Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [19]
Or rather, someone.
We’ll call him Mal, though that is not his real name. His real name has forty-seven syllables, and we have things to do.
Mal looks like nothing you know or can imagine, neither goblin nor troll nor imp nor demon. But neither the goblins nor the trolls nor the imps nor even the demons know what Mal is either. For Mal is not any one of those things, but all of them.
Mal is a goblin. He has green-brown skin, a froglike mouth, and sharp little teeth. Mal is a troll. He is seven feet tall and warty, has terrible breath, and a penchant for hanging out under bridges. Mal is an imp. He has small bat wings, a high-pitched screech of a laugh, and pointy little ears. Mal is a demon. And that means he is up to no good.
But we are not interested in Mal for who he is—and we’ll be leaving him soon enough. We are interested in him for what he has done.
If you had encountered Mal just a few days before this story began, you would have found him in very good spirits. For Mal had just invented something delightful—or at least something that he found delightful, which is altogether a different prospect.
On the surface, it looked like an ordinary mirror. It was about the size of a tall man. It was oval shaped, like something you would find covered by a white sheet in an old haunted house. It had a thick frame carved with winged beings crawling and clamoring all over each other. The beings looked like angels at first. It was only when you got close enough that you could see that their faces were like skulls and their eyes were filled with menace.
There was nothing ordinary about that mirror. And if you were the perceptive sort—which of course you are—you would have known it immediately. But if you weren’t, you might look in the mirror and think, I did not know that mole was so enormous or Why is my face festering? Or My goodness, I had no idea I was so evil looking. For the mirror took beautiful things and made them ugly, and it took ugly things and made them hideous.
It was most marvelous mischief indeed.
Mal took the mirror around, reflecting everything he could in it, delighting in the transformations he saw. A rose garden looked like piles of boiled spinach. A grove of trees became a charred wasteland. A sparkling lake turned into burbling oil.
And then he decided he would fly it up into the sky, right up to the heavens, to see the sparkling blue earth look like a mean shriveled-up thing.
So Mal took the mirror and flew into the sky. He flew up, up, up.
And something happened.
Something unexpected.
Something fateful.
Mal flew too high, and the mirror began to protest. The mirror creaked, then the mirror cracked.
It shattered into a hundred million pieces in Mal’s hands. The pieces caught in the wind and landed all across the earth below. The beings of the hidden earth came out to watch.
And so did the witch.
She had come because of the snow. She could travel from one snowy world to another—to her it was all the same place. She liked heavy snowfalls the best, the kind that blankets the world in white quiet, the kind where the snowflakes are big enough to show their architecture, the kind that, if there is any magic to be had in the world, would make it come out.
She stayed in the woods where all the hidden creatures were, and the trees feared her. She moved through the shadows and kept her eye on the glimmering world outside. She felt the mirror shatter in the sky, she closed her eyes and saw its story spread back into the past, she fell with the tiny shards as they spread over the earth. Some fell to the ground. Some landed in trees, turning the bark black. And one, one landed in the eye of a boy, and she saw it as if she were right there.
“Oh,” said the witch, placing a long finger on her cheek. “This should be interesting.”
Chapter Six
Castoffs
Hazel walked in the front door of her house, trailing snow behind her. Her feet were soaked in their sneakers, and she was shivering underneath her thin shirt. She didn’t really care.
Her mom