Page 41 of The Broken Mirror
“What you also don’t know about me is that I have a lot of brothers. Had. Have?” Rosie sighs. “They’re older than me. They’re my dad’s sons. I guess they’re more half brothers? But as my dad says, there’s no such thing as half-loved. They’re my brothers! My mom is their stepmother. Well, that’s the whole thing. So I’ve been obsessed with talking mirrors for a long time, mostly because they seem like the most straightforward way to find out where my mother is.”
Sadness sweeps over Filomena. So much is going on that it’s been a moment since she’s thought about her own mother. Filomena thinks of her now, wonders if she’s still in the hospital or if she’s been allowed to return home yet. She hopes her mother is at home, in bed with a good book and a steaming hot cup of tea. Fil sympathizes so much with Rosie. Losing a mother… It’s something she doesn’t want to even imagine.
Rosie keeps telling her story: “After my mother had been gone for a while and none of us could figure out where she was and what happened to her, I decided we should sneakinto Queen Christina’s castle and steal her talking mirror. If we could just ask it where my mother is…”
Gretel pats Rosie on the shoulder. She’s starting to tear up. “It’s okay, Rosie, you don’t have to tell us about this right now if you don’t want to,” she says.
“No, I have to,” Rosie responds, taking a deep breath. “I was keeping watch. My brothers were going to grab the mirror off the wall. I thought that if talking mirrors tell only truth, then they must also have a sense of justice. They’d be on our side. We even chose a day when Queen Christina was away. She was at Cinderella’s ball actually.”
Gretel’s, Alistair’s, and Filomena’s eyes widen, realizing they’d been in the same room with this queen.
“But it didn’t matter that she was gone,” Rosie says. “Her horrible minions captured my brothers, and I couldn’t warn them. I didn’t even see them. The minions kept my brothers in Christina’s dungeon, and every day I would go to check on them. I’d sneak up to this one tiny window that looks into the dungeon. The day Christina got back from Wonderland… It was horrible.”
Rosie looks so shaken up, Filomena wants to ask her to stop talking, stop telling the story, stop reliving it. But she knows, somehow, that she needs to hear the end.
“Queen Christina turned my brothers into swans. She cursed them. I had to watch them transform from boys to swans, and it was so awful to see them contorting like that. They were in so much pain.” Rosie wipes her tears away,remembering. “But she let them go. She turned them into swans and then let them fly away. I thought that was so odd. But when I think about it now, it makes sense. She captured their personhood, so they’ll be trapped no matter where they go. And it’s all my fault. I was supposed to keep watch, but I failed them.” As Rosie says this, she stands up to touch the strange fabric scraps hanging off the mannequins. “After that, I decided that if I couldn’t access an existing talking mirror, I’d make one. I’d find a way. So I went to visit the Winter Witch.”
Alistair gasps. “That’s very dangerous, Rosie!”
“Who is the Winter Witch?” Filomena asks, puzzled. She has a vague buzzing of memory. The Winter Witch is mentioned somewhere in the Never After books…
“She’s a very unpredictable old witch who lives on the mountain in Snow Country,” Rosie explains to Filomena. “It’s impossible to tell whose side she’s on or who she favors. She has no allegiances, and she’s very powerful. She never leaves her cave.”
“Visiting her means risking your life,” Alistair says. “I’ve heard of people who went to see her and never came back. If she doesn’t agree with whatever it is that you seek, you’re a goner.”
“Well, that’s chilling,” Gretel says.
“So you risked your life like that?” Filomena says.
“I did, and even with her gifts, still nothing!” Rosie yells in frustration.
“What happened?” Filomena asks. She has to know.
“I told her why I was there, that I’m searching for a way to create a talking mirror and that my brothers are cursed. At first I thought she would kill me on the spot; after all, it is incredibly presumptuous to try to create one of the most ancient powers in Never After from scratch.” Rosie laughs at herself, cooling her tears. “But she said she liked my pluck, or something like that. She gave me a truth serum she created—an incredibly powerful substance, very rare. I’m not sure if even the fairies can make truth serum. And she also told me a way to reverse the curse on my brothers.”
“Wow! That’s incredible!” Alistair says.
“It would be, if I could ever bloody figure out how to do it.” Rosie sits back down in a huff.
“So what is it? How do you reverse the curse?”
“I have to make shirts for them out of star flowers.”
“That’s it? You just have to make shirts?” Alistair says.
“That, and I have to put the shirts on them. But star flowers are incredibly delicate and hard to find. Whenever I pick them, I accidentally ruin them. I’ll finish three shirts, but by the time I’m on the fourth, the first three are wilted and falling apart.”
Filomena looks over at Gretel, who is absolutely beaming.
“Rosie, Rosie, Rosie,” Gretel says, grinning. “Aren’t you lucky that your dear cousin Gretel happens to be an expert seamstress?”
CHAPTERTWENTYGRETEL’SCURSE-BREAKINGASSEMBLYLINE
Gretel is totally in her element. She’s pacing around the loft, surveying the materials at hand. Filomena loves to see her friends so expertly doing what they do best. It makes her wonder what exactly it is that she does best.
Despite Rosie’s protesting, Gretel finally got her to agree to let them help.
“Aren’t we supposed to be figuring out this League of Seven thing? Not making T-shirts?” Rosie says.
