The Queen’s heart seemed to stop and all the blood in her body felt as if it were rushing to her head. She whipped around and tore the curtain from her father’s mirror. Though she already half expected what she would find there, she was not prepared for the shock of seeing a living, moving face, hovering before her in the mirror. Her eyes grew wide with terror, her mouth gaped. It was a petrifying apparition—a disembodied head that looked like some sort of grotesque mask. Plumes of mystical smoke whirled around its hollow eyes and its long drooping mouth; its macabre face seemed forlorn.
“Who are you?” the Queen gasped.
“Do you not recognize me? Dear, has it been so long? Have the years that separated us caused you to forget me…enchantress?”
And in that moment, the Queen’s face blanched.
She recognized the face in the mirror, promptly lost all ability to steady herself, and collapsed.
But before she had fallen into blackness, she heard two final words ushered from the mouth of the visage in the mirror: “My daughter…”
Hearing the crash, the King rushed to the Queen’s chamber. He found the Queen awake but shaken, lying on the cold stone floor. The Queen was trembling, clutching the curtain she had torn from the mirror.
She looked up, but the man in the mirror was no longer there.
The King reached out to her, but she recoiled in horror.
“What is it, woman? Speak to me!”
“I’m, so sorry…my love…I didn’t mean to…frighten you,” the Queen said groggily, attempting to catch her breath. “I just…I must have fainted.”
The Queen was dizzy. She couldn’t find her own voice to further explain what had just happened, all she could manage was, “The mirror…”
The King looked to the mantel.
“Your father’s mirror. Of course. This is why you have had such an aversion to it. Had I known everything you just told me, I never would have brought it into our home.”
The Queen struggled to speak again. “Break it, please,” she managed to mutter.
Without hesitation the King tore the mirror from the wall and smashed it into the mantel. Shattered glass littered the chamber floor like stardust sprinkled over a moonless sky.
The Queen sighed, relieved, though not entirely convinced that the mirror was destroyed for good. She gathered all her strength to speak.
“Before the day I met you, my lord, I dreaded visiting my father in his workshop. Seeing my face reflected back at me again and again only reminded me of how unsightly I was—a fact of which I didn’t need reminding. A day of my childhood didn’t pass when my father didn’t tell me how unattractive I was, how ugly, and that is how I saw myself.
“My mother was beautiful; I knew that from the portrait that hung in my father’s dingy little house. The one source of beauty in my life was that portrait, and I would stare at it for hours wondering why I wasn’t beautiful like her. I didn’t understand why my father was content to live in a rundown hovel of a house, when he could afford to live anywhere he desired. No matter how much I scrubbed, I couldn’t rid the house of its stale, musty scent. I couldn’t imagine my mother—so beautiful—living in that house, and I fancied that somehow the house, too, must have been mourning my mother’s death. I fancied that while she was alive it was probably a pleasant little cottage where birds would alight to feed on the windowsills, and flowers bloomed all around. But after her death, everything within the house was moldering and distressed, all except for my mother’s things, which my father kept locked away. Sometimes I would go through her trunks and adorn myself with her old dresses and jewelry. Lovely dresses with intricate beadwork and jewels that sparkled like the stars. She seemed to love beautiful, delicate things, and I wondered if she had lived, would she have loved me, too, ugly as I was?
“Stories of my father’s love for my mother were known throughout the lands. Tales of the maker of mirrors and his beautiful wife were told throughout every kingdom like an ancient myth woven with strands of love and sorrow. My father made beautiful mirrors of all shapes and sizes, lovely mirrors that inspired the great kings and queens to travel over hill and dale just to purchase one of his gorgeous and enchanting treasures.
“My mother loved the winter solstice, and my father would make the grandest spectacle of the occasion. He made tiny mirrors in the shapes of suns, moons, and stars and hung them in all the trees on their grounds. Candles, too, decorated the trees, casting the most magnificent light reflected in the mirrors, so that their home could be seen for miles around—a tiny magical city illuminated and glowing in a sea of wintry darkness. He was heard to remark upon the gorgeous glow he created around his home every winter, saying it was pale in comparison to the beauty of his wife: her raven hair, fair skin, and sparkling onyx eyes—the sort that tilt up at the corners, adding a catlike quality to them. How I wished someone would love me the way my father loved his wife; so inspired by her beauty, he created intricate treasures so she could see her grace reflected back at her. I thought I would never know that love, or know what it was to be beautiful. And then I met you in my father’s mirror shop.
“When you ventured off promising to return, leaving me alone and bewildered, my father’s reaction sent my heart racing into panic. ‘Clearly you have bewitched him, daughter. Soon enough he will see you for the vile hag you are,’ he told me. I attempted to convince him I was no witch. I knew no enchantments. But he persisted. ‘Do not think a man such as he would have you as a wife. You are too old, daughter, and unsightly; you a
re unremarkable in every way.’
“My mother’s death was a result of my birth, and I am sure my father blamed me for it, seeing my resemblance to her as a taunting insult added to the injury of his loss. My father never talked about the night my mother died, but I heard tiny shards of the story and pieced them together in my imagination, like reflections in one of his broken mirrors.
“I imagined my mother writhing in terrible agony. In my mind I saw her clutching her bulging stomach in pain, crying out to her husband for help as the midwife tended to her. My father helpless, his face white and ghastly, filled with fear as my mother lay there lifeless after giving birth, and his eyes filled with revulsion when he looked upon the little creature that ripped his dearest love from his life. My father must have hated me from that day. Whenever he looked upon my face, it was with disgust.
“Once—I must have been five or six years of age—I was standing in our yard, the sun streaming through the canopy of trees. I was holding a bunch of wildflowers when my father came upon me.
‘What are you doing with those flowers, girl?’ he asked; his face was screwed up in controlled anger. I told him that I wanted to bring the flowers to my mother. He stared at me blankly and cruelly. ‘You didn’t even know her! Why would she want flowers from you?’ I remember being too sad, too shocked, to cry as I responded, ‘She was my momma, and I love her.’
“He just looked at me in that way I had become accustomed to—that way that told me if I said anything more he would strike me. Sometimes he would strike me even if I remained silent. That day, I just stood there and held out the flowers, looking up at him with my lip quivering, my eyes on the verge of tears, but too overcome with so many different emotions to express them by crying outright. He tore the flowers from my tiny hand. Then he turned his back on me and walked out of the courtyard. I hoped that he would place the flowers on my mother’s grave, but I am all but certain he never did.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t let my father’s demons taint my soul. I swore that I was starting a new life with you. I wanted to forget him and be happy with you and my beautiful little bird. I vowed I would make Snow my own daughter and love her the way I wished my father had loved me—that I would tell Snow White how beautiful she was every day of her life, and we would dance together and laugh. And unlike my father, I would take Snow to visit her mother’s grave and use the letters you entrusted me with to tell her what her mother was like.
“I resolved to never think of the maker of mirrors ever again. He belongs to the darkness now. The day my father died it was as if my life was set ablaze, as if his descent into darkness brought me into a shining world where I was finally able to find love and happiness. That very hour, I brought every one of his mirrors outside our home and hung them from a giant tree on the grounds. It was the most remarkable spectacle I’d ever seen, the mirrors swaying in the breeze, catching the sunlight and reflecting it in the most magnificent way. The sight of it took my breath away. The townsfolk thought it was beautiful too. They believed it was a tribute to my father, and I let them believe that. They needn’t know what a horrible man he was, they needn’t know I was for the first time coming out into the light, that I was no longer lingering in darkness and in doubt. That was the true reason I had celebrated.