“Who—Sirella?” I asked, thinking of the little old lady with her hunched back and grey hair and wrinkles.
“She is no older than you,” Lady Isella told me. “I know, for she is a wood nymph who lived not far from me. One day Queen Mab summoned her to the palace and she had to go, poor thing, for no one dares to ignore a summons by the queen! Mab sucked away her youth and beauty and left her as you see her now—a dried out husk of her former self.”
I thought of the tight, white mask of skin stretched over the Queen of the Winter Court’s face. Was it possible she was giving herself the equivalent of a magical face-lift by stealing other women’s beauty?
“But…that’s horrible!” I exclaimed. I looked at Lachlan. “That’s a big deal, right? It must mean that her soul is completely corrupted, right?”
“Oh, it is.” He nodded. “But she hides the ugliness the corruption causes with magical means. She’s very powerful—otherwise she wouldn’t be able to manage it. But if you saw her true face…”
“She is dreadfully hideous beneath her stolen beauty,” Lady Isella whispered, as though she was afraid to speak the truth too loudly. “I have only seen her once and that was by accident. I was coming to her chambers to let her know that she was wanted in the Great Hall and I happened to see her looking in her magic mirror at her true reflection.”
“Magic mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” I murmured, remembering the words from a Disney movie I’d watched when I was younger. I really did have a Disney princess obsession when I was a kid. Now I wondered how much of what I’d watched was based on things that had really happened.
Lady Isella nodded earnestly.
“Exactly!” she said. “She asks that of her mirror nightly and it gives her the name of the most beautiful woman in the Winter Realm. Then she summons the poor girl to the palace and steals her youth and beauty. If she doesn’t keep doing it, her mask will slip and her true face and form will be revealed and she could not stand that.”
“Wow…” I shook my head. “Is that what happened to my mother? To Princess Lorella?” My real mother’s name sounded strange to my ears, but it felt right to say it—to acknowledge her, even though she was gone.
“She tried,” Lady Isella told me. “But Lorella was quite powerful in her own right. She blocked Queen Mab’s siphoning spell and ran away to the Summer Court—she came to stay with me, in fact, and my family kept her in hiding. It was there that she met Prince Tarren, your father,” she added sadly. “And that was how they began their doomed courtship.”
“Why was it doomed?” I asked. “Because Queen Elia wouldn’t let him marry her?”
“That was part of the reason,” Lady Isella told me. “By then, the rivalry between the Summer and the Winter Courts had grown intense. Each believed they were better than the other and word of Queen Mab’s madness had reached Queen Elia. She declared that there should be no more visiting between the courts and banned residents of the Winter Court from coming into the Summer Lands.” She shook her head. “But your parents’ love was doomed from the beginning because by the time Lorella ran away, Queen Mab had already poisoned her.”
“What?” I sat back, feeling my eyes grow wide with shock. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised—Queen Mab totally struck me as the type who would poison a family member. But I had been raised by a mother who loved me—who would have given her life to save me if she had to. It was hard to imagine living with someone who wanted to kill you and steal your beauty instead. “That can’t be right!” I exclaimed.
“I’m afraid it’s true,” Lady Isella said sadly. “Your mother told me that the queen had tricked her into eating a bite of the Pomme Mechante—the Wicked Apple. It works as a slow poison and there is no known cure.”
“So she was already dying when my father met her?” I asked, shaking my head. “Didn’t she tell him?”
“Oh yes—she did!” Lady Isella nodded. “She would never betray someone she loved to death—not Lorella! She told Tarren the truth—that she was slowly dying and so she could not be with him. But Tarren wanted to try anyway. He hoped, you see, that by Blood-Bonding her to him, he could take some of the poison himself and dilute it and save them both.”
“Just like the two of you did for me,” I said, looking at Bran and Lachlan. “When I was bitten by that black widow!” I looked back at Lady Isella. “Why didn’t it work?”