A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables #2)(14)

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 Disney 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.