings back upon me, her eyes alive with glee, her rags swirling, her knees popping, her mad hair snaking, the crossroads crackling with restored magic.

“What do I want, what do I want,” she croons as she dances around me. I wait, imprisoned by the chilly drizzle that falls harder and harder. “The spell you’ve asked for, it’s ancient, it’s dark, and it doesn’t come cheap, not for the likes of you. What I want is a royal-sized payment. Let me see, let me see here. Your youth is gone, your voice won’t be missed by anyone, and your firstborn is only months away from a woman’s curse, more bother than it’s worth…” She stops and laughs, a sharp, baleful laugh like the crack of a whip. “Ah, I know just the thing.”

“My soul,” I whisper, with doomed certainty.

“Not your soul, silly girl, of what earthly use would your soul be to me? Brimstone and damnation are ever men’s unsubtle threats and crude bargains, and they’re welcome to them. What I want is your life’s spark.”

I stare at her through the rain that has become a thousand daggers of cold stabbing me over and over.

“Your spark,” she repeats with impatience. “Your warmth. Your passion. You know. You’ll get your wish, you’ll go back to your life, and you’ll go on, sure as rain, but from now on, everything around you will seem deadly dull. Flat, like. The cheer of singing, the taste of good food, the touch of a lover—you can have them all you want, but they’ll be like pages from a book in a tongue you don’t speak, like a tedious aunt droning on and on about her dressmaker’s cousin’s ailments. Like that children’s counting rhyme: A garden with no flowers, a summer with no sun, a forest with no birdies… Well, you know how it goes. I want your joy. Ah, I see by the look on your pretty doll face that you understand. So, what say you, my pet chicken? Yes or no?”

No, I want to scream back. No, no, no! But I never scream at anyone, I do what people tell me, I bend to everyone’s will, an obliging sort of woman, am I not—and just as I think that, the hate in my heart unfurls its great burning wings, and smashes and smashes anew against my rib cage until I cannot breathe, until I cannot think, and the wolf winds are howling, and the storm is raging around us, and the world is black and red, black of my fear, red of my anger—and “Yes,” I say. “Yes. Take it all, take it now.”

I close my eyes.

“That’s right, keep them closed, my precious, it’ll all be over in a moment,” the witch sings out. “And it won’t hurt a bit, or perhaps it will, but only a little, only a stab, one teensy-weensy little stab, a little pinch in exchange for a lifetime of no pain at all, not such a bad bargain—”

I have never had much physical courage. I brace for the violation, my eyes screwed shut, my face dissolving, the water and the tears all running together. But the moment stretches, and stretches, and stretches, and nothing is happening. The rain has become a deluge; all is dark, wet misery. The witch is hemming and mumbling, fussing about me. I am suddenly conscious of my satin slippers swiftly growing soaked through; my toes are quite frozen, and a sneeze is creeping upon me.

“Well, now,” the witch mutters, and she is close, so close I can smell the stench of her breath. “This is peculiar. Very peculiar.”

I sneeze and, gingerly, open my eyes. Her nose almost pressed against mine, she is squinting at me through the downpour, which is starting to abate, ever so slightly. I wait, hardly daring to breathe.

She makes a noise in her throat and moves her face away.

“How big is that sapphire of yours, anyway?” she asks gruffly.

Without a word, I plunge my hand into the glacial water flooding the pouch, and fish for the brooch, and show it to her; and the stone is quite big indeed, the size of a phoenix’s egg. She considers it briefly before her spider fingers pounce upon it, and it vanishes somewhere in the soggy crannies of her robe.

“And that locket with rubies. One fine-looking man, your husband.”

She explains nothing, and I know better than to ask questions, for it is unwise to pry into the caprices and causalities of magic, the give-and-take of fate. I will never know what has just happened, why I have been spared. Feeling limp with relief, I hand her the locket. She scratches at its inside with a crusty nail to dislodge the enameled oval of the portrait, drops the picture absently into the potion, and pockets the locket itself.

The rain has dwindled to a trickle.

“And the trinket on your finger,” she says now.

I gasp. The diamond has been in my husband’s family for many a generation, has served as a boon in many a royal quest. Shell-encrusted sea monsters have swallowed it, only for its dazzle to be revealed beneath a curlicue of parsley in the mouth of a garnished bream on some king’s dinner platter; prophetic golden-eyed eagles have flown off with it, so that some bewildered maiden with bleeding feet could climb a glass pinnacle to retrieve it from a hungry fledgling’s beak and later, limping still, exchange its hard brilliance for her pocket-sized happy ending; sorcerers with indecipherable accents have sworn dreadful oaths on its flawless facets. He will surely notice its absence, and he will be furious, I think in an agony of indecision—and then remember that, once I am done here, he will never be furious with anyone, not ever again.

I twist the ring off—and it requires much effort, for it has been on my finger for thirteen years (thirteen and a half, to be precise). I am not sorry to see it go.

“Well,” the witch says with a shrug, “this isn’t much, but it will have to suffice. One must always make the best of a sorry deal. And now, for the spell.”

She turns to the cauldron. Dead coals smoke, splutter, and burst into vigorous flames. The rain has stopped. My feet are miraculously dry again.

The Spell: At Last, the Beginning of the End Proper

“Magic’s not strictly a science, it’s more of an art,” the witch says as she stirs the cauldron. “There are laws, to be sure, but every case is unique and, with a potion this powerful, we can go in any number of directions. First off, there is the trusty old eye-for-an-eye approach. He’s caused you pain, and you can repay him in kind—say, make him break out in boils and hives, or go lame, or develop a bad case of hemorrhoids, well, you get the idea. No doubt satisfying in its own barbaric way, but I can’t recommend it, because, let’s be honest here, if you’re having trouble with him now, just wait till he is hurting good and proper. Ever had your husband stub his toe? Those princes are all manful bluster, of course, when it comes to skewering ogres or hunting down maidens—or is it the other way around?—but they’re such insufferable babies when faced with the least physical discomfort.” I can tell that she has given this speech countless times before, for her words have grown fluid and remote, like pebbles worn smooth by the ceaseless attrition of the sea. “So, then, moving on, you can make him fall back in love with you, relive the romance of your honeymoon, flowers, kisses, all that maudlin sop. And it works, and some of my clients do opt for it, but I always tell them, ‘Dearies, there is a catch.’ No potion can change his nature, so whatever lousy thing he did to you in the past, he will do it again in the future, as soon as he tires of your kisses, which he certainly will if he has once already, and in double time now, because let’s face it, you are no spring chicken. No, not a long-term solution, a year won’t pass before you’ll be dropping by my cave, begging me to curse him all over again.”

The more she talks, the smaller I feel, as if my story is just like every other story, a commonplace, and I a lifeless cardboard cutout, in control of nothing, made to go through motions to illustrate some preordained, banal conclusion. A grain of resistance starts to form deep, deep inside me, tiny yet stubborn, insidious like a pea under a suffocating pile of mattresses to which a fellow princess was once subjected in an insulting parochial trial. Oblivious of my mood, the witch carries on. “A better way, by far, is to target the root of the actual problem. Does he treat you with cruelty? We can make you invisible. Does he gamble? We can turn all the coins in his pockets into cobwebs and leaves—a cheap fairy trick, that, but quite effective. Does he drink? Any wine he puts in his mouth from now on will taste like troll piss. Are there other ladies involved? We will cause him great difficulties in this department, if you get my drift, heh-heh-heh, just say the word—”

And I do, after all my years of silence. And the word is “No.”

“No,” I say, in a loud, clear voice. I feel myself flushing, not with embarrassment but with anger. “No, I do not want any of that.”

The witch looks startled, and I am startled, too, for I have never spoken to anyone with such force before, not me, not the sweet-natured girl who never argues.

“No,” I repeat once again, just to prolong the unfamiliar sensation that has awakened in me. This new sensation is heady and large, its edges harsh and defiant, not like any of the plaintive, aggrieved, stealthy sensations I have carried inside me for so long they have grown soft and worn-out with a decade of use, like crumpled old handkerchiefs soggy with old tears. This sensation is one of power—of having him in my power at last, of holding the smiting sword of justice raised above him, not some impersonal fairy-tale justice meting out brides and slugs, but my own, very personal, long-overdue justice, about to crash down upon his handsome curly head.

“Well, it’s your spell,” the witch says cautiously after a pause. “What do you want, then?”

I know just what I want.

“I want him dead.”

A strike of lightning, perfectly timed, accompanies my words. I do not flinch. I see everything clear and frozen in its purple flash—the witch, her scraggly eyebrows lifted in surprise, the cauldron with its revolting blood-tinged concoction, the wolf winds lying in prone submission at my feet. Then the world winks out again.

“It’s your spell, madam,” the witch repeats, but a novel note sounds in her words, one I am not accustomed to hearing from anyone. I wonder if it could be respect. “Well, then. If you’re sure.”

“Do it,” I tell her.

And the night is black and the fire red and the commencing spell long and extravagant and full of awe-inspiring sound effects, complete with growls and howls and rolls of mighty thunder. A dark, stormy stretch of the heart-pounding eternity passes before the witch throws her arms up and screams the closing words of the incantation. Another impeccably timed bolt of lightning strikes the cauldron, and I am blinded. When I can see again, I look at the old woman with a new appreciation. I am grateful to her for matching the magnificent pitch of her magic to the magnitude of my marital disappointment.

Anything less might have made me less certain of my intent.

“Now it’s yours to complete,” says the witch. “Get the lock of his hair. How long have you been married?”

On any given day, I know the exact duration of my marriage as surely as I know my husband’s collar size (sixteen), the ages of my children (eleven and six, soon to be twelve and seven), and my own age: thirty-five, soon to be thirty-six, then forty, then fifty, then—while he grows only more attractive, a graying lion with his imposing stride, commanding gestures, and the fierce geometry of cheekbones—then just another bent and wrinkled hag, not all that different from this warty old woman.

“Thirteen years. Thirteen and a half, to be precise.”

She takes the soaking chestnut curl from me, deftly peels off thirteen single strands, counting under her breath, then breaks another one in half, and tosses away the rest, and drops the thirteen and a half hairs into my readied hand.

They lie on my open palm, wet and seemingly harmless in their insignificance.

“Just throw these into the cauldron, one after another, and when the last half goes in, spit after it. Spit with feeling, mind. And then—poof!—you’re a widow.”

Something seizes within me at the matter-of-factness of her words. My fingers stiff with cold, I separate one hair from the soggy bunch, stretch my hand over the cauldron.

“Well, go ahead, drop it, drop it!”

I release it. Together we watch it drown.

On the surface of the potion, images bubble and flit.

The Beginning of the Beginning (After the Happy Ending)

Once upon a time, in a distant land, there lived a merchant who had a wife and a daughter. The wife was soft-spoken, the daughter pretty, and his trade successful, and for a while all went well with him. But then all his deals went sour, his wife took ill and died, and he had nothing left but his little girl. He thought to start fresh and moved with her to a new land, and there married a local woman who seemed kind to him but was not. For in truth, he barely spoke the new language, and he knew the new customs so poorly that he understood very little of what his new wife said and did. Soon the merchant, his spirit broken, sickened and died, and his daughter was left all alone in the world, with nothing to her name but a dried bunch of forget-me-nots from her childhood garden and no one but her stepmother to care for her. The woman had two daughters of her own; like their mother, they had no patience for people different from themselves and disliked the pretty little girl for her heavy accent and her foreign ways. One week had not passed since her father’s funeral when the three of them began to order her about and give her chores around the house. She never complained but worked in stoic silence and, after years of drudgery and obedience, blossomed into a beautiful maiden. And then, as was only proper, came a fairy godmother, and mice that turned into horses, and, at long last, a ball with its handsome prince. The prince fell in love with her, because he had absolutely no reasons not to: she was ornamental, blond and pink, and ever ready with expressions of gaiety, attention, or solicitude, whichever was called for. And so they were married and the envious stepsisters properly chastened, and she came to live in the palace, which looked and smelled like a vanilla cake, white and light, with blue icing.

(In a quick aside, her originally murine, briefly equine, now permanently murine best friends, Brie and Nibbles, moved to the royal quarters with her. Brie was a dainty she-mouse who swiftly acquired a profusion of refinements, such as a taste for sweet cookie crumbs and a habit of wrapping her whiskers in golden foil. Nibbles was of an earthier nature, a jovial glutton whose simple conversation invariably turned to cheese. Whenever he attempted to discuss the gastronomical superiority of camembert over brie, Brie squeaked in mock indignation, “Oh, you beast!” and slapped him with her tiny perfumed gloves. When Nibbles laughed, his entire stomach wobbled like blancmange, and ever more so as he learned his way around the kitchens. He only hoped that their princess was no less at home in her palace life; he worried about her, they both did, and with good reason, and her happiness was the sole subject of contention between them. At least her new father-in-law had welcomed her gladly.)

The old king was kind to her, and she liked the mirrored buttons that were always close to popping on his soup-stained vests and the apologetic manner in which he spoke to his grooms. The courtiers, flamboyant in their flounces, ruffles, and ribbons, were overall interchangeable, employed as they were mainly for atmospheric backdrops and humorous relief. And while it was true that the queen was no longer alive, or perhaps she had vanished—well, something or other had happened to her—her passing (or else disappearance) was not, as everyone was quick to assure her, a cause for melancholy, for it had happened quite a while before and was largely a matter of convention. And in any case, deep feelings were not a likely possibility here, for in this kingdom all souls appeared to be more or less one-dimensional, with just the slightest hollow at the center, for fleeting frustrations (not enough sugar in the morning tea!) and exclamatory enthusiasms (new stockings! new kittens!) to perch ever so briefly, splash in the shallows, then take off again, no depths stirred in their passage.

This was, of course, pleasant and proper, and she felt that she was one of them, that she belonged. During the day she stayed busy being happy, and when she slept, she had no dreams but saw a sheet of solid blue instead, spreading on the underside of her eyelids, flooding her mind with peace. The prince—he was called Roland, though she had not thought to inquire after the name before sliding her little hand in his, looking deep into his cornflower-blue eyes, and whispering, “I do”—was all a prince should be, gorgeous and courteous, and he adored her. He threw balls in her honor, serenaded her with the finest musicians, showered her with sweet-voiced songbirds, soft-pawed puppies, and other tokens of princely fondness, whose very uselessness demonstrated the full extent of his devotion. If they did not finish each other’s sentences, it was only because they were not in the habit of holding protracted conversations: true sentiment had no need of verbal expression. Her love for him was all flowers, and waltzes, and a great sense of relief at things having worked out just so. And just so, they lived happily ever after, for one whole year.

By the end of that year of bliss, she was with child.

A sudden white flash rends the night over the crossroads, and I close my eyes, thinking it another bolt of lightning. Then I smell lavender soap, and my spirits sink, for I know just what—just who—it is.

“Well, look what the cat’s dragged in,” the witch says darkly.

I open my eyes to find my fairy godmother bearing down upon me, wringing her hands, smothering me in her laundered pink robes and fresh lilac smells, almost knocking me off my feet as she slams into me with the full impact of her unwavering goodness. I have never seen her apple-cheeked, double-chinned face look so distraught.

“My child, my dearest child,” she wails, “what are you doing here with this villainous wretch? Oh horror, what horror! Thank heavens I’ve arrived in time to save you from making the greatest mistake of your life!”

The witch spits at the fairy godmother’s feet.

“You can’t stop her, you know. Rules are rules. It’s her spell, and she is the only one who can end it. Madam, do you wish to continue?”

“She wishes nothing of the sort!” My godmother shakes me, none too gently. The top of her agitated, bobbing head barely reaches my shoulder. “You don’t know my darling like I do, drastic change will never make her happy. She just needs a good cry, that’s all, a good cry, a lovely cup of tea, a cuddle with her pillow, and things are bound to feel better in the morning. Let’s take you home without delay, my precious child, you’ll catch your death out here, in the cold and the damp, what with your delicate health. Come along now, there’s my girl.” She steps back to give me a sweet, encouraging, anxious smile. “My finest accomplishment.”

Her slightly protruding eyes are round, white, and moistly gleaming, like two peeled hard-boiled eggs, and I see myself reflected in them, a fragile ornament that has somehow rolled out of the box and needs to be repackaged with care in its soft, padded nest, where it will keep safe and untouched, asleep for a hundred years.

Anger scalds my insides. I twist away from her.

“I want him dead,” I say through gritted teeth.

The witch looks grimly triumphant.

“And I want him dead now. Do we really have to dole out the hairs one by one, or can I drop the whole bunch in at once and just be done with it?”

The witch ponders. Both of us pointedly ignore the fairy godmother’s gasps.

“I don’t see why not,” the witch announces at last. “Of course, traditions are, well, traditional, but allowances can always be made for exceptions. Go right ahead, it will be sprightlier this way.”

My heart takes off in a gallop—almost there, almost free… I step up to the cauldron; the two women follow. As I bend over the brew, I see the shuddering reflections of our three faces in the tumultuous mirror—a hag, a matron, a beautiful girl (who, quite true, is no longer a girl and whose beauty has dimmed, grown saggy here, tight there, yet who can still pass for one in the black of night, in the turmoil of magic, if no one inspects her too closely). I look from the florid double chin on my left to the warty chin sprouting wiry tufts on my right—my future laid out with such cruel clarity before me—and, newly hardened in my resolve, pinch the sorry bundle of my imminently late husband’s hairs in my fingers, and raise my hand.

And then, just as I am about to let go, the fairy godmother lurches forward with a stifled cry and makes a grab for me, her plump grip unexpectedly strong. The arc of my gesture goes awry. Only two or three hairs flutter, ineffectually, down into the potion, while the rest remain plastered over my fingers.

“You… you meddlesome witch!” cries the witch, as our struggling reflections in the cauldron give way to the vision of the royal palace.

The End of the Beginning

She was wan and unwell all through the spring, and the prince was obliged to attend a dozen state balls and dinners by himself. She could not help feeling that she had let him down somehow, but he was full of understanding and begged her not to worry, not even when some urgent matters of foreign diplomacy forced him to travel to a distant southern province without her. To prove that she was ever in his thoughts, he had his fastest courier (the very one, in fact, who had brought the glass slipper to her stepmother’s house the previous year) shuttle between them, delivering immense gift baskets of star-shaped purple fruit ripened by the southern sun. It was lovely of the prince to think of her so often on his grueling travels, and she always rewarded the young courier with a grateful smile.

With the advent of summer, her sickness passed, and she began to swell. The prince was more solicitous still upon his return. He had moved his own bed to his study in the west wing to ensure her proper rest, her situation being delicate, but the regular tokens of love that he sent with the servants demonstrated his unfailing devotion. (She did not, in truth, feel especially delicate, but did not dare contradict the royal physician; she felt fortunate to be in his care.) The gifts themselves grew practical in nature, more suitable to an expectant mother: a pair of thick socks to be worn in bed; a book of recipes titled Mommy, Is Dinner Ready Yet? A Guide to Easy and Nutritious Cooking with Children; a set of knitting needles, along with a basket of yarn enchanted to never run out. The knitting needles in particular offered hours of useful distraction, and she felt ever so appreciative as she whiled away her tranquil days making sweaters for old King Roland, chatting with her trusty mouse friends, Brie and Nibbles, and daydreaming of the prince’s next visit.

(Incidentally, Nibbles was courting Brie now, for Brie’s personal charms had come into much greater clarity once she had ornamented her whiskers with golden foil. Brie, however, felt rather torn, for she had met Falstaff, the pet mouse of the Marquise de Fatouffle. Unlike Nibbles, who was an ordinary brownish gray, Falstaff was perfectly white, and the insides of his ears glowed delicate pink, which Brie admired greatly. Too, Falstaff was exquisitely polite and lived in a beautiful cardboard mansion furnished with the softest little sofas and the loveliest little rugs, which he had inherited from a broken porcelain doll of the marquise’s youngest daughter. On the other hand, Brie had known Nibbles her entire life, and his cheese jokes and tummy rumbles made her giggle. For a time, distraught, she took to wandering alone in the garden, plucking daisies the size of her head, tearing off petals and muttering, “Falstaff—Nibbles—Falstaff—Nibbles,” into the spring breeze. When the gardener’s dog jumped out at her from behind the statue of a one-eyed queen, Brie only just made her escape, with a petal still crumpled between her paws and Falstaff’s name on her lips.

She was so badly shaken that she saw it as a sign, and that same night she scratched on the door of Falstaff’s mansion and allowed him a great many liberties on the plushest of his sofas. Immediately upon taking the liberties, however, Falstaff kissed the tip of her paw and said theirs was a most pleasant acquaintance and he sincerely hoped that she had not misunderstood his intentions, which were honorable, of course, but had to take into account the regrettable circumstance that he was the Marquise de Fatouffle’s beloved pet, and she, much as his soul protested against it, was only a common gray mouse—even if her whiskers were wrapped in golden foil. “You understand, my sweet,” he said, and set to brushing his immaculate fur.

She said she did, in a small, small squeak, and, still in the middle of the night, slunk away, and crawled back to Nibbles. She was relieved to hear her friend’s hearty snores continue uninterrupted as she snuggled up to his warm side and, there and then, through her tears, decided that she would accept his suit in the morning. And when she did so, Nibbles was overjoyed, even though he had only pretended to snore the night before. For he had always known where her heart truly belonged, in spite of her fancy whiskers, which, after her six seconds of misguided passion on the dollhouse sofa, she stopped wrapping in golden foil in any case. And if their first litter of mouselings were born with lighter coats than strictly necessary, Nibbles loved her enough to say nothing about it. There would be many more litters in their happy future, for they were blessed that way, unlike their poor princess, who was still carrying one single baby after all these long, long months.)

In August, the prince placed his hand on the rise of her belly, and in September, he rubbed her feet. Her love for him was all complacence, and comfort, and embroidered handkerchiefs. In October, pleasantly aflutter, she was in the midst of preparing for another of his monthly appearances and had just greeted her hairdresser when the baby made itself felt. The prince’s visit was speedily canceled, and thirty-seven hours later, Angelina arrived.

And then her world grew exhausting and warm, and everything smelled of baby formula and laundry detergent, and she was ecstatic, and she was apprehensive, and she was overwhelmed, and she was never alone, which felt oppressive at times, but she was also never, ever lonely. She held the baby close to her heart through vague afternoons and restless nights, for hours and days and weeks. The baby cooed, babbled, and gurgled—mostly—but every so often the baby cried, and then she would tickle its toes, blow soap bubbles, and have Brie and Nibbles dance funny little jigs on the rug. And her diversion tactics worked—mostly—but on occasion they failed, and then she felt as if her world might just split at the seams with the robust wails.

One morning found her lying in bed, limp with fatigue, surrounded by stuffed rabbits and beady-eyed teddy bears in varied shades of pink, with her head throbbing and the baby in her arms still going strong with stalwart howls.

“She will not cease,” she marveled aloud in a kind of dismayed wonder. “Nothing I do will make her cease.”

“Have you tried telling her stories, milady?” asked the teapot of white porcelain with a blue bird on its lid, which, just then, happened to be filling the cup on her bedside table.

“Stories? She’s too little for stories.”

“Not true, milady,” the teapot said, primly and a bit disapprovingly. “Stories are good at any age.”

“But I don’t know how,” she confessed.

“Oh, it’s easy. You go like this—and make your voice melodious-like: ‘Once upon a time, there lived a blue bird.’”

“And then?” she asked, in astonishment, for at the teapot’s singsong words, the baby had stopped crying and was cocking her head, listening.

“Why, then it simply tells itself,” the teapot replied, gathering the creamer and the sugar bowl around her like a mother hen her chickens. “Excuse me, milady, we must rush before I cool off, the marquise likes her tea steaming.”

And so she tried, and it was indeed a miracle, for, as long as the stories kept coming, the baby kept quiet, gazing up at her, spellbound, with milky eyes, eventually drifting into dreams. She had never told stories to anyone before, and the nightly ritual of saying “Once upon a time” felt deeply soothing, like settling into a favorite armchair with a bit of knitting. She told her baby about a poor miller’s daughter who lost her hands but was so virtuous she got to marry a king, and he made her new hands of polished silver, which the queen liked even better. She told her about a beggar girl who hid her beauty under a donkey skin, but her beauty shone through the disguise, so she got to marry a prince. She told her about a poor miller’s son who had a clever cat and got to marry a princess. Best of all, she told her sweet baby about a poor orphan girl who was so good and so pretty that she got to marry a prince—a story that, at first glance, seemed much like the other stories (all of which seemed much like the same story over and over again)—save that it was the one story that really mattered, the only story that was entirely true, the story of Mommy and Daddy, of their fairy-tale love and happily ever after in the beautiful snow globe of a charmed world.

And thus seasons came and went, in stories and feedings and naps, and her waist shrank little by little and color returned to her cheeks. On Angie’s first birthday, as tradition dictated, the royal baby passed into the care of the ever-capable Nanny Nanny, and all at once she had time on her hands. She invented amusing ways to spend her days. She trilled with songbirds, stopped to chat with gardeners and cooks, twirled through the palace dispensing smiles and minor kindnesses. She met the spirit of a long-dead minstrel who haunted the Great Hall and listened to him recite his militant epics, knitted a pair of mouse-eared slippers for the sweet old King Roland, sent homemade preserves to Archibald the Clockmaker and Arbadac the Magician, better known as Arbadac the Bumbler, the elderly brothers who lived at the top of the palace tower and labored over the great clock, which had, for some reason, stopped chiming on the hour and taken to marking random stretches of time instead. In the evenings, she played dominoes with Brie and Nibbles, using gnawed chunks of cheese in place of tiles. (Unbeknownst to her, these Brie and Nibbles were not the original Brie and Nibbles, for, sadly, mice—even those in fairy tales—do not live all that long. Brie and Nibbles the Second were siblings, two of the numerous children of the original Brie and Nibbles, who, when close to dying of satisfied old age, designated the best-mannered and the fattest of their offspring, respectively, to play their parts, so as not to upset the princess with their passing. The second-generation Brie and Nibbles, in truth, did not resemble their parents all that closely, neither in appearance nor in character. Brie the Second, scrawnier and much less garrulous than her mother, did not give any thought to the state of her whiskers, found dollhouses confining, and liked to spend her evenings by the fire in the kitchen, listening to Grandfather Rat sing of the brave deeds of bygone mouse kings. Nibbles the Second, larger and slower than his father, had one all-consuming passion—sleep. They did their best to follow the many detailed instructions of their beloved progenitors—“Brie: collapse in giggles every time you hear Nibbles burp. Nibbles: partake of cheddar daily”—but failed time and time again, and were perennially worried that the princess would discover their ruse. But the princess never appeared to notice.)

The prince was frequently absent, traveling the land on matters of state, and when back in the palace, he continued to stay in his private quarters: he worked long hours and professed himself reluctant to disturb her rest. Yet whenever they chanced to be together, he was unfailingly attentive. On their third anniversary, ever grateful, she reflected on their matrimonial harmony. There had not been a single disagreement, not a single harsh word exchanged between them in all three years—nothing less than perfect, in fact, that she could recall, apart from, perhaps, one entirely insignificant misunderstanding some months before, which had stayed in her memory for the sole reason that it demonstrated, yet again, Prince Roland’s forgiving nature.

Sometime in the course of her solitary rambles through the palace, she had discovered an unfrequented passage in the east wing that dead-ended in a curious tapestry, so old and faded it was impossible to tell exactly what it depicted. When a shaft of sunlight pierced a nearby stained-glass window and the air in the corridor grew briefly bright, she thought she could discern blushing youths out for a stroll or ladies strumming delicate lutes; most of the time, though, the image remained shapeless and gray, with one puzzling dash of threadbare red in the middle. She felt drawn to the mystery and, hoping that one day the light would be just right for the meaning to reveal itself, paused here often on her way from the nursery.

One afternoon, as she neared the tapestry corridor, she heard a woman’s low laugh and a man speaking softly. She could make out no words, but something about the urgent yet amused tone of the man’s voice froze her in her tracks. She listened intently—and then knew the voice to be that of Prince Roland, though not as she herself had ever heard it. Her blood quickened as she braved the corner, expecting to see she knew not what; but there was nothing, there was no one there, only the faded old tapestry hanging still and inscrutable against the stone wall.

That night, she sat opposite the prince at a long, elaborate table. The dinner was held in honor of the Duke and Duchess von Lieber, visiting from a neighboring kingdom, and as a special compliment, Arbadac the Bumbler, the court magician, had enchanted all the courses to match the unusually intense green of the duchess’s eyes. The results proved rather unappetizing, however, and she found her throat closing up at the procession of bright green venison steaks and bright green loaves—or perhaps it was her lingering sense of unease that made her unable to eat. On her right, the jolly duke was telling her some interminable hunting story with much enthusiasm and spittle, shouting “Bam!” in imitation of every shot, slamming his hand vigorously against the table, so that bright green potatoes on his plate jumped. She smiled and nodded and tried to watch the prince at the other end of the hall, but his face was obscured by the many smoking tureens and made shimmery by the many wavering candles between them and she could not catch his eyes all night.

After the poisonously green pears had been cleared away, the guests turned to her, expecting her to give the customary signal of the dinner’s conclusion. Making up her mind, she stood and crossed the hall instead. The prince, ever the polite host, was listening to the Duchess von Lieber, who prattled with animation, the woman’s small, pretty, slightly monkeylike face liberally sprinkled with velvet beauty marks, the woman’s eyes every bit the shade of an unripe pear.

She placed a quavering hand on the prince’s shoulder.

“Darling, I’m sorry to interrupt, but what were you doing in the east wing’s second-floor corridor this afternoon?”

She tried to speak softly, but the room had grown quiet and her words carried. She sensed the duchess’s astonished gaze upon her.

“An east-wing corridor, my love? But I haven’t set foot in the east wing all day. I was working in my office until they rang for dinner.” He smiled at her. “And now, my precious dear, would you please escort the honored duchess to the after-dinner tea?”

He spoke with his habitual kindness, and instantly she saw that she had indeed been mistaken, that the voice in the corridor, whatever it had been, had sounded nothing like this civilized, gentle voice, the voice of her husband. And then she heard the whispering behind her back, and understood that she had broken the courtly etiquette with her impulsive, childish question, had embarrassed her dear prince in front of all these foreign dignitaries. The prince, seemingly at ease, motioned for everyone to rise, and the awkward silence broke, filled with the scraping of two dozen chairs, the shuffling of four dozen feet. Still, she felt flustered and could not quite recover her poise during the ladies’ tea that followed, even as she played a conscientious hostess to the chatty duchess. But later that evening, she sat by Angie’s crib, singing a bedtime lullaby, when the prince paid an unscheduled visit to the nursery. He kissed them both tenderly, bounced the child on his knee, asked about her day. He did not allude to her faux pas at dinner, but his gestures, his words, were full of loving reassurance, and at last she was able to see the unfortunate episode for the trifle it had been. She looked at the two of them, her kind, considerate husband, her daughter giggling in her father’s arms, and thought: This moment, right here, right now—I want to hold this moment perfect and whole in my memory, so that even decades from today I will be able to see it, undimmed, undiminished, and know just how lucky I was.

The night. The crossroads. The cauldron. The witch. The fairy.

The witch and the fairy are snarling at each other.

“You can’t interfere, you bully, you must let her make her own choices!”

“You are the bully here, taking advantage of the poor darling in her fraught state! I am only helping her see the truth. Love will always triumph in the end. But I don’t expect you to understand, you bitter old prune, no one has ever loved you, no wonder you hate all men.” The fairy godmother faces me, her hands clasped in supplication. “I beg you, sweet child, cease this rash foolishness. Let me take you back where you belong, back to your happy marriage.”

“Two or three happy years don’t yet a happy marriage make,” interrupts the witch.

“Well, of course, one must be a bit more flexible after a decade together,” the fairy godmother admits, somewhat deflated. “Marriages are work.” She makes a visible effort to rally. “Still, whatever happened later, my child, I’ll help you move past it. The important thing is, you and the prince had such love between you once. You just need to keep the memory of that beautiful beginning alive in your heart.”

She has a gift, it seems, for saying precisely the wrong thing.

I am newly seared with anger.

“Does anything other than platitudes ever come out of her mealy mouth?” the witch asks with disdain. “Just throw in the lot and be done with it, madam.”

“No, child, no!” the fairy godmother wails. “Think of your little angels if nothing else! They need a wholesome family, they need their father!”

And just like that, the long-forgotten vision of Roland with little Angie laughing on his knee thrusts itself, unbidden, vivid, into my mind.

My fury is dampened. I look down at my hands.

One, three, five, eight, ten. And a half. Ten and a half hairs left.

Perhaps I should count again, just to be sure.

“Well, what are you waiting for, madam? You still want him dead, do you not?”

I do, indeed I do; but my daughter’s laughter continues to sound in my ears, guileless and carefree like her very childhood, which I want to protect with all my heart—which I am trying to protect, in truth, by doing this.

But what if this destroys her childhood, their childhood, instead?

Would they even understand I am doing this for them?

Would they still love me?

Anxiety tightens my throat.

“Perhaps not all at once?” I mumble.

“Once you decide to cut off a dog’s tail, you don’t hack it away chunk by chunk,” the witch notes with disapproval. “Moreover, my rheumatism is starting to act up.”

“Whatever happened to letting her make her own choices?” the fairy godmother cries. And immediately they are squabbling again. All at once I am starting to slide toward panic. I close my ears to their bickering, and next I close my eyes—and, with a feeling much like stepping off a roof, toss a bunch of hairs into the cauldron, without counting, without thinking.

Then, my heart pounding, I open my eyes to see what I have done.

Five or six strands are spiraling down into the potion.

Less than half are now left in the palm of my hand.

The Beginning of the Middle

Time had a mysterious habit of flowing faster the fewer events occupied it. The palace shone blue on summer mornings and glinted white on snowy afternoons. She turned twenty-six. Princess Angelina turned three. Prince Roland took frequent trips. She gained some weight, made preserves, presided over mouse polkas on her fireplace rug. Life was peaceful, pleasant, and predictable. On the occasion of her twenty-seventh birthday, Angie gave her a charming present: a tiny ballroom shoe that the child had painstakingly, if rather unevenly, carved out of pink soap. She ran to the west wing, to Prince Roland’s quarters, to show him, only to be told that he had departed on a mission to a nearby kingdom and was not expected back for several days. She stood before the closed door to his study, feeling the unaccustomed sting of disappointment, chewing on her lip. Then she clapped her hands in delight—she knew what she would do. She would give in to the marvelous spontaneity of this day.

She would surprise her husband.

And so, she ordered a carriage, kissed Angie good-bye, and, gently cradling the child’s soap carving in her hands, left for the neighboring kingdom, with just one aged groom minding the horses and only her trusty Brie and Nibbles in attendance. (These mice were cousins in the next generation. Brie the Third was much fussier than her mother, always anxious about everyone’s health, constantly nagging Nibbles to wear warm scarves and beware stealthy drafts. Brie was badly frightened at the prospect of leaving the palace, but Nibbles magnanimously promised to protect her. He thought her infantile and helpless, and saw himself as a fierce, even heroic, mouse; and indeed, his squeak did sound much like the roar of a lion, albeit a tiny one. Needless to say, he was thrilled to venture out into the unknown. He nurtured a secret hope that the princess might get ambushed by some ruffians along the way, and he would enter legend by rescuing her in some spectacular fashion.)

It was a bright winter day. The road snaked from the palace gates and past the town. Beyond it, landscapes became unfamiliar. There were frozen streams to be crossed on rickety bridges, falcons swooping over snowy meadows, copses of silent trees with icy branches glittering clear and sharp in the sun. Now and then, a dazzling unicorn pranced by, or a thin needle of some solitary wizard’s tower rose tall on the horizon. She sat leaning far out the window; she had forgotten to wear a hood, and her ears soon burned with the cold, yet she did not heed Brie’s admonitions to draw the curtains closed but looked and looked, drinking everything in with something much like greed—for it suddenly came to her that she had never traveled anywhere, anywhere at all. By the time the old groom guided the horses through another town, up another hill, to the gates of another palace, she was in a state of childlike excitement.

When she was announced, there appeared to be some confusion as to the prince’s whereabouts, and she, in turn, was surprised to discover that this was the domain of the Duke von Lieber, the jocular nobleman who had paid them a visit some seasons before. The duke himself was away on a weeklong hunt, she was informed by the pomaded butler with a measured gait who showed her in, but the duchess would be overjoyed to see her imminently, or almost imminently, once Her Grace arose from her midday rest. Alone she sat in the reception chamber (Brie and Nibbles had gone off to explore the kitchens) and smiled, imagining with what delight the prince would greet her. The butler brought her a cup of weak tea with too much sugar in it; once the man’s departing steps faded away, there were no sounds save for the ticking of a clock in the corner. The thrill of the ride through the brilliant countryside was still making her blood run faster. And as the minute hand crawled to mark another quarter of a drowsy afternoon hour, she did something out of character: she set down her empty cup, and rose, and walked out of the room, mischievous laughter bubbling up inside her.

No clear goal in mind, she followed a corridor, went through a double door, crossed a hall, passed under an arch, climbed some stairs, turned some corners. She soon discovered this palace to be quite unlike her own—its spaces darker, its air warmer, its furnishings soft and opulent, its lines lithe and sinuous, its colors lush, jewel bright, emerald and crimson and midnight blue—so different from the light-filled, pastel-tinted geometry of the clean, cool, clear expanses to which she herself was accustomed. In a heavily curtained chamber on the second floor, she came upon a low table with curvaceous candelabra twinkling at either end and the remains of an interrupted meal. Her silent laughter died away as she picked up a peach with an imprint of small, perfect teeth in one downy side, trailed her finger along the rim of a goblet, one of two, filled with ruby-red wine. In the next room, dimmer still, velvet pillows lay scattered on the floor, a lyre leaned against the wall, and in a shadowed niche, a cage gleamed dully.

At her approach, the cage exploded with screams.

She clutched at her heart to keep it from leaping away and blinked at the large green bird with eyes of molten amber. The bird was screaming still when a door flew open in the upholstered wall, and Prince Roland strode in. She had just the time to notice that his hair was disheveled and the top two or three buttons of his shirt were undone, when he spoke, and everything else was driven from her mind.

“You! What are you doing here?”

She had heard plenty of shouting in her youth, but no one had ever addressed her with such venom. Stunned, she stared at him. His eyes had gone dark, his face was rigid. He looked like someone else, someone she did not know. She pressed her hands to her mouth, and turned, and fled, pursued by the bird’s strident screaming; and it seemed as if the screams had words in them, some words meant just for her.

She ran—ran through chambers of startled maids, chambers of nasty statues, chambers of stalking cats, until she found herself in a room more frightful than the rest, a badly lit, cavernous place deceptive with the quivering of candles. The air here hung stuffy with some musky perfume, and a monstrous bed stood drowning under storm-tossed waves of scarlet silk. The bed—the bed was horrible, the bed was obscene—and oh, was it possible that someone was hiding under the sheets, breathing, stirring, giggling?

For one lost minute, she felt that she herself might be asleep, she herself might be dreaming, for nothing was what it was, nothing was what it seemed to be. She flew away again, a soundless cry frozen in her throat, her mind in turmoil, down long carpeted corridors, past numbered doors, and still the nightmare went on, and sudden rips ran through the fabric of things all around her, revealing snatches of dangerous half-truths beneath, and she almost lost all hope of ever finding her way out, when an unexpected light grew before her, and there was the yawning O of the concierge’s mouth, and bellboys hurtling out of her way, and the revolving lobby doors—and at last she was outside.

She scrambled into the carriage, repeating, “Go, go, go!” to the old groom, who rushed to put out his cigarette and groped for the keys, raised eyebrows all but vanishing in the nest of white hair. She expected the prince to burst out of doors after her then, to chase her limousine down the street—yet he did not. She lowered the curtain on her window and sat staring straight ahead with dry, unseeing eyes. It was not until the last gas station on the outskirts had remained behind that she realized she had forgotten Brie and Nibbles in that terrible place. At that moment, they seemed to her the only true friends, the only loyal souls, the only ties she had to anything familiar. She thought of a dozen sleek cats she had glimpsed prowling through scented shadows, and had no choice but to order the groom to turn around. As the carriage bounced back over the cobblestones, she remembered her actual reason for coming here and, with a sickened start, unclenched her tense, sweaty hands, only to find her daughter’s darling soap slipper half melted, deformed out of all recognition. She pressed it to her heart and cried, heavy with humiliation, all the way back to the palace.

Prince Roland, fully buttoned now, was standing outside. He watched her as she went in, waited stony-faced while she explained about the mice to the confused butler. It took a long, a very long, time to find Brie and Nibbles. (The reason for the delay was simple, if rather unfortunate: in the kitchen of the von Liebers’ palace, Nibbles had been eaten by a cat. Brie had not wanted to go to the kitchen at all, for she had a queasy feeling in her tummy, but he mocked her for her cowardice with such booming laughter that she ended by gathering her tremulous tail in her paws and creeping after him. Once there, Nibbles made an obnoxious racket, clanging lids on the pots, shouting out the contents of the pantry, boasting that his nose would lead him to the tastiest cheese in the icebox, clowning for all he was worth, when out leapt an enormous beast with burning orange eyes and gobbled him up, just like that, before anyone could finish saying “Parmesan.” In fact, everything happened so fast that there was no possible way to ascertain whether or not Nibbles had died a hero, although it might have seemed to Brie that, in the split second before the murderous jaws gaped open, Nibbles had turned sickly gray and attempted to hide behind her. She had no time to think about it, however, busy as she was bashing the monster on the mouth with a ladling spoon. The cat, momentarily taken aback by Brie’s ferocity, recovered quickly and was readying itself for another jump when the entire kitchen exploded in an ear-splitting commotion. A hundred roaring mice poured out of every crack and crevice and attacked the beast, prodding its sides with forks, lobbing rinds of moldy cheese at its head, poking its paws with toothpicks, until it howled and bolted in a malodorous blur of rotten vegetables.

Brie, gasping for breath, lowered the ladle and saw herself surrounded by creatures wild in appearance, ragged and grim, some missing ears or tails, many sporting horned helmets of crude leather.

“But, but,” she stammered, “but you’re all girls!”

“Women,” the mouse who had led the charge corrected sternly. “Our men were all eaten by foul beasts a long time ago, because men are weak and slow. I am General Gertrude, the leader of my pack. We call ourselves Valkyries. We run free and fight evil whenever we find it. We saw you in battle, and we deem you worthy. Join us, sister.”

And the timid Brie, who feared drafts and dust bunnies, looked in wonder from one strong, lean face to another—looked especially long into the bright eyes of a tall warrior with a jaunty red sash around her waist who stood shoulder to shoulder with Gertrude—and felt something equally strong and bright respond in her own breast, and saw another kind of life stretch before her, a purposeful, exhilarating life. Then a faint echo carried the princess’s plaintive calls to her ears: “Brie, Nibbles! Brie, Nibbles, where aaare you?”—and her heart broke twice over, for her poor cousin and for the princess’s imminent grief. She had to go back.

She explained her predicament to the Valkyries, thanked them for saving her life, and, feeling quite small once again, began the never-ending trudge to the door. On the threshold, a firm paw held her back, and she found herself meeting the bright, steady gaze of the mouse with the red sash.

“General Gertrude has given me leave to come with you,” said the mouse. “I will pretend to be Nibbles, to keep your princess happy.”

“But… but you too are a girl!” Brie cried weakly, overwhelmed by amazement, anxiety, and relief all at once.

“A woman,” the mouse replied with some severity, then added, in a gentler tone, “And would your princess know the difference?”

And so it was settled, and Captain Brunhilda left her Sash of Blood Honor behind and became Nibbles the Fourth in the royal palace. And in truth, she had no choice in the matter, for, the instant she had beheld tiny Brie fearlessly walloping the duchess’s meanest cat squarely on the nose with the ladle three times Brie’s size, she knew her own heart forfeited forever. Of course, it would take time and delicate persuasion before Brie herself shared Brunhilda’s certainties, but after a few particularly chilly nights when the fire in the princess’s bedroom died early and it seemed only natural to huddle closer for warmth, Brie would understand that everything she had learned in the course of her hitherto conventional mouse existence was merely one possible way of going about life, and that, moreover, they could always adopt. And from then on, Brie the Third and Nibbles the Fourth would live happily ever after. Their furry bliss, however, was still some weeks away when the princess picked them off the floor in the duchess’s kitchen and, silent tears streaming down her face, slipped them inside the pocket of her traveling cloak, where Brie, thrust into immediate proximity to Brunhilda’s bristly coat, started to tremble, as she had not trembled in the face of death an hour before.)

With her best friends recovered, the princess wiped her tears and walked stiffly to the carriage. The prince followed her, saying nothing. They did not speak all the way back to their palace, and when they arrived, she left the carriage without looking at him and went straight to bed. The next morning, the wintry sun shone into the bedroom and Prince Roland bounded in, smiling hugely, bearing a tray of oranges. She still had not risen, in spite of the late hour; she had slept poorly, cried much, and was suffering from a headache. He pounced onto her bed, her starched, white, modest, girlish bed (nothing like that other bed, rumpled and red, candlelit and musty, wanton and savage), and sang out: “And how is my beautiful little princess today? Tired from yesterday’s ride? It was so sweet of you to come. I’m sorry if I wasn’t quite myself. I was traveling to King Julius’s court, you see, when I was overtaken by some passing sickness, and the Duke von Lieber’s servants, who happened nearby, were kind enough to take me in. Of course, the duke and the duchess themselves were away on a hunt, but their physician saw to my comfort. When you arrived, and so unexpectedly, I was running a fever and hardly knew what I was doing or saying. If I seemed out of sorts and offended you, I am so very sorry. It was a joy to see you, my love. It always is.”

She rose on one elbow and looked at him. His beauty was breathtaking as ever, his teeth blinding, his blue eyes clear; dimples appeared and disappeared in the smooth planes of his cheeks.

“But the butler said,” she began. “The butler said the duchess would see me.”

“No, my love, you misunderstood. Have an orange. Wait, let me peel it for you.”

And she took the orange, and tried to think, but her temples throbbed, and she did grow uncertain, for the butler had indeed mumbled and she had been distracted, and in any case, fairy-tale princes never lied. The orange was sweet. Prince Roland was sweet. Their life was surely sweet. And look, there were cavorting pink-cheeked cupids painted on her ceiling and tiny blue flowers embroidered on her snowy eiderdown, and the sun slanted joyfully through her lacy blue curtains, and things were now firmly back in their places, just where they had always been. Her love for the prince was all abating bewilderment and deepening relief. While she ate the orange, he played with her golden ringlets, and the tips of his fingers smelled of sweet juice.

By the time he left, she was smiling again, if a bit wanly.

“‘Overtaken by some passing sickness’!” the witch snorts. “Doesn’t matter what they actually tell you or how plausible it is, it only matters whether you are willing to believe it. And you are, and you are, and you are, until one day—snap!—you aren’t. And here we are, up to our elbows in toad skins and newt eyeballs.”

“Ah, don’t listen to her, my darling,” croons the fairy godmother. “You were simply overexcited by that green-eyed lady’s admittedly vulgar approach to interior decorating, and you forgot proper etiquette. Surely, a visiting princess must quietly await her hostess instead of barging through rooms without knocking on doors? Of course, such an embarrassing display of poor manners would cause some coolness between you and your husband, but that’s far from tragic.” She gives me one of her patient smiles. “And just between us, my heart, it pays to close your eyes to minor missteps. A man is not a supermarket, you know, you can’t just stroll down the aisles with a basket on your arm, picking and choosing whatever you please. Still, a spoonful of tar shouldn’t ruin a barrel of honey. I see no reason to resort to murder.”

I make no reply. The woman’s middle-aged certainties are all of a kind, belonging to a world of nighttime cups of warm milk, herbal remedies for both toothaches and heartaches, sensible commonplaces, and reduced passions, and I am already too old and still too young to believe in such placid wisdom.

“Not altogether romantic of you, now, is it,” the witch says mildly as she stirs the brew, “suggesting that poor put-upon wives ignore their spouses’ transgressions with such vigor, all in the name of pragmatism and material comfort?”

“In the name of peace and love,” the fairy godmother says firmly.

“Is it, though? Is it, really?” The witch shrugs. “Well, you are the resident expert on love around here, I just clean up the mess afterward. Still, from where I stand, it seems much more pleasant to be eating éclairs amidst silk cushions in some lovely little palace than to be getting soaked at a crossroads. It pays to be oblivious, wouldn’t you agree, for as long as you can take it—or should I say, fake it?”

“I don’t see what you’re implying here,” the fairy godmother blusters.

I do, though, and my breath hitches with a sudden sense of unease.

“Please.” My voice breaks a little. “Please. Can we just get on with this?”

The surface of the potion has continued to flicker all the while.

When we look down, it is already spring in another year.

The Middle of the Middle

In her twenty-ninth year, she began to have unsettling dreams, of herself drifting lost—and, shockingly, naked—through dark, scented places where no walls ran straight, no angles were right, but everything curved and wavered and candles quivered and peaches dripped and cats streaked softly past her bare calves. When she awoke, her rib cage heaved as if something untamed were beating against it from the inside, and there was a hot heaviness somewhere at her core, at the bottom of her stomach, perhaps, that she did not understand and did not like. On such mornings, she threw on her dress, ran to the nursery, and, relieving Nanny Nanny (who was shedding just then and welcomed rest), drew princesses and built cardboard castles with Angie, then, after putting her down for a nap, sat by her bed and told her about the ball, about the slipper, hurrying just ahead of the child’s questions in her scramble to reach the happy ending, again and again.

“And they danced together all night,” she would say in a rush, “until the clock began to strike midnight. Then she fled as fast as she could, and in her haste lost one glass slipper on the stairs. And the prince declared that he would marry the girl whom it fit. And all the girls in the kingdom tried it on, but it fit no one, until the courier came with it to our house. My ugly stepsisters did their best to squeeze their big, ugly feet into it, but they failed. And then the courier got down on one knee and put the slipper on my foot, and of course it fit perfectly. They took me to the palace, and dressed me in beautiful clothes, and held the royal wedding, and then the prince and I lived happily ever after, while the stepsisters got just what they deserved. Gloria, the older one, never married at all and became a bitter spinster, while Melissa married someone so poor she now spends all her time scrubbing floors and washing dishes!”

But as she told the story over and over, it grew leached of inner meaning, as a word might when one repeated it too often, and she started to find it oddly lacking. What if the slipper had fit someone else—would the prince have married the other girl instead, would he have even known the difference? Was she, in fact, all that different from every other maiden with a sweet singing voice and a patient disposition? What exactly had he liked about her at the ball—the way she waltzed, the cut of her bodice, the childlike size of her feet? Why hadn’t they asked each other’s names, or, failing that, favorite colors at least, or favorite ice cream flavors? Also, and most disconcertingly, why did the recollection of the young courier kneeling before her—the brief pressure of his hand upon her bare instep as he had helped guide it inside the slipper, the golden brown of his gaze that had lingered one moment too long on her lips, the soft burr of his accent (like her, he had come from a distant land as a child)—why did it make her feel so profoundly unsettled?

It was at this point in her ruminations that she rose and, blushing, went to see her husband. They had not been alone in quite some time. The guard at Prince Roland’s door muttered apologies while trying to bar her way into the study, but she distracted him with her most radiant smile, ducked under his elbow, and pushed the door open. The prince sat behind his massive oak desk, his elegant fingers steepled, his eyes closed, a thoughtful look on his face, while one of the Singing Maids—they only ever employed singing maids in the palace—appeared to be crawling in search of something underneath the desk, her ample uniformed rump protruding beyond the desk’s carved phoenixes and vines, undulating in some hurried rhythm.

At the slamming of the door, Prince Roland’s eyes flew open, his eyebrows flew up, and he said, his usually smooth voice rather husky: “Esmeralda, you may stop looking for that thumbtack now, my wife is here.”

She heard a choked exclamation, a rustling of clothes, and presently Esmeralda emerged from under the desk, a bit rumpled and red-cheeked, her mouth slack, her small black eyes running about her face like startled beetles. She gave the maid a polite nod, then, once the door closed behind the woman, went and sat in Prince Roland’s lap, entwining her arms about his neck.

“I love you,” she said. “Do you love me?”

Without replying, he pulled her closer with a jerk. She gasped. His gaze seemed both intent and unfocused, and before she quite knew what was happening, his lips were devouring her neck. And then that persistent warm, heavy feeling somewhere at her core flared up, and everything grew urgent and new and vastly surprising, and she was lost in the fumbling tangle of skirts, the helpless, eager need to undo his britches (which had somehow proved already undone—but no matter), the awkward struggle to accommodate their arms, their legs, their rocking to the confines of the chair, to the shamelessness of the afternoon light flooding the windows, all of it so rushed, so vital, so unlike the few (so very few) nighttime, chaste, brief, sweet, embarrassed, blanketed, invisible, horizontal couplings of their first year of marriage (and none at all since she had found herself with Angie—which she had always assumed to be the proper way of these things—so why now, why this?—but no matter, no matter)… A button popped, the chair groaned, he groaned, she felt something unexpected rising in her, something overwhelming, akin to a powerful command to close her eyes and fall backward, trusting some great new sensation to break her fall—a sensation so unfamiliar, so freeing, so imperative as to be almost frightening. But just as it had started without warning, so now, without warning, it was over, everything was over, and, still poised on the brink of that fall into the unknown that she had not taken, that she sensed she would never take now, she felt something inside her shifting, tilting, growing unhinged and unmoored.

He tipped her off without ceremony, adjusted his clothes. His eyes came into focus and were absent. Hurriedly she dropped her skirts to the ground, to cover her shame—and, to her terror, dissolved into sobs.

“Please,” he said, frowning. “I must work now. What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” she said, and pulled herself together, then added in a small voice, “I love you, Roland.”

“I love you, too.” There was a barely perceptible pause. “My dear.”

He began sifting through papers on his desk.

She fled the room.

In later months, as she lay sleepless, stroking the dome of her belly where the baby was kicking, she found herself haunted by that anonymous endearment, by that pause in his words. And since she did not wish to give in to her unease, she began telling tales to the baby growing inside her, whispering familiar old stories into the mound of taut flesh. Yet now the comfort fare of the miller’s son, and the miller’s daughter, and the beggar girl all marrying their princesses and princes failed to soothe her, even if it still made her feel just as if she were settling down to knitting in her favorite armchair. And her unease grew, until one night, as she stood by the window, watching a pale moon rise above the black park, listening to the distant wail of a lonely siren, she realized that, quite simply, she no longer wanted to do any knitting in any armchairs.

What she wanted was to leave on a journey through mysterious twilit woods full of uncanny creatures and unexpected encounters.

And so, she began to invent.

She invented a world unlike anything she had ever known, anything she had ever heard of. She was used to small villages and bustling market towns where everyone greeted everyone else by name, so she invented an improbable city—a city so immense that all the passersby were strangers to one another and every chance “Good morning” could become the beginning of an exhilarating adventure. She was used to frivolously ornamental palaces that looked like baroque wedding cakes overflowing with frills, curls, and lace, so she imagined the lines of her city to be sleek and simple, all glass and metal. She was used to rigid fairyland rules dictating every move and every outcome, so she made life in the outlandish world of her fancy fantastical and unpredictable, for in that world there existed true magic—the magic of choice.

The ease of her invention took her by surprise: it was almost as if she were describing a place she had seen in some intense, vivid dream.

“Once upon a time,” she would tell her belly, “there lived a man who had a wife and a daughter… But no, that’s not the right beginning, it’s not about the man at all. Let me start again. Once upon a time, there lived a little girl whose parents loved her, and she was happy until her mother got sick and died. Then she grew so sad that her father decided to take her somewhere far, far away from all the sadness. They climbed onto a magic silver bird, flew across the ocean, and came to a great city, and she soon knew it for the most magnificent city in the world. Astonishing things happened there day and night—and nights were as bright and full as days, for the city never slept and it never grew dark. Enchanted lights floated above pavements, palaces stretched a hundred blazing stories into the sky, the streets were full of shiny carriages that moved without horses. Thousands of wizards who knew the secrets of the universe and could turn paper into gold and dirt into diamonds jostled one another on the sidewalks, leopards and monkeys cavorted in a great menagerie in the city’s wooded heart, pictures of beautiful princesses flashed on and off above broad squares, and there were treasures to look at everywhere you turned—necklaces and shoes and toys and roses and oh, so many things, dogs, jugglers, pigeons, churches, bridges, balloons, guitar players, parks, guardsmen, marching bands, pretzels, stone lions, fortune-tellers, people laughing, people crying, people fighting, people kissing, people living.”

The girl’s father found work doing handyman’s jobs in an elegant inn. The widow who ran the inn smiled at him whenever she met him in the hallways, and after a while he and the woman married. But he was not happy, for the glitter of the city was making him anxious, and one day his heart gave up and stopped beating, just like that.

And so the little girl was left all alone in the world, with no one but her stepmother to take care of her. And the stepmother was bossy, and the stepsisters uncaring, and when she turned fourteen, they made her clean after the guests who stayed in the inn. Morning and evening, she carried her bucket and broom down long corridors, knocking on doors and calling “Maid service,” entering to change stained sheets, mop bathroom floors, wipe steamed-up mirrors. She did not mind the work, but she longed to go outside, into the streets, where the magic of life was sweeping through without cease. Sometimes she would press her nose to a window and, from the height of the third, sixth, tenth floor, spy on the world below. One spring, one of those enchanted pictures, larger than life, was always blinking on and off on a building across the way, and she watched it light up, over and over, in childlike wonder. It showed a lovely woman in a flowing white dress who stood in a half swoon, her back arched, her eyes half closed, her swanlike neck exposed, while a gorgeous man all in black was bending over her, swirling some mysterious potion from a glowing blue bottle into a glass he was holding up to her half-open lips. There was something about the expression on the woman’s face, the slackening of the woman’s mouth, that made the girl catch her breath every time the picture flashed up. The woman seemed to belong to some other world—a world out of reach for mere mortals, a hidden, thrilling world of beauty and happiness.

One day, she promised herself, she, too, would live there.

And in time, the girl in these secret predawn stories did grow up and go to a dance and have a wedding, just like the girl in the oft-told romance Angie demanded now at every bedtime; but the sequence of these events was much less certain, the girl had decisions to make, and every tale was different in some small, subtle way that yet made her feel more alive in the telling. In none of these stories was there a fairy godmother who popped out of nowhere, nearly stabbed her in the eye with a wand, and trapped her in an insipid blue banality shaped like an upside-down cupcake. No, she had saved what modest wages she had received for helping out in the hotel—the stepmother was stern but fair—then went to a splendid shop that stretched over several lustrous floors and there found a beautiful dress all her own. In some versions, the dress was black, long, and elegant and clung to her hips just so, and in others, yellow, short, and sassy, shot through with sparkle. And when she tried it on in the bathroom she shared with her stepsisters (who were, incidentally, selfish as all teenage sisters were wont to be, but hardly the insensitive monsters of the familiar story), she loved the girl who looked back at her from the mirror, for the girl’s lips were those of a woman and the girl’s eyes shone with a great desire to live.

The dance was an annual gala held in the hotel ballroom, and she sneaked in without an invitation, using her knowledge of service corridors. Unlike the other ball, this one had many princes, and she chose the one she liked best. She chose him before he chose her, and not because he was rich or desired by all but because she liked the boyish shyness of his golden-brown gaze, the soft cadence of his accent, the warmth of his hand when it found its way into the small of her back. But of course, the man she picked would change with each retelling, too, just like the dress. Sometimes he would be blue-eyed, suave, and dazzling, and other times mysterious, silent, and dark. In all the versions, though, she fell in love without a doubt, and her love was like the home she had always dreamed of having, warm and thrilling and filled with shared understanding—and reflected, just as deep and certain, in her beloved’s brown, or green, or cornflower-blue eyes.

The girl in these stories, needless to say, did not go about losing her footwear like some silly strumpet, nor did she need to be recovered like some misplaced piece of luggage. They had a proper courtship that spanned days, weeks, months—not mere hours. They dined on spicy fare in the imaginary city’s ethnic restaurants. They went to the opera, where their souls soared in unison with the music. They took long drives through the countryside, and she laughed when falling leaves brushed her face. She knew the prince’s name. She met the prince’s family. She approved of the prince’s hobbies and forgave him his foibles, whatever they might have been. She was asked whether she wanted to be married, and she chose to say yes.

These stories, in short, were nothing like the familiar story, and this girl was nothing like the familiar girl: this girl was special. The only thing, perhaps, that the two had in common was the presence of the two mouse friends, Brie and Nibbles—although in this new world the girl had purchased them, with her own money, at a neighborhood pet store.

(There was, as it happened, great unrest among the mice during this time. Brie the Third and her companion, Nibbles the Fourth—formerly Captain Brunhilda—had adopted twin mouselings, a boy and a girl, who had been orphaned in the kitchen when the fattest of the cooks had slipped on a lemon rind and landed with her voluminous backside on top of their hapless mother. To the adopted children, in due course, passed the mantle of the Royal Companions and the titles of Brie the Fourth and Nibbles the Fifth. Young Nibbles settled into his new life of chocolate delights and musical pastimes with perfect ease, but young Brie soon began to chafe against the silky restraints of her role; having been raised by Brunhilda with a strong sense of civic duty, she bridled at having to dance polkas to the princess’s listless clapping and thought her passionately serious nature better suited to combatting poverty among the recently migrated field mice.

She was not alone in considering herself unfit for her position. Among the direct descendants of the original Brie and Nibbles, there arose a mouse with an uncommonly long tail, by the name of Maximilian, who believed that the exalted life of mouse royalty belonged to him and his by sacred birthright. His great-great-great-grandparents, he told anyone who would listen, had been Chosen by the Higher Power and the distinction should never have been allowed to pass out of the family, first to a foreign upstart with unnatural proclivities and later to some kitchen riffraff whose genealogy could not even be traced beyond one threadbare generation. Having gathered a number of like-minded followers about him, he led an efficient nighttime raid, which became known in the Murine Historical Annals as the Five-Minute Mantelpiece Coup. Upon waking one morning and finding herself and her twin brother trussed up and surrounded by an agitated mob led by Maximilian, who wielded a thumbtack, Brie was frankly relieved, and promptly abdicated in order to devote the rest of her life to the pursuit of social justice among the underprivileged inhabitants of the palace sewers.

Nibbles, however, had grown enamored of his goosedown pillows and breakfast sweets, and, too, at this sudden encounter with violence, the more militant lessons of his adoptive mother Brunhilda stirred in his breast. He determined to offer resistance. “Blood is a mere accident of birth,” he preached from inside the pumpkin in which he had been imprisoned. “It is merit alone that should be rewarded—and no one dances the mouse polka better than I!”

Two of the mice set to guard him were swayed by his eloquence, helped him escape, and became his Right-Paw and Left-Paw Captains in the eventual civil war of the Mouse House against the usurpers Nibbles the Sixth, formerly Maximilian, and Brie the Fifth, formerly Lady Bruschetta, Maximilian’s sister and concubine. In the end, the Blood Faction prevailed, albeit after many violent battles and regrettable casualties. Unluckily, Maximilian himself perished of his wounds in the final skirmish, and it was his son who assumed the title of Nibbles the Seventh to rule with his mother (and aunt) by his side. Maddened by their loss, the victors showed no mercy to the defeated and had the headless body of their enemy, the unfortunate Nibbles the Fifth, flung into the sewers. A hushed crowd of sorrowful rats brought it before their beloved Sister Charity, formerly Brie the Fourth. Heads bowed, they stood around her in the underground dimness, as she cradled what was left of her twin brother and lamented the senselessness and cruelty of the world.

“Oh, my dear heart,” she cried, her fur matted with blood and tears, “do you see where your foolishness has gotten you? And all for what—the love of chocolates and a few absentminded pats from a frivolous, moody princess who can’t tell any of us apart and treats us like wind-up toys, just because we are little? I do not blame Maximilian—like my poor brother, he, too, was a misguided fool, and he paid for his own mistakes dearly. No, I blame her, I blame her!”

She moved her eyes along the wall of silent mourners, her piercing gaze burning into them with unmouselike fire. When she spoke again, her tears had dried and her voice was a low, fierce chant: “My brother’s blood is on her hands. All of our blood is on her hands. And I curse her, I curse her, I curse her. As long as she walks the places turned red with the spilling of our lives, she will never know a day of peace but will be gnawed by discontent, fear, and sadness, just as we gnaw our daily bread. I bind her to her misery by the truth in our blood.”)

The princess hoped that her unborn child would be a girl who might benefit from being thus imbued, while still in the womb, with brave examples of free and unconstrained living. Yet when the child was born, it was a boy. They named him Roland, after his father the prince. Since the old king, too, was Roland, as the king’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been before him, it made her son Roland the Sixth. She felt secretly disappointed, even a little betrayed, as if all her marvelous inventions had been wasted—more, as if she had made some vast, courageous effort to do something different and it had been in vain.

And seemingly out of nowhere, despair descended upon her.

“‘An insipid blue cupcake,’” the fairy godmother quotes, her voice frosty. She has seated herself in an ample leather armchair she has summoned out of thin air and is brushing invisible specks off her cloak. “I never took you for an ungrateful kind.”

“As much as I hate to admit it, I agree with the busybody here,” the witch says as she stirs the potion. “Also, I must tell you, it’s not very reasonable, expecting the prince to remain eternally enticed by you no matter what. Because, let’s face it, you did not exactly overwhelm him with personal accomplishments or depths. Preserves and polkas, did you say?”

“But.” My eyes are stung with unexpected tears. I blink them back, quickly. “But that is what princesses are supposed to do!”

“Is that so? Well, I don’t claim to be an authority on princesses. All the same, it might have done you some good to develop a real interest or two along the way. You could have studied astronomy. Just for instance.”

“Or practiced watercolors,” the fairy godmother chimes in suddenly.

“Or become a rock climber,” says the witch after a beat.

“Or founded a charity that rescued homeless dogs,” adds the fairy with a sniff.

“Or learned another language.”

“Or discovered a new species of butterfly.”

“Or played in a band.”

The witch is ticking off the items on her fingers now, and they are nodding at each other.

“Or opened a bakery.”

“Or gone to law school.”

“Or taken piano lessons.”

“Or gotten involved in local politics.”

“Or volunteered at a school.”

“Or—”

“Stop!” I cry. “Stop! I—”

And then I, too, fall silent. The realization that neither of them seems to like me all that much is surprisingly painful, and I want to justify myself somehow—but I do not know what to say. When I try to catch their eyes, neither woman will look at me. Everything is very still around me. The winds have long since abandoned the crossroads. The grasses are not moving in the fields, the flames under the cauldron have become coals. The world seems perfectly flat and gray, all dust and weeds.

“Well, like I say, you get out what you put in,” the witch concludes dryly. “Let’s move along, then, shall we.”

“By all means,” the fairy godmother says. “None of us are getting any younger, and some of us have real things to get back to. Like clients who appreciate what we do.”

Feeling deeply ashamed, I return my gaze to the cauldron, in whose turmoil another stretch of time has already passed.

The End of the Middle’s Middle

One morning, as she lay on the sofa in her godmother’s visiting chamber, her tea grown cold, she drew a breath and made a shocking confession.

“I’m not very happy, Fairy Godmother.”

The matronly woman looked up from her knitting, her bulging eyes amplified even more by the rainbow-colored butterfly-framed glasses.

“Don’t be silly, my dear. ‘And they lived happily ever after,’ remember? The story is very clear on that point. Another cup of tea?”

She shook her head. “I know I should be happy. I’ve done everything required, I’ve followed all the rules. Only I’m often sad, and the prince never seems to be there, and sometimes… sometimes I even wonder…”

“Yes?” The fairy godmother stared without blinking, one knitting needle poised like a pen in her rosy hand.

“It’s… hard to explain.”

“Do try, my dear. Verbalizing your feelings helps with tension reduction.”

“Oh.” She crumbled a scone into dust on her plate. “Well, sometimes I wonder if this story hasn’t… hasn’t gone wrong somehow. Because sometimes I almost feel like I don’t belong in it. Like maybe I’d be happier in some other story—even in some other world, a really different world, if only I could figure out how to get to it…”

Her anxious voice trailed off.

The fairy godmother sighed.

“My dear child. There is no other world. There is just this world. And in this world, I assure you, stories never go wrong. All of us get exactly what we deserve. Villains have their punishments, heroes win their princesses, and if your story has a happy ending, then it is simply your matrimonial duty to be happy.” She paused to ponder. “Still, you know, stories don’t always run in a straight line. There could be something you’re overlooking, some twist to the plot. Of course, all twists are properly catalogued in the royal library. I’m afraid our hour is up now, but I want you to read up on fairy tales this week, and we’ll continue at our next session. As always, Tuesday at eleven. Let me jot it down for you, you’ve been a bit forgetful lately.”

“Yes, Fairy Godmother,” she said meekly as she accepted the appointment card.

That very afternoon, she walked to the palace library.

The library was a light-filled room with cream-colored armchairs, cream-colored curtains, and four slim white bookcases, one along each wall, with carved daisies on the sides and books neatly arranged behind glass; it was most often used for mid-morning tea parties. Professor Dagobert, the scholarly dwarf librarian, grumbled, as he showed her in, about the lack of dark wood paneling, blackened fireplaces, illegible manuscripts, and overall air of arcane knowledge and insomnia. He found the gilded compendium she required, explained how to use the index, and left her perched on an ottoman next to a small display cabinet whose shelves contained a modest collection of magical treasures, with a tiny crystal shoe in the place of honor.

Resolutely not looking at the shoe, she moved her finger down the columns of words, whispering under her breath: “Apples, as emblems of patriarchy. Apples, golden delicious. Apples, as weapons of destruction. Beasts, as allegories. Beasts, as bridegrooms (see under ‘Frogs,’ ‘Stags,’ ‘Swans,’ ‘Swine, abusive,’ ‘Swine, adulterous,’ ‘Swine, alcoholic,’ ‘Swine, lying,’ ‘Swine, not pulling their weight around the house,’ ‘Swine, unemployed,’ ‘Wolves’). Children, desired (see also ‘Children, unwanted,’ ‘Motherhood, ambiguous,’ ‘Stew recipes’). Children, grown up into monsters (see under ‘Parenting, poor’). Children, royal, as ciphers with no distinguishing characteristics, used to further the plot…”

For a while, it was quite slow going; but when she came to “Spells, false brides,” she read, with growing excitement, the entry on lawful wives being deprived of—or rather, this still being the land of deserved conclusions, temporarily diverted from—their happy endings mid-story, by scheming, envious women who plotted to marry the husbands after plunging the wives into slumber, rendering them mute, turning them into fowls or fawns, and otherwise befuddling and bewitching them in such a way that their normally faithful princes became blind to their charms and virtues. She was not by nature mistrustful, but something about this malevolent notion sent shivers of potential revelations through her mind, and she went to bed that night harboring a grave suspicion.

Was it possible that she was under some sort of spell? Could that be the reason for her feeling of wrongness—and for the deepening chill between her and the prince?

When, after much tossing and turning, she fell asleep at last, she was trapped in her old recurring dream of dim, scented places where she wandered as before, lost and naked, only this time, a giant green bird with eyes of burning amber flew after her, shrieking, “You fool, you fool, you fool!” It was barely light when she bolted upright in bed, wide awake, reeling. She thought back to that afternoon in the reception chamber of the Duchess von Lieber: the ticking clock, the muttering butler, the tray tremulous in his gloved hands as he had pressed a cup of tea upon her. She had drunk the sweet, watery offering to its last drop, courteous guest that she had been. She remembered, too, her deepening sense of confusion as she had dashed through the low-ceilinged maze filled with luscious fruit, ruby-colored potions, and slinking cats fit to be some wicked witch’s familiars—and at the end of the maze, Prince Roland looking at her with cold eyes, the eyes of a stranger.

Truth struck her like a thunderbolt.

The tea—the tea had not been tea.

She had been most cruelly poisoned.

Minutes later, she tossed on some clothes and was pelting down hallways, alarming teapots on their brisk breakfast errands, causing havoc among a clump of gossiping maids who squealed and scattered at her passage. “Your Highness, your slippers don’t match!” one of them cried, and the babble of scandalized voices followed her all the way to the fairy godmother’s door, upon which she proceeded to bang in the most unladylike manner.

“Fairy Godmother! Fairy Godmother, I must speak to you!”

There was a moment of startled silence on the other side, before a muffled reply reached her: “Not now, my child, I have a visitor.”

“But I need you, I need you now, I’m under a spell, you have to fix me, he won’t love me if you don’t!” she wailed, and, in a move even less ladylike, flung the door open. She heard an abrupt squawk, saw the edge of a robe (or, possibly, a mantle edged with ermine) and the heel of a shoe (or, perhaps, a mouse-eared slipper) disappearing into the wall through some secret passageway, and found herself face-to-face with the fairy godmother, who looked highly indignant, and not a little disheveled.

“Dear child, this isn’t proper, there are appointment books,” the fairy began, hurriedly doing up a butterfly-shaped button of her salmon-colored blouse—but she had already thrown herself onto the soft matronly bosom and wept, and the fairy godmother abandoned her scolding and started clucking.

An hour later, she walked back to her room, her pockets bulging with multicolored vials. “A pink spoonful at breakfast, for mood improvement,” she whispered to herself. “A green sip before bedtime, for insomnia. A blue drop every other day, for… for… No, the blue one at breakfast, for anxiety, and the pink one…”

The fairy godmother had promised that the potions would work as antidotes to the perfidious spell, setting her right in a matter of weeks—months at the most. Having a list of concrete steps to follow made her feel newly hopeful. Her love for the prince became an earnest resolve to cure herself of the evil malaise until she was, once again, the wife he deserved. She obeyed her godmother’s instructions with steadfast adherence, and, for a while, things did get better. Her days, true, grew a bit muffled, as though swaddled in cotton; but her nights were dream free at last, as if someone had stretched a peaceful black cloth over the nocturnal agitation of her mind. She spent her waking hours playing complacently with her children (though she now left all storytelling to Nanny Nanny, who favored simple tales of the animal kind, with foxes being cunning, chickens naive, and wolves malicious; love did not enter into them in any guise, only the most basic needs to eat and not be eaten). And whenever she saw Prince Roland at state functions, she smiled a slightly loopy smile in his direction, patiently waiting for him to notice the positive change in her nature and rekindle their romance.

Yet seasons passed, and still the prince came no closer. Her patience wavered. To speed up her cure, she began to down the potions two or three at a time, grouping them by color, or on a whim. Her days grew wobbly then and ill defined, now stretching until prolapsed, now shrinking to taut compression. Sometimes she woke up, after not being asleep, and was thrust into the midst of foggy conversations with the frowning Nanny Nanny or the Marquise de Fatouffle, who gaped at her rudely over a teacup. On one occasion, she discovered old King Roland hovering above her, in hushed consultation with the court physician, and thought she could make out, amidst their whispers, an oft-repeated phrase: “Nervous breakdown, nervous breakdown…” She was unbothered by it, for she had started to sense a kind of gap between herself and everything around her, not unlike the jolting sensation one got when one failed to notice stairs coming to an end and attempted to place a foot on yet another step, only to have it hit the floor with shocking abruptness—and in that gap, she would glimpse, at times, disjointed fragments of that other, imaginary, world, streets thronging with multitudes, roads honking with hurtling monsters, gilded musical boxes sliding up and down the metal spines of needle-like buildings, everything loud and bright and sharp-edged, and somehow so much more present than her actual life in the palace. Her feeling of dissociation grew, and grew, until she did not feel at all herself. One day, she drank three pink potions in rapid succession, then sat before her mirror, watching a pasty-faced, overweight woman who glared at her with hostile eyes, when it occurred to her that, quite possibly, she was not herself—could not be herself—for her true self, her lovely, lovable, thin, happy self, must have been spirited away by the wicked enchantress, hidden, perhaps, in some dream-spire of steel and glass—and the unlikable woman in her mirror was none other than the evil impostor in person.

Horrified, she cast about for ways to rid herself of the hateful creature. She stopped leaving her room altogether in an effort to keep the false wife away from the prince, hoping that the villainess would see the futility of her designs and go back whence she had come; yet the wretched woman did not budge. Next, she thought to scare her away with violence, and went about smashing teacups and pressing china shards into the tender skin of her arms and thighs; but invariably she found the pretender wife unperturbed and herself howling with pain. Desisting, she decided to starve the impostor instead, and tried to stop eating; yet always she broke down and accepted a cracker or a cluster of grapes that Brie and Nibbles pressed upon her, then felt ashamed of her weakness.

(As it happened, the descendants of Maximilian the Long-Tailed were no longer in power. The dynasty had developed an extravagant taste for luxury along with an imperious sense of entitlement. Not content with styling themselves mere Royal Companions, they had demanded to be addressed as Their Majesties and claimed an ever-growing number of prerogatives, from taxing all cheese consumption to exercising the droit du seigneur. King Nibbles pinched the backside of every passing mouse, whether nubile or old, simply to remind them all of his authority, while Queen Brie expected everyone she encountered on the daily inspections of her domains to prostrate themselves before her, and was always preceded by two pages, one of whom heralded her approach by blowing into a peapod, while the other walked backward unrolling a ribbon of crimson silk under her paws. And tyranny and oppression only worsened with time, even though rulers themselves changed rather frequently: numerous members of Maximilian’s family, seduced by the heady prospects of impunity and overindulgence, vied for the throne and deposed one another with clockwork regularity, by means of varied brutality that ranged from plying siblings with poisoned truffles to pushing grandmothers off staircases, and not excluding an occasional bout of surreptitious infant strangling or a more elaborate ploy involving a dozen young cousins who were invited to a birthday party only to find themselves in a locked room with a famished cat. There had, in fact, been so many assassinations and coups that no one paid attention to the regnal numbers anymore.

Still, as long as the royal contenders kept all the murder in the family, the masses grumbled quietly; but when one of the pages tripped while unrolling the ribbon before one of the queens and stepped on her toe and she had him beheaded, the grumbling grew louder. Sewer rats were the first to voice their discontent openly, and the working kitchen mice joined them shortly. In the end, the entire indigent population rose up, led by the intrepid Provolone the One-Eyed, overthrew the tyrants, and liberated their fabled stores of chocolate.

A general democratic election to the positions of Brie and Nibbles was then held in the kitchens. Victory was carried by a landslide by a team of two brothers, Snufflebit and Snifflebit, who were young and carefree, and had won the favor of the electorate by running a hilariously improvised campaign, complete with stand-up comedy, blueberry juggling, and riding along pantry shelves on bottle caps. Grandmothers’ tales had led the brothers to believe that the job would entail hours upon hours of board games, musical diversions, and much merriment, and they were eager to test their dancing skills. Soon after moving to the royal mantelpiece, however, the Mice Elect discovered, much to their dismay, that no dancing was required and that, far from being an enviable boon, the role of the Royal Companions was a grueling charity. It appeared, quite simply, that the princess was not overly intelligent and needed someone sensible to take care of her, day and night, or she might forget to eat, neglect to sleep, and have unfortunate accidents with assorted sharp objects. Less than a month into their one-year term, Snufflebit and Snifflebit grew so wan and thin that their family, alarmed, called an emergency meeting in the broom closet. The brothers were absolved of their duties, and a weekly rotation was set up among volunteers—a week, it seemed, was all it took before even the most stalwart mouse felt utterly worn-out.

As summer days cooled into fall evenings, it became harder and harder to find volunteers. Then someone remembered that in the rat-infested sewers deep below the palace, there was rumored to live an incredibly ancient seer by the name of Sister Charity, so beloved and wise that even the most murderous rat bandits grew as gentle as hairless mouselings in her saintly presence. Many argued that it was only a legend and no such mouse existed, but eventually a rat was found willing to show them the way to Sister Charity’s abode in exchange for a ration of sausages, and a small, nervous delegation with Snufflebit and Snifflebit at the helm was sent down below to ask the venerable seer for guidance.

They found her seated in the darkest underground chamber, telling a quiet story to a circle of mesmerized baby rats at her feet. She looked older than the very stone foundations around them, and in the unsteady halo of light cast by the candle stub in Snufflebit’s shaking paw, they saw that her eyes were milky and blank, for she had gone blind in her great age. Yet when she turned to face them, they felt that she was looking directly at them—looking directly into their souls.

“I know why you’ve come, o mice from above the ground,” she said in a voice like a rustle of leaves, like a creaking of trees. “I see the pleading in your hearts, and your hearts are pure. So be it. For your sakes, I declare the old debt paid, and I release her. Let all her mistakes be her own from now on. You will be free of your toils at the advent of winter.”)

At the advent of winter, a messenger came to the palace with a letter from Melissa, the princess’s younger stepsister, informing her that her stepmother had died. She felt distraught at the prospect of leaving her room. On the day of the funeral, she stood in the front row of mourners, her face buried in the fur of her collar, her eyes hidden behind oversized sunglasses; she had drunk three or four potions to calm down, and now her features felt as if they were both numb and melting. Melissa, on her right, was crying openly, but Gloria held herself with her usual haughty self-possession. It was Gloria who, her mouth hard, her back ramrod straight, tossed the first handful of earth onto their mother’s coffin. Afterward, Melissa and Gloria walked off together, Gloria’s arm wrapped protectively around Melissa’s heaving shoulders, but she herself had slipped the tightening noose of sisterly embrace and trailed a few steps behind. As she stumbled through the frozen cemetery, headstones beckoned to her, angels leered suggestively through marble tears, and at last the path buckled beneath her feet, which she was now surprised to find liberated of shoes.

A hand grasped her arm, and there was Melissa helping her to a bench, saying, “Here, sit down for a moment. Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m fine,” she replied, or tried to reply; her words had grown larger than her mouth and would not quite fit there. The world was swimming, and everything felt hot, and her stepsister was peering at her with eyes that had gone wide and solicitous.

“You don’t seem well,” she kept repeating. “And why are you barefoot?”

She straightened, tried to focus. They had not seen each other in almost a decade, not since the royal wedding, in fact, though she presently recalled that Melissa, who had ended up marrying the king’s woodsman, had persisted in sending her holiday cards, dutifully answered by Prince Roland’s scribes, as well as stork-bordered birth announcements for her numerous children, five or six by now, she was not certain exactly how many, but however many they were, she decided in a burst of resentment, Melissa had grown far too dumpy and her life was far too pathetic for her to have the right to offer any kind of sympathy, to visit any kind of judgment, to be looking at her betters with such condescending concern while living, it wouldn’t surprise her, in a shoe in some backwoods with her badly washed brood, eating porridge morning, noon, and night, telling time by the crowing of a rooster, and now Melissa’s eyes were once again brimming over, almost as if she were voicing all these awful yet indisputable thoughts aloud, which of course she was not, which she was almost sure she was not, until Gloria took her under both elbows with unwomanly strength and, lifting her bodily from the bench, passed her to a slack-jawed footman and ordered, rather grimly: “Her Highness needs to go back at once. She is upset. And speaking of shoes, do find hers.”

The last things she remembered were her younger stepsister’s glistening cheeks as she sobbed, over and over, “I forgive you, you aren’t yourself, you aren’t yourself right now!”—and her own dignified reply, while she was being manhandled into the carriage: “Well, of course I’m not myself, the evil sorceress sent me away a long time ago!”—and the hush falling among the mourners. Then everything turned black and still until, without any transition, there she was, sitting on a sofa in her reception room, possibly on a different morning, her hands cradled in the gentle warmth of Melissa’s grasp.

“I came as soon as I could, we’re all so worried about you, you must tell me what’s wrong,” Melissa was saying to her, must have been saying for some time. And suddenly she was crying on her stepsister’s shoulder, talking about the treacherous butler, and the prince’s cold eyes, and the overweight, overwrought woman in the mirror who would not go away—oh, and the potions, the endless potions that brought no cure—her words coming out all at once, in a soggy, incoherent jumble.

When she collapsed into exhausted silence, Melissa sat stroking her hand, carefully, lightly, as though it were some trembling, skittish animal.

“Show me what you’ve been taking,” she said at last, her tone guarded.

They went into the washroom. The potions were stored in a secret cabinet behind a painting of a lotus. Together they looked at the formidable army of green, blue, pink, yellow vials. Then, without warning, Melissa reached in and swept all the bottles off the shelf, and they shattered in a many-hued explosion of glass, noise, and magic on the stone tiles of the washroom floor.

“Oh no, what have you done, why have you done this!” she cried—but already the spilled vapors of spells and enchantments were billowing toward an open window, and in their swirling turbulence she glimpsed green imps, blue dragons, pink flies, yellow cockroaches with jaws loosened in toothy grins, a nebulous phantasmagoria of grotesques, all vile, all filled with some dark, dangerous essence. Growing quiet, she watched them seep and seethe past the windowpane, then dissipate in the cold wintry light. And when the last polluted whiff was gone, she felt a weight lift from her shoulders, and the world grew sharper and brighter, as if drained of some subtle yet pervasive poison.

Melissa was holding both her hands, squeezing them tightly.

“No more dark magic, promise me, promise me! You’ve been ill, and no wonder. I just don’t understand why your prince didn’t smash them all ages ago.”

“But he couldn’t have,” she mumbled. “He didn’t know.”

“How in the world could he not?”

She shook her head, not looking up.

“I prefer not to trouble him with my problems. He has so much on his mind. And it’s hard to find a private moment to talk, really. Whenever I see him, at official functions, there are always so many important people he must talk to first…”

“But I don’t understand. You see each other every night after the day is done.”

“Oh, well, no, to be honest, I mean, he travels so much, and he works so late, and I’m such a light sleeper, you see… Of course, it’s a big palace, and the west wing is more convenient for him, so after the first year or two, he just…”

She broke off. Her stepsister was staring at her.

She felt a need to defend her husband.

“He is busy, you know. He has a kingdom to run.”

Melissa pursed her lips. “Well, pardon me, I just live in a shoe, but at least Tom and I see each other daily. We talk. We sleep in the same bed. If I ever got into a state like this, he’d be the first to notice. Your prince is rich and handsome, no argument there, but he doesn’t strike me as a very nice person. Cold, he always seemed to me. Shallow. Uncaring. But to each her own, I suppose. You chose him, so clearly, compassion and compatibility matter less to you than his other, more visible, qualities.”

This was much like the Melissa of their teenage days, when they had gotten into spats over homework or chores, and she felt briefly reassured by the familiarity of her sister’s sour expression. Yet after Melissa left (full of sympathy once again, having exerted from her the promise to stay clean), she knelt to sweep away the empty orange bottles, the debris of all her crushed, drowned pills, and, as the last of the drug-induced haze lifted from her mind, thought about her life, thought about her marriage, and saw some truth behind her sister’s words.

She and the prince were overdue for a heart-to-heart talk.

She just needed to go on a strenuous diet first.

It is the fairy godmother’s turn to keep her eyes averted.

“Really?” the witch spits out. “You stupefied her with potions for years? What, do the Powers That Be pay you a commission for each happy ending that doesn’t end up at my crossroads?”

“I will have you know, it is perfectly within magical regulations.” The fairy godmother’s voice is pitched too high. “Of course, I could see there was no curse upon her, some women are just taken that way after a baby, but I thought it would be more beneficial to her cure if I allowed her to stay within her preferred frame of reference. And it isn’t dark magic, not strictly speaking, not unless misused to excess, and had she but followed my directions… Self-medicating can lead to all sorts of trouble. I feel terrible, truly terrible, but you understand, I had no idea—”

An anemic half-moon has just risen over the fields, and in its pasty light, the fairy godmother’s pale, plump hands keep fluttering like weak moths. I want to reach out and arrest their nervous trembling.

“Fairy Godmother.”

She will not look at me.

“Fairy Godmother, it was not all your fault. Not your fault at all. It was just… I was just…” I want to reassure her, but it is hard for me to stare back into my personal darkness, so I fall silent and watch the sickly moon. It is moving in and out of low, billowing clouds, and sometimes it seems as though the predatory clouds are chasing after it while it struggles to escape them, and other times as though it means instead to seek shelter behind their woolly softness, hide from the emptiness of the stark autumnal skies. “It just felt easier to run away. And I guess I kept running for a while. For a long while. And not just with the potions…”

“Yes, well, reality can be a bitch,” the witch interrupts. “And here we are, all full of remorse and weeping into our hankies. The night is halfway done, madam. Are you ready to finish this? Do you still want him dead?”

The moon has now climbed above the clouds—or else the clouds have abandoned it to its lonely, cold, naked fate. In the sudden brightness, I look at the hairs remaining in my hand.

One, two, three, four, five. And that little half.

Only five and a half hair-thin seconds separating his life from his death. And I still want him dead, I do, of course I do, I want him dead because of everything he’s done to me, nothing has changed… I stretch my hand over the cauldron, and wait, holding my breath, wait for the fairy godmother to try and stop me, but she only gives me a grateful, sheepish glance and stays unmoving and silent. And all at once, in the absence of her protests, I feel the full weight of my decision crashing down onto my shoulders, no one else there to share my burden. I am truly alone.

I bite my lip and let the hairs fall.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

And then—and then I close my hand, trapping that last half-hair in my clenched fist, keeping it safe, postponing the moment of reckoning, for just a tiny bit longer.

The Beginning of the Middle’s End

One morning in late spring, a thinner princess walked to the prince’s quarters. The guard looked puzzled at her approach but made no effort to stop her. She scratched at the heavy door, then waited nervously. Only upon hearing an impatient “Yes?” did she edge into the study.

She had not been here since that memorable afternoon three or four years before. Once again, Prince Roland sat behind his imposing desk, fingers poised under his chin, but he was alone now—or nearly alone, for on the wall behind him hung a life-sized portrait of him, which she had never seen. The prince in the painting was likewise seated behind the faithfully rendered desk, his hands held in the same elegant gesture, his eyes raised at the viewer. At her entrance Prince Roland glanced up, and her breath stilled at the unexpected sight of the two of them, one directly above the other, looking at her. The resemblance was quite extraordinary in every detail, save that, unlike the original, the painted man was smiling broadly, his blue eyes frank, his expression full of welcoming benevolence.

“How can I help you?”

She tore her attention away from the painting.

“Please, my love, I need to talk to you.” Her words came out more like a wheedling plea than the somber demand she had practiced.

“Now is not a good time.” He turned a page of some report, picked up a sharp black quill; unlike his father the king, he favored porcupines over geese as the source for his writing implements. “Perhaps if you came back tomorrow. Or better yet, Friday. Yes, why don’t I tell my secretary to put you down for the second Friday of the month.”

His face was impassive, all polished planes of cheekbones and chiseled chin; in truth, he appeared far less lifelike than the portrait behind him. She was oddly unsettled by the radiant man floating above the head of her distant husband, so much so that she found herself forgetting everything she had come to say.

“Please, when was this done?” she asked instead.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your portrait, when was it painted?”

His mouth appeared to tense. He regarded her in silence, stabbing his ferocious quill at a curl of parchment.

“I do not recall,” he said at last. “I am always followed around by that clown of an artist, it is such a nuisance. I regret to tell you I am busy now, the Unicorn Pact requires immediate action.” Still he looked at her, frowning. “You are starting to show your age,” he added presently. “Thirty-one already, are you not? Perhaps you should schedule an appointment with a beautician or something. People like their betters to keep up appearances. Good day to you.”

She curtsied, then flushed dark, and turned, and ran, Prince Roland’s parting words ringing cruelly in her ears, the glorious vision of the painted smile nestled in her breast, warm and startling.

That night, she had trouble falling asleep. She listened to the clock on the tower striking at random times and Brie squeaking in a dream. (Incidentally, ever since the mice had been freed from their backbreaking labor of minding the princess, they found themselves in possession of much leisure, and they began to dedicate their energies to higher pursuits. Grizzled philosophers stretched on couches fashioned out of bread crusts, imbibing wine from thimbles and arguing over the meaning of life from moonrise till sunrise; among the young, a secret religious cult sprang up around a mysterious blind mouse rumored to live in the sewers with a band of cutthroat rats; and arts flourished throughout the community, especially music and sculpture. An indisputable genius by the name Gouda staged vastly popular performances in which he fashioned miniature cats out of pieces of his namesake cheese, then nibbled them away to the accompaniment of savage squeaking, varying the order each time, starting now with the ears, now with the tail, to add suspense to what he called his “primal happenings”; a treatise about his technique was being gnawed into a candle by a prominent art critic for the edification of murine minds. General education, too, made giant strides, after the first mouseling school had been formed in the pantry. One of the courses, Human Studies, included, as part of its curriculum, a weeklong internship on the princess’s mantelpiece. The class, however, was not nearly as well attended as other seminars, for instance Wax Whittling or Linguistic Inquiries, which included stimulating discussions of such expressions as “raining cats and dogs” and “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.” The prospect of spending a week in the presence of royalty had seemed intriguing at first, but now only the most scholarly of the young chose to pursue the discipline, for it had quickly become known that the princess, regrettably, did very little of interest.) For minutes she lay braiding the edge of her covers, wearing her hands out with restless worry and watching the moonlight move across the rug. When it pooled inside her slippers, she threw the blankets off, slipped her feet into the cool blue glow, lit a candle, and, still in her nightdress, tiptoed out the door.

Never before had she been out of bed so late at night. At this hour, precariously poised between midnight and sunrise, the palace seemed an altogether unfamiliar place. Chandelier crystals swayed softly as she hastened by the ballrooms, yet the tunes they played now were not the customary waltzes but eerie snatches of slow, languid songs she failed to recognize. When she paused on the threshold of the Grand Audience Chamber, she thought she saw translucent figures moving with sinister grace in the mirrors along the walls, their spectral limbs coming together with sinuous undulations that made her blush and hurry on. The shadows through which she passed were likewise not the tamed little puddles to which she was accustomed, but deeper, mysterious pools that condensed into secretive presences she could not quite make out behind curtains or underneath clocks. Magic hung thick on the air, almost visible, like a sheen of green moonlight that made everything slightly distorted, shimmering and shifting—and she sensed this magic to be completely unlike any she had known before. For the ordinary brand of godmother magic was thinly spread, civilized as a powdered wig, harmless as a drop of liqueur after a four-course meal, whimsical as glass footwear, and entirely pedestrian in its dabbling, domestic purposes of comfort and matrimony. This magic felt uncanny—denser, older, much more hidden, and much less certain; though whether it was light or dark, she could not tell.

Briefly she stopped and thought of turning back; but the pull was too powerful. She walked onward with quickening steps. The empty corridor leading to the prince’s quarters echoed loudly with her footfalls. The presence of the wild old magic grew stronger here: it was now a thrumming pulse that sent troubling reverberations through her soles and into her stomach, until her whole body vibrated in some primitive rhythm. As she approached the study door, her heart bobbed like an egg in boiling water. She tried the knob, half hoping to find the door locked.

The door crept open.

She stole over the threshold.

The room lay deserted, its bulky furnishings looming in the dark, harsh and immense, like slabs hewn out of rough stone. She neared the desk, raised her candle. The painted prince met her gaze. And perhaps it was only the flickering flame of the candle in her unsteady hand, but it seemed to her that his eyes sparkled with liquid life and his smile grew more luminous still as the two of them stared at each other.

The magical thrumming was all around her now, breathing, pulsing, throbbing. It was coming, she realized, from whatever lay on the other side of the door in the far wall—the door that led to the prince’s bedroom. She inhaled, and walked toward it, her hand raised for a hesitant knock, when a voice spoke behind her.

“Help me.”

She whirled around.

The room lay dark and still, yet there it was, once again.

“Help me. Please.”

The voice was pitiful and gentle, and the sound of it shook her heart. Fearful of what she might see, she threaded her way back through the dead mass of officious armchairs and cabinets, gathering a bruise high on her left thigh from one of the desk’s brutal corners, and, once more, shined a timorous light at the portrait.

The man in the painting was no longer smiling, his hands stretched out toward her, his eyes brimming over with some mute, tragic appeal.

“Who are you?” she whispered, nonsensically, for of course she knew who he was—the beautiful man she had fallen in love with at the ball all those years ago. She tried again. “How can I help you?”

His lips moved, and her heart came to a stop in her chest like a pendulum that had wound down in its swinging and was now waiting for the next push before it started in a new direction—but before she could hear his answer, she found herself sitting up in bed, her chest stabbed through by a shaft of moonlight, her pulse erratic, and there were the porcelain poodles on her mantelpiece, and Nibbles twitching in his sleep, and her slippers lined up on the bedside rug, precisely as she had left them.

Only a dream, she told herself—it was only a dream—but her heart would not slow down.

She dozed fitfully for the rest of the sunless hours. When morning broke at last, she felt unable to settle to anything. After a wash that failed to cool her burning skin and a breakfast that left no taste in her mouth, she climbed to the nursery, but Nanny Nanny took one good look at her and sent her away. “Go ba-a-ack to be-e-ed, Your Highness,” she bleated with some severity, “and have them bring you chamomile te-e-ea and a hot-water bottle.”

Nanny Nanny was no different from Fairy Godmother, both practical, bossy, and of limited understanding, she thought as she stormed away, fuming at having to take orders from a goat, even such an old and sage one. And since she was feeling rebellious, she did not go back to her room but went for a muddy stroll in the rain-sodden garden instead, then had her eleven-o’clock tea brought to her in the library, against her usual custom, and sat sullenly contemplating the few odds and ends inside the library’s unimpressive display cabinet.

A thin coating of dust covered the whole sorry collection: a red apple with a bite taken out of its lacquered side, a dulled handheld mirror, a delicate chess piece carved out of ivory, a great rusty key with traces of something that might or might not have been blood along its jagged teeth, and, on a shelf all its own, a tiny glass slipper. She cast a furtive look around and pulled the cabinet door ajar. A cloying smell of rotten fruit escaped in a pale puff. The slipper, weightless as a moonbeam, easily fit in the palm of her hand. She unlaced the mud-caked boot on her right foot, wiggled out of it, and jammed her perspiring toes into the precious shoe.

It was at least two sizes too small.

Openmouthed with disbelief, she examined her heel hanging over the glittering edge. Then, all at once worried that someone might come in, unlikely as the possibility was—none of the courtiers made a habit of reading, for, naturally, one did not need stories if one was already inhabiting a story as good as any—she hurried to wrest the unforgiving crystal monstrosity off her aching, pinched toes, and was just putting it back in the cabinet when her eyes fell on the shelf below, and a surprisingly simple idea popped into her mind. After the briefest of hesitations, she upended her untouched cup of cold tea into a nearby pot of geraniums, slipped the handheld mirror between the ruffles of her skirt, and left the library at a barely suppressed trot.

Alone in her bedroom, having accepted yet another unwanted cup of tea, dismissed the maid, and locked the door, for the first time in her life—clearly, it was to be the day for underhanded actions, uncharacteristic emotions, and miniature revolts—she sat on the bed and raised the mirror before her.

“Show me my husband,” she demanded, her heart swollen with an unfamiliar excitement, and, when nothing happened, added plaintively, “Please?”

Still nothing happened. She wondered if she would have to be subjected to the indignity of rhyming. In the lusterless glass, she could see a sliver of a pasty cheek, a corner of a bleary eye, a puffy eyelid. The prince had been right (though he could have been kinder about it), she was losing her beauty. Hastily she thrust the glass away from her face, and chanted, all in a rush, drawing on some dimly recalled stock of stories heard in the most remote recesses of childhood: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall…”

But of course, it was not on the wall, she was holding it, so she started anew: “Mirror, mirror, in my hand, show me Prince Roland and… and… and…”

It did rhyme, in its way, but obviously something else was needed. She took a few turns about the room, thinking furiously, then tried a more abstract approach: “Mirror, mirror, bring me luck. Show me Prince Roland and… and his… his…”

But the prince kept no pet ducks, “pluck” applied only to peasant upstarts, and “yuck” did not rightly belong in legitimate poetry. She tossed the mirror onto her blanket, the reflection of her nose skittering along its surface at a wide angle, and screamed in frustration—and, all at once, had the very spell.

“Mirror, mirror, on my bed, show me my spouse, instead of my head!” she recited triumphantly.

The surface of the mirror fogged and billowed.

“That. Was. Simply. Horrendous,” drawled a peevish voice. “But you are persistent, I will give you that, and I am really bored.”

“Plus the bonus rhyme,” she offered readily, anxious to appease the disembodied speaker. “You know. ‘Instead.’ ‘Head.’”

“Well. The previous incantation, had you but completed it, would have been better. More accurate.”

“How do you mean?”

But the mirror refused to elaborate.

“Also, technically, this is spying, you are aware,” it said after a pause.

“I just want to know him better,” she protested hotly. “There is nothing wrong with that! Because I realize now, we were very young when we got married, and we might not have had that much in common. Back then. But our years together have brought us closer. All the things we’ve shared. Like our children. Only sometimes it feels like I’ve had our children alone. Oh, of course, he is there for us, he works so hard, and I’ve always had money and help, I know that, only… only sometimes I see these peasant families from the carriage window, a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, having a meal together in some field, a checkered tablecloth, a fat bottle of wine, their dog stealing sausages from their picnic basket, the mother telling a story, the father smacking her cheek with a greasy kiss, the children chasing each other through the grass, all of them laughing, and the sky so blue above them, like a hand cupping them all together, a perfect life, simple yet perfect, you know? Not this—this marble lockbox of a place, the cold ceremonials, the one-two-three dances, the polite agony of loneliness… Oh, I don’t mean to complain, I’m very grateful for everything, it’s just that… that…”

She stopped abruptly, all at once conscious of babbling—worse, of voicing aloud things that were intimate and shameful. There was an uncomfortable silence. Then the mirror sighed. When it spoke again, it sounded very old and very tired, and for the first time it occurred to her that its voice might just belong to a woman.

“Yes, girl, I know. That’s what they all say. You won’t like it, of course. But if you are sure.”

“I am sure!” she cried.

After an interminable moment, the fog shifted in a gesture oddly like a shrug and began to recede. Sucking in her breath with a childlike eagerness, she leaned over the glass, and frowned, then tilted her head, then continued to tilt it, trying to comprehend what it was she was seeing, until her head was jammed all the way against her shoulder and had nowhere else to go.

Her mouth loosened in a wordless scream.

“Ahem. It might be wise to take a break here,” the fairy godmother says, her lips pursed as she steps away from the cauldron. “Or shall we just skip this part?”

“Must you be such a prude?” says the witch. “I was finally beginning to enjoy myself. We deserve a bit of excitement after all the dreary dross we’ve had to suffer through! And in any case, it was my impression that you yourself were indulging in some extracurricular activities with the good old King Roland, or am I mistaken?”

“What gave you such an absurd idea!” exclaims the fairy godmother, visibly flustered. “That is, he was a client of mine, yes. Depressed for years, if you really want to know, though I shouldn’t be telling you that, it is privileged information. Not that there is much harm in divulging it now, poor dear… His wife died young, I felt terrible for him, just terrible. But of course, he was a widower, so there would have been no harm if… Not that… I mean to say…”

“Human!” the witch cries with savage triumph, poking one gnarled finger in the fairy godmother’s direction. “After everything, she, too, is human. Who knew?”

To my astonishment, the fairy godmother blushes, stutters, and looks away.

I blink. Who knew, indeed.

“Might as well get this over with,” I say then. “I want you both to understand.”

Sighing, the fairy godmother draws back to the cauldron.

In the mirror, the prince was having relations—but no, that was not quite right, the polite euphemism failed to convey the vigorousness and shamelessness of what she was seeing; was copulating, then—but that, too, fell well short of the mark; so, then, was—and there was no other way of putting it—her husband was—a cry of fury born at last, a hand slammed against the wall, a smashed teacup, cold tea running down the front of her dress, a deep breath, a deeper breath, look again, look, do not look away—her husband was fucking two women, one of them the stout forty-nine-year-old pastry chef on an exchange visit from a neighboring giant’s castle, and the other, shockingly—as if the rest had not been shocking enough—but yes, still, shockingly—their butler’s daughter, who was rosy, long-limbed, lovely, and not a day over sixteen. The energetic tumble was loud with deep-chested grunts (the pastry chef’s) and high-pitched moans (the butler’s daughter’s) and took place on a rich crimson background abloom with royal-blue tulips, which she recognized, after another breath, as the plush oriental rug in Prince Roland’s study. The mirror’s angle was not sufficiently wide to take in the entire scene at once but offered her a rapid succession of pornographic glimpses of female flesh—pale narrow thighs and puckering pink nipples (the butler’s daughter’s), reddened gelatinous thighs and massive chocolate nipples (the pastry chef’s)—over all of which labored Prince Roland, hard-eyed, trim, and sleek with sweat, looking rather like a circus seal, his teeth gritted with manly concentration, from which he occasionally emerged to demand, in harsh, seal-like barks: “Who’s your prince, yeah, who’s your prince?”

She watched for a minute, then carefully turned the mirror over, and quietly sat on the edge of her chaste white bed, her hands still and listless like plucked birds in her lap. After a while, she rose, crossed the room to her writing desk, at which she spent a laborious daily hour composing inevitable thank-you notes and invitations to tea parties, and, just as quietly, slid the mirror into the wastepaper basket that stood between the desk’s thin white legs. The basket had a border of plump golden cherubs practicing archery all along its edge. The mirror settled on the bottom and was now partially obscured by a small pile of glistening cherry pits, some tangled lace trimmings from an embroidery project, and a draft of a letter to the Marquise de Fatouffle, which she had begun penning on her special peach-tinted stationery the previous morning, before losing a valiant battle with the spelling of “appreciation.”

“Thank you,” she said, because she had excellent manners and it was customary to offer thanks for rendered favors, even when they resulted in death and devastation, and waited, likewise out of politeness, in case the mirror chose to reply from the trash. The mirror said nothing, however, so she returned to her bed and sat back down. Her hands were empty now. Her heart was empty. She knew the truth at last—but the deeper truth, the truth beneath the truth, was that she might have known it once or twice already and had tricked herself into forgetting. Now she could hide from it no longer. She heard the clock in the corridor outside strike noon, and felt mildly surprised at its being barely past morning, at the curious fact that time was still functioning, still flowing, still meting out the meager minutes, sand grains, bread crumbs, of her life’s passing. For just one moment longer she sat pondering the vastness of nothing in her hands, and then, somehow, the room was dark and the pale jellyfish of the moon swam in the inky sky outside the window. Someone was banging on her door, someone must have been banging on her door for a while now, and a chorus of frantic, hoarsened voices, maids, footmen, mice, were demanding to know, more and more shrilly, whether she was fine, whether everything was as it should be.

“I’m fine, I’m perfectly fine,” she told them through the door. “I’m napping. Please let me rest until morning.”

And they believed her and departed, for, as everyone knows, fairy-tale princes and princesses never lie.

Sometime later that night, she awakened from a dream of crashing trains, shattering lightbulbs, and telephones ringing forever in empty apartments to find herself slumped over in a chair. The moon was gone from the window. Her neck ached, her head pounded, she was wearing unlaced muddy boots and a filthy dress stiff with tea stains. A candle, propped dangerously on the chair’s arm, had melted down to a guttering stump and was about to set her hair on fire prior to burning down the entire palace. She blew it out, thus saving everyone from imminent demise—those who deserved to live and those who deserved to die, in equal measure—and went into the washroom. There, she lit every candelabrum until the room blazed, stood before the wall mirror, and stripped naked.

Then she looked at herself.

She had never seen herself naked before, not openly, not wholly. No one had ever seen her naked before. She was shy around her maids, and her couplings with the prince, few as they had been, long ago as they had been, had been nothing like the debauched midday romp she had witnessed in that diabolical mirror—the first few, in the darkness under the covers, and the last, fully clothed. Now she stood before her reflection, and looked at it as if it belonged to someone else. She looked over her neck, her shoulders, her breasts, her belly, her hips, her thighs, the darkening cleft between them. Then, slowly, slowly, she ran her hands along her skin, watching all the while in the mirror, the lights blazing so brightly that her very essence seemed to be burning away in their white, searing glare. She watched the pale, flaxen-haired, disturbingly voluptuous woman in the mirror, as the woman slid her hands down her sides, feeling strange heat beginning to rise from the body no longer her own, touching first her neck, then her shoulders, then her breasts, then her belly, then her hips, then her thighs, then—

Her heart stopped. Her heart stopped, and started again, quickening, racing. Her hands fell away and hung loose by her sides, shamed, still. Because there it was—her thigh. Her left thigh. The bruise, on her left thigh. The bruise, in the shape of a desk’s corner, high on her left thigh, just like the bruise she had received in her dream the night before—was it only the night before?—in the uncanny, thrumming dream the night before, the dream in which she had loved the radiant prince in the painting, and he had said: “Help me.”

Nothing was as it seemed.

She turned her back on the dissolute hussy with tempestuous eyes and hunger in her belly, rapidly blew out the forest of candles, pulled on her thick woolen nightgown, and slipped into bed. She slept the dreamless sleep of the righteous, and in the morning, she woke up a new woman, a woman on a mission. Skipping breakfast in order not to lose any time, she paid a visit to the court artist in his attic studio crammed with unfinished busts of ghosts and mermaids, and the shabby little man with smears of yellow and red in his unruly hair confirmed what she had already suspected: he had never painted the portrait above Prince Roland’s desk, nor did he have the slightest idea of where it had come from.

“I saw it once, though, when His Highness left his door ajar,” he confessed with a giggle. “The likeness is exceptional.”

Satisfied on that point, she returned to the library and spent weeks perusing weighty reference tomes. Since she was anything but adept at mining nuggets of value from wordy swamps of reading matter, she waded through tedious lists of potion ingredients, arcane discussions of child-to-bird transformations, and incomprehensible interpretations of fairy-tale symbolism with clenched teeth and aching temples, and at times felt the dull, gray despair of excessive knowledge crush her like a tombstone. Still, she refused to concede defeat. And at last, as the muggy summer heat gave way to the crisp chill of autumn, in a dingy little book with a torn-off cover, she stumbled upon a paragraph on enchanted portraits, unsatisfyingly brief and yet enough to reassure her that such things were indeed possible.

A living, warm human soul could, indeed, be trapped in a darkly charmed painting while its empty shell of a body, stripped of all love and understanding, continued to walk, talk, consume pastries with raspberry jam, sign death warrants with self-satisfied flourishes of porcupine quills, ignore concerned family members, and, in its free hours, diddle anything that moved—in short, play at being Prince Roland engaged in the regular business of everyday life.

All the certainties fell into place; but then, in her heart of hearts, she had known the truth—the real truth, this time, deeper yet than any of the other truths, which had not been true, after all—had known it the moment she had seen the bruise on her thigh on that terrible wreck of a night. She was not responsible for the unhappy state of their happily ever after—it was he, he alone; but of course, it was not her sweet prince’s fault, either. Some years into their conjugal bliss, he had been trapped under an evil enchantment. And now—now it was her wifely duty to save him, just like in the stories.

Her love for him was back, alive and generous, and it was all courage, and self-sacrifice, and, in some small measure, rising excitement at the thought of embarking on a perilous quest to rescue her beloved, then having him in her debt for the rest of his life. Energized by her clear-cut purpose, she felt prepared to enter into dangerous camaraderie with wolves, bargain with spoons and chicken bones, beg for help from cantankerous old ladies, even walk to the far side of the wind if need be, in order to break the spell. It was only a matter of figuring out how to start.

She knew that someone suitable should be coming out of the woodwork to provide the required instruction—a wizened dwarf with whom she might share a cupcake, or a bear whose paw she would obligingly rid of a splinter. She also knew herself at some disadvantage, as there was a decided shortage of bears in the manicured park at her disposal, and, too, most quests involved rosy-cheeked maidens in the first bloom of youth, not thirtysomething mothers of two.

Nonetheless, she determined to do her best.

Her initial efforts proved futile. That entire winter, she spoon-fed soup to ailing old cobblers in nearby villages, snatched baby squirrels from under the wheels of a reckless carriage (her own, as it happened, but it was the intention that counted), peered into every cluttered closet in the palace in search of an overlooked crone with a spindle who might grant her three wishes, and received nothing for her pains but manifold blessings from teary-eyed peasants, a bite from a chipmunk that had not, it transpired, wanted to cross the road, and a growing reputation for charity.

Eventually, however, cogs of magic started to turn, if a bit sluggishly. One afternoon in the early spring, a scrawny young orphan whom she helped with his orthography lessons directed her to a pond behind a neighboring mill. The pond was choked with lily pads, and in the center of every green platter sat a frog. As she neared the mill, hundreds of liquid eyes swiveled toward her as one.

“Kiss me—kiss me—kiss me,” croaked the frogs.

“Thank you, but I’m already married,” she demurred with a nervous laugh, hiding behind her parasol. But the frogs stared up at her with their wet, insolent eyes and chanted: “That never stopped nobody before.”

She thought them terribly uncouth, and was just turning to leave when the largest frog spoke up from the largest pad.

“Personally, I’m too old to care for kisses,” said the frog, and in truth, it did look ancient, warty and fat. “But if you bring me that tasty beetle crawling over there, I will tell you what you desire.”

The frog stuck out a pink tongue, fleshy and long and horribly indecent, so she picked up the beetle and carried it to safety; and once the grateful beetle had revived from its faint, it told her about the beekeeper who lived at the foot of the hill.

By the time she reached the beekeeper’s place, the sun was already setting, and blue shadows were stretching across the meadow. The beekeeper came out of his cottage, a few bees circling drowsily around his head. He was young and doe-eyed, and when he greeted her, his words carried a soft whiff of some foreign land. He reminded her of someone, but she was too preoccupied to catch the resemblance in time.

“I should ask you for a boon, it’s in the quest handbook,” the beekeeper said, and, lowering his golden-brown gaze, blushed inexplicably. “But I will tell you for free, because you were always kind to me.”

She did not puzzle over his words but pressed her bright blue parasol as payment upon him—no one should have to break the rules on her behalf—then, just as the round yellow moon the texture of ripe cheese rose in the skies, followed his directions to the dressmaker’s shop on the main square of a town across the river, where she spent a week weaving straw roses into bonnets and, in restitution, received an introduction to a gypsy horse thief who was passing through that night and in whose wagon she rode for the better part of the month, learning to cook fiery stews, wear men’s clothes, and shoe horses, until they came to the caravan ruled by the gypsy thief’s great-great-grandmother, who appeared more ancient than the mountains they had just crossed and who—once she had spent the balance of the spring braiding stars into the matriarch’s raven-black hair—gave her a Tarot card with the Queen of Swords and the address of a mighty sorcerer scribbled upon it in rooster blood. She stashed the card inside her shirt, close to her heart.

The gypsy thief put a ring of beaten silver, two hands holding a heart, on her finger, and kissed her in parting. They stood on a wild mountain peak, the sunset blazed crimson all around them, his sinewy arms smelled of smoke and hay, his dry lips tasted of pepper and freedom, and for one fraction of a moment she saw a different story, pure and fierce, unfolding before her. But when he pulled her against him, the Queen of Swords cut into her left breast, so she freed herself from his embrace, thanked him for his kindness, and, hitching up her britches, trudged down the mountainside already aflame with the vivid colors of summer wildflowers.

The sorcerer lived in a small valley on this side of the wind, but only barely. By the time she arrived, it was early autumn. Nights were growing chilly, leaves were turning red, and her cloak felt much too thin. She found the sorcerer in a neat little garden behind a neat little house, tending to a neat row of gigantic purple cabbages. A tiny old man with sad gray eyes in a furrowed gray face the size of another man’s fist, he listened to her with an anxious smile, then asked her to be so good as to speak louder, for he was a bit hard of hearing. She shouted her request, and the tall gray mountains around the little gray valley repeated her words many times over, until all the world boomed with her grievances and her hopes. When she finished and the echoes stopped, the old man shook his head.

“Sadly, my dear,” he whispered, “I am retired.”

“But you can’t be, that’s not how it works!” she cried. “I have come from afar to seek your counsel. I have borne amphibian insults, stabbed my fingers with needles and stars, worn out one pair of slippers embroidered with ladybugs, two pairs of sensible shoes, and three pairs of boots, turned my back on the young beekeeper, who blushed so sweetly, and the gypsy thief, who made wild winds blow through my blood. Has it all been in vain? Is there nothing you can do for me?”

The old man thought. The furrows deepened in his small gray face.

“I could give you a few of my cabbages,” he said at last. “Nice plump babies sometimes turn up in the patch.”

Aghast, she stared at him, then at the cabbages. Autumn was drawing closer to winter now; she saw the first traces of frost on the ground between the orderly rows.

“Thank you, but no, I don’t need a new baby. I fear I have not been the best mother to the two I’ve already had.”

And as she spoke, she suddenly knew this to be true. She had been away from the palace, away from her children, for much too long.

Her hand flew to her heart.

“I must get back at once.”

She turned to go, firmly, and was halfway to the nearest mountain when the old man caught up with her. He had been running.

“There… is… something,” he gasped. “I’ve… just… remembered.”

She waited for him to regain his breath.

“I did have a pupil long ago. Not the brightest of the lot, I’m sorry to say, always got his spells mixed up. Still, he may be able to help you—I hear he is a king’s magician now, so perhaps he’s become less muddled over the years. I must be honest with you, though, he lives a bit far. On this side of the wind, yes, but only just.”

Her hope stirred anew, even though she willed it not to.

“Please, where will I find him?”

He drew her a map on a cabbage leaf. She studied it, her spirits sinking. The world scratched into the leaf was broad and strange, bristling with snowcapped ranges, dotted with towns whose names she did not recognize. She thanked the little cabbage farmer, tightened her belt, and set off. As she walked, the eerie blue moon, such as could be seen only at the edge of the world, waxed and waned, winter came and went, hills rose into scraggly peaks and fell into shadowy dales. Her path took her by the gypsy grandmother’s caravan, where she stopped for a shot of whiskey and learned that the gypsy thief had taken up with a beautiful dancer and the two had ridden off into the wind on a stolen black mustang, singing raucous songs; she sighed, but not too deeply, for she had her cabbage leaf now. Again the moon waxed and waned, but now it looked less like a wispy blue boat ready to sail beyond the borders of all known things, and more like a head of ripened cheese; and as she continued to follow the map, the landscapes themselves slowly grew more familiar. At the melting of the snows, she arrived one morning in a town by a brown, stately river where merchants’ wives wore elegant hats decorated with straw roses. She visited a dressmaker’s shop on the main square, to trade her stained britches and crude riding boots for a proper dress and a pair of dainty slippers embroidered with ladybugs (their designs copied, the shop owner informed her proudly, from the clothes worn by a lovely princess who had once stayed there). She paid with the silver ring, two disloyal hands holding a faithless heart, then continued on, her own heart seized with a certain premonition. In the full light of an early spring day, she flew up the hill all abuzz with bees. She would not pause to chat with the young beekeeper who came out of his cottage when she passed by, but she did accept a parasol of faded blue that he begged her to have, and, calling out her thanks over her shoulder, hurried away, leaving him to stand empty-handed and stare after her with a pining golden-brown gaze.

She understood everything now. Her heart in her mouth, she followed the sorcerer’s directions past the pond, where the chorus of frogs begged her to kiss them, and around the mill, and across the park with its civilized maze of raked paths and marble nymphs, until the blue-and-white vanilla cake of a palace rose before her. It was marked on her map by a translucent star of the old man’s fingernails impressing themselves into the leaf’s fleshy pulp with an emphatic crisscross and a scrawl: “Here.”

All out of breath and radiant with anticipation, she burst inside at the hour when teapots were just beginning to serve afternoon tea, and dashed up to the nursery, and there were her darling children, Angelina and Roland the Sixth, sitting straight-backed and quiet in their little chairs, listening to Nanny Nanny bleat a nursery rhyme about a cow that flew over the moon.

She pressed them deeply to her heart, first the girl, then the boy, then both of them together. “I am so sorry to have been gone all this time!” she cried. “I have missed you so much, I love you, I love you!”

They pulled away, all resisting elbows and eyebrows raised in surprise.

“Gone?” they said. “Gone where? We saw you yesterday. You brought us cinnamon cookies in bed.”

“Bah, Your Highness, but that is ba-a-a-d, ba-a-a-d for their tee-ee-eeth,” chided Nanny Nanny, who likewise did not seem astonished to see her.

Stunned, she turned, looked around her. Everything was exactly as she had left it a year before, and she, too, seemed exactly the same as the day she had set out on her glorious adventure, down to her ladybug slippers and her blue parasol (although she thought it had been of a slightly brighter shade). The children paid her no attention. She lingered in the nursery for another minute, then kissed them on the tops of their heads, one blond, one chestnut, and, frowning, left for the tower where Archibald the Clockmaker lived next to his brother, Arbadac the Bumbler.

The winding stairs were long and narrow, with a great many landings. She leaned the parasol (decidedly, decidedly, of a lighter color now!) against the wall at the bottom and began to climb. By the time she reached the third landing, she had forgotten the boat of the otherworldly moon and the little gray man with his cabbages. The gypsy grandmother with the braids spun from the eternal night vanished on the fifth, the gypsy thief’s peppery kiss faded on the seventh. The beekeeper with his soft burr of an accent and someone else’s face was the last to cling to the edges of her recollections, but at last he, too, slipped into oblivion, and by the time she knocked on Arbadac’s door on the seventeenth landing, she was fully certain—and it was quite plausibly the truth of the matter—that only one hour had passed since she had finished correcting the scrawny orphan’s orthography lesson.

(“Master Archibald’s brother is a magician,” the boy, who was the clockmaker’s assistant, had told her. “He can sure do magic. When he’s in his cups, he likes to set all the cogs of the clock dancing. Master Archibald gets horribly mad.”

And he had giggled.

“Now, why haven’t I thought of him before,” she had said to herself. “I’ll go speak to him after we get done with this lesson.” And, forcing herself to focus: “Write down, please: ‘dressmaker,’ ‘thief,’ ‘cabbage,’ ‘destiny.’ No, dear, ‘cabbage’ has two bees. I mean, two bs. Oh, this is making me sleepy, I’d better lie down for a bit before going up to the tower.”)

After her seventh, rather impatient knock, the door flew open abruptly. From the dimness of the stairwell, she squinted at the tall, lean man who wobbled on the threshold, his wispy hair aflame with the sun setting in the windows behind him. But the light had an odd, fragmented quality to it, and she heard a soft flapping sound, as of hundreds of insect wings beating at once. Just then, sure enough, a stupendous yellow butterfly brushed past her face and sailed majestically out of sight around the curve of the staircase, and another, and three more.

“They’re escaping, they’re escaping!” Arbadac cried, and before she could collect her wits enough to reply, he pulled her inside and slammed the door shut behind them. She blinked. The chamber shone, tinkled, and flittered. Brilliant sunlight filled hundreds of potion bottles, crystal balls, and specimen jars with many-colored radiance, odd spindly-legged instruments clicked and clacked, and a thick swarm of butterflies drifted through the air. Immediately a full dozen were quivering in her sleeves, tickling her neck, stirring in her hair.

“Is this a bad time?” she asked weakly.

“How’s that? Oh. No. No, everything’s fine.” Arbadac’s eyes were the color of fog and had a perennially dreamy look. “It’s only that I’m not entirely sure where these pests came from, you see, so it’s best to keep them all in here. Just in case, yes. Still, no harm done, thank goodness, not like the other month, Archie was most unhappy, he so dislikes untidiness and explosions, and that hole in the ceiling was a hassle to repair… Well. What can I do for you, Your Highness? May I offer you some tea? The cups often turn furry, but it tastes perfectly fine, I assure you.”

She refused the offer with hasty courtesy and told him about the prince’s enchantment. While she talked, he drifted about, waving butterflies away, his robes floating and billowing around him, his gaze abstracted; she had a distinct feeling that he was not listening to a word she said. When she finished, she looked at him with scant expectation. She was, in truth, feeling rather forlorn.

“Can you help break the spell, then?”

“The spell?” he said, stopping sharply and turning to her with a surprised look. “Ah, yes. The spell. Of course. Yes. Do you know who placed it?”

She had to confess she did not.

“I suppose it could be anyone,” Arbadac proclaimed in his airy voice. “All royals are like lightning rods for curses. Well, but you don’t really need to know the culprit. What you need is to weave a shirt.”

There was a brief pause filled with the beating of wings.

“A… shirt?” she asked, faintly.

“A shirt. Give it to your husband on the anniversary of your wedding day. When he puts it on, the spell will be over.”

He beamed at her.

She spat out a butterfly and looked at him wildly.

“And… that’s it?”

“That’s it. Except.” His smile vanished. He pressed his hands to his forehead and stood restlessly rippling his fingers as though trying to summon a melody on the harpsichord of his memory, likely somewhat out of tune. “Ah. Yes. The shirt must be woven out of bluebells. No, that doesn’t sound quite… Not bluebells… nettles. Yes, a shirt out of nettles.”

“Nettles? Are you quite sure?”

“Yes. And you can’t talk or laugh the entire time you’re weaving it, not until the prince puts it on. Silence is of the essence. If you speak even one word, you must unravel everything and start over.”

“Oh.”

“And you must weave it only by the light of the full moon. Or in the hour before sunrise.” He was gathering momentum now, speaking quickly, his fingers tap-tap-tapping against his forehead, his dreamy eyes gleaming with bursts of inspiration. “And only on Mondays. Though Tuesdays are probably fine, too. Yes. You do need to mind the buttons, of course.”

“Buttons?” Her nerves were so taut with her spirits rising and falling by turn that she felt they might snap. “Oh, please, what buttons?”

“But the buttons are the most important part! When you weave the shirt, you must think about the happy years you and your husband had together. Before he was under the spell, do you see, when he was still himself. Sew on a button for each true year, and he will be restored to his true self when he wears the shirt on his birthday.”

“On our wedding anniversary, you mean.”

“What? Yes, yes, the anniversary, of course… You only get one chance at breaking the spell, mind, so you have to get everything right the first time. But as long as you do, I don’t see why it shouldn’t work, really. May I interest you in some tea?”

Hope palpitated in her heart with the hundredfold motion of soaring butterflies, and desperate to keep it alive, she declined, once again, the distinctly furry teacup he was holding out to her, thanked him, and ran out the door and down the winding stairs, yellow wings trembling in her hair, just as he was saying: “You might, of course, consider adding the tincture of…”

That very evening, she discovered that bunches of nettles were to be had in the kitchens (the head cook favored herbal soups), and she started on the shirt without delay. Her hands were soon covered in blisters, but she did not complain, because she was not in the habit of complaining, and also because she had now ceased to speak altogether, just as instructed. She had wondered how she would explain her precipitous silence, yet no one appeared to notice. Prince Roland never came near her, the old king had grown quite feeble and was napping his days away, Angie was currently answering all her own questions, Ro seemed satisfied with her mere presence in the nursery while he staged epic battles between forks and spoons, servants found her a perfect mistress who smiled and nodded at all their requests, and Brie and Nibbles had recently befriended a family of field mice and left the palace, possibly for good.

(By now, most of the mice had gone. Heady delights of philosophy had failed to sustain them for long, for they soon discovered that puzzling over the meaning of life seemed inversely related to their enjoyment of it: many of their best minds had grown weak from wrestling with the longer words, not a few had died of existential despair, and one sad morning, the most learned mouse of them all was found flat as a pancake, apparently crushed by the weight of her knowledge. As for the vicarious thrills of the arts, it transpired that there were only so many ways to eat a chunk of cheese shaped like a cat. In a desperate bid to restore the flagging enthusiasm for his work, Gouda the artist abandoned realism and began to add outlandish trunks, horns, tentacles, wings, and warts to his cheese sculptures until his new creations looked so revolting he simply could not bring himself to eat them without retching; and his digestive issues aside, after this infusion of the fantastic and the arbitrary into his themes, the powerful yet simple message behind his early masterpieces—the unequivocal triumph of good over evil—was hopelessly obscured. Eventually even his most devoted fans turned away from him, disappointed, and once the smell of moldy gouda grew unbearable, a youngster named Tuft gathered a few of his adolescent friends, all equally disenchanted with higher pursuits, and led a bloodless raid on Gouda’s studio, where they did away with visual arts once and for all.

After that, intoxicated by their success and meeting no resistance—even Gouda appeared relieved—Tuft and his cheering army abolished education, manners, abstract thinking, cutlery, all other kinds of thinking, and much of the vocabulary. Mice should be mice, they shouted gleefully to anyone willing to listen. Their days were short, and they should not waste them lazing about in sunless holes of stone, frightening each other silly with Unnatural Ideas and oohing and aahing over wantonly ruined cheese. No, they should go back to nature and be what they always had been—happy mindless creatures who smelled flowers and one another’s behinds, ran through the rain, flexed their muscles, squeaked their animal joys to the skies. And the mice liked what they heard, for it spoke to something deep and furry within them, and they abandoned the palace in droves. Only the aging professor of Human Studies worried about leaving the princess, out of some obscure loyalty he himself had trouble explaining—unbeknownst to him, he was the last surviving descendant of Brie the First on his mother’s side and Nibbles the First on his father’s; but after a full day of observing her from under her bed, he concluded that mice were not meant to understand the doings of men and that he, too, should follow the call of the wild and revert to a fierce woodland beast, leaving the incomprehensible woman with a sad face to sit alone in her stuffy room and absurdly persist in stinging her fingers with nettles.)

As she worked on the shirt, she thought about buttons and happiness. She decided on her wedding dress for her prince’s liberation: it seemed the appropriate choice. The confectionlike gown, once her most cherished possession, hung in a cloud of white tulle in her dressing room. Sewing scissors at the ready, she stood before it one morning, looked at the pearl-encrusted buttons running down its lacy back, and recalled trumpets blaring, horses prancing, crowds tossing rice into the warm spring air, her stepsisters acting huffy and displeased, and the prince lifting her veil, bending down to kiss her. When their lips had touched, she had believed that she would float in this tranquil warmth of love and comfort, shielded from all unhappiness, from all change, forever after. Now she trailed her fingers over the buttons’ cool iridescence and wondered how many to snip off. Precisely when had Prince Roland stopped being the attentive, generous man who had made her feel content and secure and been replaced by the soulless, hard-eyed automaton who wielded his sharp porcupine quill and his virile member with an equal self-obsessed, callous ruthlessness?

For she knew everything now. She had long since retrieved the magic mirror from the wastepaper basket, brushed off the cherry pits stuck to the glass, and made sheepish apologies. The mirror, which had seen it all and took everything in stride, had accepted her contrition, and she now spent an hour in the morning and another in the afternoon, as well as an occasional hour or two in the evening, watching the prince’s antics; for it seemed only prudent to keep track of his doings. She found out a great number of things, all confirming (had she needed any further confirmation) that this man was not the man she had married. This man ruled the kingdom with an iron hand, crushing every disagreement, no matter how minor, punishing every criticism, no matter how trivial, signing death warrants and exile orders with no trace of misgivings. In his leisure moments, he worked his way through the female inhabitants of the palace—and here, once her furious blushing had given way to a horrified fascination at the thoroughness of the curse, his exertions proved rather instructive to watch. The study was the place of choice for his assignations, and he plowed into scullery girls with angular hips and middle-aged countesses plumped up on bonbons, all strewn with egalitarian abandon and in varied combinations on his floral rug; he also not infrequently contrived to couple paperwork with assorted diversions, as a flock of women serviced him under his desk while he perused his reports. The latter revelation shed nauseating new light on that afternoon when she had surprised Esmeralda the Singing Maid in the act of searching for a thumbtack at the prince’s feet and had then, so trustingly, alighted in his lap. It made her study her son with fearful apprehension—would the shame of his life’s quickening find reflection in his nature? It also confirmed that, by the sixth year of marriage—conveniently, she could calculate the precise date based on Ro’s subsequent entrance into the world—Prince Roland had no longer been himself, which brought her back to the pressing question: Exactly when had her beloved prince stopped being her prince?

The radiance of their early years together shone undimmed in her mind: the first year, brimming over with dances, roses, and ardent (if properly restrained) affections; the second, when she had bathed in the prince’s doting attentions through her long confinement; and the third, when she had learned the ways of the palace, indulged in the innocent joys of poems and tapestries, and basked in her overall sense of belonging.

Without the slightest hesitation, she sheared three buttons from the dress’s back.

Then, her scissors yawning in her hand, she stopped and thought.

The fourth year, now—what was she to make of the fourth year, the year she had paid her surprise visit to the von Liebers’ palace? The prince had not been entirely kind to her at the time, but he had offered oranges and explanations later. And the following stretch, before the unequivocal afternoon in the man’s lap, had not been one of relentless misery, either, filled as it had been with the ups and downs of a regular, albeit not altogether fairy-tale, existence. Was her husband not entitled to some intermittent infelicities, moments of impatience or irritability, and sour moods before she would brand him an accursed monster? At what point would the weight of her cumulative unhappiness signal the innate change in his personality rather than an occasional bad day on his part?

After nearly a year of work, the shirt was finished at last, three buttons provisionally dotting its collar, the day for breaking the curse—their eleventh anniversary, as it happened—fast approaching, and she was still unable to make up her mind. There were only two weeks left now—and then a week—and then, somehow, she rose one windy spring morning to find that their anniversary was on the morrow and yet she felt no closer to deciding. On the verge of panic, she resolved to pay a visit to the von Liebers themselves, to uncover what she could about Prince Roland’s long-ago sojourn. The prospect was unpleasant, but she was learning to pursue her aims with a force of will no less steely for her seeming meekness and patient acquiescence, and her poor prince’s rescue lay at stake.

And so, she had her grooms ready a carriage and rode over to the ducal palace.

“It pains me to say it, but women are such self-deluding imbeciles,” the witch announces. She does not, however, sound particularly pained, and adds after some thought, “Not that I should complain, it’s what keeps me in business.”

“Well, but hold on a minute,” the fairy godmother interrupts. “That year of wandering—was it all just a dream, or wasn’t it? And if it wasn’t, am I correct in surmising that she went and allowed herself to be groped by some gypsy vermin?”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist,” the witch says, her tone dismissive. “Of course it was a dream. The girl had clearly developed a bit of an imagination while moping around her palace. A sound survival tactic, too, in my opinion.”

“But even so,” the fairy godmother persists. “A lady should be better capable of controlling what she imagines. Imagination can be highly dangerous, you know. Deadly, even. And all that mirror business, my dear child, really!”

I am grateful for the sudden disappearance of the moon behind new clouds: the conveniently timed darkness hides my reddening face.

“Ah, come now, I’m sure it did her good to stay abreast of her husband’s athletic pursuits. She may have even learned a novel move or two to try under the covers in the event her true love found his way back to her bed.” The witch pauses, then goes on slyly, “Or if he happened to be otherwise engaged, a nice young beekeeper, perhaps?”

Her insinuation, unfair as it is, comes out of nowhere, and I am winded. And then, because I must not let any chance feelings of guilt interfere with my sense of being fully in the right, I speak, sharply—too sharply.

“We need to finish this. Now.”

The witch, I see, is regarding me with new interest.

The Middle’s End

She found the ducal palace in a state of neglect. The gates to the grounds were unguarded, the paths overgrown. The windows, in spite of the twilight hour, gaped black, with only the faintest flickering of candlelight here and there. No one came to greet her carriage, and she stood before the front doors, knocking until her knuckles hurt. At last the butler of the once-stately gait let her in; he was old now, and wheezed as he walked. The Duke von Lieber, he informed her, his speech interspersed with bouts of coughing, had fallen off his horse, regrettably with fatal results, two summers ago now, and the duchess, aggrieved by her childless widowhood, discouraged visitors.

Stunned, she stared at the man. Surely, this was wrong. Fairy tales allowed for deaths, without a doubt—but not undeserved or inconsequential deaths, or, hardly ever, deaths from accidents—to say nothing of deaths without issue.

“So you’d best be going now, Your Highness, if it’s all the same to you,” the butler prompted, not unkindly. “I’d offer you some tea, but our last teapot quit.”

She wanted to plead her case, but of course, she could not speak, and her elegant visiting card, proffered at her arrival, had failed to convey the urgency behind her visit. In desperation, she grabbed the card out of his grimy gloved fingers—there was the remembered O of his mouth—scribbled a few words on its rich creamy surface, and, underlining “To your mistress,” handed it back. The old man sniffed, blinked, coughed, mumbled in a desultory fashion, and, at last, limped away with a shrug.

She waited. The clock ticked in the corner. The butler, his approach heralded from afar by scraping footfalls, reappeared in the doorway and, the look of surprise now perpetually rounding his mouth, invited her to follow. A step behind him, she walked through rooms that were darker, smaller, shabbier than the dangerous, jewel-bright, velvet-soft places that had haunted her onetime nightmares. At the end of a chilly corridor, he pushed open a door, made a creaking bow on the threshold, and departed with a shuffle.

After some hesitation, she stepped inside.

It took a moment for her eyes to grow used to the dimness. Then she saw the darkened bulk of an enormous bed, and her heart quailed at the recognition. The bed was unmade, as it had been all those years before, but now the rumpled mess of sheets and pillows bore a sad look of squalor rather than the luxurious languor of abandon.

“The maid has run off,” snapped a petulant voice behind her. “Bitch.”

She spun around. A woman sat at a vanity by the far wall, her back to the room. A single candle burned before her, and in its guttering a multitude of bottles, jars, and vials gleamed dully. The woman’s feeble yellow curls, fat shoulders straining against a robe the unbecoming color of persimmon, hands so puffy that a ring could be seen cutting deep into the flesh of one finger, all seemed unfamiliar—but just then, in the mirror, she caught the woman’s gaze and felt a jolt. The woman’s eyes, that unforgettable shade of poisonous green, stared out of the ruin of her face with frightful intensity.

“I need to talk to you about Prince Roland? Spare me!” the woman hissed with startling violence. “Come to gloat, have you?” She swung around in her chair and, snatching the candle off the vanity, thrust it close to her face. “Go ahead, take a good look, why don’t you? This is what happens to us. What happens to beauty. This will be you someday—just give it a few more years.”

She stared, horrified. Darting light threw into grotesque relief the thinning lips drawn in lurid red, the flaccid eyelids oily with peacock-green paint, the artificial beauty marks glued to three wobbling chins.

The duchess was—suddenly, shockingly—middle-aged.

Middle-aged, and repulsive, and alone.

But surely this, too, was wrong. Those who were middle-aged had always been middle-aged, whether cozily so, like plump cooks and stolid gardeners existing on the margins of every tale, or maliciously so, like cruel stepmothers with striking architectural cheekbones. A charming young woman living at the happy heart of her love story would remain charming, young, and in love regardless of the passage of time—or so she had always assumed, in spite of her own diminished expectations; for were her troubles not unique, caused by a spectacularly evil spell?

“Cat got your tongue, little princess? Too good to address the likes of me?”

The duchess’s voice, too, had changed: sharp, rusty springs poked through the threadbare upholstery of the silken, flirtatious tone she remembered. She shook her head, helpless—but even if she could speak, what would she have said? Forever mindful of her manners, she could have never allowed the frantic questions she so wanted to ask to escape into the air that smelled, sourly, sickeningly, of encroaching old age and failed beauty magic: Is this your true face, madam? Do you deserve it? Is this your punishment for something, something awful, you’ve done? Or—are you telling the truth and is this just something that happens?

Will it happen to me?

All at once, she felt she understood very little about life.

The duchess was speaking, in hot, angry hisses.

“You think you’ve won, little princess, and maybe you have, maybe good, boring girls do come out ahead in the end. But you know something? When you’re old and your precious little children are all grown up and gone and your eyes are too weak for embroidery, you will have nothing, nothing to think about, nothing to remember, because good as you are, you haven’t lived, haven’t dared, you’ve just slumbered your years away in your precious little palace. You want to talk about Prince Roland, do you? Let me tell you about your prince. Your prince was never yours. I knew right away when I saw him at that reception, knew the kind of man he was, the kind of woman he needed. His mouth was hungry, so hungry—and there you were at his side, empty as a canary, stupid daisies in your hair, chirping to my buffoon of a husband about the weather. Oh, I remember it all like it was yesterday. Our eyes met, and he smiled, such a slow, dirty, delicious smile, I bet he’s never given you a smile like that, and I knew without a doubt, I knew just what would happen when he offered to show me some funny old tapestry.”

The duchess was talking, she understood with a recoiling of her entire being, of that long-ago visit—the visit in the third, unblemished year of her marriage. She wanted to protest—more, she wanted to scream—yet she said nothing, could say nothing, and the horrid woman with the vulgar beauty marks atremble on her chins went on hissing spitefully.

“We both knew neither of us gave a hoot about sightseeing, even if the tapestry really was delightful, some faun having his way with a nymph, quite outrageously, too, his red cock smack in the middle of the daft thing! But wouldn’t you know, there was a secret room behind the tapestry, and there we spent some delectable hours together. Such a lover he was, so strong, so inventive, with an arsenal of moves that took even me by surprise, tricks he’d picked up from an earlier mistress in some exotic southern land. Of course, then you had to spoil all the fun with your pathetic little suspicions. We never did go behind the tapestry again, and the floor in his study wasn’t nearly as comfortable. Oh, but a year later he paid me a visit here, and what a visit that was. Because you know what, little princess? I may be all alone now, youth gone, beauty gone, and that fool of a duke went and got himself dead and left nothing but gambling debts behind—but there was a time when I was alive, and your prince and I, we were alive together. The games we played in this very bed, let me just tell you—”

But she was already running, her hands over her mouth.

Somehow, she did not know how, she found her way outside, and into her carriage, and, after a blank ride through the deserts of non-time, was back in her own palace, her own chambers, her own dressing room. There she threw a handful of gowns into a pile on the floor, to reveal a hidden shelf at the back of the closet and, folded on it with great care, the shirt made of nettles. She dragged the shirt into the light, looked at the three pearly buttons along its collar for one full, demented heartbeat, then viciously ripped the third button off.

The nettles, all along the seams, split and gaped.

Her legs gave way. She slid down to the floor, sat frozen for some minutes, her soul near to bursting. Then, all at once hectic, she jumped up, grabbed her sewing kit, tried to repair the damage—to patch up the holes, pull the edges together, close up the wound now gaping where the prince’s heart would be—but her hands shook, the needle kept slipping, and the leaves grew brittle and crumbled at her touch.

After an hour of her mutely hysterical efforts, the shirt was ruined.

She stared at it with stark, bereft eyes. There was no time to fix it now. It was not a Monday, there was no full moon, the kitchen was fresh out of nettles. The next day would come and go, and the spell would remain unbroken. A year of her life. A year of blistering, burning fingers, a year of silence, a year of hopes—all gone. Her mouth taut, she swept away the nettle dust, crawled into bed, and slept the heavy sleep of the defeated—slept, as it happened, all through her eleventh wedding anniversary and straight into the twelfth year of her marriage.

When she awoke, everything looked simple once again. Her love for the prince was a bit dimmer, perhaps, but he needed her help, and help him she would. She would spend another year in silence, she would weave another shirt. And this time, there would be just two buttons attached to its collar; but of those two, she was absolutely, resoundingly, certain—as, in truth, she had never been of the third.

For, once she calmed down, she mulled over the duchess’s story, and understood that it was not all that unexpected. Indeed, if she were to be unflinchingly honest with herself, the third year of her marriage had not been one of cloudless contentment. She recalled the emptiness she had felt when Nanny Nanny had taken over Angie’s care and she had found herself, quite simply, with nothing to do. There had been so many hazy, flat, lonely days—the hours spent listening to that ranting ghost of the minstrel whose bellicose epics she had detested, the battalions of pickles and preserves she had labored over in a swoon of sticky-fingered boredom, the afternoons she had stood before that faded tapestry, obsessively guessing at the meaning of the red spot in its center, willing everything to make sense. She remembered gazing at the prince across banquet tables and ballroom floors, wishing he would stop being so considerate and, her need of rest notwithstanding, start spending nights in their bedroom again. And of course, she remembered hearing the woman’s low laughter and the man’s soft voice in that tapestried hallway—but she remembered something else, too, something she had forgotten, had made herself forget, until now.

She remembered knowing, for a few brief hours.

And so, in a way, the aging mistress’s revelations had been a relief, for it was clear now that none of it had been her dear Roland’s fault: the prince had already been cursed. And the dimming of that particular stretch of her marriage only made the glorious luminescence of their first two years together stand out all the more dazzlingly in her mind. Devoid of doubts, sure of her purpose, she worked on her shirt with a steady hand, and somehow, without her noticing, the year was over almost as soon as it had begun. On the eve of her twelfth anniversary, she hung the new shirt, complete and impeccable, on the chair by her bed and went to sleep in the full knowledge of a different, blissful life that awaited her in the morning.

She dreamed of wandering in a nighttime wood. Trees loomed, leaves rustled, owls cried above her head. She was lost—there was no path before her—yet she did not mind; she liked the freedom of moving alone in the dark. After a while, she saw lights ahead and walked toward them, and soon came to a row of bright windows hanging on branches like laundered sheets on a clothesline, with no dwelling behind them. She stood on tiptoe and peeked into one, and there was her own blue-and-white bedroom, immaculate like a nun’s cell. The window next to it opened onto the palace ballroom; the window beyond, onto the dining hall. All the rooms seemed deserted, but something dashed behind the windows—curtains swayed and teaspoons rattled at someone’s passing—and then she heard knocking, as on a door. She glanced about, but there was no door to be seen. The knocking intensified, became urgent, turned into a desperate pounding. She rushed from window to window, her gaze scrambling over satin sofas and flocks of porcelain rabbits, unsure whether she herself was inside or outside, whether whoever was knocking was begging to be let out or fighting to be let in—and the urge to run, the urge to help, was still beating like some wild creature against her chest when she sat up all tangled in the sheets and listened to the frenzied knocking on the door of her bedroom.

She tumbled out of bed, tugged the door open.

Nanny Nanny panted on the threshold, the ruffled nightcap of her own wool askew on her grizzled head, both front hooves lifted. Before she had time to ask—before she had time to realize that she could not ask, bound as she was, for a few hours longer, by her need for silence—the ordinarily dignified Nanny Nanny bleated shrilly: “Angie’s been ta-a-aken ba-aa-ad, she neeeds you, she neeeeds you! Run, Your Highness, run!”

She stood for one uncomprehending instant, then, as she was, barefoot, without grabbing a robe, flew down hallways and up staircases, the labored staccato of the elderly she-goat’s hooves soon fading into echoes some landings below. As she ran, she tried to recall when she had last seen her daughter, when she had last seen her son—really seen them, really looked at them—and, to her sudden horror, could remember nothing beyond a vague sequence of perfunctory homework checks and good-night kisses, delivered and accepted in a cursory fashion, stretching back for silent days, silent weeks.

The door to her daughter’s bedroom gaped open. It was so dim inside that for one unbearable moment she thought the bed empty—thought that something horrific, something unspeakable, had happened. Then her eyes adjusted to the light of the bedside candle. Its flame dipped and flared as though gusts of wind were tearing through the air of the small chamber, and Angie tossed in the pillows, her hair plastered like feverish snakes against her moist forehead, her eyes white with fear. She threw herself before the bed, grabbed her daughter’s clammy hands in hers. Something was hurting her child, something was wrong with her child, and this was not a fairy-tale side plot, and nothing else mattered, nothing else existed, only this, only her worry, her worry swelling and gusting in the light of the crazed candle.

“Mama,” the girl whispered wildly. “Mama, the sofas, the sofas are after me—”

“Where is the doctor, why isn’t the doctor here?” she cried. Her voice was hoarse and unsteady, barely recognizable after having been lost for so long, but she did not notice, did not even notice having spoken. “Someone call the doctor now!”

She was enveloped in the smell of wet wool, and Nanny Nanny’s soft, milky-white face loomed out of the dimness like a homey moon.

“But she-e-e isn’t sick,” the nanny bleated. “Shee-e-e had a ba-aa-aad dreeeam, she can’t sleeeep, she’s been calling her ma-a-a-ma—”

Sinking to her knees, she gathered her daughter close to her, felt Angie’s small, anxious heart fluttering against her nightgown. All she knew was relief, immense and rolling like some vast, warm ocean. Not sick, not sick, her Angie was not sick… And then she tasted the rusty shapes of the recent words in her mouth, like a gush of blood from a tooth yanked out with great violence—and understood what she had done.

“There, there,” she said, and her voice rang dead in her ears.

“The wood, Mama, the wood,” Angie muttered hotly. “There were sofas in the wood, chasing me, and the bunnies shattered when I tried to pet them, and—and—”

“There, there,” she repeated.

“Tell me a story, Mama.”

She pulled the blanket over the child, shifted the pillows.

“You should sleep now.”

“I will never sleep again. Never!”

But already, she saw, the girl’s terror was draining away and her awareness of her age was returning to her—nearly eleven, she had begun to wear dresses that descended to her ankles, and slippers with small heels that clicked against the marble of the floors in the most satisfying fashion; and a shy page in tight crimson stockings had smiled at her in the hallway only a week ago. The girl’s breathing steadied, and her eyes peeked almost slyly through the turmoil of her matted hair. “Unless you tell me a story. Like before. You never come to tell me stories anymore.”

And just like that, she felt that her heart would break with the enormousness of her guilt. Had she loved her prince better than she had loved her children? No, she had not, of course she had not—and yet, having spent all this time trying to rescue him, had she not missed so much of their childhood? Because here was another year wasted—a year when she could have played with them, laughed with them, told them stories…

A year she could never get back now.

She sat on her daughter’s bed, took a breath.

“Well. Once upon a time—”

“There lived a man who had a wife and a daughter,” Angie rejoined.

She hesitated briefly.

“No,” she said then. “This is a different story. There lived a girl. A beautiful girl who loved to dance. She had these shiny red shoes, and—”

“Ooh, I know this one, too!” Angie interrupted happily. “The girl was naughty, she loved her shoes more than anything, and one day she stepped on a loaf of bread and was punished.”

“No,” she said again, more confident now, for she was suddenly aware of words—dozens, hundreds, thousands of words—that were beating in the column of her throat, fluttering at the roof of her mouth, all struggling, all demanding to be released. “This is a different story still. This girl lived with the gypsies, and she was a bit naughty, true, but no more than was good for her, and she loved the shoes, yes, but she also loved the old grandmother she lived with, and the young cousins she took care of, and she loved the mountains, and she loved the rain, and she loved the wind in her hair. She traveled with her people from village to village, and wherever they set up their tents, she danced. Her dance was like a summer sunrise, and when dour, stolid peasants watched her, they felt tiny flames of joy start up in their tired hearts. One day a passing horse thief saw her. And even though she was whirling ever so quickly, the girl saw him, too, she saw him standing in the crowd of villagers, because he was not at all like them. He was a full head taller than everyone around him, and he wore a bright red kerchief around his neck and a black shirt unbuttoned all the way to his navel, and when he noticed her looking at him, he laughed, and his teeth were like white lightning in his dark face. So, after the dance, the girl—”

Nanny Nanny issued a slight cough from the armchair in which she had settled with her knitting.

“Is Your Highness certain that this is an appro-o-opriate story for your daughter?”

“Angie likes it,” she replied, somewhat curtly. She felt aggrieved at being questioned. Had she not just given up a year of her life for the right to tell whatever story she desired? But when she glanced over at the bed, the child was asleep, her mouth half open, her hair no longer the writhing snakes of a restless nightmare but merely messy tresses framing her peaceful heart-shaped face.

And so she sent Nanny Nanny away and sat by the bed, quietly holding her daughter’s hand, until the sky started to fill the curtains with a pale glow. Then she kissed the child’s warm cheek, and stood, and walked across the still-sleeping palace, her bare feet soundless against the floors, every bit as though she were a ghost of some long-dead princess haunting the scene of a gruesome matrimonial crime. Back in her room, she unraveled the finished shirt with unhurried hands, first snipping off the two pearl buttons and carefully setting them aside. The orange sun of her twelfth wedding anniversary was just rising above the world when she sat down by the window, a pile of crushed nettles at her feet, and, in an undertone, continued the tale of the beautiful dancer and her horse thief, until the lovers rode off into the wind on a stolen black mustang.

“The end,” she whispered then, and, clamping her lips shut, started on the third shirt. Of course, three was the traditional number of fairy-tale trials, and she saw the inevitability of her two failures. The third labor, she knew, would be her last, and she had to accept it, as one accepted the natural order of things. Her work, the third time around, progressed smoothly; her days assumed a certain hypnotic rhythm. True, now and then she felt flashes of uncharacteristic, searing anger—anger toward the nettles stinging her hands, toward the palace walls closing around her, even, irrationally, anger toward the poor prince himself—more, this entire drab, predictable world of repetitious sartorial redemptions, whimsical teapots, and True Love—but such moods passed quickly, and she subsided back into her trancelike state, during which she no longer debated the past, no longer imagined the future, only wove, and slept, and watched her children’s innocent pastimes in the magic mirror, and, occasionally, wondered what her stepsisters’ days were like or how Brie and Nibbles were faring, and slept again, and wove again.

Three weeks away from her thirteenth anniversary, the shirt was nearly done, missing only the left cuff, when she ran out of nettles. She picked up her candle and went down to the kitchen to replenish her supply one final time. It was the murky hour before sunrise, and the kitchen lay deserted and still, save for the brownie who was sweeping crumbs into a corner and paid her no heed. She tiptoed to the pantry, and was in the process of filling the pockets of her nightdress with nettle leaves when a deafening crash sounded behind her.

She swung around and, her heart leaping, thrust the candle into the dark.

Arbadac the Bumbler stood hunched over the stove, a spoon frozen on the way to his mouth, the knocked-over pans settling noisily at his feet, a trickle of something viscous slithering down his chin. He blinked at her owlishly for a few moments before a look of recognition brightened his foggy eyes.

“Strawberry jam,” he explained with an embarrassed cough, plopping the spoon back into the pot. “A weakness of mine. We’re all only human. And you, Your Highness, what sweet craving brings you here at this hour?”

She pointed to the nettles cramming her pockets.

“Ah, yes, of course, the lifting of the curse! I hope it is proceeding splendidly?”

She shrugged.

“Has Your Highness managed to obtain the manticore’s mane bristles, then? If you forgive me my professional curiosity?” He beamed at her. Puzzled, she shook her head. “Or the echo of the phoenix’s song? No? But you aren’t speaking to me… eh… I hope I haven’t done anything to offend you?”

She looked at him reproachfully, gestured at her mouth.

He frowned, seemingly confused. Then his entire face sagged.

“Oh. Oh dear. I didn’t, by any chance, tell you that you needed to be silent?”

She stopped breathing, stared at him. His prominent Adam’s apple jiggled in his bony neck, once, twice. It had grown so quiet that she could hear him swallow.

“Ah. Yes. Yes, so it appears. Well, but of course, that was the working theory for a while, it wasn’t like I was suggesting anything unduly excessive. Yes. But I might have been a bit behind the times, you see, what with the dratted clock and this plague of salamanders forever setting fire to the upholstery, it was only last winter that I finally had a free hour to glance through the back issues of Magic Monthly, and, well, it seems that in the past century or two, other approaches might have been… That is to say, there is a growing concern in the community that women are being deprived of their voices in addition to bearing the brunt of paying for their husbands’ and brothers’ mistakes, so the imposition of mandatory silence during the performance of preliminary curse-breaking rituals has now been deemed, eh, somewhat unnecessary.” He regarded her anxiously. “So, you see, this is marvelous news, because you don’t actually have to not speak… that is to say… Your Highness? Your Highness?”

She was striding away, out of the kitchen, and down the corridor, and up the steps, and past the sleeping guards, and out of the palace, as she was, in her light nightdress and house slippers, nettles spilling in her wake. The nighttime darkness was only just beginning to recede, and the garden lay drained of color, unsteady with shadows. She descended the staircase. The predawn chill was like a slap against her cheeks, but her face remained blank. She walked blindly, ignoring the paths, crossing lawns wet from a recent rain, crashing through beds of wilting daffodils. Two or three marble nymphs gave her looks of alarm and bounded out of her way, the palace gates rushed to swing open and let her through, and frogs in a little pond behind the mill abruptly ceased their throaty chorus of “Kiss me, kiss me!” at the sight of her twisted mouth. She noticed nothing, did not know where she was going, just kept walking, kept walking, driven by some unvoiced urge to leave behind all the places that she recognized, all the thoughts that made well-worn grooves in her mind. She walked until her feet ached, until her fingers turned brittle with cold, until her fury spent itself in physical exhaustion. Then she stopped and looked about.

She stood in a meadow. The world was hazy with the billowing light of a soft vernal sunrise, and the golden fog hummed with manifold voices of invisible bees. There was a small cottage with a thatched roof and a door painted deep blue, the color of her favorite parasol, at the foot of a hill. She had never been here before, yet it was all strangely familiar, like some story heard in a distant past. She rubbed her chilled hands together, breathed on them, waited for something. The door of the cottage opened, and a young man came out stretching, and saw her, and froze.

She went to him, slowly, for there was no urgency left in her now. The young man watched her unmoving. When she stopped before him, he shook his head like someone snatched out of a dream and cried, “But you are shivering, and your slippers are wet! Please, won’t you come inside to warm up?”

His speech seemed to have a slight tilt, and the words slid down it a bit awkwardly, as though not completely sure of themselves; like her, he must have come from across the sea.

She met his shy gaze the color of honey.

“I must warn you,” she said. “If you offer me a cup of tea, I will scream.”

This was the first thing she had chosen to say after a year of muteness, and she meant it. He smiled, uncertainly.

“Your Highness pleases to make jokes. That is Your Highness’s right, of course. Alas, I do not possess any tea to offer you, only cider. But I promise it will be good.”

Aware of an odd twinge of disappointment at having been recognized, she followed him inside. The room she entered was clean and warm, and had a nice, solid smell about it, equal parts wood shavings, baked bread, and honey. A sturdy table by the window was covered with a blue tablecloth, and on it stood an unglazed earthenware jug with some disheveled red wildflowers. The young man brought out apple cider, and in silence they sat at the table, sipping from two chipped white cups. The cider was spicy, and good, just as he had promised, and she drank deep, with keen pleasure, feeling life return to her stiff fingers and toes. When her cup was empty, she wiped her lips on her sleeve, in a decidedly unprincesslike gesture, and studied the man across from her. He, too, looked eerily familiar, with his cast-down eyes and tousled hair the color of fallen leaves, like someone from a long-ago story—like someone from her own story, she realized then, in the days when her own story had made perfect sense.

“But I know you,” she said, sitting back. “You are Prince Roland’s courier, are you not? You—it was you who came to me with the glass slipper!”

“I am the beekeeper,” the young man said quietly, addressing his cup. Nor was he all that young, she saw, perhaps only a year or two younger than herself.

Undaunted by the finality of his reply, she pursued her half-forgotten memories with rising excitement. “And you brought me all that fruit, I remember, I remember! The exotic star-shaped delights, I waited so eagerly for their arrival. Yes, Prince Roland had traveled to some southern province, but I couldn’t go with him. It was the year I was with child.” Briefly, she cast down her own eyes and paused, for the sake of propriety, but a moment later was being swept off again on the current of recollections. “And then—then he came back, and I never saw you again. Angie had just been born, and I was… well, in truth, I was a little overwhelmed, so I didn’t notice you were gone at first, and then I had no one to ask about you, but… I did wonder. Did you leave the royal service?”

“That was a long time ago. I am the beekeeper now,” he repeated, tersely.

“But why? Why did you leave?”

He shrugged. Still he would not look at her.

“I like bees better.”

His tone was brusque. She saw that her questions made him unhappy, and she chewed her lip, frowning. Memories moved through her mind, shifting, shaping themselves, with a slow yet sure sense, into a story with a different meaning. Her nausea and weakness in the early days of her confinement, her sickly inability to reciprocate the prince’s attentions, which had been infrequent already and then stopped altogether, the prince’s subsequent departure on a diplomatic mission to some southern land and the steady stream of thoughtful gifts that followed, the courier on his bent knee, bearing the tray of overripe fruit, not meeting her gaze, then as now, his childlike mouth drawn in an oddly sorrowful bow, as though in some unspoken apology, the prince gone for days that stretched to weeks, and, preserved in a more recent pocket of wretchedness, the aging three-chinned duchess hissing with bitterness—

“The exotic southern mistress,” she whispered, scarcely opening her lips.

“What?”

She looked at his knocked-over cup—and saw everything as clearly as she had seen any number of shameless couplings in her magic mirror.

“You chose to leave the prince’s service because you’d witnessed too much on your travels with him. Because… you felt sorry for me?”

The cider was soaking into the tablecloth, a blush was soaking into his face, and she understood that what he had felt for her was more than pity. She thought with a sudden certainty: But this is a dream. I know this for a fact, because my past few years in the palace felt like a dream but were real, and this place feels real, so it must be a dream. I never did go down to the kitchen to get more nettles. I fell asleep in my starched, lacy prison of a bedroom, in the middle of drinking another accursed cup of tea, in the middle of weaving another accursed shirt, and all the bits and pieces of my daily miseries congealed in my mind, Arbadac the Bumbler and the sentence of silence and that horrid duchess with her spiteful truths—and now I find myself, still in my nightdress, transported to some imaginary hut abuzz with bees, stripping more meat off the carcass of my marriage while I sit across the table from the youth who belongs to my faraway past, the youth with the golden-brown eyes and quiet words and gentle hands, the youth whose arrival with fruit I once awaited so eagerly. In truth, though—for, asleep, I can speak freely—I never ate any of the fruit. I abhorred those star-shaped monstrosities. I also abhorred plush blankets, and eternally closed windows, and knitting. Oh, I abhorred knitting most of all! I was alone, and I was bored, and I resented the pedantic physician forever telling me that I was too frail, that I needed to keep to my bed, “Prince’s orders,” and I resented the prince himself, who—quite possibly, fresh from the embraces of some southern slut—would arrive once a month on a scheduled visit so we could exchange halting banalities for an endless hour, while I hid my yawns behind yet another ugly sweater I was making for my kind old father-in-law, my heart beating out a sluggish rhythm: bored, so-bored, so-bored. Because what I really longed for, all through that year, the tedious year until the baby came, the miserable second year of my marriage—yes, what I really wanted, even if I would never dare confess any of it to my waking self—was a hearty plate of herring, a loaf of black bread, and the presence of the shy young man with that childlike mouth and those golden eyes that darkened every time he looked at me.

So here he is now, summoned into transient being from the far reaches of my nighttime fantasies. And since this is a dream, I can do as I please.

And with that, she rose, leaned over the table, and kissed him.

He pushed his chair back, holding himself away from her stiffly, his eyes wide with shock. Then his eyes closed, and he kissed her back.

And even though it was a dream—and it was, of course it was, she was sure of it—the smell of honey in his hair was real, and the taste of apple cider on his lips, and so were his lips themselves, pliant and warm, and his hands, which drew her closer to him, and the darkness behind her eyelids, gentle yet increasingly insistent, so much so that for one half-panicked instant she worried whether this was no dream, after all, and was just about to draw back when she forgot to worry, and simply succumbed, and there they were, the two of them, enclosed in the long, soft, enveloping moment like no other moment in her life, and within its glowing seclusion the world felt surprising and thrilling, yet it also felt solid and good—yes, the world made sense at last—and then trumpets exploded just outside the wall.

She jumped back, he jumped up, his chair tottered and crashed, her cup fell and broke. Fists pounded on the door. They stared at it with a wild surmise. He moved toward it just as it shuddered and flew open, and three or four guards burst in, all chain mail and gauntlets. She screamed, realizing that the blissful dream she had anticipated blushingly was about to become a full-blown nightmare. Upon seeing her, however, the guards started to bow, bumping and elbowing each other in the narrow doorway, and the dream turned harmless, commonplace, and disappointing. They were all speaking at once, and she stopped paying attention, for there was some nonsense about frogs who had seen her sleepwalking this way and her presence required immediately at the palace and the king, the kind old King Roland, dying, dying just before sunrise that morning.

“Your Majesty,” the guards called her, bowing, bowing.

She allowed herself to be led outside. The beekeeper stood mute on the threshold, shielding his eyes against the sun, which hung directly over the meadow now, watching them all impassively, as the sun would, while they blundered about on their small human errands of love and grief. She realized that she did not even know his name, and she wanted to ask, but did not—she just accepted a cloak from one of the guards and, meekly obeying the dream’s illogic, climbed onto a horse they brought her, and rode away with the men.

In the palace, unresisting, unquestioning, she was dressed in robes trimmed with ermine by maids weeping copious tears, then taken to the grandest ballroom, all marble and gilt, and there placed next to that man who looked like her husband but was most certainly not. Her fake husband’s face, she noticed absently, was not like it always was, not sleek and bright and cold but drawn and pained, filled, it almost seemed, with some real emotion. He turned to her and tried to speak, but she did not listen, and when he tried to take her hand, she pulled away, so he grew hard-eyed once again and stared ahead. Courtiers came in a long procession as the two of them waited there, side by side on the raised dais, and the ladies cried and the lords offered their condolences and everyone called them “Your Majesties.” She smiled at them with gracious compassion, but her smiles became more strained as the interminable day, as the interminable dream, wore on, for, as she stood there, dressed in the ermine-fringed robe of somber velvet, receiving the line of mourners, listening to the man next to her thank his ministers for their offers of sympathy, she began to feel a bit winded with a suspicion that was tiny at first, a sneaking thought, a flickering, twinging “maybe,” but which grew and grew and grew, until, abruptly, she had a sensation that the world was now only a hillock of land with dark waves encroaching upon it from all sides, rising higher and higher, lapping already at her embroidered slippers.

She turned and stared at the man next to her, the man pretending to be her husband.

“Are you feeling well, Your Majesty?” the court physician inquired solicitously at her shoulder. “Well, technically, Your Highness. The coronation is not until next Sunday.”

She let out a small, wild cry and, for the first and last time in her life as a princess, fainted.

“Not the beekeeper, my dear!” The fairy godmother sniffs. “I must tell you, child, you have positively plebeian tastes.”

But I can see that her heart is not in it, and at last I understand her proprieties to be mere gestures of courtesy, kept about her like a perennial clean handkerchief on offer, for the sake of politeness, while her eyes are warm with compassion and her timid hands flutter about me, as though she would like to comfort me, if she only knew how.

“Down to one button, then,” the witch notes, and her voice, too, is not unsympathetic. “I’m sensing an unfortunate trend here.”

In the graying predawn light, her face has lost much of the hook-nosed, ancient-crone menace it seemed to possess in the harsh blooming of darkness. She is not even that old, I notice with surprise—in her sixties, perhaps—and her features, far from ugly or frightful, are merely weathered and strong.

“This is all very sad, I do agree,” the fairy godmother says. “The prince was clearly not the man we all thought him for much of your marriage. But only a short while ago, you wanted to lift his curse—and here you are now, trying to murder him. What happened in your final months together?”

“Why don’t we see for ourselves,” offers the witch. “Are you ready to finish this, madam?”

I unclench my hand, look at the last snippet of Roland’s hair on my palm.

“My child,” the fairy godmother says quietly. “There will be no turning back if you go through with this.”

“That’s the whole point, though, isn’t it?” I say, archly.

My defiance rings forced to my ears.

“She’s right, you know.” The witch gives the brew one final prod. “Not only will this seal your husband’s fate—it will also tie your own fate to his, forever and ever. In a way, you will never be rid of him. Not after this. Hate traps you as much as love does. Because hate is not the opposite of love. Indifference is.”

“So I’ll be indifferent once he is dead,” I tell her. And I take a breath, and I take a step, and I stretch my hand over the potion, and then—and then I hesitate. My husband’s fate, my fate… I assumed that his death would liberate me, once and for all, from the confines of impersonal fairy-tale destiny—but am I fooling myself, am I simply driven to take yet another predictable step in a predictable story? I peer into the cauldron, and its oily black surface readily serves up the reflection of a woman with aggrieved eyes, sharpened cheekbones, and mad, wispy hair. This is not the face I thought of as mine for so long, the unchanging face of a young bride with rosy lips and gaze ever widened in anticipation of conjugal happiness—and yet I see, my heart sinking, that it is a familiar face all the same.

The face of a spurned, jealous wife, the face of a middle-aged villainess.

I take a step back.

“Well, do you still want him dead, or what?” the witch asks.

In my mind, I struggle to recite the litany of hate I used to repeat to myself on many a sleepless night. I want him dead because I hate the smooth perfection of his face, the purposeful nature of his days, the grace with which he charms everyone around him, the ruthlessness with which he discards whatever he no longer needs. I want him dead because I’ve given him the best years of my life, my youth, my beauty, and he has treated me in such a shameful way. I want him dead because I loved him once upon a time. I want him dead because… because… I want him dead… And then I realize that something is different inside me. The night has burned through like a splinter of kindling, and my anger—my anger has burned away with it. Somehow, without my noticing, the memories of my married years have left me one by one, drowned in the cauldron’s darkness, leaving me purged and empty, ready for something else, something new.

I do not want him dead.

All I want is to be free—free of him, free of my past, free of my story.

Free of myself, the way I was when I was with him.

I glance from the doughy pancake of the fairy godmother’s face, all soggy with commiseration, to the flinty angles of the witch’s face, made hard with wisdom, then look away to the horizon. The sun has not yet risen, but the ink of the night has become diluted, and I discern, beyond the drab stretch of the fallow fields, at the very end of the dusty road, a denser line—the invitation of the woods. And so, I release my fingers, just like that, and, not waiting for the half-hair to spiral harmlessly down to the ground, turn my back on both women and start toward the forest, one foot in front of the other.

As I walk away, I hear the fairy godmother sob once, a soft sob of relief. Then the witch’s raised voice hits me squarely between my shoulders.

“If that be the case, madam, have you considered divorce?”

I do not stop running until I burst into the trees.