Once, there were two sisters.

Rose had hair like threads of black silk and cheeks like two red petals and a voice that was gentle and sometimes hard to hear. Snow had hair like white swan down and eyes the color of the winter sky, with a laugh that was sudden and wild.

They lived in a cottage in the woods, but it hadn’t always been so.

“Tell me a story,” Snow called in the dark. She moved restlessly, wide awake in her bed.

“You’ll wake Mama,” Rose murmured. “Go back to sleep.”

Snow sat up, her bed creaking. “Rose?” Her whisper drifted in the dark. “Please?”

Their bedroom was a loft that lay above the hearth and kitchen and below a pointed ceiling. On one side were the sisters’ beds. On the other side was their mother’s bed. Rose peered through the gap in the faded screen that turned one small room into two very tiny ones. The blue light in the window showed the curve of their mother’s side rising and falling softly.

Rose sighed. “Okay, but I’ll come over there.” The hush of a match sounded as Rose lit the yellow beeswax stump between their beds, followed by a few soft tiptoed thumps as her feet padded across the floor. She climbed under the covers of Snow’s bed.

“Your feet are freezing,” Snow whispered.

Rose drew her knees up to her chest. “Which story do you want to hear?” Rose asked. Her dark hair glowed with glints of red and gold in the candle’s light. “The one about the magic lamp?”

“No,” Snow said, pulling the covers tightly around her shoulders. She smiled, her pale hair a messy tumble on the pillow.

“The mermaid and the monkey?” Rose asked.

“No,” Snow whispered impatiently. “Not that one.”

“Or the fairy tale about—”

“No, no fairy tales.” Snow tugged gently on the sleeve of Rose’s nightgown. “Tell the story of us.”

After another sigh, Rose began.

“Once upon a time,” Rose whispered in her best storyteller’s voice, “there were two girls, one with black hair and one with white. They were born to a nobleman who was as tall and as broad as he was gentle and kind. Their mother was from a common family, but she had a rare and delicate beauty, like—”

“Like a Siamese cat,” Snow offered.

“Yes, like a Siamese cat,” Rose continued softly. “And their mother was a painter and sculptor, who loved to wake up the things she said were asleep inside big slabs of marble, and her statues filled the sculpture garden. And their father loved to build places that didn’t exist until he imagined them. He loved to read about all the things that other people had imagined and built, so he had a library with shelves that reached to the ceiling.

“Their mother and father loved each other, too, of course, more than books or sculptures. But more than anything else, they loved their two daughters.

“And since love is something you cannot see, the mother and father tried their best to make an invisible thing visible. So when the girls were both still very small, their parents commissioned a spectacular garden, a wonder that people would come from miles and miles to see. Stretching the entire length of the house, this garden was like no garden that had ever existed or will ever exist again.

“Half of the garden was filled entirely with white flowers of every kind—with pale, delicate bells of lily of the valley, spires of vanilla foxgloves with speckled throats, climbing moonflower vines, and bright-eyed anemones, from the tiniest white daisy to ivory dahlias the size of dinner plates. And—”

“And it was called the Snow Garden,” Snow interrupted.

“And it was called the Snow Garden,” repeated Rose with a sad smile. “And the other half bloomed only in red: vermilion poppies and scarlet pansies and wine-colored snapdragons and Japanese lanterns the color of fire. And dozens and dozens of roses, each with a hundred red petals…”

Rose trailed off. She knew hearing the story made Snow happy; otherwise she wouldn’t ask for it all the time. But for Rose, in the telling of it, she was left with a hollow that grew with each word.

Rose knew her sister was the kind of person who wanted to see or hear or taste something she loved over and over again, to remind herself that it was real. Rose was another kind of person: she wanted to hold on to a thing she loved as tightly as she could. She wanted to keep it special and safe, for fear that it might get used up—or worse, that it might escape, like sand or sugar slipping between her fingers.

“You know a lot of words for red,” Snow whispered. Her eyes were closed. “Now tell about the swans.”

Rose looked at her sister’s face, a content pale moon in the dark.

Rose breathed in and pulled the quilt to her chest. She continued the story dutifully, her voice as low as she could make it, so low it was barely there. “And in the center of the Snow Garden and the Rose Garden was a pond ringed with willows, and tracing circles on the water were two swans, one white with a dark golden beak, and the other coal black with a beak of the brightest red.

“And this is where the girls were born, the place they grew up. This is where they had closets stuffed with dozens of beautiful dresses, where their porcelain dolls had so many lovely things to wear they needed closets of their own. This is where they had an extremely fat cat named Earl Grey, and where they had their lessons and acted out plays and had their tea. And when they played hide-and-seek, Snow would always hide in the sculpture garden and Rose would always hide in the library, so it wasn’t even that good a game….”

Rose looked down to see if Snow was awake. Her sister’s eyelids fluttered, but she didn’t seem to notice that the story had stopped.

Rose went on, her voice even softer than before, as quiet as a breath. “And at night, this is where they were tucked into big brass beds wrought with flowers and birds, and where their father would read them to sleep or tell them stories about magic lamps and dragons and faraway places….”

Gently, Rose climbed out of the warm covers and tucked them around Snow’s shoulders. “As their mother put out the lights, their father would say, ‘Go to sleep, my only Snow. Go to sleep, my only Rose.’ ”

She made her way back to her own bed and snuffed out the candle.

“The end.”

But that wasn’t really the end.

There was more, but it wasn’t the kind of story anyone wants to tell, let alone call their story, because it was full of tears, and horses who can’t speak, and fathers who never come home, and questions that have no answers.

The simplest version was this: Their father had set out one day into the woods and never returned. His horse had come back alone, the only witness to what had happened. When their mother opened the bag that hung at the horse’s side, and spread the contents on the ground, their father’s things seemed to be untouched. His ledgers, his pipe and tobacco, and even a fold of paper money were all there. Only three things were missing: a watch, a blanket, and a knife.

These weren’t clues that meant anything, really. They could be wherever he was, these things. The girls hoped he was somewhere, anywhere. He might return, might fling open the doors with a wild story to tell. He might.

But the day after the horse came home, the sisters overheard the cooks whispering. Snow and Rose stood around the corner, holding their breath as the cooks chattered in speculation: “A dozen things could’ve done him in: great beasts…old enchantments…Menace of the Woods…or the Bandits of No Man’s Land….A dozen things…and the poor little misses will never know….”

Every whisper that filled the air in that house was the same: since there were wild things in the forest, something wild had been the death of him.

Still, for days, they hoped. Rose and Snow wandered the halls of the echoing house they lived in then, half expecting to see him or hear his voice. It was hard to believe that a person could be there and then suddenly not be there, never be there. So the sisters waited and watched. But the more days that passed, the more a final, terrible truth settled in the air.

That was when their mother locked herself in her room. That was when Rose holed up in the library and cried herself to sleep in the chair her father used to sit in when they read together. She fell asleep wishing the truth to be something else. But every time she woke up, the truth was still there.

But Snow didn’t cry, not even then. She didn’t cry because the truth everyone else felt was not her truth. She wouldn’t believe her father was gone. And no matter how much time passed, she insisted he would come back. Rose couldn’t say to Snow, to insist to her, that sometimes you lose someone in a way that means he will never read to you, or say good night, or swing his arms around you again.

The servants dyed a few of the girls’ dresses black, and this was what they wore, day after day. It wasn’t long after they put on their black dresses that the man with the thin face came. The sisters watched as he told their mother that they couldn’t live in the house with the Snow Garden and the Rose Garden anymore. He told her that the gardens and the house and the dresses and the library and the servants and all the rest belonged to the council of noble families.

That was when Snow kicked the man with the thin face soundly in the shins, but it didn’t change what they had to do.

They left the house and went to a cottage in the woods, the woods that had stolen their father and husband, the woods that people whispered about in tales of strange and wild things. They went to the woods because there was nowhere else to go.

And the ending of that story is the beginning of this story.

Snow and Rose didn’t know they were living in a fairy tale—people never do.

They came to the cottage when spring was nearly summer. Snow, Rose, and their mother brought with them enough to make a new life in the woods, including Earl Grey, squirming in Snow’s arms. To get there, one simply followed the path, which began at the edge of the woods, high on the hillside. There could be no confusion because there was only one path, one way through the forest. It wasn’t a real road but one cleared by feet and wheels and hooves.

The cottage was made of stone and wood, and sat alone in the forest. It had belonged to their mother’s great-uncle, who had built it when he was a young man, a long time ago. She had visited him there when she was almost too small to remember, called Edie instead of Edith.

Snow and Rose didn’t know of its existence until it became their home, and by then it had been empty for so long that the stone outside was furred in moss and the inside was blanketed in dust and strung with cobwebs. When they arrived and were standing just inside the door, their mother put her hands on her daughters’ shoulders and gave them each a small squeeze that meant, I cannot do this alone.

So for the first time in their lives, the girls had to clean. They cleaned out the tin shed and pulled water from the well and scrubbed the cottage from the tops of the walls to the floorboards, pulling long-abandoned birds’ nests from the fireplace. They helped their mother stuff mattresses for the three beds and fill the pantry with the cartload the cooks had sent with them, sacks of flour and grains and coffee and sugar.

All that remained of their old life fit into three trunks. When they had unpacked the useful and ordinary things, like clothes and pots and quilts, and their mother had hung their father’s portrait on the wall, Snow and Rose found their special box. It was nestled in the bottom of the last trunk. It held their treasures. Inside was Snow’s violin, which she placed carefully on a shelf next to her bed, not knowing if she’d ever feel like playing it again. The other treasures were the gifts their father brought them from his travels: a quilt from Bengal that was sewn together with ten thousand stitches, a book of stories from Japan, a little Turkish carpet, a brass elephant from Africa.

When the cottage was clean and the trunks were unpacked, the family began to find a routine in an unfamiliar place. But something else was unfamiliar to Snow and Rose. Their mother never smiled. She didn’t paint or carve or do anything she used to do. She drifted through the house like a sleepwalker, her movements and conversations automatic and distant. She was more delicate than ever, but her sadness hung around her heavily. It took up a lot of room in such a small house.

Since they did not know what to do, the sisters went outside. Snow and Rose would wake up and have their breakfast, and then Snow would walk down the path through the trees, step beyond the border of the woods, and watch their old house down in the valley.

Snow made it no secret that she didn’t like the cottage. She didn’t like the peasant stew or the rough bread they ate with it. She didn’t like the hard beds or the drafts that whistled through the gaps in the walls at night. Snow didn’t like it when Rose said, “It will get better.” How could it? The cottage was small and shabby, and shabby things don’t turn into something better.

Most of all, Snow didn’t like the people who had moved into their old house. They had stolen her life and stolen their gardens. So all through the spring, she watched the house, with Earl Grey beside her. Together they watched the comings and goings of the invaders, like two hungry cats ready to pounce on unsuspecting prey.

While Snow watched their old house and seethed, Rose would nestle against a tree with a book or go for a walk with her satchel over her shoulder, up and down the path. Between Snow’s anger and her mother’s sadness, it was hard for Rose to keep her own heart afloat, but the walks helped. As she made notes of the ferns and flowers that grew at her feet, she strained her eyes to see what lay in the dark forest beyond the path, and for those moments her curiosity drowned out everything else. The path to the village was well traveled and bright. But after all they had heard, after all that had happened, Rose was careful not to leave the path.

Sometimes she would go find Snow on the hillside and read aloud beside her. Or weave wild flowers into chains, trying to soften the sharpness of Snow’s anger.

Out on the hillside, where nobody but Earl Grey could hear, the sisters whispered to each other. They wondered about the things that were missing when the horse came back alone. What they meant, if they were clues, if they were still somewhere in the woods. They wondered about the way the woods might take someone and why.

The wondering burned inside them both but took different shapes because of what they believed: Rose wanted to know why their father had been taken, and Snow wanted to know how to get him back. Their wondering touched the edges of things they could never know, about this place that had changed their fortunes once and would change them again.