Finch ate one pickle, put another on the edge of my saucer, and cut the last one in four and tucked each part into a wedge of his sandwich. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s what I remember about ‘Alice-Three-Times.’”
His recounting was more detailed than I’d hoped it would be, though he kept second-guessing himself and tangling it with other tales. The basic shape of it went like this.
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On a cold day in a distant kingdom, a daughter was born to a queen and king. Her eyes were shiny and black all over, and the midwife laid her in the queen’s arms and fled. The queen looked into the girl’s eyes, shiny-dark as beetle shells, and despised her on sight.
The girl was small and never made a sound, not even a cry the day she was born. Sure she wouldn’t live, the queen refused to name her.
At first her prophecy seemed true: the months passed, and the baby failed to grow. But she didn’t die, either. Two years bloomed and faded, and she was still as little as the day she was born, and just as silent, and she lived on sheep’s milk because the queen refused to nurse her.
Then one morning, when the nurse went in to feed her, she found the baby had grown in the night—she was now as big as a child of seven. Her limbs were frail as a frog’s, but her eyes were still a defiant black. It was decided, then: she would live. The king pressed his wife to name her, and the queen chose a name that was small and powerless, an ill-starred name for a princess. The queen called her Alice.
Alice spoke, finally, always in full sentences. She spoke only to other children, mostly to make them cry. And once again, she stopped getting bigger. The years went by, and the royal household started to believe she’d be a child forever, playing tricks on her siblings and scaring the maids with her black, black eyes.
Until, on a morning so icy cold the breath froze on your lips if you dared to go outside, a nursemaid went to wake Alice, and found a girl of twelve sleeping in her bed. She was a creature of points and angles, a colt who could barely walk on her new legs. The servants whispered that she was a changeling, but her eyes were black as ever, and her temper the same: she didn’t talk much, and she appeared places she shouldn’t. The castle had trouble keeping servants, and the queen’s women gossiped that the girl was to blame.
The nursemaid charged with raising Alice learned to fear the day when she’d again find a stranger in the princess’s bed. On the morning she discovered a black-eyed girl of seventeen waiting for her in Alice’s chamber, the woman whispered a curse and left the castle for good.
The princess was young in years but had become very beautiful, and at least looked to be of age. The king, who’d rarely spoken a word to her directly, now watched her with an acquisitive eye. He gave her gifts not meant for a daughter: A dragonfly catch for her cloak, made of red metal. A blown-glass flower that looked like a scorpion striking. The queen made a decision: it was time for Alice to marry.
Because she was the daughter of a king, in a world where these things were indulged, the girl set her suitors a task. Whoever could fill a silk purse with ice from the kingdom’s distant ice caverns and carry it back to her, she’d agree to marry. If they failed, they died. Of course most of the suitors were fools. They rode a day and night to bring the ice for her little silk purse, and it melted to nothing on the way. They brought ice from a frozen stream a mile from the palace, and she tasted their treachery in its familiar, scummy tang. Or they brought diamonds, hoping ice was a metaphor, and lost their lives for the mistake.
The men who solved the puzzle were two brothers from the north, their skin nearly as pale as the ice they carried. They packed it in sawdust and carved it into bits before entering her father’s hall.
When the older brother showed her it had been done, she went still. The color drained out of her face. It made him smile.
“But which one of you will she marry?” the king asked.
The brother smiled again. Everyone present was beginning to understand it wasn’t a nice thing when the brother smiled. “We don’t want a wife,” he said. “We want a housemaid. She’ll bake our bread, and clean our house, and bear the children who will serve us after she’s dead.”
The girl said nothing. Instead, she took her little purse of ice and tipped it down her throat. In moments, frost bloomed on her arms. Her skin went blue, her eyes iced white, and she froze solid. Her father shouted, her mother screamed, and the two brothers argued, deciding finally to take her as she was, intending to decide what to do with her on the road.
They set off that night, the two brothers and the girl, tied to a horse her father gave as her dowry. Her mother watched her go, and it was as if the sliver of ice that had lodged in her heart the day the girl was born melted away.
The brothers rode until the stars were nearly faded, then stopped to make camp. They lay their bedrolls on the ground, and lay their stiff bride under a tree. They slept.
The younger brother had terrible dreams, about a fox with holes for eyes, and a child who laughed while drowning in an ice-cold pond. As the sun bled over the horizon the next morning, he woke to find his brother dead. The man’s skin bristled with frost, and his mouth and eyes were frozen open in horror. The girl was as still as ever. Her cold body didn’t respond even when the remaining brother kicked it sharply with his boot.
He thought fast. He left his brother where he lay, packed up camp, and tied the girl’s stonelike hands and feet with strong rope—just in case. He left her behind with his frozen brother, and rode away like the devil was after him.
As he rode he kept hearing a sound like wind through icy branches, and thumps of wet snow sliding to the ground at night. He rode faster. When his horse was covered in froth, and he was too hungry and exhausted to continue, he stopped and made camp. He sat up all night holding a knife to his chest, keeping a small fire alive. Nothing came for him in the night, and he felt foolish.
Until the sun rose and he turned and saw his horse. The animal was dead, its eyes colored over with a membrane of frost, and its mane had ice crystals in it.
The younger brother continued his journey on foot. The trees he moved through were so thick the sunlight could barely break through them, and he met no one on his way. The air he breathed tasted frozen in his throat, and chilled his eyes till they ached, though it was spring thaw all around him. It was barely dark when he lay down to rest, so tired he couldn’t summon up the strength to feel afraid. When his eyes had closed, the princess came out from behind a tree hung with creeping vines. She laid her hands on his eyes and placed her mouth over his. When he was dead, she stood up tall. The ice was still in her, and her eyes swirled like cirrus clouds.
She turned. There was a scent in the air of cold lilacs, a late freeze on an early bloom. It was the smell of her mother’s perfume. The black-eyed girl felt her parents’ distant castle like the pulsing heartbeat of an animal she wanted to kill. She set her path back toward it.
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Finch stopped talking. The diner rustled around us, spoons chiming on cup brims and plates set to tables with a smack. I felt a sharp sting and looked down: I’d ripped the cuticle on my right index finger to bloody shreds.
“Is that it?” I asked, finally.