A year passed, then two, then a procession of them, one after another. A gray strand appeared in the queen’s dark hair, and was ruthlessly plucked out. The blind serving girl hanged herself in the scullery one night. No one was quite sure how she had managed to do it, for the rafters were very high.
The mirror went on the wall, as it had become increasingly difficult to find ladies-in-waiting to serve the queen, and there were none to spare to hold the mirror.
The king spoke less and less to his men, and not at all to the queen. Still, apparently something happened between them for which words were not required. The queen became pregnant, and this time she carried twins for eight months before coming at last to childbed.
One was a boy. He drew breath and died, as if one breath had been enough to assure him that this was not a world he wished to live in.
The other was a girl. She was larger than her brother, a sturdy and healthy child from the first.
The queen waved her away when the midwife brought her, still slick and red from birthing. “Send her to the wet-nurse, fool. What are you thinking?”
The infant shrieked. The remains of a caul clung to her head, and she was purple and wretched and furious.
The queen stood up.
Her ladies-in-waiting gasped, and the midwife said, “My lady!” and put a hand on her shoulder to push her back to the bed. It was unthinkable that a queen should bear twins and immediately stand up.
The queen backhanded the midwife. There was little enough strength left in her hands, but the signet ring on her finger tore a line down the woman’s face. The midwife stepped back and did not touch her again.
The queen tottered across the room to where her mirror hung on the wall. There was a narrow table before it, and the queen braced herself against the edge, her arms trembling with exhaustion.
“Who?” she said to the mirror. “Who?”
The mirror chuckled.
The ladies-in-waiting crossed themselves. The midwife bowed her head over the bloody, weeping infant and walked from the room with a measured step. She had learned long ago never to run from a dangerous animal.
“Who, damn you?” cried the queen.
“Than you?” asked the demon of the mirror, throwing back her own reflection. The queen’s face was shiny red and haggard and her hair hung down in sweaty rags across her face. Her lower lip had split and she had bitten and worried it with her teeth. The circles under her eyes looked like gouges.
“At this moment, near everyone is fairer than you, O queen,” said the mirror. “Except perhaps the crone in the cow-byre and the corpse in the grave.” It chuckled again. “And the child that just slid squalling out of your womb … Yes, I think you are fairer still than she.”
The queen laughed, one short, sharp bark. “There’s that,” she said, swaying in front of the mirror. “At least there’s that — ” and she allowed her ladies in waiting to lead her back to bed.
The queen’s daughter was named Snow, because of her skin and hair.
She was not quite as white as snow. People that pale look like corpses, and if they insist on walking around, other people tend to put stakes in their hearts and bury them under a very heavy stone. But she was at least the color of a rose petal, one of the soft ivory ones with a blush of pink near the center, and that is very pale indeed.
Her hair was paler yet, so white-blonde as to be nearly colorless. Her eyelashes were invisible. When she was pink and flushed, which was often, her eyebrows stood out like scars across her face.
She was not a pretty child, and this suited the queen, on the few occasions when she thought about Snow at all.
The queen had no maternal instincts whatsoever. As the midwife said, this could only be considered a blessing.
The wet nurse weaned her as early as humanly possible and dumped her unceremoniously on the midwife. “Said she didn’t want the queen to have any reason to come looking for her,” said the midwife gloomily to the head gardener. “And who can blame her, but what am I supposed to do with a child? I’m good at getting them out of people, but after that I’m done with them.”
The gardener stifled a laugh. It was true. The midwife did not like children. But as Snow didn’t like them much either, it worked out well enough.
Snow was a pleasant, biddable child right up until she wasn’t. Once she made up her mind about something, gods and devils could not move her. “Stubborn like a rock,” the midwife said to the gardener. “It’s not that she argues with you. Everything just bounces off her, and then she goes and does whatever she was planning to do anyway.”
“The apple tree,” said the gardener.
“The apple tree,” said the midwife, sighing.
There was one apple tree in the courtyard outside the castle gardens. It was a single tree with a gnarled and splitting trunk, caged in a little ring of cobbles. Snow loved it.
She climbed it. She hid in it, as well as one can hide in an elderly apple tree. The hunters grew used to riding in and seeing a pink face with very white hair peering at them from between the leaves. First the gardener and then the midwife had tried to ban her from the tree — she would fall and break her neck, she would damage the tiny budding apples, she would be stung by the bees that crowded around the blossoms in spring. Snow agreed
