A circle of slender sprites, translucent like leaves held up against the morning sun, are leading a swaying fleet-footed dance in the grassy glade. Without thinking, almost without knowing what I am doing, quite as if summoned, I abandon the path and rush out toward them.
Then I stand blinking in the brightness.
The clearing is empty, the grass undisturbed by footprints; only a breeze is moving long branches of willows back and forth, back and forth, above a shallow fast-running brook. Oddly, it seems that autumn has not touched this place at alclass="underline" the grass is verdant here, the leaves vivid, the air full of midday summer warmth. There is a smell here, too, a sharp, clean smell that I cannot name, yet that reminds me of the wild, exhilarating way the night smelled when I walked out of the palace and ran to the crossroads, the now-empty velvet pouch at my hip still filled with my husband’s fingernails, with my mother’s flowers—was it only hours before?
It feels like another life—or else, a life of another.
A life of someone I did not like very much.
Something swoops over my head with an eerie cry, so low that the wind raised by its wings brushes my face. An owl chasing after the departing night, I tell myself—but when I swing around to follow its flight, I see a long-tailed creature wreathed in flickering fire. It trails sparks across the skies, then vanishes in the gloom of the forest. A firebird? Or even a small dragon? There are no dragons left in our orderly, civilized kingdom, of course, but I have gone so far into the woods that it no longer feels like any place I know, and I am suddenly sure that I would not find this hidden summer oasis drawn, bordered, and labeled on any of the maps my children pore over in their geography lessons.
My heart beating, I stand peering into the oaks that guard the clearing, but all is quiet again; only bumblebees hum, and the brook tinkles gently. All at once, I yearn for a refreshing sip of cold water. The brook is clear as crystal, and its bottom gleams with a pattern of bright pebbles. Too parched to care about grass stains on my dress, I kneel on the ground and scoop some water in my hand.
“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” a breezy voice says above me.
The water trickles out between my fingers as I meet the gaze of a girl who sits swinging her legs on the lowest branch of a nearby willow. She is stark naked, and her skin has a wet sheen. Perky pink nipples of an adolescent peek through the messy tousle of abundant curls the color of river weeds, and the eyes she has turned upon me are like two forest ponds, dark green and still; as I look closer, I can almost see tiny specks of water lilies floating inside them and tiny streaks of dragonflies darting through.
Looking into those eyes for long is a bit like drowning, and I glance away, dizzy.
“Unless, of course, you want to be a fish,” the girl continues blithely. “It’s not so bad, being a fish. Some may even prefer it. Not me, though. I enjoy having toes.” She wiggles them for emphasis; her toenails look just like the pebbles glistening in the brook’s merry current. “Also, I like eating the fish, myself. Girl fish are delicious.”
When she smiles, I notice that her teeth are sharp and crowded in her mouth.
Carefully, I rise and edge a few steps away.
“I’m searching for the royal woodsman’s cottage,” I tell her, then pause for a startled moment: I have not realized it myself until now. I feel a twinge of guilt as I add, “It may or may not look like a shoe. My sister lives there. Well, my stepsister, really. Do you know where I might find it?”
“Oooh, a quest, I love quests!” the girl cries, and dangles her legs faster. “But you must give me something first.” She stares at me with her disconcerting eyes. “I’ve got it! Tell me a secret. Only it has to be a real secret. Something that no one else knows. Just us girls.”
And because I am still filled with remorse over my treatment of Melissa, I remember something sneaky, something shameful, from my childhood, something I have never confessed to anyone before.
“When I was eleven or twelve,” I say quietly, “whenever I helped with the family dinners, I would… I would put things in my stepsisters’ food.”
“What kinds of things?” the girl asks with interest. “Shards of glass? Nails?”
She grins with anticipation. Her teeth are really quite sharp, filed to points.
“No, nothing like that, nothing to hurt them!” I protest with a shudder. “I just resented them because they were happy. Because they fit in. They didn’t have funny accents, and they did well at school. Of course, only Gloria got good grades, but Melissa was popular, she had so many friends. So I’d crush bugs into their soup. Or sprinkle dirt in their hot chocolate. Or do other, even worse things…”
I stop. She considers me, her head tilted.
“No,” she then says flatly.
“No?”
“No. That was child’s play. Give me something else. Something grown-up. And hurry, or I might bite you. Even if you aren’t a fish.”
She is laughing as she says it, but when I look again at her sharp, bared teeth, I am not at all certain that she is joking. Her features, her voice, her gestures are those of a very young girl, hardly older than I was when I spat in my sisters’ dinners, but her eyes, as she holds mine, are old and hungry and savage, filled with some dark, ancient knowledge, and I suddenly feel that it is the wood itself studying me out of the stagnant pools of her irises, weighing my worth, deciding whether to swallow me whole.
I take a deep breath.
“I used to fantasize about leaving my children. I imagined just walking away from them, from the palace, without glancing back. I dreamed of living a rough, bright life on the edge of the world. I’d ride stolen horses, dance with the winds, spend nights with sailors and gypsies, drink, swear—be free. And in those dreams, I never sent a single word home, just let them wonder what happened to me. And I did not miss them.”
She worries her lower lip between her teeth.
“Better,” she concedes at last. “You seem so nice and simple, but you aren’t all that nice and simple inside. Nice is boring. Still, I want something that cuts even deeper. Try again.”
And I say it before I even know what I am about to say.
“My husband only pretended to love me when he married me. In truth, he has never loved me. Not one day. Not one bit.”
In the fallen hush, the plaintive cry of the bird on fire rises from somewhere far, far away. Up in the willow tree, the naked girl claps and swings her legs.
“Ooh, yes, that will do, that is a juicy little tidbit,” she sings out happily. “That will feed me for a day or two.” She licks her lips, once, twice, her snakelike tongue darting out in quick, greedy stabs. “You are free to go now.”
For some reason, having said what I said, I can no longer meet her eyes.
“Aren’t you going to point me toward the royal woodsman’s cottage?” I whisper.
“The royal woodsman’s cottage? But I have no idea where it is. Not in these parts, that’s for sure. No royalty around here. Or don’t you know—it may have taken you only an hour or two to get here, but you are very, very far from home, lost little girl. This is my domain, and I eat handfuls of silly princesses like you for breakfast. You should be grateful I have chosen to let you go.”
And even though she may be only a thirteen-year-old willow sprite with a wicked sense of humor, some sinister thickening in her voice sends a deep chill through my blood, quite as if all my insides have gone goose-bumped. I walk toward the trees then, quickly, without protestations or questions, not raising my head. The unnatural summer, I see, ends abruptly at the clearing’s edge; back in the woods, autumn reigns once again, damp and brown. But just as I am about to reenter the cool dimness, I stop in confusion: where previously one single well-traveled path skirted the glade, there is now a fork in the road, one path going left, the other going right, both disappearing into the forest.