Nimmersdorf was roughly half a day's journey by foot across windswept snowplains and through dense, dark forests. The principality sat precariously on the edge of a deep ravine, a modest settlement of dwellings scattered about Nimmersdorf Castle, a fantastical creation of towers, battlements and crenulations, which perched on the very lip of the precipice. Below it, the land fell away in an array of cruel, jutting spikes of rock and sheer vertical drops, the bottom of the ravine obscured by the white mist of raging water.

I had visited the town before, though never on my own. Each summer, my elderly guardians would make at least one journey, to attend the market, trading knowledge for goods, reading palms, selling strange-smelling potions in little coloured glass bottles. On such visits, I would go with them, helping to carry their wares to the market and to bring back their spoils. We would set out for Nimmersdorf with charms and unguents and tonics, and return with clothes, food, livestock, pots and pans, the things we would need to sustain our isolated existence for another year.

I looked forward to these expeditions with great anticipation: everything was so exciting in its newness! And there were people, real people, not just the old, bickering women with whom I had lived my whole life. Last summer, a boy a few years older than myself had asked me my name. He had pretty blue eyes, the colour of cornflowers, and skin bronzed by the sun. He'd smiled at me, as though seeing some great and wonderful joke, and gave me a necklace of milky white stones strung on a piece of leather. Then Anicula had glared at him until he went away. I had been grudgingly permitted to keep the necklace, and wore it all that summer, in spite of Anicula's blatant disapproval, until one day I reached up to touch the smooth white stones and found the necklace gone.

Even after the necklace had vanished, I found myself from time to time remembering that boy, recalling his carefree smile and pretty blue eyes. As months became seasons and a strange new restlessness grew within me, I would find myself wondering where he was now, whether he still remembered me at all, or on shameful, sleepless nights, alone in the dark, wondering where the copper of his skin gave way to pristine, ivory flesh.

Dawn was barely breaking when I left the greystone cottage. Silvery half-light glinted off the snow outside, barely illuminating the room as Genetrixa gently shook me to wakefulness. Huddled under their sackcloths and blankets, in the shadowy recesses, the other two women slept on. From Virgina came the occasional quiet snore or mumble, while Anicula's sleeping form barely even seemed to be breathing. Genetrixa kept her voice low to avoid waking them.

'So,' she said, as she ran a toothless wooden comb through my hair, 'our little girl, an envoy to the castle, eh?'

I shrugged. 'Maybe,' I said. 'We don't know that he'll see me yet. We don't know that he'll help.'

She carried on regardless. 'They say he's devil-handsome, this prince,' she said, as the comb's few remaining teeth conspired to find the tangles in my hair, snagging painfully. 'Devil-handsome, and all alone in that castle. They say something terrible happened in his past, something tragic that just ripped him in pieces.' She had stopped combing now, and had separated my hair into three sections which she proceeded to plait. 'Can't say as I know anything for sure of course. Only ever seen him the once myself: a big procession one spring. Too far away to see, really...' She rambled gradually into silence.

'Ow!' I exclaimed as something sharp and hooked lacerated my scalp. 'What was that?'

'Just the bramble I've plaited into your hair, pet. Didn't mean to catch you then. All done now, anyways.'

'Bramble...?' Bemused, I reached up and sure enough, twisted through my hair I could feel thin, supple twine, barbed with vicious thorns. 'Why?'

'You know, she said awkwardly, 'for the journey, for safety.' She lapsed into an odd, uncomfortable silence.

'Will it help?' I asked.

'Well,' she said, sounding doubtful and uneasy, 'it won't do any harm.'

I wasn't scared, as I left the cottage. I didn't believe that Genetrixa's bramble would offer me protection in the journey ahead, but I was not afraid. Looking back, I was rarely afraid back then. Anicula made me nervous, with her sharp tongue and short temper, and I sometimes felt uneasy in the cottage, when the women were at work and the very air was thick with things I did not understand, but I wasn't frightened.

I can only remember two occasions from that time, when I had been truly afraid.

The first had been the time when I stole Anicula's mirror.

I'd waited until the women were asleep. I thought I knew what I was doing - I'd heard Genetrixa talking about the ritual at the summer markets, instructing young, flushed women as to how it should be performed: look into a mirror in the moonlight - has to be a full moon, mind -stare deep down, past your reflection, and you'll see the man you'll marry.

The mirror was old: dulled, black-flecked glass, its edges crazed with razor-sharp chips that could slice unwary fingers. It felt cold in my hands, and very heavy, as I carried it outside, careful not to trip on sleeping bodies. I faltered, on the threshold, as the door opened under my touch with an inordinately loud groan. I was sure the sound must have woken someone, waited long, drawn-out minutes in the doorway, until I was satisfied it had not, and stepped outside.

The summer was nearing its end. The days were still long and warm and bright, and the first leaf of autumn was still months from falling, but there was a chill in the night air, a certain serrated edge to the breeze that promised colder, darker times. A full moon hung low and heavy in a dark sky.

I knelt on dew-damp grass, the mirror in front of me. By moonlight, my reflection in the glass was transformed: alien and ghostly, but still my own. I concentrated harder, thinking back to Genetrixa's words, past your reflection, and I searched long and hard, as the slow, creeping coldness of the earth beneath me seeped into my flesh and bones. I looked for something hidden beyond my own distorted image. The surface of the mirror looked like water, swam before my eyes. Deep, deep down.

Underneath the glass, brief as summer lightning, something flickered. Snapping, snarling, utterly inhuman; just for a moment, something dark and ancient and savage stared back.

The mirror exploded. The air came alive in a blaze of flying shards. The sound of my screams woke the women in the cottage, who found me, incoherent and inconsolable, sobbing and shrieking on the ground outside, surrounded by hundreds of glittering fragments.

Genetrixa took me in her meaty arms and held me against her as she muttered soothing words, until, exhausted by my own fear, I cried myself dry.

Then Anicula beat me until I cried again.

The second time I can remember being frightened was my first bleeding. I didn't understand, and the sight of so much blood issuing from my own body, slicking my thighs with its dark, violent red, terrified me.

Genetrixa explained gently that my body was changing. The blood was a mark of my passage to womanhood. Even when I understood the reason for my monthly bleed, knew that from it new life could be born, it still unnerved me. I couldn't reconcile myself with the idea that the essence of life could have the same rank smell as slaughter.

Those were the only two occasions when I remember being scared. Strange that they fell exactly a month apart.

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