myself forward through the buzzing pain. The Silverlands muffled our voices. By the time words reached me, they were a jumble.
Leave him a—get thee back—Kenny, don’t—don’t, Marg—curst and laggard air—kill you.
As I pushed forward past two, three, four sets of mirrors, images resolved themselves in the floating silver. Curtis and Wald were struggling as best anyone could in that place. They were between two mirrors. Curtis had an arm around Wald’s throat, and Wald had Curtis by the middle, trying to lift him up. Three mirrors past them, Prince Harming hobbled on. As he reached each mirror, he looked to the right and left into the cloud of swimming shards as though searching for something.
“Stop it!” I shouted to Wald and Curtis, but my voice just added to the cacophony of cries, and neither paid any heed. Even looking at them as I approached, I could barely tell who was saying what.
Curtis got Wald’s head bent far enough into an image-cloud that he must actually have been through the mirror, but then pulled him back when Wald almost tumbled both of them through. Fresh snowflakes glistened on Wald’s head and beard. Where did these mirrors lead?
Neither one wanted to harm the other. Wald had a knife in his boot that he wasn’t reaching for, and Curtis looked to be pulling his punches.
I glanced at Prince Harming. He had found the mirror he was looking for now, five spaces beyond where we stood. Its cluster of fragments glowed a warm red.
He looked down the corridor toward us, saw me, and twisted his face again in anger. Without another pause, he thrust his bound hands into the mirror and screamed in abject pain. For a long moment, he held his hands there, then pulled them out. I could see smoke rising from his burned flesh. He pulled his wrists apart with another scream, and the ropes that had held him fell away.
I had to do something. It wasn’t just a matter of changing things now. This was the man who had shot me, the man who had terrorized me and my friends through decades. This was Prince Harming, who had smashed kids’ heads in. Prince Harming of the skipping songs.
Curtis and Wald struggled at my feet, each one clearly intent on subduing the other before dealing with anything else. Careful not to get pushed to one side or the other, I stepped over them.
Prince Harming, finding that his burned fingers were useless at untying his bonds, sat down and thrust his feet into the glowing mirror. He screamed again, but kept his feet in the mirror for long enough that when he took them out, the ropes were burning.
I was terrified, but determined not to let it control me. I glanced back to see Curtis and Wald still at each other’s throats, though Curtis again clearly had the upper hand. His wife was hurtling toward me, getting ready to jump over them to get at me.
I faced Prince Harming again.
I paused between two mirrors. To one side there was a sunlit beach, on the other side, darkness. Prince Harming was fifteen feet ahead of me. I don’t know what I thought. That I could stop him? Reason with him?
Scraps of everyone’s muffled voices still clattered in my ears.
From this distance, I could see Prince Harming’s hands, charred black and bloody red, cooked and raw at the same time, like poorly grilled steaks with crippled fingers sticking out of them. His feet hadn’t fared as badly, and he stood to face me. His features twisted into an expression that wasn’t rage this time, just pure terror, and I realized he wasn’t looking at me but rather past me.
Behind me, the woman had cleared the two fighting men and was almost upon me.
The woman crashed into me and half turned me around. This close, her voice brightened and became clear. “Kenny, why won’t you listen, it’s—”
And before she completed that sentence, so much happened that I could never undo.
I saw Prince Harming lunge at me on his still-smoking feet.
I grabbed the woman by her shoulders just as she was holding me and turned around, trying to use her momentum against her. If I could just get her on the same side as the crazy version of Curtis, I could retreat, get Wald, get things cleared up.
Maybe that’s what I was thinking. I’ve gone over it so many times, I don’t even know anymore.
Was I angry at her as well? Was I frustrated at all that had kept me from home?
Did I do it deliberately?
I honestly don’t know.
I pushed. Hard. Just as I heard the last word in that sentence, I held her shoulders and pushed and what had she said? Kenny, why won’t you listen, it’s—
“Peggy.”
I can still see it. I guess I always will. Peggy’s face, much older than when I saw her last, so I didn’t get it until now. I had recognized Lilly’s flash of blond hair right away. Why not Peggy? Something had softened in her when she found her Curtis and married him. Peggy’s eyes widening in surprise, Peggy’s mouth in a round “O,” Peggy’s hands flailing at me as she fell backward into the blackness of a mirror. I reached after her, but all I could feel was water and pain.
Five
Trick your feet down the street.
I don’t know how I made it out of there alive.
I screamed her name, and there must have been enough desperation in that scream, enough raw, crazy regret to stop Curtis and Wald.
I flailed my hands inside the mirror and turned my head to look at the two of them. Curtis was on top, his hands limp now around Wald’s neck.
“What … ”
I didn’t listen, just plunged my hands again into the mirror. It was downtime, and though I had thought of it as dark, I could now see glimmers of light in its swimming fragments. I was looking up through troubled water, but nowhere could I see the older Peggy, and all I could feel was the water.
I felt an impact from the side and was thrown clear. Prince Harming.
“No!” He shoved his hands through the cluster of watery shards and screamed himself hoarse, more from brokenhearted frustration, I thought, than from pain.
Then the other Curtis was upon us. He stamped on my hand and my chest in his eagerness to get past me, and for a few moments, I was too busy dealing with my pain and trying to get out of their way to know what they were doing.
By the time I had rolled away and risen to my knees, an odd tableau had asserted itself. Wald and Curtis were locked together again, but not fighting this time. “Ye cannot go,” shouted Wald as he strained, arms wrapped around the other man’s waist, to keep him from going through the mirror. “’Twill be the death a’ thee.”
“Let me,” said Curtis. “Let me go. She must be there. She needs me. Let me go.”
As they struggled, Prince Harming stood unsteadily on his burned feet and looked at me. I shrank from him, but he shook his head as if to say there was no need. All the wildfire and anger was gone now, as though his fury and reason for living had turned into water and splashed to the floor. He was closer to me than the other two, and when he spoke I could hear him clearly.
“I saw it this time,” he said. He looked at his hands and then at me. “I saw it. I didn’t before. You didn’t mean to, did you?”
“I didn’t,” I said. The enormity of what I had done was only now coming through. It was Peggy. The woman I couldn’t place. Peggy who had gone back in time to find a better life. Who had gone to nursing school with her best friend Lilly. Who met and married a soldier named Curtis Beckett. She hadn’t been killed by Prince Harming. She had been killed by me.
He nodded. “All these years. I went mad. I thought you had done it—deliberately. Knew it was her. When I was little and I met you—it seemed like you knew everything. Then—what I saw. On that night.” He looked back at the struggling figures of Wald and his own younger self, but did nothing to interfere. “And this.” He looked at me
