Mirror Mirror

by Gregory Maguire

She sensed the arbitrary, the conditional. Only when she tried to tell herself what it was did it settle down, the way telling a dream makes a dream gain its legs and lose its mystery. The space was nothing like a room . . . and as the word room is spoken, even to deny a likeness, the nonroom-like space becomes more like a room, regardless.

The long stone on which she sat seemed, on reflection, to straighten its angles, as if tending to think itself a bed; and then, belatedly, it grew or acquired bedposts of a sort, which became more nicely carved the more Bianca thought about it.

the opinionated rocks

LOL IS THAT ANY WAY TO SPEAK ABOUT THE DWARVES

The tender tips of her breasts blistered with a curious sort of pain,

Is she having her period?

Then the convulsion, which had had a teasing aspect as well as a frightening one, took a deeper bite of her body, lower down, and the soft pain of her groin sharpened.

Why does she seem to be having contractions who fucking impregnated her or is it just cramps honestly idk anymore

“Mamma,” she said, “Mamma. Gesù Cristo. Mamma, Mamma.” Then her words gave way to mere syllables, lengthening inchoate sounds.

This is giving me sympathetic crampy twinges and that's really irritating

Her legs were slick, her buttocks and her heels slick, and she fell, almost fainting, as if she couldn’t endure such loss of blood without a loss of breath or even life.

That sounds like some pretty serious PCOS

her blood lapped against their roots and splashed their sides.

Okay seriously is this three years' worth of missed periods at once cus that SUCKSSSSSS

The night was a terror, the woods scrabbling their twig fingers—but how in all the world could I fall right where you planned?” “We planned to be where you fell. It isn’t the same thing.”

“You approve of our arrangements?” he said brightly.

D'aww

several cats,

Are the cats alive???

As an exercise to prove herself canny, Bianca tried to catalog the dwarves’ attributes, and the harder she tried, the more the attributes seemed to stay put.

Bianca felt a wealth of fondness toward the old woman, who seemed to have been present at the birth of the universe and grown old long before the first drops of the Flood burst from God’s vengeful clouds.

Yeah that checks out

She’d been, what, six, seven when he left? And now she must be seventeen.

She remembered a lad with an expression of permanent surprise on his face; that grass was green when he went out of doors seemed to come as a pleasant shock every time.

Poor gooseboy

“Were you to get what you want, poor thing, you wouldn’t want it. Isn’t the wanting richer?”

She hadn’t touched any of them since the day she washed her menstrual blood from their stone feet.

Three years of periods it is.

—One day the moon had swaggered up to the sun and punched it in the eye, and the world had gone midnight at midday. Birds had lost their bearing and smashed against the walls of the kitchen garden, and Primavera had made a stew of them.

Always practical.

He therefore wasn’t as surprised as he might have been to notice one day that a portion of the wall seemed to be bowing. Perhaps it was a sort of erosion. He had been in here an awfully long time, after all.

It seemed at times to have the character of a creature, though he knew if he began befriending random boulders, his final mental collapse was near.

Honestly same

He was to have secured the limb of a tree, history’s most ancient tree, out of duty toward her.

I thought he was supposed to secure three apples

The beast didn’t merely reclaim its stone womb, though. It kept going, apparently. To judge by the noise, the creature was burrowing through rock. In its wake was a tunnel.

Thank U, Next

three well-formed Apples

I knew I wasn't fucking crazy

Was it a calcified angel of some sort, or a friendly stone dog?

Yes.

With its strange limbs the beast secreted the thing somewhere in the folds of its stone form. It disappeared, harbored in stone.

Welp that's one way of making sure he can't run off without giving you the mirror

Al-iksir

Elixir?

my dear Pietro Bembo,

Father of the gooseboy?

Donna Lucrezia, they say, in voices falsely honeyed: a patroness of the arts, a whore of Babylon, a murderess and a communicant, a mother and a mistress, a daughter and a Diana. They exaggerate my romances. They miss the point. Gossip serves some purpose. May their purposes fail in the end.

I was in Ferrara when I heard that Cesare had died in Navarre. Died as a common soldier, fighting naked in a senseless campaign, one morning before dawn.

Took him long enough

threaten the family de Nevada until they came up with an army or funds to hire one.

Okay but why did he have to be naked for that

His death occurred perhaps a year after I had sent that child out to the forest.

feats of humiliation,

Thought this said feasts of humiliation I swear I'm going fucking blind

lectures on the art of lecturing.

Useful.

The coy code names we had, the pretense at pretenses. As if my husband knew nothing, or, if knowing, as if he might care at all.

“Elixir,” said the sage, “is derived from a term of the Moor—al-iksir,

CALLED IT

The Borgia family has always had a fondness for what can be accomplished by the judicious application of a particular tincture in a particular glass of wine.

It can provoke drooling, and lassitude, and lapsing into a mental state of sharp terror, in which one can believe that conspiracies against one are being whispered in every quarter. A Borgia doesn’t need to bathe in a quicksilver pool to believe this, for it is always true and always has been.

lol I was gonna say

Rhazes couldn’t complete the transmutation of base metals into gold, as the Emir of Khorassan had required, and was fatally thumped on the head with his own Secret of Secrets,

Sucks

But he did chatter engagingly about the nature of quicksilver, and I learned from him much that would prove useful. He styled himself Paracelsus, though in his adoring letter of thanks and apology he signed his name Theo. Bombast von Hohenheim.

Then at the age of thirteen Rodrigo died. We’d lived apart for eight years, and he died apart from me. I had imagined, eventually, he would grow old enough to deserve my company, strong enough of character not to be corrupted by me. I was anticipating that day with joy. It wasn’t to be.

I invented false confessions for Fra Ludovico. (“Father, there were three beautiful brothers, each untutored in love, and their own father dead from the famine, so how were they to learn with no whore to teach them? Out of the mercy for which I am so well known, I took them to my bed, Father, at the same time, and in the following way . . .”)

This is what happens when you don't have to work.

I always had the gooseboy on my mind, for he was slow of wit and liable to wander into the jaws of a wild boar without noticing.

And wouldn't that just delight you.

But it wasn’t Cristo Himself stopping for lunch at Montefiore, but Vicente de Nevada, trudging up the sloping road, accompanied by something that looked from this distance like a dog without a head.

Oh look I think we found the plot again

I had never expected to see Don Vicente again. I had not expected that someone would need to tell him that, despite his sacrifices, his daughter was dead.

Yeah good move Lucre

The companion had certainly helped him obtain passage in every instance, as no one wanted to be bitten by a stone dog that had no mouth.

Valid.

“She has lost her tongue, in some accident or feat of vengeance. It was ripped from her mouth. She could never write, as you might remember, so there’s no way to learn what happened to her.”

Dude, FUCK the Borgias

“Here’s gabbing like a lunatic for you, my lady,” said the priest. “No one keeps news of a child from her parent.

“You’ve been a comfort, clearly,” said Lucrezia icily. “Escort him to the piano nobile, you two. I’ll prepare a restorative for him.”

Don't fucking drink it Vicente

The stone dog was sitting on its hind limbs alertly.

The best part of this shitshow

He said at last, “Let’s finish the business first. I’ve brought Cesare the token he hired me to find.” She rolled her eyes. “Cesare isn’t in a position to care, so you can save your breath. I’m not the desperate man grasping at straws that he was. I have no interest in sham and trickery.”

It's almost like it was all an enormous waste of time.