The situation was more bearable at night. Its sharp edges were blunted by the formless dark, by the purring bees and the soft, blanketing weight of the slumbering world. While the rest of the world slept, I was at my most productive.

I needn't look at what I was crocheting to do it. Decades of muscle memory stacked one atop the other, like the rows I continually added to the dress I was working on, meant my fingers knew their task without the aid of my eyes. The bone hook was worn in the middle where my fingers rested and rubbed ever so slightly with every stitch, molding it to my hand.

*     *     *
When I first met her, she was collapsed in an inconsolable heap. Tatters of her dress littered the ground around her and hung from her half-starved frame. Between tremendous heaving sobs she told me about how her stepmother and stepsisters had stripped it from her body. How they’d jeered and shouted at her as they ripped and tore.

She’d shown me the marks of this, their latest assault—the scrapes and scratches—while I picked out the evidence of their long-term torment; her scrawny limbs, hollow eyes, and broken-toothed smile.

Slowly I’d coaxed the story of her biological parents’ deaths and the subsequent neglect and abuse from her foster families. Teasing it out gently with empathy, kindness, and just a little magic.

When she’d told me her dearest wish was to go to a dance—the poor thing too beat down to even dare wish for freedom—I knew just how I would help her. What I didn’t know was that it would result in so much death.

*     *     *
I smelled her before I saw her. No longer the wet, heavy stench of new death, but rather the softer, musty odour of one returned from the earth. I knew what I’d see when I opened the door, so I hesitated as long as I could, but in the end opening doors is what godmothers are meant to do, so I fulfilled my purpose.

Her stepmother had dressed her in boys’ clothes when she buried her, so it was in boys’ clothes that she came to me. Cuffs torn and stained with grave dirt, fingernails stripped of polish and torn from the efforts of digging. It tore my heart out to see her diminished and worm-bitten. Dressed in clothes she’d have despised.

And that’s when I knew exactly what form my magic would take. Not a shroud but a dress. Another dress.

*     *     *
When I’d found her that first night, dressed in tatters and crying her heart out, I’d magicked up a dress, some amazing shoes, and even summoned up a limo. If feeling like a princess at a dance was her dearest wish, who was I to argue?

“This is the happiest moment of my life!” she’d exclaimed, twisting and turning to watch the dress flare and twirl around her. And indeed, the shadows had left her eyes and even her broken-toothed smile was beautiful. She’d looked radiant when she left in the car, and even more so when she’d returned in the wee hours of the morning.

She’d met a boy at the dance. She was certain he was going to be her Prince Charming and whisk her away to a land far, far away where they could find a Happily Ever After.

Days later, when their backseat fumbling revealed something she thought he already knew, it all fell down, and the taunts of “You’re not a real girl!” began.

At first it was just him. And then it was his friends. And then their friends as well. Before long she couldn’t go anywhere without their voices ringing in her ears. Even when she was alone.

*     *     *
She rustled, like the settling of a great pile of leaves in autumn, and I stepped aside, holding the door open and feeling the chill in the wood that her proximity had caused.

“You’d better come in,” I said.

She looked no more substantial than a corn husk, but as she drifted past me, she brushed against me and I felt it; her will. It was hard as iron and cold as a February blizzard.

She didn’t want something from me, she needed it.

“You don’t need to do this, my girl,” I said.

She didn’t respond, simply drifted over to a spot between the fireplace and the window. There she stood, waiting. Watching.

Thrumming.

*     *     *
Her mother’s death, followed soon after by her father’s.

Her stepmother’s abuse. Horrific bullying stepsisters.

A Prince Charming who was anything but.

It was no wonder that when she found the dope she took to it so wholly. So quickly.

It burned her from the inside out, hollowed her like a jack-o-lantern. That poison did its work quicker than a cancer, and within weeks the bright-eyed, vibrant fireball I’d sent to that dance had been reduced to a slack-jawed dullard with greasy hair and a picked-at face. It destroyed her long before she finished the job herself with a rusty razorblade.

*     *     *
The bees had built a nest deep in her chest. Occasionally one of them, big and bumbling, would emerge from her lips and zip around the room before finding a crack to release it into the outdoors, but eventually it would find its way back again, crawling across her bottom lip to force itself back inside. Mostly, though, they stayed where they were, inside where it was dark and warm.

Sometimes they buzzed, exactly how I’d have expected a bunch of bees to sound, but mostly they purred. Just making a soft vibration sound, a low thrum. It was soothing. Especially late at night when everything was already soft and muted.

It had taken me three full cycles of the moon to fashion and enchant my hook, and another three to make the progress I had on the dress.

She watched me from the corner between the window and fireplace, mute and pleading. It was the same place she’d been standing ever since I invited her into my home. It was the same place she’d stay until I was done.

I felt her eyes on me as I worked. Or, more specifically, the vacant holes which had once been her eyes. I wondered if she could truly see me, or if she mostly just saw the place from whence she’d come, the faces of those who had shown her the way there.

I was crocheting her dress out of spiderwebs and starlight.

Spiderwebs don’t mind what shape they are in, what form they take. They have one job—to stick to their prey. To hold them fast and allow them to be reeled in. And starlight, for all the stories and poems it appears in as a wonderful, romantic force, is really old, cold and sharp as blades. Despite the fact it casts light, it is not averse to bending itself toward tasks best done in the shadows.

The yarn slipped smoothly between my fingers. I’d spun it carefully. I needn’t burn or cut my hands with nettles to seal this spell; it drew strength from the hook. From the secrets I confessed to it. Binding my will to it. Empowering it. The things she would do with this spell … I would wear them as much as she. My words ensured that.

I was torn between completing it as quickly as possible to get it over with, and putting it off because even though something might feel justified didn’t make it any less evil. The real question for me wasn’t one of right or wrong. I knew what I was doing—what I had done—was wrong. The question was one of who I owed my allegiance to. And that was to her.

The bees purred. Their soft murmurings soothing my conscience while urging me on.

Tonight was the night. I knew it.

There was another dance.

She would go.

She would find her vengeance upon all who had wronged her.

Finally, I could put it off no longer. The dress was done.

Plain and ordinary, it was no fancier than the rags she used to wear to clean her stepmother’s chimney. Grey as wasp paper, soft as a whisper, it moved with a will of its own as I held it. Drifting as though caught in a breeze, or a current, that only it could feel.

I held it out and she stepped forward from the shadows, full into the moonlight which shone through my cracked window. The bees buzzed furiously, and I could hear them bouncing against the cage of her body.

I pulled the dress over her head and it flowed over her like water. Transforming itself into an exquisite gown full of shimmer and shifting colours as it draped over her, moving like no other fabric I’d ever seen. And as it clothed her, it disguised her as well. No longer the insubstantial husk of a person that arrived at my door some months ago, now she was dazzling and magnetic. She looked amazing. She looked happy. She looked alive.

She hugged me and the magic of her embrace forced me back into memories I’d tried to bury. Tried to stitch into the gown.

I was back there. Crouching over her stepmother like some warped gargoyle, bloodstained and twisted.

I’d meant to kill her. I’d sought her out at her hearth for just that reason. But I hadn’t meant to enjoy it.

The magic of her touch made me linger on her stepmother’s death, on how she’d felt writhing and weakening beneath me. How she’d clawed ineffectually at my hands around her throat. How her blood, warm and sticky, had felt as it painted my hands as I worked, taking what I needed from her. The ulna which eventually became my hook. I felt it in the room with us, that sense of purpose and satisfaction there, like a great dog sitting in the corner of the memory slavering, drooling, and wanting me to feed it more, more, more …

“Enough,” I said, and pulled away—I hadn’t dedicated my life to magic to be bound, helpless, by the revenant of my goddaughter. “I did what I had to in order to give you what you needed to do what you had to,” I said.

She tilted her head. Looked at me like a bird. Curious. Calculating.

And then she spun. Twisting and turning to watch the dress flare and twirl around her. And I was brought back to that night, that first night that we’d met when I’d made her a different dress. A lighter dress. A dress not designed as a weapon.

And I recalled how she’d spun. Exclaimed that it was the best night of her life.

I thought about how radiant she’d looked. How happy.

And sharp and swift as a bee sting I realized my mistake.

She hadn’t come to me for vengeance.

Not then.

Not now.

What had I done? What had I done?

She spun and spun, faster and faster. Kicking up a wind that picked up everything loose in my cabin, every paper, every trinket I’d collected over the years, even the bone hook I’d fashioned to do what I’d assumed had been her bidding. Around and around her it twisted, rattling windows and the door in its frame.

Only the bees seemed immune, pouring, one after another, an impossibly large number of them, from her lips and bumbling and bouncing about the place as though it were tranquil and quiet.

The door slammed open, banging against the inside wall, shattering the mirror I’d hung there.

I watched my reflection disintegrate into a hundred shards of glass—each sharp enough to cut. To kill—as she spun out the door.

Into the dark.

And away.

Taking the bees and their soft, soothing whispers with her.

To leave me alone with my tears, my regret, and my shattered life.