“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?”
She hesitated, biting her lower lip, and I saw that there was something she didn’t want to tell me.
“What?” I said. “Please…whatever it is, I need to know.”
“Well, it might have worked if your mother hadn’t become pregnant with you,” she said at last in a low voice. “I am so sorry, my dear, but after that, Lorella diverted all of her power to protecting you and making sure the poison didn’t seep into your tiny body, developing inside her own.”
I felt sick.
“You mean I’m the reason my mother and father died?”
“No, of course not!” Lady Isella reached across the coffee table and took my hands in hers. “There was almost no chance for them, even to start with, my dear. The Wicked Apple is a poison so strong that nothing can cure it—not even true love.” She sat back and ran a hand over her sleek blonde hair. “I mean, maybe if Tarren had met Lorella and Blood-Bonded with her when she was first poisoned—it’s less strong to start with and grows over time, you know. But he didn’t—he fell in love with her weeks and weeks after Mab tricked her into taking that fateful bite…” She shook her head sadly.
“I wonder if that’s why Queen Elia begged me not to eat or drink anything while I’m here,” I murmured, still feeling shaken.
“Quite possibly—and it was good advice,” Lady Isella said firmly. “However, if you are hungry or thirsty, I have my flask and cloth with me.”
“Your what?” I frowned.
“It’s a kind of magic that imports food and drink directly from the Summer Court or the human world to the Winter Court,” Lachlan explained. “Mother has used it to feed me and herself for years. It’s one reason I look Fae instead of appearing to be what I am—which is half ogre.”
“I was so glad when you came out looking nothing like Grund,” Lady Isella said fiercely. She looked at me. “I can provide you with safe food and drink if you are hungry and thirsty, my dear. It’s the least I can do after you freed me from a most miserable situation.”
“Well…” I hesitated. I had been wondering how I could manage to go a whole day and a night without eating or drinking anything. I was certain I could go without food—I was used to going a whole day without eating much of anything due to the awful quality of the Norm food in the Dining Hall. But going without anything to drink for that long was another matter.
“You can trust my mother, Emma,” Lachlan told me quietly. “She would never betray you.”
“Oh, I know!” I said quickly. “It’s just that I promised my grandmother—Queen Elia—that I wouldn’t, that’s all.”
My stomach chose that moment to rumble. It had been a while since the decadent banquet, which I had barely tasted because I was so anxious. I clapped a hand over my stomach in embarrassment.
“I guess that answers the question if you’re hungry or not.” Lady Isella’s emerald eyes, so like her son’s, danced with laughter. “Here,” she said.
From some hidden pocket in her gown, she drew out a small blue and gold checked handkerchief and a tiny blue bottle with golden lines etched on it. She placed them on the black coffee table between us, pointed at them and commanded,
“Grow.”
The cloth and bottle began to grow until the handkerchief was almost the size of a tablecloth and the bottle was as big as a large milk carton.
“Now, then—what shall we have for our midnight feast?” Lachlan’s mother asked.
“Anything but fancy fairy food,” I said with feeling. After the banquet with its many courses and bewildering array of silverware in the Summer Court, I was longing for something familiar.