A Ruby in the Ice
by Mary-Jean Harris
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Liana’s pace slackened as she approached the doors, each step leadening her already sore muscles. She stopped at the doors to remove her boots and replace them with her makeshift slippers. Their faded red fabric, criss-crossed with fevered midnight stitches, were crude against the rose-marble flagstones. Pathetic, they seemed to sneer. This only strengthened Liana’s resolve.
She pushed open the doors, leaning her full weight into the heavy marble. An unlit hallway stretched into the depths of the opera house. Liana’s feet were silent as she walked inside, the winter chill creeping from the stones into her limbs in sharp pricks that forced her to keep moving. Halfway down the hallway, she froze upon hearing a whimper.
To her left, a door was ajar, and faint voices arose from within. When she peered inside, Liana at first took herself to be dreaming. Or perhaps hallucinating after her sleepless night. There were half a dozen young ladies, all clad in the characteristic red slippers of the Rubies.
Four of the ladies were strapped down on narrow beds in a twisted imitation of sleep. Their arms and waists were bound to the frame with thick harnesses, against which their bodies pressed tautly, jerking to be freed. Their legs were unbound, and their feet performed rhythmic motions. Dancing. But their eyes were shut, foreheads gleaming with sweat even in the chill air.
The remaining two girls were dancing, though their motions were forced and without joy. One girl was sobbing as she turned to and fro, shaking her arms in a mockery of the grace and poise of the Rubies upon the stage. “It never stops!” she cried, turning another pirouette.
“Elaine, listen,” the other girl pleaded. She was older than the others and her green eyes were dull and rimmed with grey. But she, too, danced with a steady, ceaseless rhythm. “You will get used to the beds. You need to sleep or you’ll faint.”
“But... will it ever stop?”
“No.”
Liana waited to see if the older girl would offer some comfort to the younger, but none was forthcoming. Liana’s breath grated like icicles in her throat at the lady’s next words.
“Your contract is for life, Elaine. Once you put on the slippers, you will never stop dancing. You will live only for the stage, and you will devote the rest of your life to surviving the dance.”
While listening, Liana noticed a peculiar pattern upon the floor: bronze-red streaks across the marble. Blood, dried over years of endless dance, invisible against the ruby red of the slippers but all too stark across the floors of the hidden chambers of the Ruby Hall.
Liana backed away, preparing to flee, but a vice-like grip caught her forearm, knobbly bones digging into her flesh. “What are you doing here?” The hissing voice belonged to Mme Cecelia. She didn’t wait for Liana to respond, but pulled her into an adjoining chamber with uncanny strength, locking the door behind them. “How did you get in here?” she pressed.
Liana tried to break free, but the woman was relentless. “I... I came to see Mme Karina.”
Unlike the hallway, this chamber was illuminated by tall candlesticks in wall sconces about the room. It was a sitting room with red divans, dark wooden bureaus and a desk with obsidian stationary, behind which—
“Let me speak with her.” The woman behind the desk curled a finger toward Liana. The cast of the light set her cheekbones in stark relief beneath her hooded eyes, and her painted red lips were like a streak of blood.
“Mme Karina,” Cecelia began with an incline of her head, “I did not know you had arrived yet.”
Mme Karina flicked her wrist in a careless gesture. She did not take her eyes off Liana, who was feeling prickles of discomfort under the woman’s gaze. Mme Karina was perhaps in her early sixties, her snow-white hair styled in elegant coils that created a wintery frame about her narrow face.
“Come,” she told Liana.
This was what Liana had wanted: to see Mme Karina herself, to prove to her that she was worthy of... what? What were the Rubies but slaves to some dreadful curse? She wanted none of it. She had been foolish, so fixated upon those glittering shoes and the prestige they entailed. But for what? Agony, isolation, fatigue.
Liana didn’t move. Cecelia prodded her forward and Liana stumbled in her makeshift slippers. A slight upturn of Mme Karina’s lips made her shrink back.
“You wish to be a Ruby,” the woman said, standing. “We can make an exception.”
“No, I’ll leave. I won’t bother you again,” Liana stammered, tearing herself away from Cecelia.
“Oh, but you agreed to become a Ruby whenever I deemed fit,” Mme Karina said. She moved from behind her desk to the front, yet she did not walk; her legs were missing. She manoeuvred herself forward with a wooden contraption on wheels that rolled her out like a statue. Her black dress swayed in the empty air where her legs might have been, a phantom in the candlelight. The woman removed a ruby pendant from around her neck and held it toward Liana’s feet.
Liana had felt her body freeze at the sight of the woman, but now she forced herself to run to the door. It was locked. Turning back to her captors, she saw the ruby glowing, a little beating heart pulsing and extending its sphere of light toward her. She glanced at the windows, but they were too narrow to permit escape, and she couldn’t reach them in time anyway. The red glow touched her feet, encompassing her makeshift slippers in a frigid pool of light and turning the faded red fabric a bloody crimson.
Mme Karina grinned with a cruel delight as Liana struggled to move away.
“Stop, please,” Liana pleaded.
“But we need perfect ballerinas,” Mme Karina said coolly. “Do you not wish to be one? I did. I wanted the jewels, the applause, just as you do.”
“I don’t want it anymore.” Liana’s shoes were forming hard, pointed toes, the crude stitches blending into the darkening fabric.
“You don’t?” Mme Karina asked. “I very much doubt that. We will see how long you can withstand the dance, when you are at your wit’s end with fatigue and must resort to death or amputation.”
“Is that... what you did?”
How terrible it must have been for Mme Karina, trapped in an endless dance until she could no longer take it, forcing herself to cut off her legs. How could she knowingly subject her dancers to such a fate? Was it some morbid curiosity to see how long it would take a perfect ballerina to collapse or be driven mad? Liana realised she had never seen the name of a Ruby appear more than a few times on the opera house posters. Did they only last months? Weeks?
Liana’s shoes were now smooth and forming rubies, just as she’d always wanted... She reached down to tear off the shoes but found they burned with an impossible coldness as if each ruby were a shard of ice. Then the burning crept into her feet, and her toes were aflame, forcing her to move. As she danced, the pain subsided. Her body was no longer her own, and she had to force out of her thoughts the horror of being no more than a marionette, so that she wouldn’t panic.
Her arms traced the fluid motions of Giselle, her feet gliding within her perfect shoes. She could not stop. Pirouette, pas de chats... Had she been on stage, it would have been a revelation of elegance. All she had to do was smile, and her body would need no prodding to fall into the steps from her childhood rehearsals.
She rose in an arabesque toward Mme Karina as the woman retreated on her support back behind her desk, her task complete.
“Take her away, Cecelia,” Mme Karina said. She flinched into silence and dropped the ruby pendant onto her desk, clutching her hands together as though burned. Her eyes snapped up to Liana, icy fury sweeping across her face in a tempest. “What did you do?”
Liana hadn’t done anything, but when she looked down to her feet, she noticed that the vibrancy of the jewels had faded, and the crimson fabric was beginning to show wear. It was as if the crude shoes she had stitched were becoming visible underneath, until...
Liana fell to the floor from her position en pointe when the hardened toes softened back to plain fabric. Her feet no longer forced her into an endless dance. Was she free? She stood tentatively, and the two women regarded her with taut, rigid expressions.
“You broke it,” Mme Karina snapped. “After all these years, none could truly relinquish their desires, their greed. But you...”
Liana looked down at her shoes. They were more beautiful than the ruby slippers had ever been. Crafted by her own hands — even if in bitter disappointment — they were alive with memories rather than frozen in ice. They were the shared despair between Liana and all the other girls who had been given fabric rather than a jewel. And although they didn’t know it yet, so, too, was it the despair that would come to those who were given a ruby.
“Do you truly not desire this?” Mme Karina asked, a bit more softly.
“I don’t.” The freedom Liana felt was greater than any jewel. “Yet I am no saint. I’ve made mistakes, and so have all those other ladies. Please release them. They have surely learned the price of being a Ruby.”
The ballet mistress did not respond. She was still hard as ice, but there was something different in her gaze. Just a flicker, some touch of humanity that had long lain dormant. Perhaps she had been waiting, without truly realizing it, for someone to prove her wrong. She might never change her own heart, but perhaps she took solace in knowing that it was possible.
Liana was about to say more but caught her tongue when Mme Karina’s hand began to stray toward the ruby pendant. The jewel was no longer glowing and, when Mme Karina touched it, she did not recoil. She held it firmly and, after a breath, turned and tossed it into the fire behind her. It shattered against the bricks as if it were no more than glass, and a hiss of flames sparked red.
The click of a lock sounded behind Liana. She ran to the door and, this time, neither Mme Karina or Cecelia made a motion to stop her. It opened smoothly, and Liana was met by cries of joy from down the hall.
Liana didn’t rush out at once but turned back to Mme Karina, whose hard edges seemed blunted now, her eyes wet as melting snow.
“Thank you,” Liana said. She thought she saw Mme Karina mouth those same words.
The Palais des Bijoux had lost its jewels and its ambition to be greater than all others. Yet, perhaps, as the sun rose a dusty gold across the December snow clouds, it might have gained a heart.
*
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[Author’s note] This story was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale “The Red Shoes,” first published in 1845.
Copyright © 2026 by Mary-Jean Harris
