“Your mirror’s kind of a dick,” Gwendolyn said, her voice laced with anger as she recalled with a fresh sting of humiliation the insulting things her husband had said about her daughters, and more recently, about her.
“It reminds me of the snotty village children who call me Mother Awful and pelt me with stones,” Marguerite said. “Sometimes they make me cry. But other times, they make me so mad, I just want to . . .”
“Kill someone?” Elsinora finished. The words hung in the air. “Not that I would,” she added quickly. “I don’t have it in me, and besides, it would just prove everyone right.”
“So what?” Gwendolyn said. “I mean, the court of public opinion has long since convicted us, and frankly, I’m tired of trying to prove everyone wrong. Maybe we should prove them right. Be the villains everyone says we are.”
“You know, the portrait gallery is full of paintings of men who’ve killed those who have wronged them,” Elsinora said. “But they’re not called villains. They’re called heroes.”
“Heroines,” Marguerite amended, savoring the word. “But who would we kill?”
“Well, who has wronged us?” asked Gwendolyn.
The answer was so obvious, it hardly needed stating. But they did, all at once. “The princesses!” they cried.
5.
According to Today’s Royal, the three princesses would be attending the annual all-state fayre taking place in the capital in three days. The Wickeds decided to kill them all at once. The journey to the festivities would take two days, and they’d obviously have to go in disguise, because if sharing a few rounds of spindle pricks had drawn attention, their trio out on the roads together would get all the birds tweeting.
They puzzled for quite some time over what kind of getup would work. After all, they’d gone to Dr. Youngblood’s for years, not so much to retain their beauty as to disguise their wickedness, and look how well that had turned out.
It was Marguerite who found the solution. If they were going to lean in to their wickedness, they had to lean in to the ugliness as well. Reaching for a pair of scissors, she hacked off her hair, long and black and shining, her finest feature—even the tabloids admitted that.
Her tresses fell unceremoniously to the floor. “What do you think? Am I ugly?” she asked her friends. But Marguerite was beyond beauty. She was something else. Powerful.
“Hand me those scissors,” Gwendolyn said.
Once their hair was shorn, the Wickeds threw off their frocks and donned the clothing Elsinora’s husband had left behind when he’d moved in with a maiden half his age. They dipped their fingers into the fireplace and used the spent ashes to draw mustaches above one another’s lips. Examining themselves in the king’s mirror, they discovered that the features that had disgusted them all these years were perfectly acceptable in a man’s face, handsome, even. They’d known, of course, that the burden of beauty was carried by women—after all, there were never any men in the waiting room at Dr. Youngblood’s—but it was only when they’d relieved themselves of the weight that they understood how heavy it was.
“I wonder what your dick mirror would think of us now,” Marguerite said.
“Let’s go find out,” Elsinora said, leading them back to her chamber. “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she began. “Who’s the fairest . . .” But before she’d finished the question, she found she’d plunged the ivory handle of her scissors into the mirror’s center. “Oops,” she said as a small crack opened. Gwendolyn took the scissors from her friend, and using the blade this time, stabbed at it; the crack spread like a flower opening to the morning sun.
“Allow me,” Marguerite said, giving the looking glass a good thwack with the heel of her boot until at last it shattered. It is well known that a broken mirror carries a curse of seven years’ bad luck, but as the Wickeds stepped over the shards, none of them seemed to care.
6.
They left at dawn, on shaggy steeds from Elsinora’s stables. It had been many years since they’d ridden horseback, and once they’d adjusted to sitting astride, feet in stirrups—so much easier than balancing sidesaddle—they galloped at full speed, whooping in delight. When other riders passed them, the men simply doffed their hats and nodded a “Good day, sir,” and that was it.
As they rode, they honed the plan. They decided to spend the first night at the Leaky Pail, an inn of ill repute frequented by gamblers and mercenaries, the sort of place where they might hire a man or two to create a distraction so they could strike the princesses all at once, before an alarm could be raised.
After arriving at the inn and paying for their rooms, they sat in the back of the tavern, nursing their bowls of stew and steins of foxwater and surveying the other patrons.
“Who shall we hire?” Elsinora asked.
“Let’s wait until the end of the night and find the losing player, for he will be the one in most desperate need of coin,” Gwendolyn said.
The night wore on, the games petering out one by one until the only other patrons were a group of six men engaged in a rowdy game of three-pig poker. By this point, Gwendolyn and Elsinora were yawning, so Marguerite, who rarely slept more than a few hours a night, sent them to bed. After they left, she took her stein of foxwater to the bar where she could spy less conspicuously.
“Wise move,” the bar maiden said with a winking smile. “We’re approaching the point of the night when fights break out, and you were right in the line of fire.”
A dusty-haired man came out of the kitchen, carrying a rack of clean steins. “Here you go, Jill,” he said.
“Thanks, Jack.”
“Do you want me to close tonight?”
“That’s okay,” Jill replied. “You closed the last three nights. And besides, I have company.” She nodded toward Marguerite. Jack said good night and headed up the stairs.
“Hey, girly girl, another round,” shouted one of the men at the table, a skinny sort with mutton-chop sideburns.
“Coming right up, good sir.” Jill filled a pitcher of foxwater and set down a stein in front of Marguerite. “On the house.”
“Thank you.”
Jill attended to the men. As she cleared the empty pitchers and overflowing ashtrays, the skinny mutton-chopped gambler pinched her rump. Jill’s smile didn’t falter until she was behind the bar again.
“Do you know those men?” Marguerite asked.
“If not them, specifically, their type. Why? Do they owe you money?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m looking to hire a man or two.”
“If you want to be cheated or deceived, they’ll do just fine,” Jill replied.
It was only when the roosters began crowing that the game finally ended. The skinny one had to borrow a few coins to cover his tab, so Marguerite chose him as her mark. As the other men headed toward the town square, he walked in the opposite direction, toward a blind alley where Jill had gone to take out the trash. As she returned to the inn, he stepped right in front of her.
“Oh, sir,” Jill said. “You startled me.”
“Did I?” he replied.