A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables #2)(31)

I think of Charm and Prim, who saved me, who are still hoping I’ll stick around and hold up my half of the bargain. “That’s been my experience, yeah.” My voice sounds thick in my ears.

“I believe they’ll crown Red as their new queen soon. I mean, I overheard some very dense discussion of the monarchy as a symbolic rather than political position, and something about a body of elected representatives, which all sounds rather messy, but”—Eva shrugs—“I suppose it’s close enough. The innocent girl sits upon her throne, the wicked witch is dead.”

“Is she? Dead, I mean.”

Eva looks at my face and then quickly away. “No,” she says softly. “I don’t know how her story will end, or whether redemption is possible for a creature like that, but I … asked that she be spared. They will build a glass tomb for her so that anyone who likes can see the proof of her defeat. And make sure she still sleeps.”

I have an urge to reach across the table and put my hand over hers, which I squelch before remembering that I’m not a dying girl or a hero anymore. I put my hand over hers. “So how did you end up here? Wherever here is.”

Eva’s hand turns palm-up under mine. Her neck is now a definite shade of coral. “I didn’t feel I should linger long in the castle. Red and her parents seemed grateful, but their friends didn’t seem especially fond of witches or queens, so I left. And I found a little house waiting for me in the woods, just like there always is.” Her smile this time looks like hard work. “So I suppose I shall rot away in a little hut, after all. It’s better than being tortured to death.”

I can hear the compromise in her voice, the same mediocre deal I cut in my own world. She’s not dead, but she’s still nameless and powerless, still trapped at the margins of a story that doesn’t belong to her. Not a happy ending, but then, she’s not the main character.

I find myself grasping desperately for alternatives. A voice that sounds very much like my therapist says, Bargaining again? I ignore it. “What if—maybe you could…” My eyes fall to the table, where she’s arranged a glittering jigsaw of mirror shards. She’s fit them all carefully back into the battered silver frame, with a single gap left for a missing piece. “You could come back to my world. With me. The mirror still works—”

Eva’s fingers tighten around mine, but her voice is wistful. “And who would I be in your world?”

“I don’t know, nobody in particular I guess?”

“Here I’d hoped to be somebody, one day. Isn’t that silly?”

I want to shake her. “I didn’t mean literally nobody, just like, not magical or royal or whatever. You could be a chemist or a fortune-teller or something, anything you wanted. I’d help.”

She sighs in a way that reminds me forcibly of Dr. Bastille. “I know. Thank you.” She slides her hand gently away from mine. “But I heard what Zellandine told you. I can’t go with you, and you can’t stay here without causing great harm.” Her voice lowers. “We can’t keep running from our stories forever.”

“No.” I don’t know whether I’m agreeing or disagreeing with her. My lips feel numb.

Eva rises slowly from the table and takes a book from the shelf. The cover is worn red cloth, with a purplish stain on the back. “This was here when I arrived, somehow. It belongs back in your world, I suppose.” She tries to say it casually, but I see the way her thumb moves along the spine.

I reach for the book with a feeling of profound unreality, flipping through the pages because that’s what you do when someone hands you a book and you don’t know what to say. Rackham’s art flutters past like tangled shadows: branches and ball gowns, towers and thorns, dozens of dark tales told so many times they came true.

I think of Dr. Bastille saying tartly, The existence of any story implies the existence of a storyteller. I guess there must have been a first time each of these stories was told, somewhere in the way-back reaches of time, centuries before the Grimms ever tried to turn a profit on them. It was probably just some ordinary person whispering across a fire or carving pictures into whalebones or daubing mud on the walls of a cave, casually calling a new universe into existence.

It occurs to me with a sudden, slightly hysterical surge of hope that I am a pretty ordinary person, myself. That the only thing stopping me from writing a new story is the fact that I’m bad at it, and dropped my creative writing class after three weeks rather than suffer a B+. I felt self-conscious and stupid every time I sat down to write, very aware that I was just making things up. But maybe every story is a lie until it isn’t; maybe I’m not the one who has to tell it, anyway.

“Do you have a pen?” My voice sounds completely normal, as if my pulse is not double-timing in my throat, as if my whole heart isn’t resting on the success or failure of this extremely sketchy plan.

Eva produces a trimmed feather and a pot of ink, looking at me as if faintly worried about mental stability. I turn to the very back of the book, past the afterword and the publisher’s note about the typeface, past Rackham’s final, curling vine. There are three extra pages at the end, entirely blank.

I set the quill to the page and write: Once upon a time …

And I swear, the universe listens. I feel it as a silent thrumming through the soles of my feet, the plucking of a string too vast to hear. The windows rattle in their frames.