Mirror Mirror [ONC 2021 Version]

FOURTEEN

One moment turned to two, then three, then another.

Millie glanced desperately at the sparrow etched on the apple tree. Its small beak pointing to the right path at the fork. A road that led home. To Granny. To life...

"Millie Hood?"

Millie nodded, heaving a large breath into her suffocating chest. She'd stopped breathing. Such heavy was the decision at hand. So grim was her choice, her burden. She swallowed the lump of fear lodged in her throat. "You will reunite me with my granny, Sir?"

She didn't know how he could? Not if this was her last living moment, but she had to ask. She had to hear a hopeful answer, however much of a lie it may be.

"By the knight's honour, I will. I will carry you there myself if I must, but I'd rather you walk yourself, very much alive, with the Princess and I by your side."

"Have you seen a merge before?" she asked, trying to calm her clattering teeth. It was from the cold as much as from what was to come.

"I've read plenty about it before... though I've never seen it..."

Which means he doesn't know what's going to happen and neither do I.

Millie nodded again. Wisps of white cloud that was her breath hung about her head. It was taking her a moment to muster the strength she needed. A moment to understand what she was about to do. A moment to live.

One breath at a time.

Beneath her, Ruby's face was fast draining of colour, of blood. The princess was dying. The nick she had planned to cut, to prove her sameness had been too deep a price, too deep a cut. It was a cut that was spreading wider, faster; after all, the blade had been anything but ordinary. They didn't call it a Ripper for anything.

The one person Millie was tasked to look after was dying in her arms, and she could do something about it. She was the only one who could.

Millie nodded a third time to herself, her breath rasping out of her frightened chest.

She looked upon the sparrow again, the sign of home. So close. "Take the road the sparrow points to if I do not wake. Walk for a league, you will come to another apple tree—no, a weeping willow, by the side of the riverbank, there is a sparrow upon it, follow its beak. Another league ahead, you shall come upon a third tree, a Spruce. Its sparrow will point you home. You will see a cottage a quarter league from there, within a small clearing. The Evergreen. That's where she'll be, my grandmother."

One more breath.

One more moment.

Millie closed her eyes. It was time. "You must do right by us, Ruby-Rose. You must save this world," she whispered, grasping the unconscious Princess's forearm into her blood-smeared hand.