“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.