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1
Gemma
Mama brushed my hair as I sat on a wooden stool in front of the mirror, my little television on mute in the corner, flickers of color and light. The hairbrush was old—a century old at least—and one of her most prized antiques: sterling silver, with thick yellow bristles like discolored teeth. I knew from experience that the handle was always icy cold, like it had just been plucked up from the snow, but Mama wielded it as if it didn’t bother her at all. It was the only item she ever refused to sell, even though she kept it in the display case at the back of the shop when she wasn’t using it on me. Like a secret, except it wasn’t a very good one. It was dull in the light, even after a polish.
Outside the clouds gathered like blackbirds on a branch, peeking through the window. Staying very still, I told Mama about the boy I’d seen at the edge of the woods. But she said never mind, it was only a shadow. And I said no, too pale to be a shadow, and she said well, a rabbit then. Bigger than a rabbit I said, and she said hush. She always said that. wsh. So all I was left with was the sound of my pulse in my ears and the bristles of the brush scraping my scalp and my big eyes blinking back at me. I sat very straight and pressed my knees together, waiting for it to be over.
Hush.
I was not allowed to go into the woods because of the monsters there. I did not know what a monster was, only that it would eat you. I did not want to be eaten, but I did so long to see a monster. Mama would not describe them to me. Nightmares, she said. You will have nightmares if I tell you. You will never sleep soundly again.
I tried to tell her that I had nightmares anyway—sometimes before I went to sleep—even though I had never encountered a monster. I would be lying there in the dark and all of a sudden my heart began to beat very fast, like a fox’s in an open field. I would sweat a little and my breath would come in gasps. And I was so afraid, only I didn’t know what I was afraid of. And that fear was worse than the fear of any monster, because I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing there to frighten me. At least, if I saw a monster, I would have a reason to be afraid.
Hush.
I did see a boy in the woods, though. He was a fairy prince.
I knew he was a fairy because his voice was like the leaves curling in autumn, and I knew he was a prince because of the crown he wore in his thick brown hair, laurel and berries as red as fresh blood. Also, he told me so.
He told me lots of things.
Like how to tell a poisoned apple from a sweet one, and how to call the sun to come out after the rain. How to listen to the trees when they are telling you that an enemy is approaching, and how to waltz in the high fairy fashion: swept up on the wind, gliding a foot or more above the earth. He taught me the proper way to curtsy before his mothers—the queen and queen consort of the fairies—for when he brought me before them one day, after he had vanquished the dreadful Hunting Beast who was known for snatching fairies from their beds and eating them up. With his silver sword and scabbard, with his shield blessed by the Great Ensorceller of the Hidden Moon, he would slay the monster that came hunting every few years and free his people from its chilling shadow. And once he had completed this most noble quest—One cannot become a hero without a quest, he told me—there would be a feast that lasted days and weeks held in his honor, and there would be song and dance and revelry that would light up the night sky as if it were noon.
He told me I was invited.
But—he was still very young, and still in training, hardly older or stronger than me, a girl of only twelve. And a half.
“We must be patient,” said the fairy prince to me, “because I will have one chance to kill the Hunting Beast, and only a fairy full grown can do it.”
Only a man and not a boy, even if he was a prince.
“And why must you be the one to slay the creature?” I asked, my heart tangling with fear for him. “Why can’t the queen do it, or the queen consort? Or some other soldier so you don’t have to be in such danger?”
The fairy prince smiled in that way that made me blush down to the bones in my cheeks, and he leaned very close. “Because it was foretold, my Gemma Belle, that the very bravest of knights would vanquish the Beast once and for all, and the stars are never wrong.”
(He called me that, his Gemma Belle, and it was like a song.)
I didn’t tell Mama any of what he told me, because I wanted these things for only the two of us to share, the fairy prince and me. But I didn’t like keeping secrets from her. It made my throat feel raw. So that night while she brushed my hair, I told her just a little: just about the fairy feast we’d have after he slayed the Hunting Beast, about the music and the dancing. I longed to show her how I would curtsy before the queen and her wife but she would not stop brushing my hair.
“And why must the prince murder this Hunting Beast?” she said when I was done, in a tone like anger but under glass, and I didn’t like that, that one word she’d said: murder. The fairy prince never said murder, only slay or kill or defeat—a noble act, heroic. Murder, though; it made me shiver and made my heart spin, dizzy.
“It is for glory,” I said, and that was a word I liked: glory. Glorious. It had a melody. I let myself get wrapped up in the fantasy—fairy lights and vining waltz, the prince’s hands in mine. Mama watched me in the mirror, watched me with her wide, dark eyes that could see things about me that even I didn’t know.
“Maybe,” I began, but my voice was too loud and I lowered it. Quiet, like sleep. “Maybe, at the end of the night, he will even give me a . . .”
“Kiss?” Mama finished for me, just as the brushing was done. One hundred slow strokes, no more and no less. My scalp tingled where the bristles had been, almost painful. Mama looked at me in the mirror, unsmiling, tilting her head so that a lock of dark hair fell across her neck like a wound.
“Go to bed now,” she said. “Sleep well.”
Strange, but when she said these words I was still sitting on the stool, and the next moment I was tucked up in bed. I didn’t remember the walk up the stairs or changing into my nightgown, or even laying my head upon the pillow. I had been telling her something while she brushed my hair—but what?
That night I dreamed of berries, crushed underfoot.
In the morning, a Saturday, I wanted to play outside but Mama said no, she needed help in the shop. I asked if I could go out after and she said all right in a voice like melted ice. Dusting, it was always dusting she wanted me to do, and there was always so much of it. In school, while I sketched a boy wearing a crown of leaves in the margins of my Lisa Frank notebook, we learned that dust was just bits of skin that flaked and fell off and settled on every surface because it had to go somewhere. I only wished it could float on the air and stick to the ceiling instead, and we could all just politely agree to look anywhere but up.
Mama sat in her office with the door open, going over accounts. It seemed like she was always going over accounts, or else talking on the telephone in a tone too whispery for me to understand. I grabbed the duster off the hook in the closet and then I started in the back of the store and worked my way forward. The space was so crowded it was easy to miss things, and I carried around a small stool to stand on when items were piled too high. There was little logic in the way the shop was arranged: tea sets next to crumbling texts next to bookshelves next to an armoire. A hand-cranked Singer sewing machine, a chess table, even an ax, slightly rusted around the edges. There were hats with feathers around the brim and ribbons to tie it under the chin, and a line of dress forms wearing lacy, yellowed wedding gowns. I noticed patterns in the dust, thicker in some spots than in others, the places I had missed the week before. Sunlight came through the windows, but it was the kind of sun you only see and don’t really feel on your skin, an empty glimmering. I moved through the shadows, shivering.
I saved my favorite room for last. The Glass Room, I called it, because there was nothing else in it but mirrors and chandeliers. Blackout curtains were closed tightly over the windows so that the chandeliers could shine. And the many mirrors of all shapes and sizes reflected the glow, intensifying it: like standing close to the stars, or inside a kaleidoscope. I used to think it was a portal to some strange and radiant world.
Lots to dust in the Glass Room—each arm of the chandeliers, plus the frames of every mirror. There was a smell of lavender about the room, dying petals, delicate rot. My arms were aching by the time I was done, and I wished—I wished!—that I had a little brother or sister to help me with the cleaning. Or to do all the cleaning, since I would be the elder and could boss them around. I would make them do the dusting while I went to play in the woods in secret.
