A Wish Made Of Glass (7 page)

“Oh, yes, my girl. What a beauty you’ve become. Who’d have thought it?”

I cringe at that word,
beauty
. Yet I smile, too. Hazel’s old eyes see me through a filter fashioned of more love than truth, and I would not do without that for the world.

“Now the mask.” Hazel lifts it gingerly from the gilded box on my bed.

The dull winter light coming weakly through my windows is enough to make this mask glow. I chose it from a multitude of others, yet the moment I saw it I looked no farther. It is pearly white, and one side is plain and without embellishment. From the other side sprout the wings of a swallowtail in the first leap of graceful flight. At first glance the wings appear white. In truth, they are a green so faint it is like the first timid steps of spring. Tiny emeralds are embedded along the edge of each wingtip. They wink and glimmer like things alive, and as I gaze at them the butterfly’s wings appear to tremble with the eagerness to fly.

The mask is cool against my face. Hazel nods in solemn admiration. When she has stared long enough that I begin to get uncomfortable, I shoo her from the room.

“I can undress myself,” I say, squeezing her hand in thanks.

The moment I am alone I turn from the mirror in relief. I can still feel the beauty of the gown and the mask itself flowing through me.
Perhaps
, I think,
they are enough to make me beautiful in truth
. My cheeks grow hot as I remember that the fey man called me beautiful. They grow hotter still when I recall how easily he saw the sadness within me.

I fling the mask onto my bed and cross the room to the window. I flip the latch and swing the shutters open wide. Air hits my face, cold as iron, and I know winter is well and truly here at last. I rest my elbows on the sill a moment, letting the chill air flood through me. That is when I feel it.

A cool kiss, soft as the brush of a butterfly wing, lands on my eyelid. I open my eyes just as another touches my nose, and another my lips.

I draw back from the window as if I have been struck.

No, not kisses. Snowflakes.

A turmoil of thoughts vie for my attention. One is louder than the others, and I reach out to snatch at it. As it dredges up from my memory, I see it is more of an image than a thought or a feeling.

Fairy wishes and full moonlight on the snow-covered ground. The image sinks in and my heart turns into a flock of panicked birds, flurrying and beating at my insides to be let free.

Tonight
, I think. Tonight is the full moon. Tonight snow will cover the ground.

Tonight I will claim my wish.

CHAPTER NINE

It would be folly to tell anyone what I plan to do. Perhaps they would try to stop me or, worse, try to accompany me. I do not believe in my heart that Hazel or Blessing would do either of these things, but I am unwilling to take chances. Not with this.

At long last I think I understand what this emptiness in me has been. I have longed for these slippers for most of my life. When I am granted them tonight, perhaps they will fill the black space in my heart. I cannot wish for the thing I want more than anything else—my parents at my side. Even the fey could not do that. But perhaps the glass slippers will lead me straight to them, or work some other magic I cannot fathom. Who can tell?

Not for a moment do I believe they are ordinary slippers. No. I know that when I slip them on my feet, whatever comes next, I will never be the same. Never again will I make the mistakes I have made thus far in my life. I will be careful, for I will be treading upon my own heart.

I do not bother with a lantern. It would only betray me. Besides, the forest will be full to the brim with moonlight tonight. In no time I am beyond the gardens and at the edge of the wood. It is darker beyond the trees, but I can see my path well enough. Without hesitation, I step into the shadows.

Snow covers my head like a veil of white lace. It is thick on the ground and is falling in plump, twirling flakes around me. It revels and capers in and out of moonbeams, glorying in itself. For a moment, I want to dance with it.

But I have a task to do.

The clearing is as I remember. It has been some time since I have been to it, some time since I saw the folk standing in a solemn circle in the quiet of the night. In some part of me I recognize that this place is a sacred one to the fey. If I am to find them anywhere in the wood tonight, it will be here.

I settle behind a tree at the edge of the clearing and wait. It is not until I am startled awake that I realize I was sleeping at all. There is no noise, no echo of a noise, which could have wakened me with such force. But there is a humming in the air around me, a vibration through my bones. It has me on my feet in an instant.

The fey are here.

Their very bodies speak of silence. Their slightest movement is as soft as the snow gathering on their earthy cloaks. Though several of them stand scattered about the clearing, there is but a single pair of footprints in the snow. Every eye is leveled at one thing standing in their midst. That thing is a human.

It is Blessing.

My heart stumbles in confusion, then crashes headlong against my breastbone. Something squeezes at my lungs like a vice.

I watch Blessing from afar, speaking with the fey folk. Supplicating them, by all appearances. My belly lurches in rebellion as I watch the folk smile at her, their faces aglow. The woman nearest Blessing gives a subtle nod and slides a white hand within the folds of her cloak. From it she pulls a small satchel.

At the sight of the satchel, I freeze. My fingers dig into the bark of the tree I am leaning against. I think perhaps I am clawing too hard and should feel pain, but I cannot tell. My only thought is of that satchel, which Blessing takes from the fey woman’s hands.

The folk are disappearing, their job apparently done. Blessing has had her wish from them and they have no reason to stay. By the time Blessing is left standing alone in the clearing, I am sinking to my knees. By the time she has opened the satchel to pull a single glass slipper from it, tears are freezing on my face.

But surely I am being foolish.

Blessing loves me as I love her, I know it. She would never get the slippers for herself. She would never take this wish from me, this one last thing I have shared with her from my heart. Perhaps, after all, she only wished for them so that she may give them to me.

Yet, even now, Blessing places the lone slipper upon the ground. She pulls her foot from the dainty boot she wears and slips it into the smooth glass. It fits as if it was meant for her. It fits as if she is beloved of the fey, and I am not.

I shudder with the knowledge that she has betrayed me. If nothing else convinces me, the smile on her face does so.

I watch her a moment longer as she pushes the slipper back into the bag and makes her way from the clearing toward home. Her smile may just as well be a knife thrown straight at my heart, for it gives me as much pain or more. I turn from the sight of her and from the anguish that twists through me like poison.

I wait for fury to burn its trail in me, but all I can feel is mourning.

* * *

My dreams that night are like churning, maddened waves during a storm. They are a disjointed tangle of grief. Hatred surfaces, that black thing I had thought vanquished, and this time it is different. Impure. It is diluted by love.

It should be a simple thing, hating Blessing after what she has done, yet I find it is not simple in the least. Love and hate are so tightly interlaced within me, it is impossible to separate them. I am no longer a blind child. I will no longer hate with such purity as I once did. It is different now, a muddled tug of war.

Part of me screams
trust
. And I long to obey it. But another part rises, as dark as a creature from the deepest part of the sea. And it whispers
revenge
. It is this voice, this dark voice, which seduces me. With a sense of doom and even satisfaction, I realize it is this voice I will obey.

When I wake I know I cannot have been sleeping long. My covers are tangled around me, mimicking the twist of the dreams I have just left behind. The night is frozen, as if time has come to a halt. The only thing moving is this dark thing in me. It whispers its poison in my ears, and I am too weak to fight it. I creep from my bed to answer its call.

My sister’s door opens without a sound. I would not care if it screeched a warning and brought the whole household down upon us. Either way, I am bent on this plan.

My heart gives a painful lurch when I see Blessing lying there. She sleeps as soundly as if she has not just been wandering the forest like a gypsy, as if she has not just recovered from a grave injury. Her lovely face shows no trace of the guilt she should feel. I myself feel her betrayal so sharply I think it must be written in every move I make. How has she managed to escape it?

Seeing her thus makes me fear I will lose my resolve, so I quickly begin searching her room. It does not take long to find the slippers. She has not bothered to hide them. They are propped on the floor beneath her mirror. A wisp of translucent fabric barely covers them from view.

I squat beside them and reach out. My hand stops partway. After aching for these slippers so long, I am now reluctant to touch them. Fear sends stinging barbs across my skin. I shake my head angrily, denying it power over me, and thrust my hands out to seize the slippers.

My first thought is that they cannot possibly be made of glass. They are softer and smoother than glass, almost warm to my touch. When I told Blessing they were spun from moonlight, I was near the truth.

For a moment all else fades but their beauty. Even my anger and pain are gone as I contemplate what these slippers mean. What they are. They fairly pulse with life beneath my fingers. Rising, I dangle them before my face and gaze at them for several long moments. Do they hold my dreams, as I believed they might? My very heart? But perhaps these only hold Blessing’s dreams, since they were given to her. I will never know.

Neither will she.

Before I can change my mind, I drag back my arm to throw the slippers across the room. I stifle a cry of astonishment as someone steps from the shadows near the window. My hand falls
to my side, the slippers still clutched in them. It is the fey man. Gone is the playful youth that walked with me in the wood. His dark eyes are thunder and lightning. I remember how he heard my thoughts once before. There can be no doubt he has heard them now.

“Don’t do this,” he says without moving.

I whimper. It is pathetic, the sound a wounded animal might make. My glance shifts to Blessing. She is beautiful and serene in her slumber. The fey man need only look upon her face, as I am doing now, and I will become nothing to him. Indeed, all I have ever had are her leavings.

Grief has me by the throat. With a strangled cry, I throw the slippers as hard as I can. The noise they make when they shatter on the wall is as beautiful as music and as horrible as the breaking of a heart.

I feel the horror of what I have done even before I see the fey man’s face. His anger is gone and a wretched pain floods his eyes, as if it is his heart I have just broken and not my own. Impulsively, I step forward, reaching for him. But moonlight and shadow swallow him up and he is gone. The place he stood is empty, but it is nothing compared to the emptiness that is within me.

“Izzy, what have you done?”

Blessing is sitting up in her bed, eyes wide. It takes her a moment to understand what has happened. She turns her head and catches sight of the glittering remains of the slippers, scattered across the floor, and puts a hand to her mouth. Before I know what is happening she has leapt from her bed and is across the room in front of me. Her hand flies out and she strikes me across the face. It does not hurt much, but I am brimful of fury all the same.

“How dare you?” I hiss. “How could you do such a thing to me?”

She gives a guttural laugh. “Funny. That’s what I was going to ask you.”

My anger is nearly choking me now. “Oh, yes,” I say. “How could I destroy something of yours? How could I take something from
you
, do you mean?” I nearly spit in her face. Has she no shame, to stand here and blame me for the very thing she has done time and again?

“You knew I wanted them,” I continue, horrified to hear the tremble in my voice. “You knew they were meant to be mine. How could you …” I sound like a child crying for a toy. For all I know, that is exactly what I am. This wound I thought healed was only festering beneath the surface all these years. Now it is split open and spilling poison everywhere.

Blessing has always possessed what I want. Beauty, grace, the love of my father. And now she has stolen the last thing, the sole thing I wished for.

Or thought I wished for.

The glass slippers are broken and gone, and I will never wear them. But the moment they shattered on the floor, they dissipated from my mind and from my heart. In this moment all I can think of is the fey man’s face as he disappeared into shadow, and that I may never see him again.

I see now the fatal flaw in revenge. It turns sour the moment it is exacted. I am sick with it, right down to my bones. I may have hated Blessing when she took Father from me, but since then something has changed. I can never hate her again. Not even after this. Perhaps the fey man knew that. Perhaps that is what makes this sin of mine worse than any other I have yet committed. For I have not turned my back on love, as I did once before, but betrayed it while yet holding it close.

“You little fool,” Blessing says, and there is something close to helpless laughter in her voice. “Oh, Iz, you don’t know what you’ve done, do you? You can’t think I got the slippers for myself.”

“I saw you try one on.” My accusation is quick as lightning.

Blessing is unfazed by it. “Of course I did. They were utterly beautiful, just as you told me they would be. Who could resist it? But trying them on and keeping them are two wholly different things.”

As Blessing squats on the floor, her gown billows around her like a cloud. With careful fingers she picks up one piece of the broken glass. And it is glass, I can see that now. Nothing more. Those slippers could never have held a heart, least of all mine. Why then, I wonder, does it feel as if the pieces of my fractured heart are lying on the floor with them?