Three weeks away from her thirteenth anniversary, the shirt was nearly done, missing only the left cuff, when she ran out of nettles. She picked up her candle and went down to the kitchen to replenish her supply one final time. It was the murky hour before sunrise, and the kitchen lay deserted and still, save for the brownie who was sweeping crumbs into a corner and paid her no heed. She tiptoed to the pantry, and was in the process of filling the pockets of her nightdress with nettle leaves when a deafening crash sounded behind her.
She swung around and, her heart leaping, thrust the candle into the dark.
Arbadac the Bumbler stood hunched over the stove, a spoon frozen on the way to his mouth, the knocked-over pans settling noisily at his feet, a trickle of something viscous slithering down his chin. He blinked at her owlishly for a few moments before a look of recognition brightened his foggy eyes.
“Strawberry jam,” he explained with an embarrassed cough, plopping the spoon back into the pot. “A weakness of mine. We’re all only human. And you, Your Highness, what sweet craving brings you here at this hour?”
She pointed to the nettles cramming her pockets.
“Ah, yes, of course, the lifting of the curse! I hope it is proceeding splendidly?”
She shrugged.
“Has Your Highness managed to obtain the manticore’s mane bristles, then? If you forgive me my professional curiosity?” He beamed at her. Puzzled, she shook her head. “Or the echo of the phoenix’s song? No? But you aren’t speaking to me… eh… I hope I haven’t done anything to offend you?”
She looked at him reproachfully, gestured at her mouth.
He frowned, seemingly confused. Then his entire face sagged.
“Oh. Oh dear. I didn’t, by any chance, tell you that you needed to be silent?”
She stopped breathing, stared at him. His prominent Adam’s apple jiggled in his bony neck, once, twice. It had grown so quiet that she could hear him swallow.
“Ah. Yes. Yes, so it appears. Well, but of course, that was the working theory for a while, it wasn’t like I was suggesting anything unduly excessive. Yes. But I might have been a bit behind the times, you see, what with the dratted clock and this plague of salamanders forever setting fire to the upholstery, it was only last winter that I finally had a free hour to glance through the back issues of Magic Monthly, and, well, it seems that in the past century or two, other approaches might have been… That is to say, there is a growing concern in the community that women are being deprived of their voices in addition to bearing the brunt of paying for their husbands’ and brothers’ mistakes, so the imposition of mandatory silence during the performance of preliminary curse-breaking rituals has now been deemed, eh, somewhat unnecessary.” He regarded her anxiously. “So, you see, this is marvelous news, because you don’t actually have to not speak… that is to say… Your Highness? Your Highness?”
She was striding away, out of the kitchen, and down the corridor, and up the steps, and past the sleeping guards, and out of the palace, as she was, in her light nightdress and house slippers, nettles spilling in her wake. The nighttime darkness was only just beginning to recede, and the garden lay drained of color, unsteady with shadows. She descended the staircase. The predawn chill was like a slap against her cheeks, but her face remained blank. She walked blindly, ignoring the paths, crossing lawns wet from a recent rain, crashing through beds of wilting daffodils. Two or three marble nymphs gave her looks of alarm and bounded out of her way, the palace gates rushed to swing open and let her through, and frogs in a little pond behind the mill abruptly ceased their throaty chorus of “Kiss me, kiss me!” at the sight of her twisted mouth. She noticed nothing, did not know where she was going, just kept walking, kept walking, driven by some unvoiced urge to leave behind all the places that she recognized, all the thoughts that made well-worn grooves in her mind. She walked until her feet ached, until her fingers turned brittle with cold, until her fury spent itself in physical exhaustion. Then she stopped and looked about.
She stood in a meadow. The world was hazy with the billowing light of a soft vernal sunrise, and the golden fog hummed with manifold voices of invisible bees. There was a small cottage with a thatched roof and a door painted deep blue, the color of her favorite parasol, at the foot of a hill. She had never been here before, yet it was all strangely familiar, like some story heard in a distant past. She rubbed her chilled hands together, breathed on them, waited for something. The door of the cottage opened, and a young man came out stretching, and saw her, and froze.
She went to him, slowly, for there was no urgency left in her now. The young man watched her unmoving. When she stopped before him, he shook his head like someone snatched out of a dream and cried, “But you are shivering, and your slippers are wet! Please, won’t you come inside to warm up?”
His speech seemed to have a slight tilt, and the words slid down it a bit awkwardly, as though not completely sure of themselves; like her, he must have come from across the sea.
She met his shy gaze the color of honey.
“I must warn you,” she said. “If you offer me a cup of tea, I will scream.”
This was the first thing she had chosen to say after a year of muteness, and she meant it. He smiled, uncertainly.
“Your Highness pleases to make jokes. That is Your Highness’s right, of course. Alas, I do not possess any tea to offer you, only cider. But I promise it will be good.”
Aware of an odd twinge of disappointment at having been recognized, she followed him inside. The room she entered was clean and warm, and had a nice, solid smell about it, equal parts wood shavings, baked bread, and honey. A sturdy table by the window was covered with a blue tablecloth, and on it stood an unglazed earthenware jug with some disheveled red wildflowers. The young man brought out apple cider, and in silence they sat at the table, sipping from two chipped white cups. The cider was spicy, and good, just as he had promised, and she drank deep, with keen pleasure, feeling life return to her stiff fingers and toes. When her cup was empty, she wiped her lips on her sleeve, in a decidedly unprincesslike gesture, and studied the man across from her. He, too, looked eerily familiar, with his cast-down eyes and tousled hair the color of fallen leaves, like someone from a long-ago story—like someone from her own story, she realized then, in the days when her own story had made perfect sense.
“But I know you,” she said, sitting back. “You are Prince Roland’s courier, are you not? You—it was you who came to me with the glass slipper!”
“I am the beekeeper,” the young man said quietly, addressing his cup. Nor was he all that young, she saw, perhaps only a year or two younger than herself.