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“This is my curse, Sisters, and on my terms. I say he gets the mirror!
“My darling,” Circe continued, “this enchanted mirror will let you see into the outside world. All you need to do is ask the mirror and it will show you what you want to see.”
“I don’t like you giving away our treasures, Circe! That was a gift from a very famous maker of mirrors. It’s quite priceless and very old. It’s a mirror of legends! It was given to us before you were even born.”
“And shall I remind you how you came to possess it?” asked Circe, silencing her sisters.
“Let’s not bore the Prince with our family history, Circe,” said Martha. “He can have the mirror, not only to see the outside world, but to see the hideous creature he’s bound to become.”
“Oh yes! Let him try to break the maidens’ hearts after he’s turned into the beast!” screamed Ruby, with Lucinda and Martha chiming in, “Let him try, let him try, to break their hearts and make them cry!” They were spinning in circles like toy tops, their dresses blossoming about them like mutant flowers in a strange garden, while they chanted their incessant mockery.
“Let him try! Let him try! To break their hearts and make them cry!”
Circe was growing impatient, and the Prince looked as if he was straddling amusement and fear.
“Sisters! Please stop, I beg you!” Circe snapped.
“I’m supposed to take this seriously? Any of this? Really, Circe! Do you think I’m an idiot like your cackling sisters here?”
Before the Prince could say any more, he found himself pressed firmly against the stone wall behind him, Circe’s hand placed tightly around his throat, her voice a hiss like a giant serpent’s.
“Never speak ill of my sisters again! And yes, you’d better take everything I’ve said seriously, and I suggest you commit it to memory, because your life depends on it. The curse is in your hands now. Choose the right path, Prince, change your ways, and you shall be redeemed. Chose cruelty and vanity and you will suffer indeed!”
She released him. He was utterly gobsmacked. Her face was very close to his and full of hate. He felt frightened, really frightened, perhaps for the first t
ime in his young life.
“Do you understand?” she asked again, vehemently, and all he could mutter was “Yes.”
“Come, Sisters, let’s leave him, then. He will choose his own path from here.”
So he did.
In the first few months there was no sign of a curse: no taunting sisters, no beastly visage, and no villainous servants plotting his death. The idea was laughable, really. His loyal servants growing to hate him? Ludicrous! Imagine his beloved Cogsworth or Mrs. Potts wishing for his death—utterly inconceivable! It was pure claptrap!
Nothing of which the sisters spoke came true, and he saw no reason to believe it would. As a result, he did not think he needed to repent, change his ways, or take anything those insane women had to say seriously at all.
Life went on and it was good—as good as it had always been, with Gaston at his side, money in his pockets, and women to fawn over him. What more could he ask for?
But as happy as he was, he couldn’t completely shake the fear that perhaps Circe and her sisters were right. He noticed little changes in his appearance—small things that made him feel his mind might be betraying him and he was somehow falling for the sisters’ ruse.
He had to constantly—obsessively—remind himself that there was no curse. There were only his fears and the sisters’ lies, and he wasn’t about to let either get the better of him.
He was in his bedroom readying himself for a hunting trip with Gaston when the porter came in to let him know his friend had arrived.
“Send him up, then. Unless he wants to take breakfast in the observatory while I finish getting ready.”
The Prince was in fine spirits and found himself feeling better than he had in a long time. But he couldn’t for the life of him remember the porter’s name. A bit concerning, but one of the advantages of being a prince is that no one questions you. So if others were noticing a change in the Prince, they didn’t mention it.
“Are my things packed? Is everything ready for our stalking expedition?” he asked the porter.
“Indeed, my liege, it’s all been loaded. If there’s nothing else that you require, then I shall see to the other gentleman’s things?”
The Prince had to laugh. Gaston a gentleman? Hardly! The porter was too young to remember when Gaston and the Prince had been boys. Some of the older staff would remember. Mrs. Potts would remember, to be sure. She had often recounted old stories about the boys as children, laughing at the memory of them running to the kitchen and pleading with her for sweets after their grand adventures, both of them covered in mud, tracking it throughout the castle, like little boys love to do, making a maid trail after them—a maid who muttered curses under her breath the entire time.
Curses.
Put them out of your mind. Remember something else.
