The noblewoman's dress is torn. A silken, translucent square falls to the floor; the clock strikes is first of twelve. From the hall drifts the sound of lights flickering, violins squeaking, doors creaking, glasses clicking, shoes stamping, voices yelling; then the bells drowning them all. Drowning the click of her cumbersome heels. Drowning the call of the prince, but she turns around to see him anyway. A dull beige jacket half-hangs from him, and another scrap of fabric is tucked into his shoe. Whatever that is staining his arm, she tells herself, it will not be me.
So she runs, flicks off the heels with a swipe and a clatter and runs. Through a corridor, left, right, right, up a flight of roughly carpeted stairs, left. She is in a second-storey room; the window is open. Someone who had less adrenaline coursing through their veins and far, far more time to think would not have clambered out of the ajar window, seized the ledge and dropped to the ground; however, our noblewoman had neither of these things. She hears a crack as she lands on the grass, and a few moments later, she realises that her foot is twisted at a peculiar angle. The dull pain would have, in the past, made her fall to the floor and cry for help; now she limps on, lumbering as far from the window as she can. She does not look back. She limps as quickly as she can, gritting her teeth through the pain, stumbling and fumbling on the dewdrop-covered midnight grass.
She falls, reaching out her hands, but she is stopped from hitting the ground. She is lifted up. A familiar figure stands in front of her; a witch in a gently flowing dress with a necklace made from vials of frightening liquids that the noblewoman was told had the power to transform objects into others. The witch wraps her arms around the noblewoman, pulling her in closely. The witch kisses her. The noblewoman tells her everything; how the prince lured her from concerned eyes into corridor from which she could not make her way back, how she clawed and scratched and kicked and screamed when she realised that she was in peril, how she escaped by the edge of her dress. That she was now almost surely being hunted.
Take this, the witch says. What will it do? Hide you, change you. The noblewoman drinks. She does not feel a change, but when she looks back down at her body, the dress that reminds her of her attack has been replaced by a heavy brown garment. You will not look like a noblewoman, you will not look like herself. The prince will find another noblewoman to marry. She will stay with her witch in a house in the depths of the forest that was once a hollow log, and they will be happy. The witch pours a vial over a small round fruit that lies on the grass until it changes into a circle with wheels being led by a silver-white horse. Go, go; I shall find you, my dear. The noblewoman, now a peasant, leaves through the forest. The witch senses someone coming towards them; someone unfamiliar to her, and with a desperate and furious demeanour. A man approaches the witch. A dull beige jacket half-hangs from him, and a scrap of fabric is tucked into his shoe.
A lady has left the palace; I fear she is in danger. Help me find her, woman.
The witch seizes a vial from her necklace she swore she would not use unless it was necessary, and she throws it at the man's feet. Blue smoke surrounds him, and when it clears, he has vanished. The witch smiles at her handiwork. She leaves for the forest to find her noblewoman.