Ever After, page 3
She was told about the strange things going on in the kitchen at night, though, soon enough. And after the first night I nearly ran afoul of the servant who lingered late with lights to see if she could either catch a culprit or see where the mice were coming from even that was not really an option any more.
Run, the mirrors said. Run, to some place where your ugliness will not cause such grief, such harm. Run.
Run, the gentler mirrors said. Or the crueler ones, I don’t know. Run, before you die.
So I packed a small carpetbag, with those small white hands with the thin fingers and the bitten nails, and it was a pathetic enough bundle of possessions to mark the short years I’d been on this earth. I took a spare set of clothes, a couple of favorite books, my slippers, my hairbrush, the earrings which had come down to me from the mother I had never known, given to me by my father one day without any word other than an attestation of their origin after which their existence was never mentioned again). I took some bread, a wheel of cheese. I took no mirrors.
I have no idea if they even pursued me or if my sudden absence at breakfast the next morning – and at dinner that night – and at breakfast the day after that – was greeted by nothing except relief, and perhaps a double check of whether any of the silver was missing. By that stage I was deep into the woods – alone, on foot, dragging the bag that despite its negligible contents was almost too heavy to hold after an hour of carrying it, without any idea of where I was going or how I was going to get there. And fall was already biting in the air, and winter was coming, soon now.
I walked for three days. The remains of the bread I had taken were stale and hard. The cheese was beginning to make me feel nauseous. I had no idea what I would eat, after these things were gone. I drank recklessly from a forest stream that I found, and worried that I hadn’t brought a container to carry water with me. This had been badly planned – but then, I hadn’t really planned it. The mirrors told me I had to go and I went. Ran. A refugee from hate and from malice.
I slept where I dropped, each night, shivering, wrapping myself in loving overhanging roots when I could (where it was warmer) and then shaking the leaves and the dirt down from my dress in the morning, like a human hedgehog getting uncomfortably rid of stuff stuck on its quills. On the fourth night, cold, exhausted, hungry, and increasingly thirsty (I had found no friendly stream that day), I collapsed heedlessly underneath a tall ash, too tired and too dispirited to go any further. Eventually, I slept.
When I woke, it was to three short, ugly little men who stood above me, eyeing me contemplatively. Two of them carried woodsmen’s axes. Another carried a large dagger, almost long enough (on him) to be called a short sword. They wore badly handmade felt hats, the stitching uneven and coming apart where the seams were, with signs that those seams had been re-stitched before. Possibly many times. They also wore almost identical trousers, leather jerkins, and boots which looked as though they has seen better days.
Their eyebrows were huge and furry, their lips I couldn’t see (but at least one showed a crooked tooth through a thicket of beard), and their eyes were small and close-set on either side of noses which looked, to a man-jack of them, as though they’d been broken in several close-quarters fisticuff fights and re-set badly.
For some reason, I warmed to them immediately.
“What are you doing out here, on your own?” one of them asked, frowning, wrinkling his features into an even more frightening formation than before.
“I’m running away,” I said. And then, for no reason that I could think of, added, “Because I am too ugly.”
Their expressions were interesting, for a moment. And then one of them said gently,
“Are you hungry? You don’t have to be afraid – but our cottage is not too far away, and at least one of our brothers is home, cooking. It won’t be pretty and it won’t be nearly enough – but we’ll share.”
I thought about stale bread and the remains of that increasingly iffy cheese, and I said, “Thank you. That would be very nice.”
Well, I was ugly. But I wasn’t stupid, and nobody had ever said I had bad manners.
The cottage was sturdy but it definitely showed that a gaggle of men lived here with no woman’s touch to the place. Axes stood leaning on walls, or fallen down beside them; there was a layer of dust on things not touched regularly; the kitchen was a mess of dirty dishes, many of which were doing second-go-around duty as manhandled by the brother who had been designated as cook. He looked surprised when the three who had escorted me there ushered me into the house, but not put out. He simply wiped another plate down with a (none too clean) cloth and set it at the table, scootching the others closer together.
I was welcome here. It was a strange feeling.
And there were no mirrors in that house. Not one. There was a blessed silence from whispers.
There were three beds in that house, and it seemed as though they were all shared, by a changing cast of the seven brothers who lived here – seven small, ugly men who eked out a small living as woodsmen and hunters and sometimes builders, if someone would hire them to raise a barn or a small house. I was given one bed, and they all piled into the other two, when night came – there was no question of them turning me out again to go on my way, not until I chose to go.
And I stayed for a day, and then another. And another. And then one day I found myself alone in the house, all the brothers away at work somewhere, and I rolled up my sleeves and repaid their kindnesses. I fetched water, and scrubbed all their dishes to a state of cleanliness which they probably hadn’t seen since they had been new. I put everything away in its own tidy and accessible place. I cleaned out the fireplace. I swept the floors. I made the beds with clean linens – they didn’t seem to have much of those and what they had was not always free from rips and holes, and I repaired what I could with needle and thread I found in the cottage. I even tackled one of the coming-apart hats which I had found tossed into a dark corner, apparently as unredeemable.
They returned, the brothers, as the light began to fail and a thin snow began to fall, in twos and threes, from they had all been. They noticed the place was different. They raised their eyebrows, but said nothing. Neither did I. After the evening meal I sat in front of the fire working on the rest of the hats. They said nothing. Neither did I.
But the day after that two of them stayed behind at home when the others went away, and began sawing and hammering at something at the back of the house. An extension quickly took shape there; they raised the walls and had the roof on before the real snows came, and by that stage it had its own hand-made wooden bed with a straw mattress, its own pillow, its own little pot-bellied iron stove which two of them had carted up from somewhere on a wagon and whisked off into the new addition without a word. It even had attempts at crude comfort, like a small rug beside the bed, an oil lantern which gave a good light, for sewing, perhaps. I moved in there, without a word spoken. Everything was understood. I learned to cook better than the itinerant brother who happened to be in charge of the kitchen managed; I even, when the spring came, asked one of them for seeds and seedlings and started a small garden out back where my extension was. And we had fresh carrots and beans and pumpkins that year, and there was even apple pie (when they brought me the apples, and the flour, and the butter).
Only once was our first meeting ever referenced again.
It came weeks, maybe months, after I had been living there, a part of their household, a part of their lives.
“You are not ugly,” the oldest brother said to me, abruptly, one evening as I stood outside the cottage’s front door to greet him as he came home. “You said that to us, that time, in the forest. You are the loveliest thing any of us have ever seen and we are grateful for your presence here.”
“The mirrors told me,” I said faintly.
He held my gaze with his own, and said, his voice level and flat, “Mirrors lie.”
He was right. Mirrors of glass and silver lie all the time, because they only see the outer skin. But I was looking in a mirror even as he spoke, in the mirror of his eyes, and I could see myself reflected back at me.
No, not ugly. Not ugly any more. Snow-white, and dark-haired, and smiling with those full lips and showing a crooked tooth.
I ran, from hate and rage and malice and evil – and somehow a refuge was waiting after all. A place where there were no mirrors, and I would always be loved. And treasured. And respected. And beautiful.
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Alma Alexander, Ever After
