Eventually, they gave up. Snow was allowed the run of the apple tree. In earliest autumn, she would stuff herself on green apples and become violently ill, and the midwife would make up a nasty-tasting potion from the herbs in the garden and force her to drink it down.
“And it’s no more than you deserve,” she said severely, watching Snow, who for once had gone much whiter than her hair.
“I know,” said Snow, pleasant and biddable as ever, drinking the potion and planning her next escape.
After Snow was born, the queen barred the king from her bed. Don’t ask me how. The demon in the mirror may have told her a way. It was old and cold and had been bound in the mirror-glass for a long time, and had seen many witches come and go. A few of them had even been queens.
The queen’s witchblood came from an ancestor many years removed, who had loved a troll and been loved in return with little thought for the consequences. The blood of trolls and mortals mixes strangely, and such is the nature of witchblood that it twists and turns and doubles back on itself, so that one child may grow up strange and fell and not a drop be found in the veins of her siblings.
The queen’s blood ran thin and hot, and when she had found the mirror, she had no thought but to use it. The demon did not have to seduce her with words or visions; she came essentially pre-seduced. This offended the demon’s notion of its own craftsmanship, but it did save time.
Other than the mirror, there were very few signs of the queen’s nature. The touch of iron did not burn her, although she disliked it, so she avoided knife blades and the great wrought-iron candelabra in the great hall. A sword or a plow might have caused her actual pain, but she stayed in her bower and the issue did not arise. Banishing her husband from her bed also banished the last bits of iron that she came in contact with regularly — buckles and snaps and studs and so forth — and so she continued in greater comfort.
The king, who now spoke three or four words a day, if that, said nothing of this new arrangement. Perhaps it suited him as well.
He was not kind to his daughter, nor unkind. Snow was not actually sure that he knew she existed.
She would have been surprised to know that he was very aware of her existence, and that it troubled him. If he had died childless, the kingdom — for what little it was worth — would have gone to a distant cousin. An annoyance, but there it was.
Having a daughter complicated things. Ruling queens — queens who ruled in their own name, that is, rather than by proxy for a son or absent husband — were rarer than hen’s teeth in that age. Unless Snow could have swept in as a warrior queen with an army at her back, she was unlikely to hold the land at all. So the kingdom would go to whomever Snow married, and the king, who had a very bitter view of marriage by now, did not like to think of it.
When Snow was fifteen, the king left the castle. It was said by some that he went on crusade, but in the stables and among the king’s huntsman, they said that the crusade he had gone on was to find a new wife, one who could bear him an heir.
I do not know what their leave-taking was like. The great oaken door to the queen’s bower was closed. The noises that came behind it caused the servants to cross themselves and hurry past. The king rode out the next morning without speaking, and the queen kept to her bed for two days.
On the third day, she began her rule.
It was a bad time in the castle. One would think that the servants might leave, but in fact, few of them did. Most of them had nowhere to go, and some of them owned their own small cottages outside the castle walls — owned them free and clear, by grant of the king’s great-grandfather — and the thought of leaving and condemning their own children to live as serfs was a hard one.
So they banded together as best they could to temper some of the worst of her excesses.
The first time she ordered an execution, the master-at-arms and the steward and the chief huntsman stared at each other across the great table in the kitchen, while the cook prowled behind them. It was the master-at-arms who said, “We cannot do it.”
“The lad wasn’t trying to murder her,” said the cook, holding a meat cleaver in her thick fingers. “It was a chicken bone, for god’s sake. A chicken bone!”
“She choked on it,” said the steward.
“Would that it had killed her!” hissed the cook, which was treason, and treason tripled when the three men nodded.
They did not speak for a little time, while the cook prowled with her knife.
“I cannot order my men to kill a kitchen boy,” said the master-at-arms at last.
“Perhaps there is another way,” said the huntsman. He was younger than either of the others and had less contact with the queen.
So the kitchen boy was smuggled out in a hay-wagon, and a false grave dug by the huntsman and the master-at-arms. The tall, stoop-shouldered steward told no one how badly his gut had churned when he approached the queen in her bower and said, “It is done, my lady.”
“Good,” said the queen, staring into the mirror. “Good.”
She did not stop brushing her hair when she spoke.
The steward would speak those words several more times over the next few years, and would thank all the saints and the little household gods that the queen did not wish to watch the executions herself.
Once,
