Snow White Queen

Summary

Snow White wakes up in the snow next to a corpse, clutching a bloody knife. She remembers a smiling man hunting her through the woods. Her memories are otherwise full of holes.

Seeking clues to her past, Snow White (Isa) wipes the blood from her hands and sets off through the forest her mother warned her never to enter. She almost convinces herself she's still the timid girl who was desperate to earn her mother’s love after her father abandoned them. That works right up until she incapacitates a man with a few brutal moves and his own knife.

It quickly becomes clear that nothing around her matches her shattered memories. Villages fend off mysterious attacks from the forest. Her mother has ordered Isa's death, and she knows there must be more to that than a magic mirror. Even the squirrels are wrong—Isa's pretty sure they didn't drink blood before.

The kingdom is poised on the brink of collapsing in on itself as knights with metal faces and strange bear-hounds scour the countryside. The key to saving it—and herself—lies with that bloody corpse, somewhere in Isa’s memories. But the more she recalls, the more she realizes there's something worse lurking in the shadows of her past. Something she might not want to remember at all.

The most dangerous monsters don't live in the woods. They're the people we love.

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

"Once upon a time in midwinter, when the snowflakes were falling like feathers from heaven..."

—"Little Snow White," Germany, by Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm, translated D. L. Ashliman

Now

              Black.

              White on blinding white.

              Drops of red, red blood.

              The frost blurring my vision slowly melts into silver sky. The air glitters above me like the snow under my cheek. I have to get up, but I can't remember why. My muscles shriek at me. Go!

              Finally, I rise.

              My fingers are clenching the hilt of a dagger. Three drops of red slide off it and splash onto the snow as I stare blankly at the blade. The last echoes of someone screaming still ring in my head.

              A man lies crumpled at my feet, the wintry ground crimson around him.

              I catch a ragged breath and the knife tumbles from my fingers. What have I done?

              Dusk is turning the forest air a murky purple between endless crowds of ice-feathered trunks. I scan the clearing desperately for clues to where I am, but I might as well be at the bottom of the White Sea; I don't recognize this place at all.

              I reach for memories of anything that happened before this moment, but they slither between my fingers, reluctant to leave the cool, dark recesses in the waters of my mind.

              My hand is sticky with congealing blood. I clench it, but my fingers squelch together and I quickly straighten them.

              This is absurd. I didn't just lie down for a nap in the middle of the woods. I must have had a reason to be here. I glance reluctantly back at the corpse.

              My eyes slip and scrabble for purchase on the body. All I can gather are quick impressions: Blood. A fur-lined cloak. Ice-rimed limbs. No sign of a weapon. I can't see his face; I tell my legs to move closer, but they don't listen. Instead, the forest swirls dizzyingly around me and I sag against a nearby fir tree. Its bark crackles as it digs into my arms through my thin sleeves.

              Maybe he’s still alive. I should check, but the burning horror in my chest tells me he's not. I killed him. My mind tries to drift into blankness again.

              I shake myself impatiently. Falling apart won't help.

              Exasperation with my own helplessness boils over into my limbs. I brush my skirts matter-of-factly—if a little too violently—like I know what to do and am ready to get on with it. Pearl-encrusted silk swishes under red-stained fingertips that don't feel like my own. An elaborate white gown hangs from my frame, torn and spattered, topped by nothing but a thin cloak. Oh—I'm freezing, I note distantly. A whisper of dread rustles through me. I wasn't supposed to be here.

              Snow crunches faintly. I whirl around.

              A black squirrel creeps out of the trees. Belly low to the ground, its tiny shoulders dip and rise as it crawls slowly toward the corpse. It circles the body, ragged tail twitching.

              My heart plunges. It's licking the blood from the snow.

              I glare at its scrawny form. Stop that. The words lodge like air bubbles in my throat, slowly sinking back down to my stomach, where unexpected fury burns. I lurch forward to frighten the squirrel away.

              Its head jerks up. Its eyes glint in the dusk, predatory and protective. More squirrels scuttle like spiders out of the surrounding obscurity to join the feast, their gazes fixed on me as they prowl past.

              Right. It's time to go. I back away.

              A deep thrumming resonates just out of sight through the trees, more feeling than sound. The last vestiges of warmth flee my body. Whatever-it-is rumbles closer and the world bends toward it.

              The squirrels dart away with panicked, jerky bounds. The air fractures. Down in my stomach I know that if I stay here, I'll die. I don't look back. I run.

              Stark branches whip at me. My lungs rasp on the wintry air. Escape is all there is to know.

              I stumble over sharp stones and pain lances through me. I look down. My feet are bare, torn, and seeping.

              Someone told me the forest is dangerous. I reach out my hand—but that's not right, there's no one here to hold it, so I let it drop to my side, strangely bereft.

              What am I running from? I almost have the answer, but the words are in the wind, in the wood. I'm nowhere and I'm no one.

              The trees behind me blacken: the beast is coming. I run faster.

              The shadow of my fear rises to follow.

CHAPTER 2

"All day she wandered back and forth, trying to find a way out, but instead she strayed deeper and deeper into the dark, pathless forest."

—"The Three Sisters," Italy, by Christian Schneller, translated and adapted Heidi Ann Heiner

Then

                I was seven years old and my mother said, "Come comb my hair."

                I scampered onto the polished footstool behind her and began our evening ritual. My mother hummed contentedly in the back of her throat as the teeth of the ivory comb ran through her locks. The warmth of the hearth reached out to cradle us. Her ebony hair gleamed, catching the glow of the flames and pulling them in.

                Smiling, she pulled me into her lap and tickled my sides. I giggled and leaned back against her chest, feeling it rise and fall with her breath. She rested her cheek on the top of my head. She smelled like home.

                After a moment, we straightened, and she began combing my hair as we gazed into her mirror. I looked past my reflection to meet her eyes in the glass, but she suddenly froze, staring with a lost look at her own image.

                She turned to the dark window. "Isole, you must never go into the woods alone."

                I nodded. Of course. She'd warned me over and over, and I'd heard about the dead people.

                Tonight, though, she added, "I'm leaving in the morning. Don't enter the forest at all until I return."

                "Yes, Mama," I promised, abruptly scared.

                Her hand trembled and she said in a strained voice, "Ready?"

                I didn't want to do the next part of our going-to-bed ritual. The mirror sometimes put her in a bad mood, and she was already acting strange. But I chanted obediently with her:

                "Mirror, Mirror, on the wall..."

Now

              I'm alone in the woods now, despite my mother's warnings. I wish I hadn't dropped that knife. My brain skitters away from that line of thinking.

              Every part of me throbs with the pounding of my feet. I can still feel the heat of the fire from the hearth in my memory. I want to go home. But I can't even remember what home looks like. Just the inside of that warm room from many years ago.

              Night has plunged over the forest, painting it in grays and blacks. I left the thrumming air—and hopefully, whatever created it—in the distance, but it's still back there somewhere. I push on.

              My breath thunders in my ears as the columns of trees thin ahead. I burst into a vast meadow, silver in the rising moonlight.

              The snow rumples away from me in motionless waves. Here and there, boulders rear up out of the ground to touch my missing memories. The wind rasps against my skin, whipping ebony locks across my face. My own hair looks foreign.

              I stagger as I step into the deeper, crusted snow of the field, my bare, battered feet screaming in pain. I look back. Each step adds a bloody footprint to a gruesome trail stretching behind me. I'm painfully easy to track right now.

              I lurch over a log-sized mound, then another. I almost recover, then topple, plowing through the snow blanketing the next hard lump. I lie there, panting. With each exhale comes an involuntary little huff and sob. In my mind, someone is counting down, a predator eagerly anticipating his prey. "Ten...Nine..." I fight to rise, but a solid sheet of ice underlies everything.

              I rest my cheek against the biting snow of the mound. I'll get back up soon, but I need a moment to imagine what it would be like to just give up. To rest.

              A hollow roar rises behind me, shooting primal shock through my veins. I straighten. That's not the thing chasing me. That's something else. Perfect.

              Monstrous silhouettes blend and separate at the edge of the clearing. They're bigger than horses, a herd of nightmare creatures stalking back and forth under the shelter of the trees.

              I shove myself up, but my hands slide out from under me and my chin slams into the frozen mound. That's when I see her.

              Green eyes stare unseeing at me through the glassy dome under my cheek.

              It's a woman, encased in ice, her skin glittering in the moonlight.

CHAPTER 3

"Then she began to run, and ran over sharp stones and through thorns, and the wild beasts ran past her, but did her no harm."

—"Little Snow White," Germany, by Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm, translated Margaret Hunt

Then

                From the time I was tiny, my mother would tell me the story of my birth. How I got stuck coming out and she labored for days. How my father was delayed by an out-of-season snow storm and couldn’t arrive in time. How she almost died.

                “I was so happy once you were born,” she’d tell me. “It was just you and me, and I got to show you the world.”

              She also told me how hard it was, how I cried without stop when I was a baby, how she had to leave me in my cradle and step outside so she wouldn’t do something to hurt me. “I just hadn’t slept in weeks, and you wouldn’t stop crying. I had to plug my ears so I wouldn’t hear you.”

              But I didn’t remember that. I remembered bits and pieces of my first years: rubbing noses together in our special kiss, playing with my dolls in a sunlit room while she sewed the alphabet for me to trace with my fingers. Life was so simple, and if she was happy, I was. I knew where home was: it was with my mama, and I was safe there.

Now

              The biggest creature steps into the moonlit meadow, its hoof daintily breaking the crust of snow. Its next step is pure power.

              Wod. It's a wild boar, unbelievably enormous. The other hulking creatures materialize behind it, picking up speed as they forge across the field.

              I freeze. There must be at least ten of them, taller than me and bellowing deep in their chests. I have nowhere left to go and no energy left to run. Their beady eyes fix on me.

              The ground trembles with the boars' approach. I tense for the impact, my body chilled with dread. I start to let myself drift, my head filling with a dizzy, floating feeling. I killed that man. Perhaps I deserve to die.

              Or do I? Cold defiance blooms in my chest. I didn't survive a thrumming beast that bends the world, only to be killed by a bunch of pigs. Even giant wild ones.

              The boars thunder toward me like an avalanche.

              And then the world thunders back.

              The earth beneath my feet rumbles and crackles as something deep underground bursts free. The boars stumble. Frigid cold rips through me. The cold tears through the boars, too, dropping them mid-stride and coating their bristles in frost.

              They don't move again.

              As I exhale in relief, a searing hot wind whisks the snow off the log-like bumps that litter the meadow. Warm light traces a path across the meadow, its brief glow revealing what lies underneath the scattered snow.

              There are frozen bodies all over this field.

              I black out.

***

              The deep, dark presence of the thrumming beast leaps forward through the trees.

CHAPTER 4

"Snow White was so beautiful that the huntsman took pity on her and said: 'Run away from here, you poor child.'"

—"Little Snow White," Germany, by Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm, translated Maria Tatar

Then

                I grew up knowing my mother was the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, the way you know that the sun sinks below the horizon in the direction of the White Sea. Every nightfall, her looking glass told us how lovely she was, sure as the sun sets.

                But one autumn evening, when the air was crisp and black outside our windows, there was no sunset.

              The mirror, treacherous piece of glass, said:

                "You, my queen, may have a beauty quite rare,

                but Little Snow White is a thousand times more fair."

                The comb dropped to the floor with a slow, echoing clatter. My mother's fingers tightened, suddenly claw-like, on my shoulder. Her eyes emptied. I hunched in anticipation of her fury, attempting to shrink into nothing, the best way to be when she was angry.

                But still, I thought she would love me. Right up until she told her huntsman to kill me.

Now

              Gasping, I awaken. I blink snowflakes from my eyelashes and gulp down the piercing morning air. Snow slips off me in a powdery cloud as I sit up.

              My mother is a beautiful queen. She tried to have me murdered.

              It must have been a gradual process, my growing beauty. But in the end, one day she was the fairest, and the next day, I was. Whose fault was it: mine, for becoming more attractive; or hers, for becoming less? Either way, I would have happily given all my beauty away for her to love me the way a mother is supposed to love her child.

              The meadow glitters bleakly under the rising sun. The strange glow that lit the field last night—and whatever created it—is gone.

              I'm surrounded by snowy corpses. Trembling, I stand and wander among them. Men, women, young, old, they're perfectly preserved, skin pale under the encasing ice. The boar carcasses lie scattered among them, unmarked. What happened? I shiver. Sleeping here, I must have looked like just another dead body. Why didn't I die during the frigid night?

              Nothing makes sense. My lost memories, the dead boars, the bodies…I'm lost in every possible way. I look wistfully in the direction I was headed last night. Then, I was hoping it led home. Now, I hope for the opposite. Everything in me feels heavy. My mother's not going to save me.

              Smoke rises beyond the distant trees. Strangers might turn me over to my mother, but I somehow know the thrumming beast is still stalking me, waiting to materialize out of the dark woods like a wolf in a household tale.

              The skin of my hand is stiff with dried blood. I scrape a handful of granular snow off the ground and scrub furiously. My desperate need to erase whatever happened with that knife before I woke up lends me a brief burst of frantic energy.

              I straighten and jog toward the far-off smoke, my skirts billowing behind me. What kind of a person can I be that my own mother wants me dead?

              There has to be more to it than a magic mirror.

***

              Light filters past gray clouds as a small town appears through the towering trees. I almost sob with relief. It must be close to midday; I thought the forest would never end.

              But here it's shorn off abruptly by a strange swath of cleared land, stumps cluttering the ground. The old stone wall surrounding the town stretches higher than my head, while a rough, deep ditch filled with water hugs its base. Wooden towers, hardly more than platforms on stilts, rise behind the walls, manned by archers. Odd defenses.

              To one side, a road cuts across a frozen lake to slip through a gate in the town wall. I tremble under the bare branches as I debate whether to go in. I have no idea how far I am from home, whether I'm safe from my mother here.

              Muffled hoofbeats draw my attention. People are skiing and sleighing across the solid lake toward me. Thickly wrapped in worn furs and fabric, they peer around anxiously, barely murmuring among themselves. A memory from childhood slices through my brain: villagers, pouring through our castle gates for protection from an approaching army. They had the same hunted look in their eyes.

              You must never go into the woods alone.

              I glance down at my own bedraggled gown, the ivory silk chased with tiny pearls and dried blood. I pull my white cloak tight to hide the stains. There's a very real risk I'll be recognized in that town. But right now, I'm more afraid of the monsters of the forest.

              Heart pounding, I dart into the back of the crowd as they pass, following them over the ditch-like moat. At the guarded gate, I duck my head so that my tangled black hair hides my face, bracing myself for the inevitable shout indicating I've been noticed.

              "Hey!"

              There it is. I flinch, but the next words are, "Make way for the Ice Warden!"

              I peer through my hair. Ice Warden?

              A man with a walking stick and a sack strides past us and out the gate, boots pounding on the wooden planks of the bridge over the moat. Five guards flank him, spears in hand. They don't even glance at us; their gazes bore into the woods. The Ice Warden stares at the moat as they begin to circle the town, as if he's searching for people hiding in the watery ditch.

              I turn back to the town. The travelers are already heading down a snow- and mud-churned road past half-timber houses with fading, fanciful paint. I hurry after them.

              The town is disturbingly silent. Grotesque, carved beasts grin down from cornices. Spots of silver glint from doors. I squint at a nearby house—they're fish scales nailed to the wood. In the corners of my eyes, bizarre shadows slip around corners and into doorways, always too fast for me to see what they are. I can hear their skittering claws, though.

              I hobble on numb feet behind the cluster of fur-clad people, trying not to draw attention to myself. No one speaks; this seems to be a group of strangers traveling to a common destination, rather than a close-knit band. Still, I feel like a predator slipping into a herd, rather than part of the pack. My stomach squelches; I can still feel the dried blood on my hands. I left a dead man behind me in the woods. That's exactly what I am. A predator.

              A stone cathedral rears up ahead. At the top of its steps, armed men guard the arched door. In my group, a freckled man glances back and his eyes fix on my fine gown and lack of layers. His brow furrows under wispy blond hair. I stare at the ground, silently willing him not to say anything, but he slows his gait to drop back next to me. Wod.

              Hooves thunder behind us. I automatically slip away from the curious man into the middle of the crowd, hunching my shoulders, and peek up to gauge the approaching danger.

              A man on a chestnut horse streaks past us, his cloak flapping in the wind. His dark eyes sweep over us without seeing, burning with determination. I duck my head even more.

              At the foot of the cathedral steps, he tosses his leg over his mount's back and leaps off before it even halts, landing solidly on the icy cobblestones. One of the guards at the top of the stairs hauls open the cathedral door for him. The other guard jogs down and takes the chestnut's reins.

              I slink along, a wolf in sheep's clothing, keeping to the middle of my flock. I hope the curious freckled man stays distracted. As we climb the church steps, the cathedral bell tolls, its deep, resonant voice bursting the quiet bubble that the town has been resting in. My companions glance up with barely-suppressed alarm. The archers on the wooden towers come to attention. The town gate crashes closed, echoing through the empty streets behind us. We scurry inside.