Three Hearts for Three Castles

Sister Josefina, an old nun who was responsible for teaching the older children, sent me  to the Abbess’s office after Giovanni’s father ran off with Mr. Petchard, the baker. Now, I fumble with the straps of my leather bag as I wait in a big floral-clad chair that threatens to swallow me if I lean too far back. I resist the urge to bounce on its plush faded cushions like when I was small. I want to be taken seriously, even if I am in trouble.  

A thump-thump comes from the thing trapped beneath the brown flap of my bag. I resist  the urge to pull out the taut muscle and examine it again. My fingers inch towards the  clasps, unlatching one, which makes the beating sound from inside the bag grow louder, faster.  My breath catches in my throat as the second latch gives a soft click. I push my small fingers under the flap and begin to push it upwards. The feigned beating of the hollow in my chest matches the cadence of the heart inside the bag, my fingers stretching towards its odd form when — the door opens. My hand falls away from the pouch and I clasp it tightly in my other in an attempt to keep myself still.  

“Evra, dear, sit up straight,” the Abbess chides, her gravelly voice cold despite her best effort to be endearing.  

I feel my back muscles tighten almost instinctively. My braids flop against my back as I  stretch my hunched form upward as far as I can. My hands flick to the sides of my chair; I nearly sit on them. The bag lies abandoned in my lap.  

“Yes, Abbess.”  

“Do you know why you are here, Evra?”  

I know this game, I’ve played it before. The Abbess is giving me an out, but this time I’m  not sure I want one. I’m not sure why what I’ve done is wrong. Really, I’m not even sure what I  did.

“No, Abbess.” I steady my voice as best I can.  

“I believe you are in possession of something that does not belong to you.”  

“No, Abbess.” The pulsing heart in my bag slows itself to a gentle cadence that  barely stretches the bag’s exterior.  

A gift. It was a gift. I chant this in my head like it means something, like it will matter to the Abbess, whose left, narrower eye, two shades golder than the amber right, is always trained on me. She thinks I’m consorting with faeries if I’m not stealing hearts, practicing the Old Ways. All equally unforgivable in the Lord’s eyes. 

“Now Evra, you know what the Lord says about lying.” 

          The Lord says a lot of things … well, His nuns say a lot of things for Him. But the one thing I can get behind is not lying, and I’m not. “I didn’t steal anything, Abbess. Mara gave it to me, just like Giovanni’s father gave his to Mr. Petchard.”  

The Abbess always has a smile on her face, though it does not suit her austere features. When she frowns, it is a bit like staring a disappointed God in the face, which is both frightening and, frankly, sad.  

“As Sister Josefina explained to you before, Mr. Petchard stole Mr. Zapos’s heart from  him. That is an irreparable crime, young lady, one I am astounded you would commit!” My brow scrunches up, just like it did when Sister Josefina first “corrected” us in class. She had tapped her ruler against the already dented part of her desk to quiet the storm of “rumors” and “lies” about “romance” and “love” that had kicked up like dust between us children. Giovanni had been absent that day, as was the early-morning scent of fresh sourdough that wafted through our small village like clockwork. Everybody knew why.  

The Abbess rubs her temples with ink-stained hands. She’d been writing letters to parents  all morning. I’m sure the ink from the letter to my mother is what produced the fresh black dots that pearl on the outside of her thumb.  

“But Mara —” 

“Mara is a good girl. This is unlike you, to drag her into your messes.” The Abbess flicks the drop of ink on her thumb before leaning forward on the table, her voice lowering to a whisper.  “If you truly care about her, you will return her heart to her. Perhaps then we can pretend that all of this never happened.”  

“But I didn’t do anything wr —”

“Enough, Evra!” The Abbess’s hands slap down on her cherry wood desk. The sound  forces the crease in my brow lower and my shoulders to hunch. I have never seen her like this,  taloned and impatient.  

She must see my discomfort, for she pushes out a long and shaky breath. “I know you do  not understand, Evra. But for your own good, you must do as I say. You’re too young to care for  a girl’s heart. I will ensure Mara is returned her heart and its key.” She sighs, pushing back a gray lock of hair that loosened in her exasperation. “You will stay home for a few days. Perhaps your mother can better explain this to you.” There is a lingering disapproval there, a doubt.  

I wish Mara were here, so she could help me explain. Mara is charming, polite, and easy  with her words. She could tell the Abbess how she felt, why she gave it to me. I feel her heart  beat in my lap, as if it knows I am thinking of her. The two of us were going to walk the edge of the forest today. I imagine scattered light from between the leaves on her soft face. I wish I was there and not here. There is a sadness, a hissing tear-soaked anger, that takes hold of me, a displacement that I can’t quite understand. I care for Mara, isn’t that enough? Can’t I care for her heart if she asked me to? As if it were mine? 

“Come on now, child. Hand it over.” The Abbess stretches her inked fingers out to me. 

My much smaller hand slips into the leather bag, sliding deeper into the pouch despite my mind’s protests, its desire to clutch the sack to my chest and run. My fingers close around the little beating thing, like a songbird dozing in my hands.  

I wish I were a faerie, that I had fangs to bear, or scales to slither away upon until it was  safe to curl up around Mara’s precious heart.  

The Abbess makes an impatient gesture with her dirty fingers. She will stain Mara’s  heart. Before I really can understand what I’ve done, the heart sits solemnly in the Abbess’s  hand beside its delicate silver key, dwarfed by her elongated and spindly fingers. My hands do not move from their protective encirclement of my bag. They begin to shake, replacing the absent gentle thrum of the heart’s beat. 

I stand up as tears begin to pool in my eyes. I blink at them rapidly, trying to understand, to fathom how my own fingers or even Mara’s heart could have betrayed me. Let it be over. 

I keep my head down, waiting for dismissal.  

The Abbess wraps up the heart in a silken scarf, one that used to be a doily beneath a  black velvet alocasia that died last winter. Mara’s heart goes in a drawer. I think that it will wither and die there without care. Then Mara won’t have a heart at all. Like me. 

The Abbess nods at me, letting me go. 

I don’t know where my own heart is, but I am certain when I find it, it will be broken.  “Evra.”  

I stop in the doorway, my hands still curling around my bag.  

“It is better to have no heart at all, than to choose the wrong one.”  

… 

Mama is waiting at the front of the schoolhouse, an old chapter house converted after a  scare in the village a couple decades ago. Something about a little girl who made a deal with the faeries. She disappeared for weeks before she returned, heart and key in hand. The children of our village sometimes pretend to be the girl. They emerge from the woods with mud-coated faces and twigs clutched between their fingers. They tell tales of adventure and tricky bargains. They call out names they think belong to faeries.

It is the kind of “Old Ways nonsense” that the nuns try to teach out of us. Time in school means more God and less faeries. They prefer to teach children that hearts belong to God, not to faeries, not even to ourselves. They don’t like the games either. The nuns squash any mention of the girl or the faeries fast. Playing that game at school means rewriting sentences and reciting verses instead of free time between lessons. Mama doesn't want me playing those games either, but it’s because she takes the faeries seriously. She says it’s easy to get lost in the forest, especially when you don’t know who you’re calling out to.We walk down the pebbled path that leads from the schoolhouse to the Abbey’s entrance,  and then the road, in silence. Mama adjusts her headscarf every few minutes, despite there being  no wind, her red hair falling in soft waves down her back. Her fingers clutch her skirts, a habit  she told me she developed as a girl.  

“Holding onto something,” my grandmother had said, “keeps the magic out of young  girls.”  

Mama grips her skirts, I my satchel.  

“You know, your father gave me his heart when he was about your age.” Mama’s voice  catches a bit when she talks about Papa, but once she gets started there is a hint of music in her  voice, an old melody. I don’t quite understand it, but I hear it sometimes when Mara speaks  softly to me. 

Mama fingers a golden necklace around her throat as she speaks, only pulling at it  enough to show a bit of the chain but not its pendant.

I can feel her eyes on me, open and green, like the field out behind our house that separates us from the wood. The very same wood where that girl said she spoke to those faeries years before.  

I want to meet Mama’s eyes and smile like I usually do, but I can’t seem to look up. 

“I know you think you’re too young,” Mama says, “but it does happen. Caring for someone else’s heart. Mr. Petchard and Mr. Zapos just found each other later in life. Nothing wrong with that. And nothing wrong with you and Mara either,” Mama whispers, turning her head forward down the path. She unfurls her hands from her skirts and reaches toward me, clasping my hand between her fingers.  

I look up at her now, less afraid of her disappointment but still all muddled and mucky  inside. “The Abbess says it’s better to have no heart than to choose the wrong one.” I feel tears  welling at my eyes again. I don’t brush them away this time.  

I can feel Mama’s frustration, her grip tightens on my hand and her shoulders get a lot  more rigid than usual. I keep going anyway. “I don’t even have a heart, that’s why Sister Josefina and the Abbess think I stole Mara’s, isn’t it?”  

Mama stops. She looks me square in the face, features crinkled like an overwrought  napkin, her lithe fingers gripping my shoulders too tight. “Baby, no. Not at all. Everybody has a  heart.” 

“Everyone in my class has one except for me and Mara. Mara found hers and she  already —”  

“Mara has always had her heart, baby. Just like you and me.” She loosens her fingers  enough to tuck a strand of my dull brown hair behind my ear. Her face is still scrunched. I don’t believe her. I could feel Mara’s heart, real and solid, pumping in my bag. I saw her pull it from her chest, red and gleaming, with a silver key strung around her neck. 

I had rushed to the bathroom afterward to see if I too had a cavity there that could be opened, with something wonderful inside that could be removed, but no such luck. No key, no opening, no heart. I don’t say this to Mama, the lines on her face are just starting to smooth and I don’t want to upset her. Instead, I stare at the gold chain peaking through the collar of her dress that holds her own articulated key and father’s braided iron one. I nod half-heartedly.  

She pulls me in for a hug, the cool metal of her chain pressing against my throat. I am young but almost as tall as her now. Still, I have to stretch on my toes to get myself in the  optimal place for a hug. “We’ll figure this out together.”  

I believe her, and a bit of calming warmth surges through her small but powerful arms.  But … but still I think I will have to find my heart alone.  

… 

It’s over breakfast, with a cracked and somewhat dry loaf of sourdough of Mama’s own  making, that I realize what I have to do.  

“It’s with the faeries isn’t it?” I say, mouth half full of butter-lathered bread. Mama looks up from washing the dishes in their bin. She pushes her headscarf back as she straightens up, wiping her hands on her apron. “What is?”  

       “My heart.” I finish chewing the bread, gulping down a glass of our goat, Capra’s, milk. I wipe my mouth. “I have to go on a quest for the key. I’ll find it and then my chest will be open,  just like that girl the nuns made the school because of.” 

Mother blinks a bit, as if remembering something, her arms elbow-deep in murky  breakfast-dish water. When she finally does speak, it’s slower than usual, hesitant. “I suppose  you could go looking for it. As long as you’re back for supper.”  

I glug down the rest of Capra’s milk before I push up from my seat. I scramble for my  coat and my shoes, grabbing an old wicker basket used for collecting eggs to throw the essentials  in. Mama makes me a sandwich, and packs a flask of water. It’s all very quick, and Mama and I  hardly breathe until I am on my way out the door.  

I make it to the end of the path at our house, the one out back leading towards the woods,  before Mama calls me. “Evra, wait!” She stands in the doorway, pulling at her golden chain again. I turn and march back to her, my face twitching with mild annoyance.  

“Your hair, silly. You don’t want it to get caught in the brambles.” She pushes the  choppy brown locks from my face and turns me away from her so she can braid. When she finishes, she spins me around again, placing a kiss on top of my forehead. “Now, be back  home before supper. You should still be able to see the sun through the trees, okay, baby?” She  brushes off my shoulders with a gentle smile.   

She thinks smiling will make the worry in her eyes invisible to me. It doesn’t. I put on the bravest face I can and turn to go. 

Mama calls again, “And Evra?”  

I stop and turn once more. 

“There is no need to fear the faeries. Just be yourself.” She speaks like she knows.

Every good tale begins in a forest. I think perhaps my heart will lie there, among the fae and the beasts the Abbey tells me to fear.  

But I don’t, I’ve always been good at listening to my mom.  

I wave goodbye, swinging my basket, and set off down the road.  

…  

Dense wood, and spindled branches encircle me like wise old creatures, soft in their looming. My hand trails on rough bark, so small in comparison to the trees surrounding the  clearing. These are the largest in the forest, evenly spread apart around a nearly perfect circular  field dotted with alyssum, like gods protecting something hidden in the grasses. I somehow knew this is where I would end up. If there was something to be found, the  forest would spit it up here, especially if it belonged to someone. Someone like me. The forest should feel less alive, the sounds of the wildlife fade into the surrounding thickets, and yet the hum of old magic dwells here. The Abbess would punish me for talking like this, about the Old Ways, but I am sure she and Sister Josefina have never been out in the woods. Even the ground thrums with energy here, a spark inducing the sort of feeling that makes life in the village feel so small, so unaffecting.  

My chest cavity feels like it's brimming with water, swelling towards overflow. It gets all  tight in the space near my lungs. I lay down in the grass, twirling a white alyssum blossom  between my fingers. I let that warm feeling seep into my body. It thaws the hardness of the day.  My body shakes as it attempts to sink into the grass, to release. I feel tears rolling down my  cheeks before I even release a sob.  

“I didn’t do anything wrong.” I choke, releasing the flower and digging my fingers into  the earth. Tears drip from my cheeks to the grass, watering the dirt. I think that this must be the  pain of the heartless, to be reviled for trying to love outside of one’s chest. Mama didn’t say it  was going to hurt like this. Maybe the Abbess was right, maybe it was better not to love at all.

The ground beneath me begins to rumble. I don’t move, but cry harder.  

I almost don’t notice the long slithering body making its way towards me in the grass.  When it hisses, I scramble backward, sitting up.  

The fae-beast raises three serpentine heads, yellow eyes piercing. Knowing. Droplets of  water, tears, cascade off of the serpent’s back. It lifts its pale underside to me, one head  stretching forward inquisitively. The rightmost head’s tongue slides past its mouth, extending  towards me like a forked hand. I blink, righting myself. I am not afraid of the fae, only nuns are afraid of the Old Ways.  Mama taught me to never be a nun.  

The snake’s hiss is melodic, like the strumming of a lyre on a summer afternoon by the  river, light and warm. His tongue approaches my bag, curious as a hungry cat. When my hand comes to rest on the pouch, where my adventure’s provisions are held, the tongue slips back into its mouth, and the snake slithers away.  

“Wait!” I call out, holding out my sandwich.  

The snake stops.  

I break the sandwich into threes, and extend one to the most curious of heads. Its eyes  shine with a familiar gleam, a playfulness that reminds me of Mama nibbling an egg cookie or  beating me at chess. Its mouth opens at my offering, long creamy fangs catching the last of the  pink evening light. The jaws of the rightmost head unhinge, translucent walls stretch blue veins  too long, too wide, as if the snake means to swallow me whole.  

But I am not the offering. I think that if I was, the snake would have taken me by now. I am no nun.  

I reach my hand forward and place the sandwich third inside the snake’s mouth; I make a peace offering, freely given.  

The snake swallows the comparatively miniscule collection of bread, cheese, and salami  in one fell gulp.  

I wipe the remaining gunk and wet from my eyes just as a large wooden door materializes  in place of the snake’s throat.  

The door is plain but homey, made of a washed birchwood. In its center is a circular port, through which I glimpse the billowing of reeds, the flow of a river. I look to the door handle. In it is one familiar, delicate silver key. I step closer, gripping  the sash of my bag. The familiar smell of moss and muddy skin beneath a warm and gentle sun fills my nostrils. It calms what little is left of my fear and guides my hand around the keyed handle. I push, and the entryway swings open easily. I know where I’m going. I rush forward into the stream, and the water soaks through my breeches, cool and lovely. The reeds sway in waving welcome and the moss forms a soft bed beneath my curled toes. For a second, worries vanish, and a soft breeze plays over my skin. I close my eyes.  

It is in the darkness behind my lids that I realize what I have done. I already know before  I open my eyes and turn around to check that the door is gone.  

I wade in the waters, alone.  

It wasn’t like this the last time I was here. I remember Mara’s hand inching towards mine  on the bank, her laugh ringing pleasantly in my ears as she charged into the water to escape  teasing.  

It was here I first began to feel the absence in my chest. It had ached so painfully. I  collapsed on the bank and had to be carried by Mara’s father to their lovely cottage amongst the  planting fields.  

Now, I knock my fist against my chest. I swear a hollow resonance echoes from within. My  brow crinkles like Mama’s does, tears aching to fall, but dried up at the edges of my eyes. I’ve got to keep moving. Maybe it will be here.  

I step up onto the muddy banks, pants soaked and sticking to my legs, searching for the  cottage whose chimney should be visible in the distance. But there is no chimney, only a tall  square tower with notches at its top, surrounded by lower, similarly shaped buildings, all far  larger than the family cottage I had come to love. I walk faster through the field paths, where workers bend low with scythes and baskets collecting bushels of wheat. An older man surveying the laborers tips his hat to me as I break into a run, the castle drawing closer with each step.  

Of course this is where my heart would be, locked in a fortress near where I first began  to feel its aching absence. It makes so much sense to me now, I nearly forget to breathe. I  skid to a stop in front of a door similar to the one I had entered through, but doubled and  stretched high above my head. There are no ports, but windows seem foolish when these doors  never close. There is no herald, no guard, only a woman dressed in a simple cream gown, dark  hands folded in front of her: Mara’s mother, but somehow not. The worry lines on her face are  smooth, her cheeks fuller than I last remembered.  

She reaches a hand out to me. “Welcome to Cor Mara, Evra.” 

I take her hand. Her palm is soft and uncalloused, that of a queen rather than a farmer.  With a familiar, but not quite right, warm squeeze, Mara’s mother leads me inside the two  birchwood doors. “I will take you to Mara, my dear, but you must be tired from your journey.  Would you like tea? Canestrelli?”  

I remember the two-thirds of a sandwich I have left in my bag. I mustn't eat that, not  when the first piece opened in the fae-snake something like this. My stomach gives a faint growl, and I think that hot tea and powdered cookies sound delightful. I am about to assent as a trill of laughter fills the hall. Mara.  

Tea and cookies forgotten, I nearly neglect to politely shake my head.  

         “Eager to get on then?” Mara’s mother smiles, holding me still in the center of the black- and-white-tiled foyer. “Are you quite sure?” There is a faint tightness in her grip, a protectiveness that seems entirely unrelated to egg-yolk pastries and hot beverages. I place my free hand on top of hers. My hand is so much smaller and seems insufficient laying there. I open my mouth to speak, but find there is  no voice to give. I want to panic, to grasp at my throat, but Mara’s mother covers my hand with  hers and smiles.  

“No need to fear, little one. Whatever you say will be right, when the time comes.”  I suck in a breath as a shaky, dehydrated tear falls down my cheek. I wish Mara was there holding my hands. She always knows what to say when I don't. She knows how to feel when I don't. She isn’t here, but she is waiting. I nod, letting my hands be squeezed by Mara’s mother. She begins to lead me up the stairs, past landscaped paintings that seem to move and catch the light as we walk. The one closest to the top of the stairs, just before the tower’s spiral staircase, was of that day at the creek. Hand in hand, Mara and I are stretched out on the muddy bank, warm and content.  

Mara’s mother lets go of my hand, and taps my nose sweetly. “You are on your own from  here. Just up the stairs, dear.” I can hear the call of children from down below, where Mara’s siblings are running and scampering where I cannot see. That same homey, nearly-belonging feeling fills my chest as I turn away from Mara’s mother.  

I turn to look at the tower’s steps, narrow and steep, climbing from the upper levels of the castle even higher into the sky. I turn to look back, to thank Mara’s mother for leading me this far, but she is gone.  

The climb up the stairs is quick, the walls seeming to whisper encouraging, inviting platitudes that edge me closer and closer to Mara at its top.  

When I reach the top of the tower, there is no door. Only an archway, open and welcoming, as Mara and her family had always been to me. I step through it into a circular chamber. In its center, sits Mara, her hands clasped  loosely around a familiar pumping mass of muscle. This time it is cased in a thin silvery sheen.  I know this heart. And though it was given to me, it is not mine.  

I step forward.  

Mara looks up at me with her gentle beam. “You’re just in time. Come sit.” I try again to move my lips, to make some kind of utterance, but there is nothing. I seat myself beside her, my limbs aching from all the running. At least my breeches are finally dry. Mara leans her head on my shoulder, her breath soft and warm.  

I want to stay here with her, to end my quest and lay down and fall asleep in the  midday chatter, evening and fae forgotten in a fortress of plush safety. 

But the sun is setting outside of the snake’s jaw, and I haven’t even found my own heart yet.  

I lean against Mara and breathe out a frustrated sigh.  

“I understand.” She says. She brings the heart to her lips, kissing it. Her eyes keep on  mine.

My face grows hot, but I don’t look away.  

This is what the nuns were afraid of.  

The place where she kisses comes loose with the touch of two of her soft fingers. She  reaches for me, takes my hand in hers, and presses into my palm a sliver of silver-tinted sinew. She closes my fingers around it. “You have to keep going. With this, I’ll always be with you, okay?” I gaze down at the silver heart piece, rock it back and forth in my palm. I close my  fingers around it, and press my lips to my palm. My cheeks feel like they are glowing. I safely  stow it in my bag. As the flap closes, I feel my eyes drift closed. 

“You’ll find it, Evra, I know it.”  

I don’t have time to tell her that when I do find my heart, it will be hers. 

… 

I awake to an empty silver lantern and a snake with only two heads. The light weight of  the silver heart piece in my bag is gone, somehow replaced by this utility. I clasp its handle, and  pull out the second third of my sandwich. The largest of heads in the center lays sleeping in the  grass, but the head on the far left perks up as I hold my hand out, fingers curled around the edge of the bread.  

       The snake gently takes the snack from my hand, gobbling it down in a similar fashion to the first. Darker, scaled, and bigger than the first one, the leftmost snake unhinges its jaw. Pinkish insides lay bare to me as a heavy iron door with a braided pattern around its edge materializes.  

          I look away from the door and up at the sky. The sun has hardly moved since my leaving.  Perhaps I can find my heart and be home on time. Besides, Mama wouldn’t want me to let go of  this chance, would she?  

There are two keys in the double-locked iron door, one of the same material, and the  other of a lovely gold that matches the bear-headed knocker at the center of the door. Though I  know the door will be unlocked, I take the circular knocker from the bear’s tight jaw, and  pound it against the metal. The door vibrates beneath the bear knocker before it creaks open,  only wide enough for me to slip through. There is no laughter here. Only the crackle of fire in a distant hearth and the quiet breath  of a woman alone. The castle is dark; stone huddles toward me. Everything in the foyer is  hunched: grandfather clock unticking, black alocasia drooping, even the table for the keys, which looks so much like the one we have at home, is bowed inward. Spiders weave their webs in forgotten corners, and portraits of memory are quiet, solemn. Remnants of images shift, half-obscured, in the frames. They depict a man with thick callused hands working a blacksmith’s anvil, three blurry figures bent together over a meal, a woman running into the woods surrounded by faint blue dots, and the man and woman, smaller, holding hands.  

The stairway that should lead upwards, towards the tower where the heart should be, is  blocked off by a solid iron door. There is no knocker and no visible key. I go to push on it, but  the handle is stiff and cold.  

I listen again for the crackle of the hearth. Fire will light my lantern, and help me find  what I am looking for.  

Crackle. Pop. 

I follow the breathing fire to a parlor room, where a single winged chair sits at its edge, closest to the fire. A woman, small and fair-haired curls in the chair. Dull ginger waves unfurl down her face as she stares bleary eyed at the fire.

Mama. 

The figures in the portraits, the memories. That must have been us. Papa and Mama. I want to call to her, but my voice stays caught in my throat. I step forward, approaching the chair cautiously. I wave at her, but she does not seem to register my presence. I have never seen Mama so despondent, even after Papa died. Tears stain her cheeks, her lithe fingers curled around her now empty golden chain. Keys left in the door for me. I kneel at the foot of her chair and touch her knee.  

She doesn’t look at me, but her lips part. “They’ll never tell you how much love hurts.  Not really. They’ll only tell you how lovely it is to have it. How warm and soft, how fiery.”  I lean my head against Mama’s knee.  

Her hand comes to rest in my hair.  

“Love burns.” She whispers in an oil-soaked longing that fuels the hearth blazing before  her. Mama reaches for me, beckons me into her lap. She still clutches her chain with one hand,  but with the other she holds me close.  

In her lap, I too stare at the fire. Deep within its flames is a glistening golden heart,  veins of iron pumping as it beats and beats. Tiny winged figures dance around it, stoking the  flames with shimmering blue wings. The little dots from before, helping the fire rage on, though  contained behind a metal grate.  

“We could stay here … together.” Mama buries her face in my hair, and I can feel the wet  of tears against her hot skin. Mama never told me how much she hurt. “It is safer here,” she says. Her eyes stay on her heart in the fire. “The fae will protect it, like they did before.”  She’d told me stories of the fae and they’d always felt so personal, like she knew them somehow. I never thought it meant she’d been the one to meet them. That she’d come looking for her heart. That she was the girl the nuns warned us about. That she was like me. I turn and cup her cheek, pressing a cooling kiss to it.  

“I know you have to go, baby.” She strokes my hair, her eyes finally locking on mine.  “Just don’t forget about me, okay?” She nudges me to get down, and she stands, taking my hand.  She moves to the metallic grate and pushes it aside, reaching her bare palm into the fire, her  other digits curled around mine. The chain lies forgotten in her seat.  

Mama pulls out a piece of the pumping, iron-laced muscle. A blue-winged faerie sits cross-legged on the loose ventricle, wings stoking the smaller fire. “Open your lantern.” Mama gently releases the piece and its fiery fae down into the glass-and-metal holder. The lantern burns brightly, illuminating the room for an instant. Whispers of days gone by drift high above, memories I hold and others I do not. My father, sweaty and soot-faced, buries his nose into my mother’s hair. The sound of her laugh must have been crisp then, but it is faint in the air. When I bring my lantern back down to peer more clearly on Mama’s face, she is gone. I curl up in her chair with my lantern, two heart pieces clutched close. I wonder if Mara’s heart was in pieces once too. If she had to find them in the forest, like me. I close my eyes, let the fae warmth rock me to sleep. 

… 

The center snakehead is the largest of all. My tiny third of a sandwich is the size of a  beetle in its mouth, dissolved simply by the touch of its tongue. The offering seems more like a  formality than anything substantive, a ritual to finish off the circle of three.  

The last door takes longer to form from the snake’s jaw. Shards coalesce together until I  see it is not a door at all, but one pane of glass, a mirror rimmed by sharp pearlescent fangs. I am  only a shadow in its reflection, the sun inching down beneath the canopy line. Mama will be  expecting me soon. I must hurry.  

I step closer to the door, the lantern and its faerie flickering beside me, illuminating my  legs in the reflection. The door makes a sound, creaks as if trying to open, but is not quite  unlocked.  

I level the lantern with my face.  

There I am, stocky stature, ash-brown braid falling over my shoulder. My round eyes glance to one hand that holds the lantern, and the other, which holds a bright, opalescent, crystalline heart. I look down at my actual hand, which holds nothing. I look back at the mirror, and there it is again, reflecting beautiful pinks, blues, and yellows in the fading light. I know what I have to do. Hopefully I won’t be too late for dinner. 

My throat loosens. “I’m ready.” I shoulder my bag with my free hand, clutching tight the  lantern. I step through the glass.  

… 

         In the center of a Great Hall, which looks remarkably like our dining room but blown out and cased in iridescence, I find a single plate. Bread crumbs dot its shiny, clear surface, forming a perfect circle around a translucent key.  

I reach tentatively for it, my breath hitched somewhere between my lungs and nose. My fingers curl around its cool surface. I breathe out. In.

It smells faintly of sourdough and salami.

The ache in my chest grows fainter. I press my fingers to it. I trace the divots in my skin until they become lines, a box, and then a door. Just at my sternum, is a depression large enough to be a hole. To fit a key.

I smile. 

… 

I walk the path from the wood to our house, weary and clutching my key close to my  chest. I push open the door, my feet coated in mud, twigs and brambles stuck in my braids, my stomach growling.  

Mama is sitting on a stool in the kitchen, watching the door, her foot tapping on the bottom rim. When she sees me, the lines in her face soften, the crinkle in her brow releases. 

 “Hi, Mama.” My voice rings out strong and true, despite my tiredness.  

“Hi, baby.” She stands and pulls me into a hug. My chest gets squished against her chest,  but it feels full, whole. “Did you find what you were looking for?”  

“Yes, Mama. I did.” She squeezes me tighter before I pull away and show her the now-purplish crystalline  key with two blue faerie wings beside it. I keep the key in my hand, afraid to let it go. I move  aside my shirt, revealing a small hole between my breast bone. I place the key in and turn. My  chest swings open like a well-oiled door.  

Inside beats my heart.