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In the stone floor of Anna's room, there was one tile that had been, at some point, chipped quite severely. The hole in the tile was small but deep, deep enough that when Anna was pushed inside the room some four years ago, her foot had caught on it and she had tumbled to the ground. The torn flesh of her hands had begun to bleed.
"It hurts," Anna had wept. Tears dripped from her one red eye.
"I care not," said the old man who had pushed her, his own red eye glinting in the dark doorway. "This is where you shall stay from now on. There will be supplies in your closet. You will know how to use them. You will never look out the window. You will watch this land—from the time you rise each day to the time you must sleep. But not directly. Only in the reflection of your mirror."
"And why not,” she had asked then, frightened, enraged. “Why can’t I look out the window? Why am I here? Why are you doing this to me?”
The old man did not respond for a very long time. And then, with a smile in his voice, he said, “Look outside, and you will be cursed.”
“Cursed? How?”
“I do not know. I no longer care. Goodbye, Anna.”
He closed the door then, and it had never opened again.
Flowers would always bloom at the base of Anna’s tower, throughout the spring and the summer. Though she could not see them in her mirror, she could smell them, even over the wet, lush scent of the river that coiled around her tower’s little island. The sky stretched out wide and blue as billowing white clouds floated past the window reflected inside Anna’s mirror.
It was a day that was much like the ones that had come before. Anna had woken while the sky was still dark, sipped the cider and porridge on her table, and opened the closet beside her mirror to find: a new canvas, a pot of cold, clean water, and a fresh set of exquisite paints. They awaited her every day; she did not know where they came from, and by now she had ceased to care.
Her dream last night had been dark and confused, full of cold, cruel shapes. It was not completely unfamiliar; a long time ago, she had dreamt something similar. Some days later, soldiers had begun to cross over her river in endless parades. Eventually, she had dreamt of their victory and the men returned to their homes with cheer. This time, Anna suspected, she wouldn’t do the same.
The old man had been right back then, when he said Anna would know what to do. She had spent that night crying herself asleep. She had no idea what the man had brought her here for, yet when she awoke the next day… She saw the food on the table. She saw the canvas in the closet. She saw the world outside shining in her mirror, and she painted a man killing his brother asleep in his royal bed, and knew somehow that what she painted would one day come true.
Anna hated her life here. Her heart trembled with rage and despair, but there was one thing she could not deny; though she lacked even the simplest of freedoms in this tower, she certainly did not lack purpose.
She barely looked at her brush as it moved across the canvas. Instead, her eyes were fixed on the mirror to watch the five people crossing over her river’s bridge. In her time in the tower, Anna had seen many different people, both as she slept and as she sat before her mirror. But while those in her dreams never looked in her direction, those in the world outside certainly did. To keep silence away as she worked, Anna had learned to sing, and those who passed her tower by must have heard her. She could see their heads turn up towards her window, then bend towards each other to whisper. Anna would have wondered once what the people out there thought of the strange singing girl in her tower. Now it barely mattered. The distance between her and them may well be as wide as the space between the earth and the stars.
Anna would have ignored these people just the same but for one who caught her eye—a small, dark haired girl, about her own age, with a face so breathtakingly miserable Anna almost mistook it for her own. She was dressed in the dull tunic of a page. The broad shouldered man she followed behind must have been a knight, then, and she in his service. Despite herself… Anna grew curious. What reason did this girl have to look so resentful? Could her suffering be anywhere near Anna’s own? The thought of this was oddly pleasant. It warmed her heart to know that even people free to walk on the earth could suffer just as much as she did.
Yet Anna would not have thought twice about that girl if that night, with the day’s painting complete and set aside to dry, she had not dreamt and seen her again. The girl was in an empty stable, her back pressed against the dirty wall. Before her were two older children in the same plain tunic she wore. Her fellow pages? Anna stared at the girl’s face, the mole under her right eye, the uneven brush of her hair against her jaw, and felt a fear she never felt before. It was too close, she was too close; she had never before stood so near to the object of her dreams. A flash of steel distracted her—one of the children had drawn a small dagger from his waist. He jeered silently and the girl snapped back, her mouth snarling and vicious. The boy advanced on her, and then! Anna blinked, and suddenly the boy was stumbling back, a hand pressed against a growing red stain on his chest. His companion screamed and fled, leaving behind only the girl. Her thin chest heaved. Blood dripped from the blade in her own trembling hand.
And then Anna woke up.
For the first time in a very long time, she hesitated before she began to paint.
Years passed by in a slow, uncertain way. Anna slept less and less with each passing day. Each day, she spent more time seated before her canvas, the paintings having grown in complexity under her brush, more vivid in their details, nearly as real as the reflection in her mirror. At night, she barely slept for an hour or two before startling awake.
Perhaps soon, Anna mused, she would sleep only as long as she needed to dream. Perhaps one day, she would simply not fall asleep at all. What would she do then? What would be left of Anna the Prophet, Anna-in-the-tower, dreamless and purposeless? Suddenly, she realized this was why she was brought here all those years ago. That red-eyed man had lost his dreams, and something—the curse, or his own madness—had driven him to imprison her here.
Anna’s brush paused. That her isolation would end only for her to chain another in her place…. She imagined herself in that man’s place, closing the door on a terrified, red-eyed child and her heart grew cold. She could not imagine doing it of her own free will; the Anna who would do such a thing would be one made a puppet by her own fear. To be given the illusion of freedom one day only to be trapped still...!
A flash of violet and silver along the road interrupted the spiral of Anna’s thoughts. When it drew close to the bridge across the river, it resolved itself into a woman in a coat of chain mail. She was small and dark, her hair cut close to her shoulders, and her steps were quick and purposeful. Anna watched her go past as she did all travelers that passed her by, yet it was only until the woman had nearly escaped her mirror’s reach that Anna realized—that woman was the very same girl she’d dreamed of once, the sullen page on the road. It had been so long ago yet she was absolutely certain. Her fingers tightened painfully around her brush. She ached to stand. To run to the window and call out to that woman, to see her turn back and look at her, to see Anna in her tower.
She did not.
That night, closer to dawn than not, Anna left her painting and laid down to rest. And the moment she closed her eyes, that woman stood before her. It was a dream, but her breath still caught in her lungs. This close, she could see the woman’s sharp eyes and sharper mouth. It curled into a frown, then a sneer as she turned her head away. Anna (was it Anna standing beside her? She had never been this close before) must have said something, for the woman looked back. And the woman smiled, and she raised her hand, and… And Anna woke up, sweat cold against her scalp.
Anna leapt from the bed. She felt possessed. She felt electric. She felt unmoored from her body as she tore open her closet for a canvas and propped it up on her easel. The brush in her hand moved uncontrollably across its surface. She forgot the mirror; she could only look at the woman coming alive before her, her eyes, her furrowed brow, her mouth— Her hand bumped against her paints, knocking them to the ground.
“No!” Anna screamed. She was almost done, just the mouth, only her mouth! She lifted her thumb to her teeth and bit it open and bloody. She smeared her hand on the canvas and beheld what she’d made for five frozen seconds. That woman’s smiling face. Her raised hand. Then Anna took her palette knife and tore it apart from corner to corner. She trembled before her mirror. The moon set, and the sun gentled the darkness into blue, and still she stood there. Trembling. Whether it was with rage or grief, she did not know.
Anna should have known. Oh, she should have known. Her curse was meaningless, or perhaps this was her curse, though she had never looked from her window. It made no difference. How could it, when she was reduced to such a state? To see that woman’s figure here in a crowd of peasants fleeing a roaring fire, her black-haired head there bent over a book beside an abandoned prince, her dark eyes shining through a window as a noble lady kissed her commonborn lover among the roses outside?
She was not in these futures, she could not have been, and yet Anna’s traitorous brush would pick her out in shades of violet and silver. Not once had she dreamed of that woman since that time, nor had she crossed Anna’s river, but it made no difference. She knew not her name nor her nature, and it made no difference. Her mind seemed to burn with fever. By now, Anna no longer slept; the visions came in flashes whenever she closed her eyes. It was summer outside, her flowers blooming heavy with perfume, and Anna could barely smell them. The warmth of the midday sun was no different than the cold at night.
She'd gone mad before her time, sick of shadows passing in her mirror, through her dreams. She was resigned to this. It was the only answer for why she drew a slim lady in mail watching an execution in a town square, and for why that same lady appeared in the distant bend of the road.
Anna stared fixedly at her mirror. A waking vision. It could not truly be her surrounded by so many people, smiling people in many colors. A woman with gleaming brown hair, a man in white, two children with round faces—and her, her face for once gentle and calm. Happy. At peace. It was more than Anna could stand. She had dreamt of that face, and it had been turned towards her . Towards Anna, free of this place. What curse could keep Anna here when nothing terrified her more of dreaming of that face again only to wake to her empty tower?
Anna thought of a smile, and sunlight warming her hair.
She set her brush down. She did not think of that woman. Anna turned, and walked three paces to the window. The mirror cracked behind her, and she knew it must be the curse, upon her at last. For a moment, she hesitated. She might die the moment she leaves this room. She might die before she could even reach the door. For a single moment, Anna hesitated. Then she laughed, and as the shards of her mirror chimed and shattered against the floor, Anna—Anna already dead, Anna finally alive—stepped outside.
She closed the door then, and she never opened it again.