Lips red as blood. I cut the smile so big in them they never stop grinning. The edges turned gnarled and black after that, but the ruby lips were still there, stretched and mutilated. Skin white as snow. I tried just to get a tan at first, but this faded after I turned a bright, flower pink. So I took the fire poker and rolled it across my arms and hands. The skin was still white but mottled and pinched, even turning gray in places. Hair black as ebony. At first, I cut my hair but it quickly grew back. Then I attempted to cut it and pour acid over my scalp but was stopped. So I shaved it constantly, at the first sign of any soft fuzz, and often used the razor to flay jagged scars.
Still she kept asking that horrible mirror, "Who is the fairest of them all?"
And still that damn mirror said my nickname over and over.
She would look at me and scowl, but the doubt remained that he would still come in the night and rape me. He still would come and make me his Queen instead of her.
“Veils can cover what you've done to yourself,” she said.
So she asked the Huntsman to take me out and kill me. “Bring back her eyes so I know you have done it,” she begged.
Perhaps, it was because of how young I was, it was certainly not because of how I looked, but he spared me. He said that deer have dark eyes like mine and he would convince her. After all, he had never lied to her in thirty years of service. It was easier to send me out to starve in the woods then to kill me and carry my eyeballs back to my mother. It was easier for her to believe her daughter was dead then to give me into the hands of him. And it always comes down to what people would rather believe. The mirror still would have told her I was alive, but then maybe she may have never had the chance to ask it again.
To be honest, I'm not sure how I survived as long as I did. I knew what was poisonous for the most part because I helped my mother gather herbs. She was not often allowed out of the manor, but once a season she could go and “wander,” as he called it. So two or three times a year, with three handmaidens, me, and probably at least fifteen guards, we were allowed out of the walls. I was never sure if the guards were there to protect us or to keep us where we were supposed to stay.
One of my first memories of my mother was her gathering lavender; her hands full of small, purple flowers; the smell wafting around her; her dark hair loose and shimmering like water in the sunlight. She was laughing as I danced towards her; I was probably three at the time. The sun had lit her dark eyes with flecks of silver. But before I reached her, he came up behind me on horseback, home early. Her eyes had dimmed, her smile sagged, her whole body slumping. She dropped the lavender in a heap, and desperately dug in the grass, looking for her wimple.
Swiftly, he had stepped around me before I even realized he was there. He grabbed two fistful of her long hair. He tore one handful out of her scalp, shoved it in her face and screamed, “This should be the only way that your hair is out in sight!”
She had shrieked, hoarsely, a howl of fear and pain. I had kept going towards her, for I had not yet learned what he would do to anyone who interfered. The eldest handmaiden, Tikka, scooped me up and turned me away.
She covered one of my ears and spoke into the other. “Hush now, child,” she whispered over and over again. Trying, I think, to block out the screams of my mother and the curses of him.
Later that night, he promised her for the first time that I would be his, just as she was now his. I would be his bride, his Queen in her stead. The next day, my mother commissioned the Mirror.
She told him it was a special mirror that would always tell the truth. She said it would help her stay beautiful for him. So he told the craftsman to follow her guidelines exactly. About a month or so later, he left and my mother presented the full plans to the craftsman.
It was a 10-foot tall mirror, which she eventually put in her dressing room, a place no one but her and I entered, not even he trespassed there. I think she may have warded that doorway against him. It was also the room I slept in, with a maid sleeping outside the door I bolted. The mirror loomed over me as I slept; a dark curtain hung in front of it but the long outline of it still visible. It had silver framing and was bolted to the stone wall. The framing had curled, looped writing all around it. My mother said that was partially why it was so large, to fit all the words she needed to hold all the magic she gave it. He knew she had magic; he had been spellbound by her himself once. But he thought her magic trifling.
“Woman’s magic,” He called it with a dismissive wave of a hand and a slight wrinkle in his nose.
He thought it the kind that brewed mild healing potions and poultices, and helped women with child-birthing and other womanly pains. Nothing like what she made with that mirror. Nothing even like the ward she put around in the mirror room. I think he truly thought no woman capable of what my mother did.
After the mirror was set up, it took ten men to do so, my mother locked herself in the room with it for three days. Tika would not let me near the door. I kept trying to peer underneath and stick my chubby, child fingers through, as though that would somehow coax my mother out. On the fourth day, my mother emerged, haggard, with half-moon circles under her eyes so dark they looked etched there. She's sagged into Tika's arms, who half-carried, half-dragged her to the bed. Tika called for water and food, snapping her fingers at the stunned serving girls. We were lucky he was away, consumed by a border dispute the next full year. For if he had seen her, pale and limp and clammy, as she was for the next six months, he would have cast her out and taken me that year. I was five. But that never mattered to someone like him.
Perhaps the border skirmishes were the mirror's doing as well; I was never sure. From that year on, he was mostly gone. He would come back weary, most of the fire snuffed out of his silver eyes. He would comment on how my mother was still so lovely. She seemed hardly to have aged at all. And how the mirror, which he had never seen, was such a wise idea of his. He would glance at me, still unmarred at this time, and nod. “Not yet,” he would mumble and walk past. He was perhaps home three days out of each year for those next ten years.
When I was fourteen, the stare he gave me was longer, hungrier, even though my mother was still plump, pale, and flawless. She didn't even have gray in her hair, though I suspected that was dye and not the mirror's power. That year, I burned my arms, hands, chest, back; all the skin I could reach with that hot poker.
I had locked myself in the dressing room with the mirror and the stoked up the fire. I had stared at the black mirror, wishing magic could lie. I didn't cry, but I brushed the mirrors gilding, and wished I could somehow escape, knowing my mother had tried and almost been killed in the attempt. She had lost other daughters this way before me. He had built a golden prison to keep her after she scaled the walls a second time, about five years before I was born. It was secluded and walled from the rest of the manor, with its own garden, walls and kitchen. He claimed it was for her protection. I leaned my face into the mirror and wanted to smash my head into it. Then, I slowly took the glowing poker and began to roll it over my skin.
I had fainted and nearly set the room on fire but my mother had found me in time. The only damage a singed curtain and blackened floorboard. I had, on the other hand, nearly killed myself. When I awoke four days later, my skin was pink and mottled, and tight in the wrong places. It pinched to move my face and I could barely move my arms. Inhaling hurt, because the fragile skin there was tight and still blistered slightly in places.
My mother had glowered over me, "Do you know what you did?" It was the only time she ever screamed at me
I shrunk back, and shook my head.
She sagged onto the floor and laid her face against my pillow. Only then did I see the deep lines creasing her forehead; she looked worn like she had after her days with the mirror. Her eyes were sunken and she looked thin. There was a pale gloss of sweat on her nose. Despite the pain of moving even my fingers, I gently moved the ones that lay between her face and mine towards her forehead.
"I had to….heal you," she whispered.
"Why didn't you let me just die?" That truly had been what I aimed for.
"You can't...yet. Just, please," she swallowed. "Give me more time."
I moved my hand away from her and nodded.
When he came back, and I was fifteen, he barely seemed to notice my scars and only looked at me longer. None of my self-marring seemed to deter or even phase him. That year was when I cut my lips open up, and began to shave my head. Also that year, my mother found a small crease near her left eye. That was the day she told the Huntsman to kill me.
Earlier that week she had found out the land disputes he had been absorbed in for years were settling. He had decimated most of the surrounding landlords, but was still away negotiating the treaty with one final Lord, who had truly thwarted him. So I like to think, whatever magic had been holding him away was fading, and whatever had kept my mother young was dying. In fact, the mirror itself seemed to be dimming. The silver was tarnishing, the etchings blurring. When my mother stood before it to ask that fateful question, the voice that replied out of the reflection-less depths was weaker and graveled. I like to think my mother sending me away was her last, perhaps futile, way of saving me. Even miles away, in the wilderness that was the Eastern Woods, owned by no one, not even him, even with a scarred body, mangled face and scalp, I shivered when I thought of him. And what he must have done to my mother when he found out I was gone. Somewhere deep in my gut, like a hard rock settling low down in my pelvis, I knew he would find me.
I spent most of that first summer in the woods moving further inward. There were rumors of things in the forest. It was said old magic still lived there; the wind that moved the trees to life and breathed the faye into movement. The ancient kind magicians once crafted to their liking. Some said the archaic spirits wandered in these lands still; the deadly, silver faye, the oldest nyads, and other things that had no names. My mother had told me some of the old fire witches still could be found there. They could see the soul at the time of death and they might even be able to tell your afterlife fate.
As I moved further into the forest, I half expected to see small fairies flitting in the ponds and under the dells of the trees. I saw things that seem to be dark, hulking shadows in the corner of my eye. Shadows that seemed to breathe and shift. Then they melded into ordinary bushes or trees when I looked directly at them.
I dreamt silver faye slid near me, while I slept and tried to prick me with fiery-edged knives. I somehow knew they wanted the magic in my blood. They would come, hover over me, long and lean dark shadows, their tongues slithering across their thin lips, like they were hungry. They looked gaunt, bony, and they swayed a little as they stood over me. They never came any closer than the edge of my campfire light. They edged closer as the fire died down but never touched me. I was afraid to contemplate how real the dreams were. I just kept moving further inwards and eventually the dreams, and maybe the actual faye, left me behind.
As I journeyed, the trees became more gnarled and twisted, broader and older. Some oak trees grew together to form twisted halves of a knotted pair. Long, gray moss hung limply, long tendrils of it crossing between branches, like the curve of curtains. It shivered in the warm wind. The humidity had slowly increased as I had journeyed, so I knew I had steadily traveling south. I was probably close to my mother's ancestral lands, which bordered the Southernmost stretch of the woods.
I had asked my mother once why she had married him and left the warmth of her home for his barren, northern castle. We had just asked the mirror the daily question. The voice was fading and the blackness had stopped shimmering. She slowly turned to stare at me, in the way she did when I had cursed my maid or tore my newest pair of stockings. I was probably ten at the time. She had looked down her long, thin nose at me and raised a dark eyebrow.
She slowly turned back to the mirror, tracing the etchings with her fingers. “I had little choice," she had whispered.
She never told me about her family, just complained of how dry the northern air made her hair, and how scaly my pale skin always was. I had bitterly replied, "I hope it all dries and cracks and falls off."
She had frowned at this but seemed little surprised. She had long stopped scolding me for my morbid wishes to be ugly and maimed. But sometimes, softly, she could say, "Be careful what you say, child. Words have more power than you think."