Fractured fables, p.14
Fractured Fables, page 14
The girl leads the way, striding past humped roots and clawing branches, and I follow her without consulting the queen, because it’s not like she’ll let either me or the mirror out of her sight. We haven’t made it ten paces before I hear her stomping and muttering after us.
The woods darken and thicken around us. Briars tug at our clothes and small, slinking creatures rustle just past the bright ring of lantern light. A few reluctant stars blink like filmy eyes through the branches, but the moon refuses to rise.
The young Snow White never slows down or hesitates. I wonder briefly what could scare a kid like this, who walks so fearlessly through the dark, and decide I’d rather not know.
Eventually another light shines through the trees: a pair of lit windows, warm and inviting, wildly out of place in the thorned and twisted wood.
I point Snow White toward the windows. “Okay, there’s probably somebody in there who can help you out. Just do whatever they say and stay away from strangers, and you’ll … be…” I trail away, because there’s a small bird silhouetted in one of the windows, the first we’ve heard or seen all night. Something about the shape of it rings a very distant and unlikely bell in my head.
It flutters toward us and perches directly above me, lit from below by the shuddering yellow of Snow White’s lantern. It fixes me with a single bright and clever eye and I know, suddenly, where I’ve seen this bird before.
I whisper, softly and a little desperately, because this is more than six impossible things and breakfast is still a long way off, “No way.”
But the multiverse in all its infinite weirdness, answers: Yes way.
The door of the hut opens and an old woman stands in the spill of light looking exactly as she did five years ago, when I sat at her table drinking tea with a different folkloric princess.
I feel dizzy, suddenly uncertain, as if I might have fallen into the gap between stories and gotten stuck. “Z-Zellandine?”
Zellandine, for her part, does not look even slightly surprised to see me. She points her chin inside the hut and says tiredly, “Well, come on, then.”
5
IT’S THE YOUNG Snow White who moves first. She strides into the fairy’s house with a stiff spine and an expression suggesting that nothing in front of her could possibly be worse than whatever’s behind her. Zellandine welcomes her with a grandmotherly nod, gesturing to a seat around the table. There’s a rightness to the shape they make against the light, two silhouettes repeated in a thousand variations of a thousand stories: the old woman welcoming the weary traveler, the witch inviting the child inside, the fairy godmother sheltering the maiden.
Then Zellandine turns back to us and the rightness vanishes. We eye one another—three straying characters who have run off the rails of their own stories and collided in someone else’s—before Zellandine grimaces as if to say, What a mess, and chucks her head toward the other three chairs around the table.
Her hut is exactly as I remember it, cottagecore with a witchy edge, blue-glass bottles on the shelves and herbs strung before a crackling fireplace. The only difference is that the kitchen table has four chairs now, and four cups of tea on mismatched saucers.
We sip our tea in uncertain silence, not looking at one another. Zellandine butters bread and sets it in front of our Snow White, who eats with the determined efficiency of someone who doesn’t turn down free calories. In the fuller light of the hut she looks even younger than I thought, her cheeks still gently rounded, but she lacks a little kid’s wide-eyed trust. Her expression is closed and watchful, precocious in the bleak, uncanny way of a child who has spent too much time thinking about how and when she’ll die. It’s the expression I’m wearing in every one of my school photos.
“You’ll find a bed made, upstairs,” Zellandine tells her gently.
Snow White’s eyes cut to the bright-lit windows, shining like beacons into the black sea of trees, and Zellandine adds, even more gently, “I’ll keep watch tonight.”
Snow White nods in grave thanks, one hand on her chest, then repeats the motion to me and—after a moment’s hesitation—the queen. The queen’s eyes widen very slightly. I suppose wicked stepmothers aren’t often thanked.
Zellandine clears the cups as Snow White climbs the steps to the loft, which I’m 98 percent sure didn’t exist the last time I had tea in this hut. “There are three beds up there,” Zellandine observes.
The queen makes a visible effort to un-slump herself from the table. “I thank you, but I’m afraid Zinnia and I must be on our way.” Her tone aspires toward chilly rebuke, but lands closer to very tired.
“Oh my God, give it a rest.” I tap the silver frame of her mirror on the tabletop. “You can get back to your jailbreak first thing in the morning. I promise.”
Even her venomous glare is exhausted. After a long and weighty pause, she grates, “Your word that you will neither flee nor damage the mirror while I rest.”
I’m tempted to roll my eyes, but I restrain myself to a flat stare. “Sure, yeah. Scout’s honor.” I slide the mirror across the table and she stops it with two long fingers against the frame, her lips slightly parted in shock. “See what you get when you ask nicely?”
The queen cuts me a look, dark and inscrutable, before following Snow White upstairs.
“Sorry about her,” I say to Zellandine. “She’s the villain, obviously.”
Zellandine unties her apron, fingers slower and older than I remember them, and settles across from me. “Oh, we villains aren’t all bad.” A flash of humor in the pale blue of her eyes.
“No, she’s like, a legit villain, not a misunderstood protofeminist fairy.”
Zellandine makes a very neutral sound, her eyes glinting with that subterranean humor. “We don’t all get to choose the parts we’re given to play. You should know that better than most.”
I think unwillingly of all the other roles the queen was given: the ugly princess, the barren queen, the foreign monarch. A string of women with just enough power to be hated and not quite enough to protect themselves. I swallow a lump of inconvenient sympathy. “Sure, okay, but we all get to choose what we do next. A sad backstory is no excuse for being a dick. I should know.”
This feels to me like a solid rhetorical win, but Zellandine undermines it by murmuring, “You should, yes,” under her breath.
“And what’s that supposed to—”
“How’s the princess?” Zellandine asks it blandly, even pleasantly; there’s no reason the question should feel like a sucker punch.
I try to make my face equally bland and pleasant. “She’s good. Fine. She’s married now, actually.” My smile feels weird but I can’t seem to make it un-weird. “Doing the happily-ever-after thing, I guess.”
Zellandine gives me a nod containing more sympathy than is strictly warranted. “So how long has it been since you last saw her?”
“A while. A few months.” Six months and twelve days, but whatever. “Anyway, I don’t know why it matters. What matters is what the hell is going on? What are you doing here?”
Zellandine doesn’t look even slightly thrown by the topic change; it’s annoyingly hard to surprise a prophetic fairy. “I could ask you the same thing,” she replies evenly. When I squint, she lifts one shoulder. “This isn’t your story either.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not my fault. I’m headed back to the Sleeping Beauty–verse as soon as I can.” I don’t mention the secret, wild hope that I don’t have to return to my own story at all. That I’ve found a way to break free of this endless cycle of cursed girls and pricked fingers, to punch through the walls of my own plot and bust into other narrative dimensions like a fairy-tale Kool-Aid Man. And if I can make a new beginning for myself in some other story—what’s to stop me making a new ending too?
There’s a pause before I can speak through the hope now crawling up my throat. “I was kidnapped by an evil queen. How did you get here?”
Zellandine sits back in her chair, watching me as if she knows exactly what I didn’t say. “It’s happened a few times now. I step outside and find myself in deep woods I’ve never seen before, on a mountaintop that isn’t mine. Once, I woke to find my house all covered in sweets, with gingerbread for shingles and boiled sugar for window panes.”
I think: Oh shit. I say: “Oh shit.” I remember the talking wolf in the queen’s world, my juice-stained copy of Grimms’ fairy tales, things shaken loose from their moorings and set adrift. “You’re slipping between stories.”
Zellandine tilts her head. “There do seem to be a lot of tales that require someone old and magical living alone in the woods. I don’t mind it, mostly—cursing the occasional haughty prince, letting a handsome knight or two warm themselves by my fire.” I check her face for innuendo and find it suspiciously absent. “But it’s been happening more and more often. And I’m starting to feel like…” She trails away, her hand stroking the inside of her wrist. The flesh there has milky translucence I don’t remember from five years before.
“Like butter spread over too much bread?”
“Yes, like that,” she breathes. “And I confess, I was fond of my home on the mountainside. We miss it.” Her blackbird trills to her, but I hardly notice because the word home is rattling between my ribs like a stray bullet, carelessly fired. I think of my phone, fully charged but turned off, zipped in one of those inner backpack pockets no one ever opens. I think of three hands buried in the same popcorn bowl. I think of Charm’s face the last time I saw her, asking me for something I couldn’t give.
“Well.” I clear my throat, searching for levity and finding nothing but sickly sarcasm. “You have to admit, your story kind of sucked.”
“But it was mine.” Zellandine’s tone is sharper than I’ve heard before, grief-edged. She bites the inside of her cheek before adding, “I might not have chosen it, but I always chose what to do next.”
“Often on other people’s behalf, if I remember right.”
I meant it as a stinging rebuke, but Zellandine is nodding thoughtfully. “To their detriment, I think now. I was trying to save others from a fate like mine, but perhaps I was taking away their own right to choose, to make of their stories what they would.”
She gives me such a mild look that I bristle defensively. “Hey, I’m not—it’s not like that. I’m helping people fix their stories. And if they can’t be fixed, I help them escape.”
Zellandine is still looking at me with that weaponized mildness. “Oh, I don’t think any of us escape our stories entirely.”
“Prim did.”
“Did she?” I want to sneer that I don’t think Perrault or Disney ever pictured Sleeping Beauty marrying a hot butch with an undercut and a Superman tattoo, except I have this horrible sinking feeling that she might be right. I mean, I said it myself: She’s doing the happily-ever-after thing, I guess.
I raise my hands in mock-surrender, abruptly exhausted. “Well. I’m sorry about the narrative slippage. But I’m glad you were here tonight.” My chair scrapes against wood as I stand and make my way toward the steps.
Zellandine speaks just as my hand lands on the railing. “I don’t understand what’s happening to me, or how.” She turns, her eyes catching the dying red of the hearth, and in that moment I see her as she must be in other stories: the fairy who curses kingdoms, the crone who punishes ungrateful travelers, the witch who waits in the woods.
Her mouth twists, wry and tired, and she is only Zellandine again. “But I think both of us know why.”
* * *
ZELLANDINE’S BEDS ARE squashy and warm, piled deep with flannel and down, but I sleep in fitful bursts. Each time I drift toward unconsciousness I’m woken by some small noise—the scritching of skeletal black branches at the window, the distant shrieks of night birds—and left wide-eyed and panting in a pool of adrenaline. Snow White is apparently accustomed to sleeping through horror movie sound effects, but every time I look toward the queen’s bed, I catch the lambent white of open eyes before both of us turn away.
Breakfast the next morning is gray and quiet. I chase my oats in miserable circles, muffling phlegmy coughs in the crook of my elbow and refusing to wonder if they sound wetter than they did yesterday, if tiny protein buds are already sprouting along my bronchial tree like deadly Christmas lights.
The queen doesn’t look great either. There are spongy bruises beneath both eyes and her makeup is mostly smeared away, leaving her looking like a painting that sat too long in direct sunlight. Several determined freckles are poking through the remains of her face powder, forming an unexpected constellation.
Zellandine settles at the head of the table and folds her hands in a businesslike manner. “We didn’t introduce ourselves properly last night. I’m Zellandine, an old friend of Zinnia’s.”
She looks expectantly at the queen, who looks, for no reason, at me. For the briefest moment I see something raw and bleeding behind her eyes, like an unstitched wound, before she gathers the edges of herself and presses them back together. “You may call me Your Maj—”
“Eva.” I interrupt. The queen gives me a glare that’s more searching than scorching. I don’t like the vulnerable set of her eyes, another glimpse of that red wound in the middle of her, so I lean over and stage-whisper, “Short for Evil Queen.”
While she’s still sputtering, I gesture to the poor kid sitting next to me. “And this, of course, is Snow White.”
Snow White has been eating her oats in determined silence, looking at the windows as if she’s waiting for something to emerge from the trees. At the sound of my voice, she flinches so badly she sends her bowl shattering to the floor. She doesn’t seem to notice, crouching in her chair with her eyes pinned on me.
“Oh, my bad,” I say mildly. “Is that not your name?”
She answers slowly, as if she half expects me to sprout fangs and pounce. “No. You don’t—” Her eyes narrow, moving from my face to my jeans to the backpack propped against my chair. “You’re not … from here, are you?”
“Nope. I’m an interdimensional tourist, just passing through.”
She stares for another long, hard second before saying tersely, “My name is Red.”
“Huh.” There are several Red-variants running through Western folklore—Rose Red and Little Red, for a start—but I’m not sure what any of them would be doing in a Snow White story. (Yes, there is technically a Grimm story titled “Snow-White and Rose-Red,” but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the other Snow White; yes, it is very confusing. Take it up with Jacob and Wilhelm.)
Well. The name Snow White always had uncomfortable implications about racialized standards of beauty; maybe in this world, her mother named her for the drop of blood, rather than the snow it fell on.
“Hi, Red.” I say it as comfortingly as I can, which isn’t very. “You should be safe now. Zellandine is a powerful fairy, and she’ll keep you hidden from your wicked stepmother.”
Red’s eyebrows scrunch together. “My what?”
“Or mother, or sister, or whoever—”
“Perhaps,” Zellandine suggests, with a touch of asperity, “the girl could tell her own story.”
After a beat, during which I stick my tongue out at Zellandine and the queen sighs as if she regrets every decision that led her to be sitting at this table, Red does. It takes approximately two sentences to confirm that we are very, very far from the singing woodland creatures and flower-strewn forests of Disney. We’re not even in one of the Grimms’ bloody fantasies, with their violent morality; we’re someplace darker and wilder and much older, where the villain has a terrible hunger, and the hero is the one who survives it.
Red, it turns out, is not a princess. She’s a shepherd’s daughter from a poor village at the edge of the woods. Every winter, the queen sends her hunters to snatch the strongest and healthiest children and drag them back to her lair.
“Nobody knows what she does with them. Ivy says she gives them candies and jewels, but Ivy’s stupid.” Red’s voice is flat and even. “I think she plucks out their hearts and eats them. Either way, nobody ever sees them again.”
A small, appalled silence follows this. It’s the queen—Eva, I suppose, since she’s not the queen of anything around here, and the name seems to annoy her so deeply—who speaks first. “But why would she do that?”
Red gives her a look suggesting the cannibal queen’s personal motivations are fairly low on her list of concerns. Zellandine speculates about the latent magical properties of innocent hearts and the power that could theoretically be gained through ingestion, but I miss most of it because I’m busy hissing back and forth with Eva. (“Hold up, Miss Moral High Ground, didn’t you ask for Snow White’s lungs and liver?” “Yes, but I wasn’t going to eat them! I’m not depraved!”)
I shush Eva, which she visibly hates, and turn back to Red. “And your family, your parents—they just let her take you?” I consider Red’s hair, pulled away from her face in pretty twists, and remember my dad braiding my hair every day before school, his fingers gentle. Someone must love her. “They didn’t fight for you?”
Eva makes a scathing noise that tells me more than I wanted to know about her own parents, but Red answers with a soft and terrible brevity. “They did.”
Eva seems to be struggling with something, her lips working until she says, almost angrily, “Why don’t you all leave? Or hide?”
“She always finds you,” Red says, her voice still soft. “She talks to the moon, people say, or maybe a magic mirror. And then…” Her eyes flick to the window again, and this time the warm brown of her skin goes ashen. “And then her huntsman come to fetch you.”
There’s something funny about the grammar of that sentence, but it’s only when I hear the crunch of many pairs of boots through the woods, then the thud of many fists on the door, that I understand I misheard her. She didn’t say huntsman, with a singular A; she said huntsmen.
* * *
MY FIRST, PROFOUNDLY unhelpful thought is: This isn’t how it goes. There’s supposed to be a witch disguised as an old woman, an apple the color of blood, a pretty coffin in the woods. There’s supposed to be three chances and a happy ending. But instead there are fists pounding on the door.
