Free Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All by Jane Yolen

didn’t cry. Not when she hit me again with the hard side of the brush or with the bristle side or with the ruler I used for homework or a wooden clothes hanger or a ladle whenever the mood took her, though she was always careful not to raise a bruise where anyone could see.
    And I didn’t cry when she made me stand out in the garden, nearly naked, where a person walking by—even kids from school—might catch a glimpse of me in my underthings.
    Nor when she forced me to scrub the kitchen floor with my toothbrush.
    Nor when I had to rake out the still-warm coals from the stove with my fingers.
    Nor when she gave me only the scraps left over from her dinner.
    No, the only time I wept was late at night in my bed, when I was certain she was asleep and not standing silently at the door listening. Every night for a week, a month, two months, three . . . until it all seemed normal and proper that I should be treated that way.
    Was my spirit broken? I no longer had a spirit to break.

•13•
    STEPMAMA REMEMBERS
    W hen I first apprenticed to the Master, I worked hard, both day and night. He taught me little in those first months but the value of hard work. Not the Craft, which was all I wanted. Instead I swept floors, scrubbed counters, set out potions and flowers and seeds whose names I didn’t know and whose secrets I couldn’t figure out on my own.
    When I was too slow, he hit me. When I was too slipshod, he yelled. He used a belt and a switch and a ruler on my knuckles, though I understood what he was doing and never complained.
    And when he thought my spirit broken, and I biddable enough, he began to teach me down in the cellar, but only the smallest bits of the Craft.
    He showed me how to tease out the future from an apple peeling, how to make a witch cake, how to curse a cow. He taught me skin on skin how to use my body as a gift, as a tool, as a weapon. He taught me giving and withholding. But the Deep Magicks he kept from me, and when I asked, when I begged, he looked at me crookedly and said formally, “When you are ready and not before.”
    He meant when he deemed me ready. I didn’t want anyone—and certainly not any man—to have that power over me. And yet he had that power and more for I had fallen in love with him. That awful, gut-wrenching, knee-weakening love that makes true what is false, and mockery of any wish to be strong.
    Finally, when he believed me ready, he taught me some of the Deep Magicks. How to poison and how to heal. How to put to sleep and how to awaken. How to strengthen and how to take away strength. He taught these to me by doing them to me. So I sickened and got well, died and came to life again. Over and over he did these things to me until I understood them down to my very bones.
    I learned well and forgot nothing. I didn’t have to write down the secrets, though I did so in a code of my own devising. But I had them secured in my head and knew I’d never forget a bit of what he taught me.
    Then one day, when the Master had stayed out late into the night and came home to sleep in a stupor marked by his dark rattling snores, I decided I’d both the time and knowledge to do some snooping. Only I didn’t call it that, of course; I called it “some growing” and “some learning” and “some searching for enlightenment.” But calling a pig a princess doesn’t lift it out of the sty. I was snooping all right, sneaking and stealing secrets. I was marking territory like a dog in its yard. And I was coming into my own.
     
     
    Off to the side of the main cellar room where the Master had taught me most things was a small room, but it was always kept locked. Master wore the key to the lock around his neck and never let me in, not even to clean, though he went there whenever he felt like it and locked the door behind.
    Aren’t forbidden doors the most alluring? The old stories point that out surely. Even the greatest heroes and heroines fall under the spell of a locked door. And so did