Mirror, Mirror

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.) 
— Sylvia Plath, “Mad Girl’s Love Song”

The Mirror

The mirror clung to the wall as the king sold off everything in its sight. He tugged at the gilded frame with a boot braced against the plaster. The mirror trembled but held fast. It had occupied this spot for generations and would rather shatter than allow this whelp to un-home it.

One might imagine the mirror would be bored after generations of overseeing a solitary room—and only a sliver of it, at that. The mirror never saw the full picture, but it knew every inch of the scene it surveyed. This was the mirror’s kingdom, and anyone who passed within the bounds of its frame, its subjects. It was the keeper of their truths.

It remembered the king’s mother, and his mother’s mother, and so on, who had sat before it scrutinizing their pores, plucking stray chin hairs, unburdening their fears into its depths. The mirror watched King III kiss his queen’s child- swollen stomach. It watched King X beat his queen with the bedpan and what King XIV did to his chambermaid on the floor just out of sight, as if even the mirror would be one too many witnesses.

The mirror endeavored always to portray the truth, regardless of how painful. But it did not reflect the worst of humanity unscathed; it bore a hairline crack from when the most recent king, as a young boy, had flung a riding boot at his mother’s head and missed. He’d been ineffectual since birth. He couldn’t even save his first wife; then he died. Now, another woman sat before the mirror, the newly widowed queen of the newly widowed king.

The Queen

The king had spotted her, then simply Sarah the goose girl, amidst the townsfolk on May Day. His eyes locked on her and held fast as she spun around the maypole, weaving in and out of the other girls, a red ribbon sliding in her palm. She bloomed under the cool appraisal of his gaze.

When the fiddle stopped and the dancers broke apart, she fell, flushed, at his feet. The king extended a gloved hand, and she accepted it—and his offer of marriage—while the others looked on with ribbons dangling from their fists.

As the king bowed to her, the townspeople fell silent, their faces thunderous with jealousy. The people she’d known all her life suddenly became strangers to her. But what did she care? The king had freed her from this life of dirt and toil; she would be queen! Pride sealed her fate.

The Huntsman

He’d admired Sarah from afar since they were children; she was in pigtails, her hair gold as wheat, a spray of freckles across her nose, her scent of freshly baked bread. He was too conscious of the grime under his fingernails to speak to her—until one morning, when he checked his snares to find he’d trapped the girl. She was asleep on a bed of pine, and when he knelt at her side, she awoke with a start, alert as a hare.

She watched, unblinking and wary, as he sliced through the noose around her ankle. The rope snapped. She shied away from his outstretched hand, but he held steady, his eyes cast down—just as he had when earning the trust of his hound.

The huntsman held his breath until she slipped her hand into his. He helped her to her feet, and she shook out her skirt. The hound, then no more than a puppy, nipped at her booted ankles.

“Thank you for freeing me,” Sarah said, and with her gratitude, sealed his heart in her grasp.

The Queen

She loved the huntsman—but with a girl’s love, all consuming, self-defining, obliterating. She hadn’t had a chance to find out who she was before she became the huntsman’s. He’d avoided her eyes, his gaze flitting everywhere, until she gave him her hand—and he looked her full in the face. His eyes were the bright green of a ribbon she’d coveted in a store window. Until that moment, she’d thought that ribbon was what she wanted most in the world.

The Huntsman

Sarah joined him in the forest as he checked his snares and dozed in his lap as he waited for deer to wander within shooting range. She turned away from the killings, proclaiming she could never; he must have a heart of stone. It’s his livelihood, he said, and even then, the huntsman never took killing for granted.

His godfather, a woodsman who preferred the company of animals to men, had taught him to kill with compassion. He’d forced the boy to bear witness as the doe he’d shot folded to the dirt, and to meet her eye as he sliced along her jugular.

The Queen

On Sundays, he would bring a gift of rabbit or venison to her parents’ cottage. Her mother baked sourdough, and her father stewed vegetables from their farm, and they dined together by the light of the fire. When Sarah’s father died, the huntsman prepared the vegetables and they planned their future, though he had yet to kiss her. He would build them a house and free her from a life of goose gathering so she could do as she wished. They would have three children, he said—and when she shuddered at the thought, he promised she alone would be enough for him. Good, she responded; children are little more than snares at their mother’s ankles.

When Sarah’s mother died, the meals ended. Her uncle claimed the cottage and allowed her to stay—in exchange for cooking and cleaning and indulging his every whim— and never let her forget his kindness.

The day her mother was lowered into the ground, Sarah took the huntsman’s hand and led him into the forest beneath the pines. She put a palm to his chest, pushed him back against a tree, and claimed his lips.

The Hound

By the scent of the huntsman’s aftershave, she knew they were going to see the lazy goose girl who rolled around in the hay with the huntsman while her geese scattered across the field. The last time the hound herded the geese home, she’d gotten nothing more than a quick pat from her master, whose hands were busy up the goose girl’s skirt. “Shoo,” the girl said with a disdainful flap of her hand, even in the throes of passion.

The hound tried to warn him time and again. She growled at the goose girl and nipped her when she got close enough, but the huntsman dismissed her with a laugh. “She’s such a jealous little thing.”

Of course, she was jealous—but that wasn’t the only reason she hated the goose girl. The girl’s scent, fox fur and overripe berries, gave her away. She was a cunning creature whose touch was never gentle, her voice never soft. She took pleasure in smacking her geese with a willow switch, sending the poor things scuttling across the lake. Then she’d pranced before the king, shameless, while the good huntsman looked on. To the hound, love was loyalty; the goose girl was unworthy of the huntsman’s.

The Huntsman

The night Sarah accepted the king’s hand, the huntsman came to her cottage in his father’s wedding suit, a size too big. Sarah’s uncle opened the door in his dressing gown. The huntsman bristled at having to grovel to this man; his freshly shaved cheeks burned with humiliation. “I come to ask for your niece’s hand in marriage,” he said.

Her uncle laughed. “What does she need you for when she’s got a king?”

The huntsman willed himself to stand firm. He had as much to offer as the king; what he lacked in gold, he made up for in adoration.

“What does he want?” Sarah’s voice skipped through the cottage like a pebble across a lake. Still laughing, her uncle stepped aside, ushering her through the door. The hound’s fur stood up along her back and she barked in warning.

“Hush now,” the huntsman whispered, but she growled as Sarah drew him beneath the trees. He stopped at the pine where they first kissed and turned her to face him, sliding his palms down her arms to find her hands clenched at her sides. She met his eyes, her gaze level—angry, even.

“Well?” she said.

He dropped his hands. She glared at him, as if impatient to have him out of her sight.

“I understand how you might feel trapped, might think marrying the king is a way out. But you must know I intended to wed you; have always intended.” He reached for the hound’s comforting fur. She arched into his touch, still rumbling.

Only last week he and Sarah had lain together in the hayloft watching the sun settle over the hills through the dormer window. Her hair spilled across his forearm like blood. She’d gazed up at him with a slow honey smile that relit the fire deep in his belly, and he rolled her over so fast she’d laughed, a surprised, joyful snort like the farmer’s sow when devouring a pumpkin.

He’d given her a leather bracelet he’d woven in a challah braid. He couldn’t afford a ring and believed this promise would do as he tied it around her wrist. He should have woven it with steel.

Sarah shook her head.

“I am trapped,” she said, her eyes dirt dry. “This is how I free myself.”

The Queen

She had learned opportunity favored the bold—as when she’d caught the huntsman watching her and stepped into his snare to see what he might do. Just as she’d been the one to kiss him first. Just as she had to be the one to leave him. The huntsman’s pain pained her, but she’d become practiced at hiding her feelings, even from herself.

She’d never lied to him. She’d believed she wanted a life with the huntsman when he was her only chance at salvation, but the king’s outstretched hand had offered more—the chance to become anyone she chose.

The Music Box Mirror

The girl had studied herself in this sliver of glass as if it were a window to another world, as if she could become someone new with a pair of earrings or a paste diamond choker. The mirror had captured her storm-gray eyes, summoned them when the lid remained sealed. It dreamed of a looping melody, the eternal spin of the ballerina whose eyes it could never catch. It flashed with joy at the sight of the girl’s eyes now, although the storm in them was darker and fiercer than ever before.

The Ballerina

The ballerina spun before the mirror, grateful for the chance to stretch after a long stillness. She had only ever seen her world in glimpses before it was gone, and half her spin was but a reflection of what she’d just seen.

Years ago, the box had been open all day, positioned in view of a baby girl while her father tilled the field, and her mother toiled at the oven. The babe, at first, had gazed longingly at the ballerina but had soon succumbed to despair. Her screams drowned out the music until she stopped crying because no one ever came.

As the girl grew older, she’d looked past the ballerina, scrutinizing herself in the mirror. Yet, the ballerina continued to perform for her, spinning in unceasing circles until the box folded her back into the velvet, on her belly or her back, or crumpled on her side.

Her company in the dark was a jumble of hard, cold things. Rocks, acorns, baby teeth, a gold chain, a silver pocket watch. Now, a leather bracelet landed on the heap and the lid slammed shut again.

The Huntsman

The huntsman supplied meat for Sarah’s wedding but was not invited. He crouched in the snow, peering through the foyer window at the scene glittering with candles. Servants waded through the crowd of guests bearing veal and champagne on silver platters. A string quartet tucked beside the grand staircase performed a melody that sounded like a dirge. As their tune shifted to the wedding march, the huntsman longed for a candle to flicker too close to a tapestry and set the whole place ablaze.

His breath caught as Sarah descended the stairs, her train billowing like a ghost. As she crossed the carpet, its fibers caught the candlelight, and she seemed to glide along a river of gold. She took the arm of the forbidding man with stern eyes and sour breath, and beneath the portrait of the stern king’s stern father, the huntsman’s Sarah became a queen.

The Hound

When the goose girl married the old man, the hound was so relieved she even took a little pleasure in being mounted by the blacksmith’s pug.

The Queen

The guests were gone. The king took her hand, and the queen squeezed his damp palm, grateful for the gesture. He tugged the diamond from her finger.

Her wedding gown vanished too, then her crown and the tapestries, the silver and the servants. The former queen had spent every penny from the royal coffer, the king said. The new queen would have to be frugal. He took her mother’s chain from her jewelry box, her father’s watch, her comb, her shoes. He took and took until there was nothing left, and then he took her body.

He was heavy, but his elbows and knees were sharp as he rutted above her, gasping his wine-soaked breath against her cheek. She screwed her eyes shut and repeated to herself, with every thrust, I’m the queen, I’m the queen, I’m the queen.

The Hound

The huntsman lent her body to townsfolk who admired her lean physique and webbed paws, her skill in bringing down hares. She did not remember the dogs who fucked her. She’d barely glimpsed them, never even learned their names before they mounted her from behind. It was better that way. She reserved her love for her master.

The Mirror

The mirror knew a commoner when it saw one; many of the queens had been commoners. The mirror never tired of watching their transformation to nobility and made a game of catching the moment they began to believe they were better than everyone else. This woman had arrived a queen.

She was no more miserable than her predecessors, yet the mirror had little sympathy for the woman who sat before it, studying herself from all sides as if searching for glimpses of someone else. Her desperate gaze was so pathetic the occasional view of the king’s fleshy backside was a welcome—if brief—distraction.

The Queen

The king wasn’t all bad, she often reminded herself. He left her alone when he wasn’t fucking her. He didn’t demand to know how she filled her time. She answered only to herself. As it turned out, she was a forbidding master.

“Sit up straight,” she commanded the woman in the mirror, whose slumped shoulders reminded her of a peasant’s. She pinched her cheeks and forced the woman to smile.

“You’re mooning about like a stupid goose girl,” she scolded herself. “Dresses and diamonds didn’t make you a queen—the king did.” As his queen, she had a role to play. She was someone different than Sarah the goose girl, and that was enough, even if she didn’t like the role.

Then the king was trampled to death under his horse’s hooves, leaving her alone in this godforsaken place. Alone, but for the child.

The Hound

The hound had three litters; every time, the huntsman sold the pups off her nipples. Her children scattered throughout town. They don’t know her, but she remembers each strange, warm body pulsing from her own.

The Queen

She tried to find some kinship with the creature, but it was always screaming, clinging to her neck, wet and stinking. Its wails echoed down the empty halls. The babe did not sleep; neither did the queen.

She sat before the mirror, all that was left besides the bed and crib. Her tears obscured her face in the glass. She wished for a rifle. Or a knife. Or a spiked heel to drive through her temple. Her toes were stiff on the bare stone floor. Without the king, she was no longer a queen. Without the huntsman, she was no longer Sarah. In the blur of her reflection, a figure began to take shape.

“Who are you?” the queen asked, leaning close to the glass.

The Mirror

I don’t know, the mirror yearned to reply. All the mirror knew was what others showed it. It did not recall its past life as silver. It did not recall the moment of its birth, when it was painted with mercury and baked in oil. It did not know it was born in those crazy- making vapors.

“Is someone there?” The queen pressed closer to the mirror, fogging the surface with her breath.

The mirror did not know what the queen saw in its depths, even as it peered into hers and was unnerved by what it found there. Behind the queen, the child strained in its crib, its eyes screwed shut, its open mouth toothless and angry red.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” the queen said.

The Queen

The queen baked soda bread, her mother’s specialty. Every Christmas, her mother had made enough for the entire village and took the loaves door to door. The villagers had sung her family’s praises along with their hymns. Her family was beloved, once. Perhaps they would welcome her back.

She tucked the still-hot loaves into a basket and set out for her village on foot. There were no horses left. The child’s screams followed her down the path. The townspeople drove her back up it, pelting the bread at her. They blamed the king—and now the queen—for their poverty, their hunger and desperation. Her cheek bore the imprint of the baking cross.

The Hound

The forest had been empty for months, yet the huntsman hunted. He skipped supper but ensured his hound was well fed, especially when she was pregnant. She’d birthed another litter last week. Sarah’s uncle bought the last puppy to feed his pigs. It nearly broke the huntsman’s heart, but he too needed to eat, and he was promised a pound of bacon in return.

The hound’s ears quivered with the shouts of the townspeople as they drove the goose girl back to the castle. She was grateful that the huntsman’s simple human ears were incapable of hearing at this distance, but she heard, and her tongue slid out between her teeth in pleasure.

The Queen

“What ails you, queen?” The voice slid through her brain like mercury.

“I do not know myself,” she said, pressing her palm to her branded cheek.

The Mirror

“You’re the queen! The queen!” the woman trilled at her reflection, sending shivers of fear through the mirror. It strove to reflect the queen’s bloodshot eyes, the deep pits carved beneath them, her pale skin, her teeth-ravaged lips.

“Remember who you are,” the queen said, glaring into her own eyes bisected by the hairline crack in the glass. She opened her music box and stroked the only remaining item: a leather bracelet that held no value to the king.

The Queen

“Remember who you are,” the queen ordered the woman in the mirror again. “She was far better than you—and anyone you might yet become.”

The Ballerina

The ballerina had been waiting for this moment. She sprang into dance. But there was no little girl peering past her into the mirror, no young woman holding the box up to her face to shape her sharp brows. The ballerina caught glimpses of a strange woman whose black gown and shoulder fins like a bird of prey’s offset her colorless skin, her gaunt cheeks, her red- rimmed eyes. Despite her strangeness, those eyes were the same. The woman plucked the bracelet from the box and shut the lid. Now the ballerina was truly alone.

The Hound

The huntsman tied a ribbon around her neck, untied it, shoved it in his pocket. The hound followed at a respectful distance. The silence of the forest pressed in on them.

By his jittery energy, she knew they were on their way to the goose girl. A letter had been delivered from the castle that morning; she’d scented the girl’s bitter saliva on the envelope.

The huntsman had proven far more loyal and far stupider than she’d given him credit for. If she could stop loving him, she would, but her loyalty was stronger than his. She would do anything for him, and he would still do anything for the goose girl. By proxy, the hound too served the goose girl. That bitch.

The Huntsman

“Huntsman,” Sarah purred. She swept her gown aside with a welcoming whoosh, and the gesture fanned the air from his lungs.

She looked nothing like the girl he’d grown up believing was his by right.

“Come in. Please, come in,” she warbled, like the waxwings that toppled off the branches drunk on juniper berries.

He obliged, scraping the mud from his boots at the threshold. He needn’t have bothered. The hall was a mosaic of footprints. He’d seen this frenzied pattern before, in the tracks of a wounded doe. The hem of Sarah’s gown was heavy with mud. The huntsman’s boots echoed on the stone floor. The rugs were gone, the tapestries, even the old king’s portrait. In the room once flickering with warmth, he could see his breath.

The woman before him, whose dark gown matched the circles beneath her eyes, was as familiar as a faded dream.

“How delightful to see you,” Sarah said, in a throaty voice. “It has been far too long for old friends.”

She rested a hand on his forearm. It was weightless as a sparrow. He held still so as not to startle her.

“Your majesty,” he said with a nod. He did not know what to do with his hands, hanging heavy at his sides.

She laughed, an affected, hollow sound.

“Come now,” she said. “Let’s not stand on formalities.”

The Hound

The goose girl smelled wrong. She’d always had the musk of a predator, but now there was another scent, sour and oily, a prey’s desperation. A growl started deep in the hound’s throat. She was often all that stood between the huntsman and death; she scented wolves long before they drew near and battled squirrels in his honor, but he had never heeded her warnings about the goose girl. Today was no different. The huntsman was immobilized before her, his fingertips quivering. The hound clamped her teeth onto his sleeve and tugged until a seam ripped, but he didn’t notice. She shook her head, tearing at the fabric, straining flat on her belly.

The Huntsman

He looked for Sarah in this strange, cold woman. Did she find him changed as well, irreparably marked by what she’d done to him? Did she still want him, if she’d ever really wanted him at all? He had nothing to offer her that could compete with a kingdom—just his heart, which had never been enough.

She stepped closer, until he could see she was wearing makeup to hide the redness around her eyes. No, not makeup, he realized as a tear tracked through it: flour.

She had nothing; less than him, now. Not even her pride.

He leaned in and licked the salt from her cheek.

She gasped, and in her flicker of surprise she became herself again. Then the girl he’d known as Sarah disappeared as quickly as she’d manifested.

He traced his teeth along the edge of her jaw, and she quivered against his chest, tipping her head to guide his lips to her ear. He held his breath steady, watching the skin along her cheekbones tighten and flush, and willed the old Sarah to come to back to him.

The Queen

She didn’t know if she forced the tear from her eye, or if it had slipped out on its own, betraying an emotion she hadn’t admitted even to herself. He nipped her earlobe, and the hair rose along her arms. Arching her neck, she pressed her breasts against him. She had always given herself to the huntsman freely, trusting he wouldn’t abuse that power. She longed to lose herself in him again and reemerge as the girl she’d been before.

She turned her head, guiding his lips along her jawbone until they met her own. She was warm for the first time in a year. If only she had wed this man, with his muddy boots and forest eyes. If only he had been enough. Your pride is showing, her mother used to say, as if it were a hem she could tuck back beneath her skirts.

Everything would be okay if she could just return to the way she’d felt in that hayloft glowing gold in the setting sun. She could reclaim what she’d thrown away and move forward renewed. She pushed against him, tangled her tongue with his. She felt his desire pressing against her. The hound’s panting echoed in the hall.

A wail returned her to the drafty castle, to herself, a different woman in his familiar arms.

The Huntsman

Sarah’s eyes opened wide, all pupil, like a doe’s in the moment before the knife, one last dark glimmer of desperation.

“Come.” She turned, clearly expecting to be followed. Her new authority was terrifying, but the huntsman followed, like a dog.

The Mirror

The child stood screaming in her crib. Her diaper sagged, and shit leaked down her legs. Her mouth was a hole of need. When the door opened at last, the child toppled back onto her mattress, landing with a sodden thump.

“Jesus,” the queen said. “What a stench.” She peered around the room as if searching for its source.

A man strode in behind her. He took in the scene with a hunter’s precision, cataloguing its emptiness. His gaze skimmed the mirror without so much as a flicker of interest and settled on the child. His lips parted.

The Hound

The scent of shit was overpowering, but not unpleasant. The babe’s warm, meaty scent reminded the hound of her own pups, before they were ripped from her teats. Its cries drew her into the room, to the crib where the scent- swamped babe reached out between the bars of its cage.

The hound’s ears went flat. She pressed her muzzle through the bars, questing deep. The child silenced at once. Its eyes, locked on the hound’s, were the vibrant green of the moss beneath the pines. She had seen these eyes before.

The Huntsman

The huntsman rested a hand on the hound’s head and found the sensitive spot just behind her ear where the fur was softest. Rubbing her velvet folds between his fingers usually quieted his anxiety, but the hound was so tense even the tips of her ears were vibrating. This child had Sarah’s crooked eyebrows, Sarah’s hair floating like dandelion floss around her head. In this moment, he wished the king were alive so he could murder him. And yet, he was struck by a sense of protectiveness toward this strange little creature that reminded him so much of the woman he’d known and lost.

Sarah didn’t so much as blink when he scooped the child from the crib. Wetness soaked into his shirt as he laid her on the floor. He made funny noises at the child as he stripped off the sodden diaper and tickled her belly to make her laugh. As he wiped the shit from her skin, she smiled up at him.

“What’s her name?” he asked. Sarah stared at him blankly.

The Queen

She had never named the child. That would have made the baby hers, and it couldn’t possibly be hers because she didn’t even know where it came from. Sometimes she had vivid nightmares of giving birth, of blood and tissue, of someone searing through the umbilical cord with a hot kitchen knife. She didn’t like to dwell on it.

The huntsman looked natural, cradling the child in the crook of his arm. He’d wanted to be a father. He would be a good father to this child—but that would make Sarah its mother, and that’s all she’d ever be. He had promised she would be enough.

He would do anything for his goose girl, she had no doubt. This was how she would reclaim the life they’d imagined together.

“Will you do something for me?” She rested one hand on the huntsman’s arm. His breath faltered. “For us?”

She handed her music box to the huntsman.

“Take the child into the woods,” she said. “When you bring me her heart in this box, we can return to our old life—our real life—and I will be yours again.”

The Huntsman

He gazed down at the child’s plump fingers wrapped around his own. Sarah had asked him how he could kill and listened with skepticism as he’d explained hunting as an act of need, not pleasure.

“There must be another way,” he said.

“There is no other way.” Her voice was flat and cold.

His Sarah was gone.

The Hound

The hound’s nails clicked against the stone as she followed the huntsman through the empty halls. The huntsman carried the child, now clean and smelling like cows and line- dried linens. She looked at the hound over the huntsman’s shoulder, her familiar eyes watchful. The hound could hear the goose girl pacing in her chamber, the sound of rustling leaves as she wrung her hands, the groan of springs as she spread out on her bed like a spider.

The child’s eyelids closed as the huntsman carried her with his steady, loping stride across the brown lawn and into the woods. The huntsman worried at the knife in his waistband, stroking the hilt, running his thumb along the edge of the blade. The child’s mouth relaxed; her lips sagged against his collar.

When it began to snow, the huntsman folded the blanket over the babe’s face and trudged on. The hound followed in his boot tracks. She knew where they were going long before they arrived. She could smell fire in the stone hearth, stew on its third day simmering, blankets salty with sweat, musty corners, and dried beef. The cottage emerged from the trees.

The Huntsman

The door opened before he could knock. Although his godfather was stooped with age, his eyes were sharp beneath his swooping white brows. The huntsman clasped his arms in greeting, and his godfather smiled, revealing the gap where another tooth had gone missing. The huntsman allowed his godfather to draw him into the cottage, where the single room was hazy from the fire.

The huntsman pressed his godfather into his armchair and the old man studied him, unblinking. He hooked one weathered finger into the blanket and peeled it back carefully, revealing the child’s cheek, rose red from the cold. She whimpered in her sleep. The old man’s hands trembled as he gathered the babe into his arms and tucked her against his chest.

“Who is she?” he whispered.

The huntsman sank into a chair across from his godfather, whose hawk-like gaze radiated wonder and disapproval in equal measure.

“She is no one,” the huntsman said. “And she’ll never be safe, so long as the queen believes she’s alive.” He trusted his godfather with his life—and now, with the child’s.

The old man studied the child. Her eyelashes quivered. She whimpered again, and he rocked her quiet.

“What is her name?” he asked.

The huntsman gazed down at the pale face framed by golden curls. Parted in sleep, her lips were blood red. He couldn’t save Sarah, but he’d saved the little part of her that remained. To name her would be to love her.

The Hound

The hound followed her master through the forest, blinking away the thick snow that kicked up from the huntsman’s boots. His breath was labored, and his shoulder dipped under the weight of a shovel. His breath rasped, and the hound trotted up to his side, startled by the sight of his tears. The huntsman never cried. Not even when the hound was a puppy and the huntsman, then a child, was beaten again and again within an inch of his life.

The huntsman leaned against a tree as if he could no longer stand on his own. He slid down the length of the trunk and the hound settled beside him and rested her chin on his knee. He stroked between her ears. She dozed awhile.

The hound awakened at the slightest twitch of her master’s boot and scrambled to stand. He urinated and began to dig. The snow soon gave way to frozen ground, and the impact from the shovel shuddered his lean frame. The freshly overturned soil smelled like peppery seeds just starting to sprout, the funk of tawny mushrooms, the bitter tang of wood beetles. The hound dug beside him, eagerly scraping through the dirt, coating her snout in the stew of scents.

The huntsman didn’t seem to be enjoying the dig as much as she was. His jacket steamed with sweat. His hands were bleeding. When he’d carved a shallow hole, he tossed the shovel aside. She tipped her head at him.

“Down,” the huntsman said.

She dropped to the dirt. It was warm against the taut skin of her belly. She looked up, awaiting his next order, eager to please. He lifted his gun to his shoulder, and her ears flattened in shame. He’d seen something—something she must have missed. She knew every scent and sound in this forest: the warning snort of a deer, the loamy chocolate spice of a bear, the swish of a rabbit in the underbrush. She had betrayed her master. In the split second it took the bullet to find her brain, she realized she was wrong. It was she who had been betrayed.

The Huntsman

The huntsman crouched at the hound’s side and slipped the knife between her ribs. His hands, always so steady, trembled a jagged slice along her fur. He reached into the warm cavity of her chest, nauseated that the heat felt so good against his frozen skin. He slid his other hand inside and welcomed the throb of pain as feeling returned to his fingers. It was the hound’s final gift to him—penultimate gift, he corrected himself, as he drew her heart from her body.

The huntsman opened the music box with bloody hands. A tinkling melody began, and a ballerina spun before a slice of mirror as the huntsman placed the heart inside, still beating.

He scraped earth over the hound and laid a cross of branches at her head. This, unlike hunting, felt like murder.

The Ballerina

The ballerina sensed the presence of something new, tough and yielding, warm and wet, pulsing along with the last strains of the music thrumming through the darkness.

“Who are you?” she asked, with her cheek crushed against the velvet.

There was no answer. But even in darkness the ballerina knew another broken heart.

The Mirror

The mirror bore witness when the huntsman laid the box at the queen’s feet, then turned his back on her, his shoulders bowed. He retreated from the mirror’s frame, this time for good.

She stood in the center of the room, staring at her reflection. The mirror was adept at reading her moods; it had memorized the tilt of her chin and subtle shift of her eyes mid- expression. But the mirror had never seen the look the queen now wore—and would never forget it. Not in the months to come, when she’d fill the castle with off-key song. Not in the years to come, when she’d discover the huntsman’s betrayal and turn huntress with a single quarry.

The mirror would see through the queen’s various guises—a washer woman with a golden comb, a peddler with a silk gown, an old farmer’s wife with a shining apple—and strive to reveal the crone she’d become. For centuries past, it had found purpose in serving as the keeper of its subjects’ truths. What good was a mirror that showed only what they wished to see?

Later, when the queen took up a hammer and smashed the mirror, it felt every blow, every scrape of the broom as it was swept into the dustbin, the rush of wind as it was flung out the window onto the rocks below. Its shards mirrored the sky, earth, and sea in ever smaller glimmers until they were worn to sand.