“Oh, I see!”
Carmen didn’t realize that was all the mayor’s wife needed to know. A tailor’s wife . . . a previously married woman. The faces around the table stiffened. But Ofelia’s mother was still lost in her fairy tale. Once upon a time . . .
She rested her hand tenderly on Vidal’s. “After my husband died, I went to work at the shop, on my own . . .”
The other women looked down at their plates. What a confession! In their world a woman only worked if she was poor and had to support a family. But Ofelia’s mother still believed the prince had saved her from all that: the poverty, the shame, the helplessness . . . She looked at Vidal, her eyes bright with love.
“And then, a little more than a year ago”—she still had her hand on his—“we met again.”
“How curious.” The pearls the mayor’s wife wore around her neck shimmered as if she’d stolen a few stars from the sky. “Finding each other again like that . . .”
There was a hint of warmth in her voice. The tailor’s wife and the soldier . . . everyone loves a fairy tale.
“Curious. Oh yes, yes, very curious,” the rich widow said, curling her lips. She only believed in fairy tales where a hero brings home heaps of gold.
“Please forgive my wife.” Vidal freed his hand and picked up his glass. “She thinks these silly stories are interesting to others.”
Carmen Cardoso stared down at her plate in embarrassment. There were fairy tales describing dinners like this. Maybe her daughter should have warned her that she had mistaken a Bluebeard for a prince?
Mercedes saw Carmen’s sunken shoulders as she walked back into the room, and she was glad it was good news she whispered into Carmen’s ear.
“Please excuse me,” Carmen Cardoso murmured. “My daughter, she is . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence.
Nobody looked at her when Mercedes pulled her wheelchair from the table.
“Did I tell you that I knew your father, Capitán?” the general asked as Mercedes pushed the wheelchair toward the door. “We both fought in Morocco. I knew him only briefly, but he left a great impression.”
“Really? I had no idea.”
Mercedes could hear in Vidal’s voice that he didn’t like the question.
“His soldiers said,” the general continued, “that when General Vidal died on the battlefield, he smashed his silver pocket watch on a rock to make sure his son would know the exact hour and minute of his death. And to show him how a brave man dies.”
“Nonsense!” Vidal said. “My father never owned a pocket watch.”
Mercedes longed to pull the pocket watch out of his jacket to show them all what a broken, lying thing he was. But instead she pushed the wheelchair out of the room. The girl was waiting. Mercedes had left Ofelia upstairs taking a hot bath to drive the cold away and she’d tried to wash the dress, but it was ruined.
Ofelia evaded her mother’s eyes when Mercedes pushed the wheelchair into the bathroom. There was still that hint of pride on the girl’s face and a rebelliousness Mercedes hadn’t noticed before. She liked it much better than the sadness, which had followed Ofelia like a shadow when she arrived at the mill. Her mother didn’t feel that way. She picked the ruined dress up from the tile floor and ran her hand over the stained fabrics.
“What you’ve done hurts me, Ofelia.”
Mercedes left them alone and Ofelia let herself sink deeper into the hot water. She could still feel the woodlice crawling on her arms and legs, but she had fulfilled the Faun’s first task. Nothing else mattered, not even her mother’s upset face.
“When you’ve finished your bath, you’ll go to bed without supper, Ofelia,” she heard her say. “Are you listening? Sometimes I think you’ll never learn to behave.”
Ofelia still didn’t look at her. The foam on the water showed her reflection in a thousand shimmering bubbles. Princess Moanna.
“You’re disappointing me, Ofelia. And your father, too.”
The wheelchair didn’t turn easily on the tiles. When Ofelia lifted her head, her mother was already at the door.
Her father . . . Ofelia smiled. Her father was a tailor. And a king.
She heard the soft flutter of wings the moment her mother closed the bathroom door behind her. The Fairy landed on the bathtub edge. She was wearing her insect body again.
“I’ve got the key!” Ofelia whispered. “Take me to the labyrinth!”
The Mill That Lost Its Pond
Once upon a time, when magic did not hide from human eyes as thoroughly as it does today, there was a mill in the middle of a forest, which was said to be cursed by the death of a witch who’d been drowned by a nobleman’s soldiers in its pond.
The flour the mill produced turned black every year on the anniversary of the witch’s death and as not even the cats keeping the mice away from the farmers’ corn would go near it, Javier the miller would throw the ruined flour into the woods. The flour was always gone the next morning, as if the trees had devoured it with their roots.
This went on for seven years. The witch had died on a foggy November day and when the eighth anniversary of her death dawned, the ground behind the mill was white with freshly fallen snow. The flour the miller threw onto the frozen forest floor seemed even blacker than it had the year before, so black it looked as if the night itself had fallen from the sky to make room for the day.
As always on the following morning the flour was gone, but this time a few remnants blackened a trail of footprints. The miller followed the footprints all the way to the millpond. The thin layer of ice covering the surface was broken, black flour drifting on the water like ash.
The miller’s heart filled with fear as cold as the broken ice and he nearly stumbled over his own feet as he backed away from the pond. He had witnessed the drowning of Rocio eight years ago. He had tried to pull her lifeless body to the shore after the nobleman’s soldiers had left, but the vines that grew as densely in the pond as a waterman’s green hair had kept the woman’s body firmly in their grip. When the miller had finally rowed his boat out to get her, the body had already sunk to the bottom of the pond. What if she is still there? he asked himself. What if Rocio was coming to take revenge on him because he hadn’t saved her from her murderers even though he’d known her since childhood and she’d once healed his wife of a terrible fever?
The miller stepped closer to the water to at least get a glimpse of the creature whose footprints, blackened by the cursed flour, looked so human. Be careful, Javier! the trees whispered with their barren branches. What’s in there was bred by murder and cruelty. The sins of men are not forgotten. They bring forth poisonous fruit.
But men don’t hear what the trees say. They have forgotten how to listen to the wild things, and the miller took another step toward the pond. Something moved under the ice. It was as silvery as the moon Rocio used to dance beneath.
The face emerging from the water appeared female, and was so beautiful the miller took another step forward. The eyes of the creature resembled the golden eyes of a toad and the hands reaching out for him had webs between each finger. The miller didn’t care. He yearned for the touch of those hands more than he’d ever yearned for his wife’s embrace, more than he’d ever yearned for anything. He waded into the water and embraced the shimmering body even though it felt like ice in his arms. The creature’s lips were covered with black flour and the miller felt his heart become as silvery and cold as hers when he kissed them, but he couldn’t let go and they both sank into the pond, united in a fierce embrace.