Fractured fables, p.12
Fractured Fables, page 12
Just about the time my wrists are chafed bloody and my tendons are cramping, the manacles pop open. I rub the numbness out of my fingers, shove my stuff back into my pack, and tuck the mirror carefully on top. Its surface is a perfectly mundane reflection, but it feels heavier than mere silver and glass should.
The door isn’t locked, which means the queen underestimated me after all. I feel a fleeting, embarrassing twist of disappointment.
I’m three steps into the hall when a heavy hand falls on my shoulder and a cheery voice says, “Pardon, miss.”
There’s a man standing just outside the workroom door. He has a generic, uncomplicated handsomeness, like one of the lesser Hemsworths, and I’d guess from his callouses and clothes that he’s a woodcutter, or—aha!—a huntsman.
I raise my chin to an aristocratic angle. “Unhand me, sir! I am the Lady Zinnia of Ohio, and the queen herself invited me to—”
But he’s shaking his head earnestly. “Sorry, miss. Back in you go.” He tugs politely at my shoulder as if I’m a pet trying to escape her crate.
“You are mistaken.” I keep my voice shrill and disdainful, but my hand is already in my back pocket.
“Her Majesty said if I saw a skinny wastrel in men’s trousers I was not to let her escape—”
The huntsman stops because I’ve driven my fist toward his throat with the long splinter sharp between my knuckles. He catches my wrist in a hand roughly the size and shape of a baseball mitt. He gives my arm a shake that makes my bones creak, and the splinter falls from my nerveless fingers.
He shakes his head again, tsking as he picks up the splinter. “None of that, now. Her Majesty also said I was to whip the flesh from your ribs and leave you hog-tied, awaiting her pleasure, if you gave me any difficulty.”
I try to wrench my hand away, but I have the upper body strength of a wet paper doll. I’m not even sure the huntsman notices. “That—okay, that is definitely not necessary.” I soften, letting my lashes fall and my lip tremble. “Please, sir, don’t hurt me.” This seems like a fairly traditional retelling of Snow White, which means the huntsman is a giant softy with a track record of disobeying his queen.
He looks visibly torn, like a good kid thinking about breaking curfew. “Well, let’s just get you locked back up, eh? Then she’ll be none the wiser.” He lays a conspiratorial finger along his nose, which isn’t something I thought anyone ever did in real life.
“No, that’s not—”
But it’s too late. He hauls me back into the queen’s work room and snaps the manacles back over my wrists. He must not be quite as stupid as he looks (which is, to be clear, a very low bar), because he searches me, confiscating the bobby pins, and tosses my backpack out of reach. He pats me clumsily on the head as he leaves, pausing only to flick something into the fireplace. A matchstick, maybe, or a long wooden splinter.
And then I’m all alone, except for the ashes of my spindle and the questions I can’t answer, and the coldly comforting thought that the queen didn’t underestimate me after all.
* * *
YOU WOULDN’T THINK a person could fall asleep with their arms cuffed above their head and their neck dangling at a sickening angle, but I’m here to tell you they can.
I wake some hours later to find the light slanting long and heavy through the window and the queen sitting once more in her chair. She’s fiddling with something in her lap, and her face looks different in the absence of hunger or hatred: younger, softer.
I try to move my fingers and make a tiny wheeze of pain.
She doesn’t look up. “Good morning. Or rather, good evening.” I guess she’s switched to good cop mode. She holds a little golden object up to the light before setting it gently on the floor beside me. It’s my mockingbird, dented and battered but whole once more. “It’s a clever little device. Took me the whole afternoon to put it right.”
I got that mockingbird from a twelfth-level artificer in a steampunk version of Sleeping Beauty; I doubt very much that a short-tempered medieval witch could repair it. I attempt a sneer, but my lip cracks and bleeds. “If you fixed it, how come it isn’t singing?”
“Because I mean you no harm.”
I make a noise of pure disbelief and the queen’s eyes flash beneath those lowered lashes. She moves. There’s a silver gleam, a rush of air, and then there’s a wicked point pressing into the bare skin above my collarbone. The little bird breaks into a shrill song, somehow even less melodic than before. Apparently she really did fix it. Under the circumstances—with her knife at my throat—I find my capacity for admiration is somewhat limited.
The queen drags the knife up my neck, scraping along my jugular, pushing uncomfortably into the soft meat beneath my jaw. My chin lifts reluctantly. Her eyes burn into mine, scornful, scorching. “When I threaten your life, I promise you will know it.”
I glare back, unflinching, deliberately unimpressed, until the queen’s jaw tightens. She sits back with a faint hnnh and tucks the knife back into the red drape of her dress. The mockingbird warbles into silence once more.
“I was hoping,” she says, with a sweetness entirely at odds with the clenched muscle of her jaw, “that you and I could start again. Here.”
She sweeps to her feet and turns a key in my manacles. My arms flop gracelessly to the floor, the fingers swollen and useless as minnows gone belly-up in the bucket.
The queen leaves me clumsily rubbing at my own limbs while she settles beside the fire. There’s a second chair across from her and a small table heaped high with food between them. “Come. Help yourself.”
I’d like to be prideful and heroic about it, but I haven’t eaten in a full day and it’s not like I’m going anywhere with dead fish for arms. I stumble into the chair and make a clumsy grab for a pewter cup. You never realize how good water tastes until you’ve spent a day hungover and chained to a wall.
She waits until I’ve made it through a full pitcher and three rolls before she speaks. “Let me state my position more clearly.” Her voice is earnest, her face carefully contrite. She definitely noticed me noticing her—again, sue me—because her makeup has been carefully reapplied and the laces of her dress tightened so that her breasts are squashed higher. I wonder if this is how she seduced poor Snow White’s dad out of his kingdom, and if she even knows who she is when she’s not playing the bloodthirsty villain or the helpless femme. “I am a foreigner and a widow, with nothing but a throne to protect me. But I know now that I will lose that throne, along with my life. And I…” She places one hand on what, I am mortified to report, can only be described as her heaving bosom. “I need your help, Zinnia Gray.”
I skip the apples on the tray and reach for a fourth roll instead. “Again, if you wanted my help, the manacles were not an amazing start.”
Another little flash of annoyance, but her voice remains penitent. “A mistake, born out of great need. I’m sorry.”
I pick bread from between my molars. “So that mirror of yours. What’s it do?”
I can almost hear her teeth grinding. “It shows the truth.”
“Where’d you get it?” My voice is casual, my eyes on her face.
“I didn’t get it. I made it. A woman in my position needs to know the truth at all times.” There’s the faintest blush of pride in her voice. I count magical objects in my head—comb, bodice lace, poison apple, mirror, my own mockingbird—and decide to believe her. It’s a pity she mostly uses her considerable skills for homicide.
“Neat,” I say. “Now, can I have my pack?” Suspicion is obvious on her face. I turn both hands palm up. “No, for real, I have to take my meds—magic potions, whatever—twice a day. You’ll recall the terminal illness I mentioned.”
“That was not a ruse?”
“I mean, yes, it was”—and so is this—“but it’s also true. Now give me my shit unless you want me to drop dead in the next twenty minutes.” That’s horseshit, of course. These days I forget my meds for weeks at a time, approaching them with the sporadic guilt that inspires people to buy multivitamins. It’s weird, actually, after living for so long under a strict regimen of pharmaceuticals and appointments, injections and X-rays. I used to be visibly, obviously sick in a way that made parents look away from me in grocery stores, as if my very existence was a bad omen. But now I mostly pass as a healthy person, carrying the GRM like an ugly secret, a bad seed in my belly. It’s almost a relief to announce it like this, even if it’s mostly a lie.
I snap my fingers and the queen’s mouth thins—God, I love bossing around royalty—but she fetches my backpack and tosses it into my lap. I make a show of fishing out ziplock baggies and plastic boxes labeled with days of the week, surreptitiously shoving the mirror deeper into my bag.
The queen watches me count pills into my palm. “What is the nature of this … illness?”
I swallow a lump of steroids and blood thinners. “Did you read that whole book of fairy tales?”
A regal nod.
I make a ta-da gesture at my own chest. “You’re looking at the protagonist of a bleak contemporary version of Aarne-Thompson tale type 410.” My smile tastes bitter. “Little Brier-Rose.”
“The … pro-tagonist?”
“The main character. In ‘Little Brier-Rose,’ the protagonist is Brier-Rose.”
The queen breathes an ah of understanding. She steeples her fingers and says delicately, “In that case, I would imagine you would have a certain sympathy with my situation—”
I cut her off. “And the book. Where’d you get that?”
She’s visibly annoyed now, the edges of her innocent act fraying badly, but her voice is still measured. “It appeared three days ago on my shelf.”
“No shit?”
Her brows lower several centimeters, in offense or worry. “It is not the only strange appearance in recent months. The cook found a golden egg in the belly of a goose she cut open for dinner, and a fortnight ago, the huntsman said he met a wolf in the woods.”
“I mean, isn’t that where wolves should be?”
“It…” The queen looks pained. “Spoke to him.”
“Huh.” Am I in some kind of fairy tale mash-up? Is Chris Pine about to pop out and sing Sondheim lyrics in a confused accent?
The queen gathers herself with the expression of a woman who is determined to regain the reins of the conversation. “People do not like strange things. Golden eggs, talking wolves … They are seen as ill omens, portents. Acts of witchcraft.” Her eyes flicker. “They will soon want a witch to burn.”
I make a show of looking around her workroom, with its skulls and pestles and unpleasant things floating in jars. “They won’t have to look very hard, will they?”
A flat look. “Quite. And if that book is to be believed, the people will get exactly what they want. You understand why I want out.”
And honestly, I do. I’ve spent most of my life trying to dodge the third act of my story, and the rest of it trying to save other sleeping beauties from theirs; I know exactly how it feels to find yourself hurtling toward a horrible ending.
The difference is what Dr. Bastille would call an issue of agency. I steeple my fingers. “Or—and I know this is a big leap for you—you could just stop trying to murder your stepdaughter. It would save everyone a lot of grief.”
The queen’s face flattens further, her mouth a grim red slash.
“Ah, I see. The chickens are already on their way back home to roost, then. How long has Snow White been in her glass coffin?”
The lips peel reluctantly apart. “A long time.”
“Bummer.” I throw the word at her with the same pitiless stare she gave me.
She doesn’t seem to find it as flattering as I did, because she says in a harsh monotone, “And do you know how my story ends?”
I elect not to explain about institutions of higher education and the department of folklore. “Snow White marries the prince who fell in love with a dead child in the woods—I mean, my story is yikes, but that’s double, maybe triple yikes—and they live happily ever after.”
“My story, I said.” Her lips twist in an expression that’s only distantly related to a smile and her voice acquires the stilted rhythm of recitation. “Then they put a pair of iron shoes into burning coals—”
“You don’t have to—”
“They were brought forth with tongs and placed before her. She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead.” She stares hard at me when she finishes, the lines on either side of her mouth like a pair of bleak parentheses.
I stare back, trying not to look grossed out. “Sure, yeah, the German peasantry liked a good comeuppance.” Or at least, the Grimms did. There were plenty of other stories floating around the European countryside at the time—weirder, darker, stranger, sexier stories—but the Grimms weren’t anthropologists. They were nationalists trying to build an orderly, modern house out of the wild bones of folklore.
“And you think that’s justice? That I should die dancing in red-hot shoes?” The queen’s voice is trembling very slightly, her fingers curling into the wooden arms of her chair.
“No, I mean, I’m not a capital punishment person—my mom’s into the prison abolition movement”—she’s into all kinds of activism these days, as if all the energy she’d been reserving to hate Big Energy on my behalf had been redistributed to every other modern supervillain—“but this feels like a ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’ situation, you know?”
The queen stares at me for a murderous moment, then closes her eyes. “Help me.” I didn’t think a whisper could sound so imperious.
“If I were begging for my life, I might add a question mark and a ‘please.’”
Her eyes remain tightly shut, as if she fears she will throttle me if she sees my face. “Help me, please.” She doesn’t quite manage the question mark.
I lean forward across the table, drawing out a long, vicious pause before I say, “Nah.”
The queen’s eyes fly open. Her face is so bloodless her lips look oversaturated, a little unreal. “Why?”
“Because I’m not setting an evil queen loose in the multiverse! Because somewhere in the woods right now there’s a little girl stuck in an enchanted sleep for no reason except your malice, your vanity.” I’m aware that I’m no longer playing it cool, that my voice is shaking with honest vitriol, but I can’t seem to stop. “She didn’t deserve it, she deserved to grow up, to meet a normal dude and live a normal life, to just live—”
I bite the inside of my cheek hard, but it’s too late. The queen’s eyes are alight, her smile small and red. “Oh, Little Brier-Rose, you feel sorry for her. Poor Snow White, so pretty, so pure.” She shakes her head, mock-pity on her face. “You think this is her story.”
The queen leans closer over the table, her lips peeling away from her teeth. “You know nothing, Zinnia Gray of Ohio.”
The first wobbly notes of mockingbird-song are rising and I’m getting ready to flip the food tray in her lap and make a run for it when there’s a hard knock at the door.
The huntsman’s voice comes clear and cheerful. “My Queen, a messenger has come from across our borders. You are invited to a royal wedding this very evening!”
* * *
THE ROOM GOES very still, except for the shallow sound of the queen’s breathing, the tick of her pulse in her throat. The two of us sit like awkward statuary until the huntsman prompts doubtfully, “My Queen?”
Her throat makes a small, dry rasp as she swallows. “A wedding,” she repeats.
“Yes, Majesty. This very evening!” The huntsman is afflicted with exclamation points too. “Shall I give the messenger your answer to his invitation?”
“Not … yet.” The queen is paling, wilting before my eyes. She looks suddenly much younger, and it occurs to me for the first time that every queen was once a princess.
“Oh.” A scuffing sound on the other side of the door, like a large man shuffling his feet. “It’s just, he’s waiting in the great hall now, and he brought so many guards with him to escort you, and—”
The queen summons enough regality to say, firmly, “Offer them food and drink while I make myself ready.”
“Yes, Majesty.”
When there are no subsequent boot steps, she adds, “That will be all, Berthold.”
“Yes, Majesty.” He clomps dutifully down the hall.
The queen still hasn’t moved. Her skin is the grayish-white of last week’s snow, or cheap dentures. She could almost be mistaken for the protagonist of this story if it weren’t for the faint pink marks of the crown on her brow. I could almost feel sorry for her if she hadn’t poisoned a child and shackled me to a wall.
“Berthold, huh?” I slouch back in my chair, ankles crossed, eyebrows up. “He seems bright.”
She answers absently, one shoulder twitching in a shrug. “He has his uses.”
“Oh, it’s like that?”
I’m being a dick on purpose, maybe trying to provoke her into anything other than this congealed panic, but her expression barely flickers. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a lover who isn’t angling for the throne? He was…” Her lip curls, and I can’t tell if it’s the huntsman or herself she disdains more. “Kind.”
It doesn’t seem very helpful to remind her that he betrayed her and let Snow White live, so I don’t say anything.
Eventually the queen gathers herself, blinking twice and exhaling sharply. If she were a knight, I imagine she would lower her visor, but since she’s an evil queen, she stands and stalks to her workbench.
It takes less than a second for her to whirl back to face me. “Where is it? What have you done with it?”
A brief, hissed exchange follows, wherein I try and fail to deflect her accusations (“Where’s what?” “You know what, you thieving pustule!” “Okay, calm your tits, it’s in my backpack.” “Calm my what?”), and then she’s clutching the tarnished frame of her mirror, whispering to it. I can’t hear the words, but I don’t have to. Maybe it’s in the original German, or maybe it’s the Grimms’ translation: Mirror, mirror in my hand, who is the fairest in the land?
