by Olga Grushin
“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, lookin
g 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.
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.