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?