“You don’t approve?” Joan asked, picking up on Delphine’s tone. “Their stories were for themselves, not the Mirrors.”“What do you mean?” said Bea.“Certainly sometimes a good little character would find a lamp, and would not be so corrupted by the strangely endless possibilities of three wishes that they ended up causing more harm than they ever imagined. Those stories fostered belief, they were retold, certainly; but they were few and far between. Most of the genie’s tales showed the characters exactly who they really were, not when they were despised and degraded, not when they’d reached the gutter and been given licence to look at the stars. No, the genies showed them who they were when they were invincible. The characters, they try to forget stories like that.”

“You don’t approve?” Joan asked, picking up on Delphine’s tone. “Their stories were for themselves, not the Mirrors.”“What do you mean?” said Bea.“Certainly sometimes a good little character would find a lamp, and would not be so corrupted by the strangely endless possibilities of three wishes that they ended up causing more harm than they ever imagined. Those stories fostered belief, they were retold, certainly; but they were few and far between. Most of the genie’s tales showed the characters exactly who they really were, not when they were despised and degraded, not when they’d reached the gutter and been given licence to look at the stars. No, the genies showed them who they were when they were invincible. The characters, they try to forget stories like that.”

“It is a rather remarkable trick of the mind that there can be a wicked little voice that whispers in your ear that you’ve done it before and nothing happened, so why not do it again? Everything will be OK, it says. Things are bad now, but something will turn up. The good will prevail, you’ll be rescued, you’ll find the answer at the last minute. No one dies in a story…”

“The woman above him had tumbled out of his dreams, and now stood like a half-waking ghost, a photograph double exposed, showing him in one moment the fallacy of his past as it bled into his future. The image of Maria Sophia had grown too large for him to bear. He had made it so. In his industry and creativity he had transformed her into something so wonderful that the very fact she might now be anything less terrified him almost as much as the prospect she might exceed it.”

“She was here and the world, for so long ugly and deformed, was all at once itself again. She was taking a glass of sweet wine from one of the waiters. She was smiling. She was breathing. She was here. She was an island of such colossal importance within a sea of inconsequence that it seemed impossible the Ball was able to continue its empty existence.”

“Mistasinon stood as the music of life flowed around him, the instrument of his agency muted.”

“How can we learn the value of saying no, if we didn’t occasionally say yes?”

“Once upon a time there was war, and starvation, and death. Once upon a time we would kill our brothers and sisters, fearing for our own lives. Once upon a time the characters turned from us, and we wept. Now we do not war, nor do we fear, nor do we weep. We Redact.”

“There isn’t anything I can tell you that you don’t already know,” Melly answered.“Yes, but if we already know it then you’re not telling us anything new,” Bea said, thinking her way through the carriages of fear on the witch’s train of thought, “and if we don’t tell you what we know and what we don’t know, then you won’t know if you’ve actually told us something we don’t know, and what you don’t know we don’t know won’t hurt you.”Melly stared at Bea, her cigarette hanging from her lip in defeat.“Did that make sense?” Joan asked.“Yes,” Melly said slowly, “but it probably shouldn’t have done.”

“There are a number of rules that should be observed when one meets royalty, ranging from what one can say and when, to where one should stand, when one can sit, even where one should look. Sindy bobbed a nervous curtsy and, before being introduced, blurted out an invitation to come inside whilst looking John directly in the eye.”

“It’s a terrible person who listens to what we say rather than what we mean”