Queen Icilia's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Icilia carried the sleeping spark to her castle and set it against the Mirror's glass. The frost took hold at once. The spark froze into the silver, small and still. She stepped back to watch it hold. It did not hold. A thin line of pink light seeped from the seam where Cordelia's candy magic met the frost. The witch's work had never fully joined her own. It bent when she pushed, like ice over running water. She pressed her palm flat to the glass and felt the debt beneath it, unnamed and waiting. She could not trust a seal that owed someone else. She would go to the witch and settle it. Icilia crossed the forest to the gingerbread hut where Cordelia lived. Sugar smoke rose from the chimney. Beside the door stood a strange thing: a boar built of red brick, wound through with dead briars. Cordelia had made it, or unmade something like it. Icilia did not knock. She walked in. Cordelia was mother to Snow White and Briar Rose. Icilia had borne both daughters and lost both to their own dark crafts. To stand in the witch's warm kitchen and beg felt like swallowing coals. Cordelia looked up from a pot and smiled with candy on her teeth. "The queen comes to me," Cordelia said. "Your Mirror leaks." "Your magic leaks. It will not hold my spring." Icilia set her hands on the table. Frost spread across the wood. "Name the debt. Now. I will not carry an open price inside my glass." Cordelia stirred her pot. "You want the name early. That costs more than waiting." "I will pay it. Speak." The witch set down her spoon. "Then here it is. When I ask, you will show your Mirror to the one I bring you. One person. My choosing. You reflect them true, whatever they are." She leaned close. "That is the debt. Say yes, and the candy in your glass becomes yours alone." Icilia knew the Mirror's cost. She had shown it to her sister once, and to Briar Rose, and neither came back whole. To promise a stranger to that glass turned her stomach. But an unnamed debt was worse. A named price she could see. She could brace for it. "Yes," Icilia said. Cordelia snapped her fingers. Far off, in the castle, the pink seam in the Mirror flickered and went white. The candy magic dissolved. The frost drank the seal whole. When Icilia returned, the spark sat locked in clean silver ice, held by her power and no other's. It did not leak. It did not bend. She had her seal. She had traded it for a face she did not yet know, a stranger she would one day drag before the coldest truth she owned. The Mirror was hers again. The debt now had a shape, and it was waiting for a name.