The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen - Delia Sherman [54]
“Madame,” I breathed, “I’d love—”
“Shut up, Neef!” Airboy’s shout jerked me out of my rosy dream. I glared at him. He glared back.
“Little boys,” Madame Factor said, “should be seen and not heard.” She waved her slender hand. The magical humming rose. Two mirrors trundled forward to stand on each side of Airboy, reflecting him back and forth between them down an infinite tunnel of frightened boy statues. He didn’t move. I didn’t think he could, even if he’d wanted to.
“That’ll keep him quiet,” she said. “Now, ugly girl, if you keep my mirrors polished and do everything I tell you, in a year and a day, you could look like this.”
The gargoyle-me in the mirror shimmered and morphed into a beautiful maiden. Her—my—hair was straight and shiny, her—my—skin was pale and smooth, her eyebrows perfectly arched, her mouth perfectly full and pink. She was tall and slender and graceful.
In fact, except for her brown hair and hazel eyes, the mirror-me looked exactly like Tiffany or Bergdorf or Best. She didn’t look like a hero at all. She looked like someone the hero rescued.
“What do you say?” Madame Factor asked eagerly.
My beautiful self gazed out at me pitifully. “I don’t know.”
Madame Factor’s perfect eyebrows rose. “You aren’t thinking clearly. It’s that boy, isn’t it? You’re jealous because he’s better-looking than you are. Shall I turn him into a real fish? We could watch him drown in the air.”
The hunger in her voice reminded me of Peg Powler and the Wild Hunt. Clearly, Madame Factor wasn’t nearly as good as she was beautiful. I began to be very frightened.
“Or I could make you uglier,” Madame Factor said. “Or I could turn my mirrors on that stupid bag of yours and burn it to a crisp.”
I moaned and clutched Satchel to my chest. Something inside it nudged me sharply. I reached inside, grabbed the first thing I felt, and flourished it over my head. “But you won’t,” I said. “You’ll let me go. And you’ll tell me what I want to know. Because if you don’t, I’ll break all your mirrors.”
Madame Factor burst into a storm of scornful hnya, hnyas. “With one little apple? I don’t think so. I can turn it into applesauce.”
“Then why don’t you?” I said, and threw the apple as hard as I could at the nearest mirror.
The apple hit the glass with a dull thud and rolled away. The mirror wasn’t even cracked. My heart sank.
Madame Factor gave a horrible screech. “You broke it!” she wailed. “You broke my mirror!”
I turned around and gasped. Elizabeth Factor had changed. Oh, she was still tall and slender, but her golden hair was more like wisps of dry grass, her teeth like steel chisels, and her sparkling green eyes like bulging, malevolent grapes in a face that would have sent a demon screaming.
I reached into Satchel again, groped around hopefully, and pulled out a giant drumstick, too big for even a turkey leg. Ostrich, maybe? It didn’t matter. It was big and heavy and shone with grease. I started to feel somewhat less frightened. “There’s just something knocked loose,” I said. “Maybe this will fix it.”
“You’re an ungrateful, selfish little girl,” Madame Factor wailed, “and nobody likes you. I could have made you beautiful. I could have made you popular.”
I raised the drumstick threateningly. “I didn’t come here to be made beautiful. I came here to ask you some questions. You can answer them or I can destroy your mirror. You choose.”
Madame Factor writhed. “I’ll answer, I’ll answer. Next time an ugly girl wants to see me, though, poof. She’s a toad before she opens her mouth.”
I ignored this. “I want to know about the magnifying mirror you got from Snowbell the Swan Maiden in Lincoln Center. The whole story. Every detail.”
Madame Factor took me literally. I got far too much information about what Snowbell was wearing and what Madame Factor was wearing and the magic mirror shades that