She turned and stared at the man next to her, the man pretending to be her husband.
“Are you feeling well, Your Majesty?” the court physician inquired solicitously at her shoulder. “Well, technically, Your Highness. The coronation is not until next Sunday.”
She let out a small, wild cry and, for the first and last time in her life as a princess, fainted.
“Not the beekeeper, my dear!” The fairy godmother sniffs. “I must tell you, child, you have positively plebeian tastes.”
But I can see that her heart is not in it, and at last I understand her proprieties to be mere gestures of courtesy, kept about her like a perennial clean handkerchief on offer, for the sake of politeness, while her eyes are warm with compassion and her timid hands flutter about me, as though she would like to comfort me, if she only knew how.
“Down to one button, then,” the witch notes, and her voice, too, is not unsympathetic. “I’m sensing an unfortunate trend here.”
In the graying predawn light, her face has lost much of the hook-nosed, ancient-crone menace it seemed to possess in the harsh blooming of darkness. She is not even that old, I notice with surprise—in her sixties, perhaps—and her features, far from ugly or frightful, are merely weathered and strong.
“This is all very sad, I do agree,” the fairy godmother says. “The prince was clearly not the man we all thought him for much of your marriage. But only a short while ago, you wanted to lift his curse—and here you are now, trying to murder him. What happened in your final months together?”
“Why don’t we see for ourselves,” offers the witch. “Are you ready to finish this, madam?”
I unclench my hand, look at the last snippet of Roland’s hair on my palm.
“My child,” the fairy godmother says quietly. “There will be no turning back if you go through with this.”
“That’s the whole point, though, isn’t it?” I say, archly.
My defiance rings forced to my ears.
“She’s right, you know.” The witch gives the brew one final prod. “Not only will this seal your husband’s fate—it will also tie your own fate to his, forever and ever. In a way, you will never be rid of him. Not after this. Hate traps you as much as love does. Because hate is not the opposite of love. Indifference is.”
“So I’ll be indifferent once he is dead,” I tell her. And I take a breath, and I take a step, and I stretch my hand over the potion, and then—and then I hesitate. My husband’s fate, my fate… I assumed that his death would liberate me, once and for all, from the confines of impersonal fairy-tale destiny—but am I fooling myself, am I simply driven to take yet another predictable step in a predictable story? I peer into the cauldron, and its oily black surface readily serves up the reflection of a woman with aggrieved eyes, sharpened cheekbones, and mad, wispy hair. This is not the face I thought of as mine for so long, the unchanging face of a young bride with rosy lips and gaze ever widened in anticipation of conjugal happiness—and yet I see, my heart sinking, that it is a familiar face all the same.
The face of a spurned, jealous wife, the face of a middle-aged villainess.
I take a step back.
“Well, do you still want him dead, or what?” the witch asks.
In my mind, I struggle to recite the litany of hate I used to repeat to myself on many a sleepless night. I want him dead because I hate the smooth perfection of his face, the purposeful nature of his days, the grace with which he charms everyone around him, the ruthlessness with which he discards whatever he no longer needs. I want him dead because I’ve given him the best years of my life, my youth, my beauty, and he has treated me in such a shameful way. I want him dead because I loved him once upon a time. I want him dead because… because… I want him dead… And then I realize that something is different inside me. The night has burned through like a splinter of kindling, and my anger—my anger has burned away with it. Somehow, without my noticing, the memories of my married years have left me one by one, drowned in the cauldron’s darkness, leaving me purged and empty, ready for something else, something new.
I do not want him dead.
All I want is to be free—free of him, free of my past, free of my story.
Free of myself, the way I was when I was with him.
I glance from the doughy pancake of the fairy godmother’s face, all soggy with commiseration, to the flinty angles of the witch’s face, made hard with wisdom, then look away to the horizon. The sun has not yet risen, but the ink of the night has become diluted, and I discern, beyond the drab stretch of the fallow fields, at the very end of the dusty road, a denser line—the invitation of the woods. And so, I release my fingers, just like that, and, not waiting for the half-hair to spiral harmlessly down to the ground, turn my back on both women and start toward the forest, one foot in front of the other.
As I walk away, I hear the fairy godmother sob once, a soft sob of relief. Then the witch’s raised voice hits me squarely between my shoulders.
“If that be the case, madam, have you considered divorce?”
I do not stop running until I burst into the trees.
PART TWO
In the Forest Clearing
The wood is just as I imagined it, just as I dreamed it. Leaves have not yet fallen but are already shot through with copper and bronze, and the trees stand tall, like columns in some mysterious autumnal cathedral carved out of gems, wrought out of precious metals, all rubies and amber and gold. Paths crisscross and disappear into the russet-colored dusk. I inhale the smell of ripeness, the smell of rain, the smell of wild things growing, dying, changing freely. It is neither day nor night under the trees, but a lingering in-between gloaming. The path I follow seems to have a will of its own, twisting, turning, always taking me deeper and deeper in. The farther I go, the more ancient the beeches, aspens, and elms, the more pungent the scents, the more solemn the world around me—and the less afraid I feel, as though with every step into the unknown, I am shedding a bit of my familiar past, losing a bit of my familiar self.
The wood is quiet with a profound, churchlike silence, but as I keep walking, I begin to sense stealthy presences all about me, traveling along invisible forest roads on hushed errands of their own. Enormous white moths that look like flowers—or else flowers that look like moths—glide slowly, weightily, from one pool of shadow into another. Glinting eyes stare at me from under misshapen roots, from inside hollowed trunks, yet when I draw nearer, they are quick to blink out of sight or turn into innocuous fireflies that zigzag across my path, winking in and out, before dissolving in the canopy above. The path soon takes me to the edge of a clearing, runs alongside it. I can hear water trickling somewhere nearby. It is dark on my left, light on my right: pale dawn has begun to glow between the giant oaks that line the clearing. I glance over, squinting after the dimness of the forest—and catch my breath.