Franca knew she was not beautiful, but it took her years to understand how painful it was.

It started as tiny little things, hints of problems to come: when her family was invited to a ball or to a meeting with other Sicilian nobles, Franca was always among the last to receive a flower or a smile, while girls her age, wondrous in their white and cream dresses, would receive a compliment about how lustrous their locks were, or how shiny their eyes, or how fair their skin.

The best sons of the kingdom would share longing gazes with her friends – or supposed so – and they would often take a stroll hand in hand, to go God knows-where into the gardens and between the bushes. Franca, who might have lacked in certain departments but surely not in wit nor hearing, would often leave, alone, to shiver behind a tall pine or beneath a porch, listening in trance like a befuddled opium smoker to the titter and laughter and gasps that came from those secluded places, so close and yet so far.

So far, for her.

She thought it was her own fault. Maybe her dress was not as beautiful as others? Maybe it was her perfume? Maybe it was her etiquette, something in her voice. Was her conversation not as interesting? She had just taken piano lesson, wouldn’t someone sit down and listen? She knew how to hold a conversation in French! She knew poetry!

No, she realized one dreary afternoon when she hit the large mirror in her room, shattering glass and her illusions alike: the broken image told her the truth, at last. It wasn’t about something she could do. Nothing would fix her crooked nose, her bulbous forehead, the deep bags between her eyes, her too-wide waist and her too-thin hips. She would always appear as haggard as water-witch, with her black hair rolling down her shoulders like a moldy curtain.

She took up strange habits. Began to attend mass too often – she would often be found holding a crucifix and a bible in her pale hands, praying to God for deliverance to make her desirable.

But God seemingly had no time for such frivolous requests. The sun shone outside and girls her age strolled around in the fields, laughing, sharing forbidden kisses under the shadow of beeches.

All the while Franca gnawed upon herself like an old festering wound. She had all mirrors removed. Began to find excuses not to attend parties. Instead she threw herself upon the floor, scratching her wrists like an old battered rug praying for help.

Help did not come.

Never would, as the broken crucifix attested, thrown into a dusty corner.

That was when she began to hear the whispers.

At first they came at night: a soft murmur in the wind, reaching her ears when kept her eyes closed, weeping as her hands grasped the sheets tight. No words. No meaning.

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Just an invite.

She thought them a trick. Of her mind, perhaps. Perhaps of something else.

Her Christian upbringing did provide some measure of solace, for a time. She came fully back to the faith she had briefly forsaken and covered her room in a curtain of holy water and icons of the Holy Virgin, but her efforts did little to keep the voices at bay. They tormented her night after night, beckoning her to leave her warms sheets and soft bed and step on the cold floor, step outside, step into the woods.

It was always the woods.

Summer was now approaching and her family often dragged her out, with the excuse open air would help her ailing health, when it would just provide the world with the sight of her mangled body. The whispers began to reach her at noon, while she held a spoon of soup close to her lips. They echoed in her ears while she attended mass with her parents. Come, they said. Come.

In the shadows between hedge and branch she began to see shapes. Tall, pointed ones, with alluring smiles and eyes like dead stars.

Summer grew thin and with it her resistance.

The house of her family had been built in the middle of the island, far away from the rich cities of the coast. It had been built on the backs and sweat of hired hands, many of whom seemed to know about the secrets of the woods. Franca knew they did not go where the shadows were deeper, where trunks and leaves darkened and took on strange shapes.

She had even seen strange rituals take place. A bowl of milk left as an offering. A cup burning human hair and incense. Bones, arranged in strange patterns. Always in the direction of the woods.

Come.

Come.

Hours compressed in her memory – she wouldn’t have been able to say how or when she found her feet crackling against leaves, smelling damp earth and musk, light leaving her eyes to shine only in checkered patterns between branches hanging upon her head like a canopy of arms. She shuddered. The night was cool, but the real cold was inside her.

Come.

She followed.

The farmers used to speak about a place that had been there for a long time, like an ancient blighted heart beating at the core of the island. The Old Country, they named it.

It surely seemed like she was stepping in the matter of legends. The trees around her grew bent and gnarly, stretched out misshapen, as if they were trying to reproduce human figures twisted in agony.

Come.

And she obeyed, walking in the mud, cutting her way through brambles and thorns that seemed to hook into her clothes and into her skin, as if to hold her back, to test her resolve. She paid them no mind, nor to the cuts they bled into her skin, crimson turned bright grey inside the bowels of night.

Until she reached a small opening.

You have come, said a woman’s voice.

She froze mid-step. It was a soothing whisper, like a whiff of sweet smoke it caressed her ears, tickled against them.

Something had come as well. An imposing figure, half-hidden between the trees, holding a tall and thin staff. A smile like a sickle of moon and eyes like burning embers of gold.

Franca did not ask who she was. She did not ask what she wanted.

“What can you offer?” She whispered instead.

What is it that you desire? The wind picked up. It passed through her hair like a caress. Images flew into her mind like a scattered flight of doves: dancing at a ball, a handsome duke entranced by her beauty, picking up flowers in a meadow. A crown of gold? She shook her head. The voice seemed to laugh. It was toying with her, because she already knew her answer. A lover’s kiss.

Her cheeks prickled. She lowered her gaze, away from those twin golden orbs that seemed to gawk directly into her forsaken soul.

To look in a mirror once more?

Franca trembled. Slowly, caring little for the remnants of her soul, she held her hands out in offer.

“Yes.”