“I hate it,” she said, could only say to her grandmother, who would think well of her anyways. “I hate being this way. Why should it be their business what I’m like? Why should they get to decide?”

Only her grandmother would sit beside her on the bed and listen, and hold her tight when her voice started to shake loudly enough that someone walking past the bedroom could have heard.

“I’ve told you the tale already,” her grandmother reminded her. “About how-”

“I know, and I don’t want to hear it again,” she said. Cruel, snapping, childish tone that anyone else would have thought worse of her for, and how she hated that, too. “I just want to know why. I want it to stop. I want it to not matter at all what they think about me.”

“Well, that’s not true for any person,” her grandmother sighed against her shoulder. “But I understand, love. It’s not fair on you, for what they think to change you this way. Curses rarely are fair, blessings either, but you can still cry for being hurt by them. You’re only a child – they shouldn’t look down on you for shedding a few tears for your lot.”

And would her grandmother always see her that way? As a child who should weep for being cursed, who should need to be held and comforted while the tears dried on her cheeks? Someone who thought well of her still worked that curse’s magic on her all the same, making her what they believed her to be.

Her only freedom might have been not to be known to anyone. To run so far away that no one searched for or remembered her, to live in a quiet place visited and thought of by no one. But she was a child, with no idea where such a place might be, so she let her grandmother go on holding her while she wept for being cursed instead.