In a Glass Grimmly by Adam Gidwitz Page B

howled. Jill tried to pull the ax out, but it seemed to have become lodged there. Jill turned and grabbed the long, curving knife from the wall. She raised it and brought it down—but before it could enter the man’s flesh, she was flung back by a kick to the chest. She tumbled over the rope and out into the daylight.
    The man lay amid the fallen tools in the tiny shed, blood pouring from his arm onto the ground. He was staring at Jill.
    “You leave her alone!” Jill snarled again, and then she ran.
     
    ----
    Jill passed the tavern so quickly she did not see Jack looking out the window, watching her run up the road. Not that seeing him would have stopped her now. She kept going, up, up into the steep and misty hills. The wet grass was like a sponge beneath her feet. She could smell the peat smoke rising from the fires in the houses of the village. It was a sweet, musty smell. She passed a flock of sheep, lying on the green wet hillside. They bleated at her.
    At the edge of the little valley behind the first hill, there stood a small sheepfold—just a wooden structure with three walls and a roof, where the sheep could gather if they wanted to get out of the rain. Jill made her way to that. She sat down in it. She looked at herself. Her clothing was splattered with the man’s blood.
    She was sorry she hadn’t killed him, but she thought that maybe, lying there, he might just bleed to death on his own. She thought of the beautiful mermaid—how perfect she was. And how she loved Jill. She loved her, Jill knew it. And to think that there had been six more of them, and that the bearded man had killed them all. It made her sick. And then, to think of his little daughter, who had died from grief because of him. Oh, what he had done to his little daughter.
    Perhaps, she thought, she would return to his hut that night and be sure the job was done.
     
    ----
    When the night was black, and Jill was certain that the people would have left the tavern and gone to their homes to sleep, Jill hurried back across the field of sheep, skirted around the edge of the silent fishing village, and made her way down to her little harbor. The mermaid was singing again. The song seemed to penetrate Jill’s soul. It was intoxicating. It was unbearably beautiful.
    ----
     
    Come, come, where heartache’s never been.
    And where you’re seen as you want to be seen.
    Come, come, the place of shadow and green,
    Where you’ll never cry no more, dear lass,
    Where you’ll never cry no more.
     
    Jill’s vision became blurred. She couldn’t see the houses of the village, nor the sky above it. All she could see was the black, heaving ocean and the craterous, craggy rocks that rose up around it, like teeth around a great mouth. The mermaid was singing more sweetly and sadly than she ever had before. Jill came to the water’s edge. She looked out at the mermaid’s rock, surrounded by the spuming, frothing ocean, but the mermaid was not there.
    “Here,” she heard. Jill looked down. There, directly below Jill, just beneath the surface of the sea, the mermaid floated. Jill bent over and, staring down at the mermaid, it felt like she was staring into a mirror of obsidian, and the mermaid was her beautiful, perfected reflection.
If only the mermaid really were Jill’s reflection,
she thought. If only. She wanted it so badly it made her heart ache.
    The mermaid’s eyes were wider and blacker and greener than Jill had remembered, and her hair that looked like the shining of the moon on the water at night blew every which way under the waves. And she was smiling at Jill.
    “Beautiful girl,” she said from under the water. “Beautiful, brave girl. You have done something to defend me, and to avenge my sisters. I can feel it.”
    Jill sat down on the edge of the rocks. She folded her feet behind her and dangled her fingers in the cold, wild water. “I tried,” Jill said. “I tried to.”
    The mermaid beamed at her. “You beautiful, brave girl.