It was comfortable inside her turret; she had no reason to complain. Nor, having resided there for as long as she could remember, did she have any reason to wish she were elsewhere. She would read or write to pass the time, having learned how long ago, when nurses came to the tower, and there was always embroidery, which, having had a great deal of time to practice, she excelled at. If she pleased, she could spend long hours combing her hair, or painting, or singing and strumming the ruby-studded harp her father had given her during his last visit. Never in her life had she seen the sky, never truly. She had heard talk of it when the servants who kept her turret in order spoke to one another, and come to the conclusion that the drumming sound she sometimes heard above her head must be rain. She could see a small smear of land through the thick glaze of a single stained-glass window, but the distortion was so complete that she shuddered at the mere thought of having to make sense of it. Once, and only once, she had broken it, fitfully flinging a fist through the glass. She had gained multicolored splinters, a glimpse of the night sky, and a gust of cold air in the face, which had terrified her. Wind was new, and she had taken ill. Her godmother had entered the turret not long afterward and found her weeping feverishly in the middle of the floor, surrounded by bright fragments of glass. The window had been repaired immediately and she had never touched it since.
When her father visited, he never mentioned the outside world. The only world that mattered, he would say, was the ivory Eden that remained safely, caringly locked inside its crystalline tower. He would always give her another emerald necklace or bolt of damask or some other souvenir to add to the splendor he had sworn to provide.
I've built you your world, given you all the world you could ever want.
It was a world of curling lace and rippling satin, gleaming lacquers and carpets so deep and rich she would sink into them up to her ice-colored ankles; a world of jeweled flowers and gilt-framed mirrors; a world of feathery fingers that plucked at a lute while a reedlike voice sang to drown out the sound of rain; a world of black marble veined with gold, white marble veined with the daintiest pink; a world of enameled combs she wore in the brittle milkweed nimbus of her hair and of translucent skin the sun's fiery fingers had never so much as brushed.
In any case, there's more than enough to ensure you aren't distracted by that nasty window by the far wall; here, I've brought you a tapestry to hang over the ugly thing, just in case.
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Her world might have been a powerful enough charm against all others, but he had no such charm. He was buried at sea and a messenger came to the turret with the brocade he had meant to bring back for her. She clutched it and cried diamonds, letting go only when a servant took her arm, announcing that the widow had requested her presence in the courtyard.
She had seen his second wife and her daughter only occasionally, when her father had insisted they see the turret and the idyll within: a woman who wove garnets in her hair, and a girl with eyes as dark and empty as onyx. She remembered them, vaguely, and then forgot them entirely as the world swirled into a gust of wind and she collapsed like cut paper with one foot over the threshold.
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The brocade was a perfect match for the garnets in her stepmother's hair and was therefore spared, in a manner of speaking. Eden fetched a good price.
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The sky, she knew, was a flat blue piece of glass as stained and distorted as her old window. It spat smoke over its surface when it was angry and wept sharp tears that sometimes froze into icy bullets.
Feet that had never before touched the earth shuffled unsteadily forward.
Mica glittered in her stepsister's black eyes and one doughy finger jabbed towards the garden.
Trembling in unfamiliar wooden overshoes, she followed its path.
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The fresh air stung her skin and the sunlight made her eyes stream. Squinting and sneezing, she somehow found the garden. The sun burned her to a rosy red, and by the end of the day she resembled the radishes she had been sent out to gather.
If no longer fair, her skin was still as delicate as the gauze she had been draped in when the messenger came. Her hands, silk too close to the fire, seemed almost to wither upon making their hesitant acquaintance with the soil and stalks of the garden. The soil stained and the stalks scratched, but she dared not return until the task was completed and the dark earth had branded her hands with its excess. Upon handing her basket to her stepmother that evening, the tip of a single radish somehow pierced one frail fingertip. Three bright teardrops of blood gracefully sought relief on a nearby spinning wheel.
And her stepsister's hand was there, again and again, and a new red splotch began to bloom on her charred face. She never understood why; then again, she had precious little time left for comprehension. But there were servants to do the spinning, and surely the damage the radishes had done was considerably less than what those bloated fingers had done by wrenching the spindle from its proper place. Once or twice she caught a glimpse of a face that reminded her of two blackberries drowning in a bowl of cream, and a spindle that dived at her like a macabre bird. The final blow sent her tumbling into the ashes; above the new mark on her face, what was left of an eye began to swell shut.
An arm was dragging her out of the ashes, then, while a finger pointed at the garden and a voice shrilled into her ear: go back out, don't return until you've separated every particle of soil from every grain of sand the garden contains, not even if it takes you all week.
She considered flight as she stumbled back outside, cradling one side of her face, but there was, to all effects, nowhere to fly. She had learned geography as a child, but actually facing it had proven to be fearsome. And so she fell on her knees, took up a handful of earth, and began.
It wasn't long before she was too exhausted to do anymore, and when the wind came and destroyed her efforts, mixing sand and soil together in a colorless mass, she gave up entirely in favor of sleep. It was a long time in coming. She curled up in the garden, far away from the radishes. She tried to sleep among peas that dug into her skin like barbed marbles, and among pumpkins that loomed like giants. At long last, she slumped beneath an apple tree, where she managed to muster just enough energy to devour one of the fruits before plunging into a long, dream-filled slumber.
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The dream the slumber contained was a strange one, incorporating elements of an old story she had once read. In the tale, an old woman had blessed a maiden much like herself with diamonds and pearls, which had fallen from her mouth whenever she spoke forever after. It had always struck her as odd that the maiden never choked on her gift or had trouble carrying on conversations during meals; the entire thing seemed wildly improbable. She had never much cared for the tale, though she and the maiden, she thought, were quite similar.
But it was the old woman from the story who appeared in her dream at one point, proving later to be the only part of the dream she would remember at all.
No, the woman claimed, diamonds and pearls are not for you anymore. You are not like that girl at all, not now. Not a thing like her at all.
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And then she awoke after her first night outside. Raw welts from unfamiliar insects covered her skin and the wide purple patch of her stepsister's ire still brandished itself proudly across her face. A cracked streak of a substance she carefully avoided identifying cut a lurid path through the dirt and ashes smudged beneath one eye. After several attempts and even more half-formed cries, she managed to open her eyes, preemptively slitting them against a sun that had not yet risen. It was easier than it had been the day before; the eye on the bruised side of her face yielded no sight at all. With an unconscious delicacy she lifted a hand to her mouth to smother a gasp, but instead she coughed and her hand and the ragged, too-heavy sleeve that contained it were suddenly stained a red more brilliant than the apples hanging on the tree.
She had begun to grope desperately for a lace-fringed handkerchief she no longer possessed when, more suddenly than seemed possible, it began to rain, and then to storm. With a moan that instantly drowned in the thunder and a shudder that the swirling wind quickly turned to a convulsion, she collapsed back under the tree. Having spent such a great deal of her life within the turret, she had never learned, nor needed to learn, the seemingly common knowledge concerning the importance of avoiding trees during thunderstorms.
As the branches whipped wildly beneath the churning sky, an apple came loose and spiraled downward. Still crumpled beneath the tree, she opened her eyes long enough to see an indistinct red shape as it grew larger and larger, closer and closer. She could put no name to it, not even when it caught her between the eyes and the stars that suddenly exploded behind her mind melded with the lightning until it all seemed to illuminate a tower someplace very far away. A single word hovered on her lips, unvoiced, until she coughed once more and all was red again. She fell back, a new bruise forming on the cold skin of her forehead, and she lay there softly and soundlessly, as befitted a maid, while her rags floated lifelessly in pools of rainwater.