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how to cook the food they threw on the table, gathering together from the shattered jigsaw of memory everything I must have seen the castle servants do ten thousand times. Gradually I
learned how to keep hunger at bay and disease from the door: all the sorcery of fire and iron and water.
    Hard work was no hardship to me; it kept the pictures at bay. Whenever I slackened or stopped to rest by the fire, I was haunted by the image of my stepmother. My father was only a tiny picture
in my mind, shut away like a miniature in a locket. But his young widow stalked behind my eyes, growing tall or wide as I let my mind dwell on her, now smiling, now spitting, ever stretching like a
shadow against a wall. I pictured her life as the queen of the castle, and it was strangely familiar: long days in charge of fire, and iron, and water. Her hands would stay smooth as lilies while
mine were scrubbed raw day by day, but we were living much the same kind of life.
    The men never asked what was in my mind, not even when I got lost in a daze and let the broth burn. They let me dream by the fire like a cat.
    This was only a lull, a time out of time. You see, I knew my stepmother would find me. The thread between us was stretched thin, wound round trees and snagged in thickets, but never broken.
Somehow I trusted she would track me down and kill me.
    But when she came at last she seemed to have changed. I looked out over the half door one summer day and there she stood in the clearing, hitching her horse to a tree. There was nothing of the
wife about her when she smiled. May I come into your house? she asked.
    I said no and turned away. But when I had stoked up the fire and boiled the shirts and chopped the turnips, I went back to the door, out of curiosity, and she was still there, with her back to
the tree.
    I let her in for a minute. She said how thin I had grown. I said I was well. We said not a word of what was past. She said, I keep breaking mirrors.
    Sitting by the fire with her I shut my eyes and it felt like old times. She stood behind me and laced up my stays tightly, the way I could never lace them on my own.
    When they came home that night the men found me alone in a sort of stupor. First they were anxious, to hear my breath come so quick and shallow, and then they were angry, to see the turnips
curling on the table and no food in the pot. They said my stepmother had to be a sorceress, to find me so deep in the forest.
    Some weeks went by and I was myself again, scrubbing and mashing and earning my keep. The visit began to seem like another one of my daydreams.
    One afternoon I was resting on a tree stump outside the cottage, snatching a moment of sun on my back, when I heard the jangle of her harness. This time, she knelt beside me, and there was
nothing of the queen about her. I haven’t had a night’s sleep since you left, she said; it feels like dancing in shoes of red-hot iron. Will you come home now?
    I said, No, and turned my head away. She took out her jewelled comb and began to draw it through my hair, patient with all the burrs and knots my new life had put in it. I shut my eyes and let
the points of the comb dig into my scalp, scraping down to the kernel of memory.
    When they came home that night the men found me curled around the tree stump on the damp grass. They lifted me up and told me that my stepmother must be a witch to put such poison of idleness in
my head. They warned me to stay inside and shut the door to all comers.
    For some weeks I did what I was told, kept house and kept quiet. My hair knotted again, my stays hung loose.
    But one afternoon in early autumn I was troubled by a whiff of a scent of overpowering sharpness. I could not remember what it was; all I knew was that I could hardly stand it. I turned, and
there at the half door my stepmother stood, an apple in her upturned hand.
    Stepmother, yes, that was the word, but there was nothing of the mother about her.
    The apple was half ripe. One