Ancient Curiosities

Long before the name Cinderella was ever heard in the West, a ninth-century Chinese girl named Ye Xian lost her parents, was abused by her stepmother, and found her only friend in a golden fish that came to her call. When the fish was cruelly killed, its buried bones answered her grief with a magic robe, golden slippers, and a path out of bondage — the oldest Cinderella ever written down.

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A scholar of the Sui dynasty, traveling through a broken age, is given a small bronze mirror older than any dynasty he knows. Held to a face, it shows not the skin but the truth within: the fox beneath the beauty, the demon at the sickbed, the illness hiding in the body. He uses it to unmask spirits and cure the dying, until the mirror itself decides to leave him.

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