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.