A Mirror Mended Read online

  The queen looks profoundly unmoved. “How tragic,” she says passionlessly. The part of me that isn’t busy calculating the distance between me and the exit and the likelihood of dying in a fairy tale I don’t even like goes huh. Twenty-six years of terminal illness has taught me to anticipate and weaponize pity, however tedious and gross it feels—but the queen’s face is the definition of pitiless. It would be gratifying if it weren’t so inconvenient.

  I take another step, edging behind a chair. “It is, truly it is.” The queen is watching me in a way that reminds me uncomfortably of a lean-boned stray watching a very stupid robin. “It’s a sad tale, which I will relate to you, at length and with footnotes, should you desire it, Your Majesty.” On the final syllable I shove the chair hard, sending it tumbling between us, and rush for the door.

  I make it, hands slapping hard against the wood, fingers fumbling for the latch—

  Which is, as it turns out, locked.

  I stand facing the door for a long moment, breathing hard into the silence.

  “Oh dear,” says the queen. “Let me get that for you.” I turn to see her carefully righting my tossed chair, setting the mirror on her workbench, and taking a long green ribbon down from a hook. She saunters toward me with a swaying, careless step that makes me think again of a hungry cat, if cats wore crowns and gowns the color of fresh kidneys.

  She stops far too close to me, and there might be the teensiest, tiniest delay before I move my eyes from the clean line of her collarbone up to her face. There’s a curl in her lip that tells me she noticed.

  Her eyes fall to my throat and my brain leaps unhelpfully to that fucked-up Gaiman short story where Snow White is a vampire, and then, even more unhelpfully, to an undergraduate lecture about the inherent homoeroticism of Western vampire literature.

  The queen lifts the green ribbon between us. I have time for two very brief and stupid thoughts (Where’s the key? and God, that mockingbird is loud) before her other hand snakes past me and the ribbon is wrapped around my neck.

  * * *

  IT DOESN’T SEEM that bad, as garrotings go. The queen barely knots the ribbon before stepping away. But in the startled second it takes my hands to reach my throat, the ribbon has wound itself so tightly that I can’t fit my fingers beneath it. It pinches harder, crushing veins, clenching around my windpipe. I try to scream, but nothing emerges except a wet wheeze.

  Dark spots bloom across my vision. The back of my head cracks against the door. One of my fingernails snags and rips as I try and fail to tear the ribbon away, and then I’m falling and thinking, with extreme irritation: I’ve been here before. I have been on my knees in some distant Disney-knockoff castle, fighting for air and not finding it. That time there was a princess to kiss me back to life; this time there is a queen to watch me die.

  Which is bullshit, because I’m not supposed to die yet. I’m supposed to have years, maybe even decades, and I’ll be damned if somebody else’s evil stepmother is going to steal them. On this bracing thought, I lunge for the queen’s legs. Except it turns out your muscles need oxygen to function, so what I actually do is flop face-first at her feet.

  I hear a distant sigh. Hands under my arms, dragging me across the floor. The cold click of metal around my wrists. Just when my vision has contracted to a single point of light and my limbs have gone so numb they feel like bags of wet sand, the ribbon disappears.

  There’s an ugly little stretch of time here that mostly consists of drooling and choking and the sickly sound of vomit hitting the floor. Let’s skip over it.

  When I can see again, I find my arms manacled awkwardly above my head, with just enough loose chain to rattle but not enough to either stand or lie down. The queen is carefully emptying my backpack onto the counter, examining each item with mild interest and sorting it according to some ineffable system of her own devising. The socks and underwear are piled together; my phone is held briefly at arm’s length, as if she is considering her own reflection in the dark glass of the screen, before being placed carefully beside the knife.

  “What,” I begin, but I have to stop to wheeze hoarsely between each word. “The fuck. Is wrong. With you.”

  The queen doesn’t answer immediately. She’s holding my little mechanical mockingbird up to the light; the bird is now producing a pitch only dolphins can hear. “Oh, you’re perfectly fine,” she assures me without a single atom of remorse. “It would only have sent you into an enchanted slumber.”

  “Only? Jesus Christ, lady, don’t they have human rights here? I didn’t do anything to you and you just—you—” This time it’s a sudden, helpless rage that chokes me. I still dream of my own death sometimes, except now it’s a memory instead of a prophecy. I feel my lungs massing with misbegotten proteins, my pulse weakening, my mouth full of air I can no longer breathe. I don’t even like holding my breath in the pool anymore or putting my face under the blankets; it turns out I really, really dislike being strangled.

  I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, just like my stupid therapist taught me, until I can snarl, “Just whack me in the head next time, you fucking psychopath.”

  “Noted,” she replies coolly, still studying the mockingbird. Eventually she sweeps it to the floor and crushes it quite casually beneath her heel. There’s a small, pathetic crunch, like several finger bones snapping at once, and the mockingbird is quiet. The silence leaves me chilled, dry-mouthed, unable to believe I permitted myself even a single homoerotic impulse about this woman.

  She turns a level, businesslike gaze on me. “Now, let us talk. I require your assistance.”

  It’s hard to pull off a mocking laugh when you’re shackled to someone’s wall and they’re looking at you like you’re a lock they will either pick or break, but I give it a good effort. “Really? Because I could swear you just choked me with a magic murder ribbon.”

  “It’s a bodice lace, actually.”

  “I figured.” I may not know this story as well as Sleeping Beauty, but I’m still a folklore major with a significant Grimm obsession. In their version, called either Schneewittchen or Schneeweißchen depending on the edition, the wicked stepmother tries to kill Snow White with a poison comb and a bodice lace before she goes for the apple, which are sufficiently weird murder weapons that my favorite professor even wrote an article about them (“Mirror, Mirror: Vanity as Villainy in the Western Imagination”). If Dr. Bastille were here, she’d probably be asking the queen whether her choice of tools represented a sublimated reclamation of the male monopoly on violence, whereas all I can think about is how badly I want to punch her in the throat. And how I’m going to escape, and whether I have a chance in hell of taking that mirror with me.

  The queen watches my sour, snarling mouth for a moment before sighing and dragging her chair to face me. She sits, her kidney-colored gown falling in another perfect sweep around her feet, her face tired beneath the makeup. “Please understand that I will do whatever I must to get what I need.” Her eyes are concerningly sincere. “No one will interrupt me. No one will save you.” Her accent is lightly burred, her words blunt, nothing like Prim’s vaguely British, grammatically suspect speech. I wonder if Charm has finally removed the word whence from her vocabulary, and then quickly stop wondering, because thinking about Charm is like thinking about an amputated limb.

  “And really,” the queen continues. “It is no great favor I ask of you. I only need to know how you do it.”

  I curl my lip and ask scornfully, “How I do what?” But there’s only one thing she could possibly want from me, however unlikely it seems. The hunger has returned to her eyes, and it strikes me, with a sudden, plunging chill, that I’ve seen it before: staring back at me out of every mirror since I was old enough to understand my own story.

  “I want to know how you get out,” she grates, and for the first time her voice is something less than perfectly calm. “I want to know how you leave your world and find another.”

  A heartbeat of silence. Another, while her eyes bore into mine and my brain produces nothing but strings of panicked question marks (?????????). I try very hard not to look at her mirror.

  “Tell me,” she says, imperious, barely leashed, and I feel my chances of getting out of this with all my fingernails and teeth declining precipitously.

  I swallow hard and say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean,” because I’ve seen enough Marvel movies to know that it’s generally frowned upon to hand the obvious villain the keys to the multiverse. I don’t have a clear idea what she’d do with the ability to zap herself into other versions of Snow White, but I doubt it’s anything good, and more importantly, fuck her.

  The queen’s mouth flattens. She holds my very twenty-first century backpack by one fraying strap, her eyebrows raised very slightly.

  “Oh, that? I got it from a wizard in a kingdom far from here. I’m happy to draw you a map, if you’d like to talk to him.” All I need is about two minutes un-shackled so I can prick my finger and peace the hell out of here, preferably with that magic mirror in tow. I would like to know where it came from, and how the queen found out about multiple worlds in the first place, and why her eyes are so ravenous, so familiar, but it doesn’t seem worth lingering to find out.

  “I am not,” she says gently, “a fool.”

  “Okay, fine, you got me! I’m from another world. But frankly”—I rattle my chains at her—“I don’t see why I should tell you shit.”

  She rises from her chair, face twisting. The air seems to gather and darken around her like a personal thunderstorm. “Because if you don’t, you writhing maggot, you miserable louse, I will feed your beating heart to the carrion birds. I will knap knives from your bones and use them to flense the fat from your breathing body.” She pauses, perhaps to appreciate her own alliteration. “I am the queen.” There are no sibilants in that sentence, but she manages to hiss it anyway.

  My lips peel back from my teeth as I look up at her, not fearless but pissed enough to do a good impression. “Oh, please, you’re just the bad guy. The villain, the evil stepmother. You’re the Wicked Witch of the East, bro.”

  She opens her mouth, but I interrupt, entirely unable to resist. “You’re going to look at me and you’re going to tell me that I’m wrong? Am I wrong?” At least Charm will be proud of me if these turn out to be my last words.

  I watch the queen teetering on some internal precipice, perhaps deciding between the thumbscrews or the pliers. Instead, she tucks her fury carefully away. It’s like watching a woman shove a mattress into a pillowcase. She strides to a crowded bookshelf and asks abruptly, “What’s your name?”

  “Zinnia Gray. Of Ohio.”

  She takes down a slender volume with a bright red spine, incongruous in the gloom of her workroom. “Aren’t you going to ask me my name, Zinnia Gray? Or do they not have manners in Ohio?”

  “Whereas here it’s customary to chain your visitors to the wall.” She studies my face with finite patience, one fingernail tapping the book, until I sigh. “Fine. What’s your name?”

  Obnoxiously, she doesn’t answer. She slinks back over to me and stands, paging through her book. I crane my neck upward, expecting to see a book of hexes or poisons, something with embossed silver and dyed leather, but the cover is simple red canvas, lightly scuffed. It has a tatty ribbon glued to the binding as a bookmark and a purplish stain on the back, and there’s something very, very familiar about it. Like, distressingly familiar. The kind of familiar that your brain refuses to process because it just doesn’t make sense, like seeing your first grade teacher in the grocery store.

  I can’t read the title upside down and backwards, but I don’t have to, because I already know what it says. This book—this exact copy of this book, with the tatty ribbon and the grape juice stain on the back cover—has been on my bedside shelf since my sixth birthday. It’s the 1995 reprint of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, with Arthur Rackham’s original 1909 illustrations.

  This is, I find, my limit. I’ve been sucked into a story that doesn’t belong to me, garroted, chained up, and questioned by a queen, but seeing a fairytale villain with my favorite childhood book is apparently the place where my disbelief draws a hard fucking line in the sand and says: No way.

  But the book persists in existing, solid red against the white of the queen’s fingers, whether or not I believe in it. She finds the page she’s looking for and turns the book around, kneeling before me. One page is a full-color plate of a sleeping girl with skin the color of chewed gum and seven small men gathered around her. The other page is dense text with a title in curlicued faux-Victorian font: Little Snow-White.

  “You were right, of course,” the queen says, conversationally. “I am the villain, the stepmother, the wicked witch, the evil queen.” Her face is racked with furious grief, lips twisting with something far too dark to be humor. She leans past me, so close I can feel the heat of her cheekbone against mine, the slight stirring of my hair as she whispers, “I don’t have a name.”

  3

  THE QUEEN DRAWS slowly back from me. She meets my gaze for a long, taut moment, her expression fierce but her eyes full of the impotent ache of someone who knows how their story ends and can’t change it. I see, or think I see, the faint sheen of furious tears before she whirls away. The door slams as she leaves and I remember, for the first time in several minutes, to exhale. I suspect I’d feel that way even if the queen hadn’t been threatening to rip out my beating heart; she has that kind of presence, an intensity that thickens the air around her.

  I knock my head ungently against the wall and order myself to get it together. Luckily, or unluckily, I’ve been in enough perilous situations by now that I don’t waste too much time panicking or regretting my life choices or shouting SHITSHITSHIT in all caps. I’ve developed a simple system.

  Step one, which turns out to be equally useful in staving off panic attacks and escaping dungeons, is to make a list of your physical assets. I have a book of fairy tales that shouldn’t exist on this narrative plane, a piece of spindle in my back pocket, two bobby pins tucked in my shoe, and a finite number of minutes before the queen returns.

  Step two is to make a plan. The obvious choice is to wrangle the splinter out of my jeans, jab my finger, and whisk myself back to the Sleeping Beauty–verse. But I could also go for the bobby pins and try to pick the lock on my shackles (don’t laugh—once I realized how often various kings and fairies were going to be tossing me into dungeons and throwing me in the stocks, etc., I spent a serious number of hours watching lock picking YouTube videos. I only have about a 50 percent success rate in the real world, but I’ve found that fairy tale locks are inclined to pop open at the first sign of narrative agency).

  Step three is to get moving. I hesitate for a fraction of a second before going for the pins instead of the splinter. Partly because it would require some pretty uncomfortable contortions to reach my back pocket, whereas all it takes is a half split to grab my ankle, but also because I’m curious. Not about the queen—despite her hungry eyes and her silken hair and the way she looks at me, like I’m something vital, desperately necessary to her survival—but about everything else.

  I waggle the bobby pin in the lock while I assemble a list of questions, including but not limited to: How did I pop into Snow White? How did my childhood book wind up in an alternate universe? Did the queen steal it, or did it spontaneously manifest? Is that mirror some kind of palantír/all-knowing orb situation that lets her peek into other worlds? If I steal it, will I be able to escape my story forever? And, PS, has my casual world-hopping had some unfortunate and unforeseen effects on the narrative integrity of the multiverse?

  I can’t stop myself from picturing the slideshow Charm would assemble for the occasion: So There’s Something Fucky Happening to the Multiverse: Ten Implausible Theories. Or maybe, So You’re a Little Bit Hot for the Villain: We’ve All Been There but This Isn’t the Time, Babe.

  But Charm stopped answering my texts six months ago, over basically nothing. The last message I have from her is two paragraphs long and calls me “a pretty shitty friend” and “an irresponsible lackwit,” among other things. Prim must be rubbing off on her.

  Just about the time my wrists are chafed bloody and my tendons are cramping, the manacles pop open. I rub the numbness out of my fingers, shove my stuff back into my pack, and tuck the mirror carefully on top. Its surface is a perfectly mundane reflection, but it feels heavier than mere silver and glass should.

  The door isn’t locked, which means the queen underestimated me after all. I feel a fleeting, embarrassing twist of disappointment.

  I’m three steps into the hall when a heavy hand falls on my shoulder and a cheery voice says, “Pardon, miss.”

  There’s a man standing just outside the workroom door. He has a generic, uncomplicated handsomeness, like one of the lesser Hemsworths, and I’d guess from his callouses and clothes that he’s a woodcutter, or—aha!—a huntsman.

  I raise my chin to an aristocratic angle. “Unhand me, sir! I am the Lady Zinnia of Ohio, and the queen herself invited me to—”

  But he’s shaking his head earnestly. “Sorry, miss. Back in you go.” He tugs politely at my shoulder as if I’m a pet trying to escape her crate.

  “You are mistaken.” I keep my voice shrill and disdainful, but my hand is already in my back pocket.

  “Her Majesty said if I saw a skinny wastrel in men’s trousers I was not to let her escape—”

  The huntsman stops because I’ve driven my fist toward his throat with the long splinter sharp between my knuckles. He catches my wrist in a hand roughly the size and shape of a baseball mitt. He gives my arm a shake that makes my bones creak, and the splinter falls from my nerveless fingers.