a Faerie Duchess of Remarkable Bearing
According to Her Selves
One is never really alone with a mirror. Add a second mirror facing the first, and one’s company multiplies infinitely. So many versions of oneself, seen from so many angles. This is truth. This is happiness. Violette pities anyone with fewer than forty-two mirrors in her bedroom, two hundred and forty-seven in her grand hall, and sixty-three in her water closet. She even has five of them on her ceiling over the bed so that when she wakes in the night with the candles still burning, as she has done just now, the million and one insects of loneliness lurking in the shadows can’t touch her.
Violette has memorized every inch of herself, from the wavy hair as glossy as a ruby in sunlight, to the eyelashes as long and elegant as spiders’ legs, to the lips as perfectly pursed as a taut bow just before the kill. And yet . . .
Violette marvels at the new and wonderful things she is still learning about herself, qualities she never knew were there, never even thought possible. Like the curse or, rather, its amendment. Proof that her power is indeed enough to counter Malfleur’s. The spindle. The girl’s birthday. A princess asleep. It has all occurred as it was outlined sixteen years ago.
The only catch is the sleeping sickness. It was never meant to infect others.
For a fleeting moment, Violette fears she has done something wrong. Hadn’t Belcoeur, before she vanished, brought the golden spinning wheel to Violette and asked that she keep it safe? She should never have agreed in the first place. It had given her a bad feeling all along, even before the princess was born. It had been important to Belcoeur, obviously, or she wouldn’t have asked, and Violette had felt the burden and the sadness of its presence. It had become a symbol of loss.
Decades later, after the child’s christening, she didn’t like the object of a curse being so close to her all the time, staring at her like a big dumb animal, majestic and silent and hungry. She resented being asked to keep so many secrets for others, when she had so many of her own to tend to. That was why she’d finally decided to get rid of it. But it couldn’t be burned or melted or destroyed. So eventually she’d simply stowed the cumbersome thing away in one of those abandoned cottages in the royal forest. At the time, it hadn’t seemed particularly foolish; what had seemed foolish would have been to believe that a faerie curse could still come true. Everyone knew how far the fae had fallen, even then.
Or maybe they hadn’t. And maybe Violette hadn’t—hasn’t—either.
Surely it’s not too grandiose a notion to think she might now save the kingdom. It cannot be hyperbolic to assume she, Violette, is both the source and answer to all this madness. She probably should do something about it. Try another curse reversal, perhaps.
Yes, she really ought to get out and let the world marvel.
She tucks her fluffy covers up to her chin, watching intently as her double mimics her in the mirror directly above. She is pleased to see that this, her most favored reflection, has paid such dutiful attention.
She begins to drift off again. It cannot be paranoia to assume that the night is full of the sightless and the angry—people who’ve had their vision robbed by Violette herself. Can it?
She looks up, staring into her own eyes between each heavy blink, her face almost unfamiliar in the waning, wavering lamplight. What was it she was pondering?
Oh, right. The sleeping sickness, and how to end it.
Then again, she thinks, perhaps it’s not such a good idea to get involved after all. Going out and saving the kingdom would require interacting with other people . . . seeing not just their appearances but through to their hidden fears, their anger, their twisted, thwarted insides. And she’s had about enough of that for one lifetime.
With that decision made, she closes her eyes.
Infinite reflections close their eyes too.