Jill headed for the front of the castle. She started walking very slowly, her stomach turning over and over. Then she walked faster. And faster. And faster. Soon, she was running. She came to the castle gate.
The guards took one look at her and said, “Princess?” Jill nodded, her eyes brimming, her throat too thick for words.
“The princess is home!” they shouted. “The princess is home!” The call was taken up all throughout the castle. Jill ran to the great door, and then through the grand hall, and finally up the steps that led to the throne room. And as she ran, she heard, “The princess is home! The princess is home!” echoing from the walls, and also laughter, and whooping, and even some weeping.
Jill burst into the throne room. Her father jumped nearly a foot at the sound of the door banging open. He cried, “Darling!” But Jill ran for her mother. Her mother had turned, and her eyes were wide like moons, and Jill catapulted herself into her arms. And, burying her face in her mother’s neck, she said, “Mommy.”
And her mother held her. But not tightly.
At last, Jill pulled back.
Her mother looked slightly disgusted. “Darling . . .” she began. “What’s happened to you . . . ?”
“Well,” said Jill, “it’s a long story. It starts with a beanstalk. No, it starts with a frog, who can—”
But her mother cut her off. “No,” said her mother. “I mean, what’s happened to your skin, darling?”
Jill felt like she had been punched in the gut. She took a step back. She looked at the floor. She said, “Sorry, Mommy. I’ll go wash.”
So Jill got washed up as best she could, put ointment on her blisters, put on all the correct clothes, and went back to her life as it had been before—sitting by her mother’s side as the queen reapplied makeup or fussed with her hair.
But it didn’t feel right.
From time to time, she would tell her mother how beautiful she looked. And her mother would blush and deny it and smile, just as she always had.
But now, this ritual reminded Jill of goblins and a throne and silken bonds.
One day, her mother was testing new shades of eye shadow, and Jill was bored. She stared out the window, remembering that fateful day with the beggar. Then, suddenly, across the square, she espied three dark forms. Her heart caught.
Birds, she realized. They were black birds, casting long shadows on a windowsill. Perhaps ravens. She smiled to think that, maybe, they knew the future . . .
Suddenly, Jill was reminded of something the ravens had said to her. When you no longer seek your reflection in others’ eyes . . .
She thought of the Others’ pale eyes. Then she thought of her mother.
At that very instant, the queen looked up at her. “Darling, will you go put some more makeup on? Your blisters are starting to show again.”
Jill felt the familiar twisting in her stomach that she was again growing used to living at home. But she swallowed it down. She took a deep breath. She tried a new approach. “It’s just the two of us here, Mommy. And I don’t really care about my skin.”
“Well, I do! It looks dreadful! You look dreadful!” And the queen went back to testing eye shadow.
Jill stared at her beautiful mother. And then, very slowly, she reached for a heavy silver hairbrush that sat on a side table.
The queen was too busy admiring a new shade of blue to notice. Nor did she notice Jill pull the brush back behind her head. But she certainly did notice the brush crash into the large silver mirror and send it shivering, shattering, into a million pieces.
“I DON’T CARE!” Jill screamed.
Jill’s mother turned around, mouth agape, eyes as wide as moons.
An anger and a hurt so deep, so old, exploded from the little girl. “I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK! I DON’T CARE! You stare in that mirror all day long and you don’t even see! You don’t even see!”
And then Jill spun and ran.
The queen was frozen. At last, she shook herself, stood, and hurried to her chamber door. She looked down the hall. Empty. She looked back in her room. Her mirror was shattered.
And yet, in that moment, the queen was not concerned with the mirror. Not at all. She was much more concerned about something else. Someone else. Which she found very, very surprising.
“Jill!” she cried out. “JILL!”
But it was too late. Jill was gone.
* * *
Jill arrived at the well.
She stopped.
Jack was already sitting on the ledge. The light on his face was dappled by the bare trees. Birdsong echoed throughout the grove, as did the creaking of branches in the wind.
Jill sat down beside him. Neither said a word. They did not have to. Jack pressed his lips together in a weak excuse for a smile. Jill put her arm around his shoulders.
Just then, the frog clambered up onto the edge of the well.
“Hooray! You’re back!” he cried. “How’d it go? Good? Better than here, I hope. I thought Eddie was smelly. Jeez! A frog leaves his well for a year, comes home, and it’s like they’ve been growing mold on purpose! In fact, they probably have! And stuuuupid! ‘Hey Frog, where were you? Where was I? Where am I? Who am I? What is the meaning of life?’ Idiots.” The frog smiled up at the two children appealingly. Then his face fell. “What?” he said. “What’s wrong?” He waited. “What, it didn’t go too good?”
Jack and Jill shook their heads. “Not too good at all,” said Jack.
The frog sighed. “No, ‘You’re so beautiful,’ ‘You’re so great’?”
“No,” said Jack.
“No,” said Jill.
The birds sang in the trees as if nothing at all was wrong. The frog looked up. The sky was that deep, cerulean blue that he had once loved so.
“No, ‘Home Sweet Home’?” the frog tried again.
“This isn’t my home,” said Jill.
Jack looked over at her.
She said, “Home is where you can be yourself.”
Jack pressed his lips together. He nodded. He took her hand, picked up the frog, and stood up. Jill stood up, too.
And then Jack and Jill walked away.
* * *
As Jack and Jill walked, no destination in mind, they came to a very tall hill, just on the outskirts of town. Around the base of the hill, a large crowd had gathered. The two children came up and tried to ask what was going on, but no one would listen to them. All strained their necks to see the top of the hill.
Finally, Jack nudged a boy about his own age. “What is everybody looking at?” he asked.
The boy said, “Three murderers are being punished. They’re to be rolled down this here hill.” He was a small boy, with a sooty face and no front teeth.
“Rolled down a hill?” said Jack. “What kind of punishment is that?”
The boy grinned at Jack with his gap-toothed smile. “Well, they came to the royal guards and confessed to being murderers—and cannibals! So they were brought before a judge. Not just any judge. The Beggar Judge.”
Jack and Jill shrugged.
“You don’t know the Beggar Judge?” the boy exclaimed. “But he’s famous! He’s the beggar that gave his blanket to the princess when she was naked!” Jill blushed hotly and stared all the more intently at the boy, who went on, oblivious. “The king saw him do it, and, for being so kind and merciful, he made him a judge. And he’s the best judge we’ve got. Wise and fair.”
The boy continued, “Anyhow, the murderers were brought before the Beggar Judge. He asked them why they confessed. And you know what they said? They said, once they confessed, they would be the greatest, bravest, wisest creatures in the whole world! Creatures. That’s what they said!” The boy was clearly enjoying the story. “So the judge said, ‘If you’re so wise, you can be my assistants, and h
elp me be a judge!’ Well, the murderers like that, don’t they?” The boy took a deep breath, readying himself for the story’s climax.
“Well, the first case they had to decide was that of a murderer. And the judge, he asked them what the punishment should be. And they said, put him in a barrel, drive nails into it, and roll him down a hill. They were pretty proud of themselves for that bit of wisdom. So the Beggar Judge, he says, ‘You have pronounced your own sentence.’ Just like that.”
As the boy finished his tale, a terrible scream rose from the top of the hill, and three barrels started tumbling down the steep slope.
The barrels bounced and bounded over rocks and gullies, and with each bounce the screams grew more bloodcurdling and horrible. And then, about two-thirds of the way down the hill, the screaming stopped altogether, and the barrels tumbled onward in eerie silence.
When they finally came to rest at the bottom of the hill, the crowd surged forward to pry open the barrels and inspect the bodies inside.
But Jack and Jill turned away. “They must have been very con-fused indeed,” muttered Jill. Jack nodded.
And they left.
* * *
Jack and Jill had a new home. It was a small clearing, behind a tiny village on the outskirts of the kingdom of Märchen. They had no roof over their heads, nor even a natural canopy, for it was the dying days of winter, and no tree had leaves. When it rained, the children were soaked to the bone, and they huddled together and shivered. Rain at night was the worst. As they held each other against the freezing needles, the frog would sigh and say, “Even my well is better than this.” But he stayed with them anyway.
During the day, Jack and Jill collected fallen sticks in the forest and laid them out in the center of their clearing to dry. Then they would bundle them up and take them into the village, going door-to-door, selling them as kindling, hoping for a penny for the whole bunch.
Most people refused them. “Ugh!” they would cry upon seeing the children on their doorstep. “It’s those filthy orphans!” And they would slam the door in their faces.
Which was understandable. Jack and Jill did look pretty disgusting. They had not washed themselves for weeks now, and their skin was scabbing from the blisters, and their hair was matted, and their clothes stank.
Occasionally, someone would buy a fardel of twigs for their fireplace and pay the children a penny, and then Jack and Jill would trade that penny for a loaf of bread or a small round of cheese, and they would take their food back to the clearing and eat it hungrily. But most days, the children would just sit in the driving rain, huddled together on the muddy ground, the bare branches lashing against one another, wailing in the wind. Jack’s arms would be around Jill, or hers around him, and the frog would curl up between them, and they would be pummeled by the rain or the sleet or the hail. And there was nothing at all they could do about it.
From time to time, they would take out the Seeing Glass. They would stare at it and think of all the mistakes that had brought them to this place. Foremost of which was going out to look for this stupid, useless mirror.
* * *
And then, as the days became weeks, and the weeks became months, things started to change.
The weather turned from late winter to early spring. Little buds appeared on the branches above where the children slept at night, and then the buds burst into white blossoms.
After collecting twigs for the day and laying them out in the sun to dry, Jack and Jill would play. Jack, you will remember, had the most incredible imagination. He would create fantastical scenarios and narrate them to Jill, and they would act them out—meeting dragons and speaking invented languages and finding buried treasures. Jill was the funny one. She would make these jokes that were so dry, Jack wouldn’t recognize them as jokes, until the frog started laughing, and then Jack would start laughing, too, and keep laughing until his sides hurt.
The people of the village still shouted at them, and children would see them playing and tease them, even throw stones at them.
But the strangest thing was happening. Jack and Jill began not to care. They would run deeper into the woods, pretending they had been chased by giant, man-eating unicorns, or something equally ridiculous. Later, they would climb trees and leap from their branches. They would run headlong into a swollen, muddy stream and make balls of mud and hurl them at one another, and the frog would scream and they would keel over laughing. And then at night, they would lie under the stars, and the night was not as cold as it had once been, and Jack would think, I had fun today. And Jill would think, I was happy with what I did.
It was a strange sensation.
* * *
Do you know what is happening to Jack and Jill right now?
I’m not sure. But I think it is something like this:
There is this weird thing that happens, when you stop worrying so much about what other people think of you. When you are no longer—to use the ravens’ word—con-fused.
At that moment, you suddenly start seeing what you think of you.
For the first time in their short lives, Jack and Jill felt free enough to see what they thought of themselves. And they were shocked to discover something very surprising indeed.
They were shocked to discover that they actually liked themselves.
They were funny and silly and imaginative, and very, very loving.
They’d never realized it before. But actually, they liked themselves quite a lot.
* * *
And then something even stranger happened. It was on a warm spring day. Jack and Jill were wading in the stream, lobbing mud balls at each other and laughing at the top of their lungs, when a small girl appeared in the trees at the edge of the stream.
Jill saw her and decided to ignore her. The girl was probably waiting to throw a rock at them.
But Jack saw her and stopped. When he did, one of Jill’s lobbed mud balls hit him directly in the head. He stumbled. He looked up. The little girl, who had stringy orange hair that hung to her shoulders, put her hand up in front of her mouth. She was hiding a smile. Jack wiped the mud from his face and smiled back.
Jill hit him in the head with another ball of mud.
“Hey!” he shouted at her. Jill cackled. Jack turned back to the girl. “Do you want something?”
She continued to stare at them, shrugged, and then she said, “Can I play with you?”
Jack’s mouth fell open. So did Jill’s.
“Um . . .” said Jack. And then he said, “Uh . . . sure.”
The little girl waded directly into the stream, leaned down and buried her hands in the muddy riverbed, collected a large ball of mud, and pelted Jack in the face with it.
“Hey!” he cried again. Jill squealed and threw another at him. He bellowed, “Retreat! Retreat!” And the two girls went chasing him through the river, hurling mud balls after him.
* * *
The next day, the little girl—whose name was Elsie—was at the stream again. She had brought her little sister, who had the same orange hair and spatter of freckles. Jack and Jill were in a tree this time, inventing stories for each other.
“Can I come up?” Elsie asked. Jack gestured for her to join them.
“Can I?” echoed her little sister in a thin voice.
“Sure,” said Jill. And she slid over on the branch to make room for the girls.
Over the course of the next week, a small group of children formed in the forest. Each day, in the warmth of the late afternoon, they would gather and play with Jack and Jill. And no one said anything about their skin or their clothes or where they lived. They just did not seem to care.
Soon, it was a regular ritual. Every day, after Jack and Jill had sold the last of their sticks, they would be greeted by a small group of boys and girls at their clearing in the wood. It felt good. It felt like
home.
* * *
From time to time, Jack and Jill still took out the Glass. They peered into it, marveling at its perplexing uselessness.
“How did the goblins find it so valuable?” Jack wondered.
“Dunno,” Jill shrugged. They studied it for a while longer. “Guess the whole quest was a waste,” she concluded, tossing it aside.
“Yeah,” Jack agreed.
But neither child felt that way. Not anymore. Not at all.
And then, one day, the frog poked his head out of the hollow log in the clearing. “Hey, guys! I figured something out!”
Jack lifted him out of the log.
“Get the Glass, too,” the frog instructed Jill.
She looked at him oddly, and then reached down and withdrew the Glass from its hiding place in the log.
“Hold it up,” the frog directed Jill. She held the Glass in front of him.
“Still looks like a fat old frog,” said Jack.
The frog ignored him. “I think I know what it says.”
Jack looked at the frog’s reflection. “You know what what says?”
“The inscription, dummy!” cried the frog.
Suddenly, the children’s expressions grew serious. Jill said, “It says, ‘Fo timb hat da jeek, bok no father.’”
“Great wisdom,” added Jack.
“Maybe it’s in goblin . . .” Jill wondered.
“No, stop, listen for a second,” the frog insisted. “It’s not, ‘Fo timb hat da jeek, bok no father.’ That first letter isn’t an f , it’s a t.”
“To?” Jill said slowly.
“And in the next word, it’s not a t, it’s an f.”
Jack and Jill leaned more closely over the Glass.
“And an n, not an m, and, I guess, a weird looking d.”