“Of course you do,” Eva says to the ceiling. Her voice is mocking, almost smug, as if no one could possibly understand her.
“Hey, I’ve got nothing but time.” I try to spread my arms invitingly and succeed only in rattling my chains. “If you want to give me a long, sympathetic speech about your motivations, be my fucking guest.”
Eva answers whip-fast and vicious. “Or maybe you could justthinkfor two consecutive seconds. My Snow White was a pretty little girl who sang to songbirds and trusted old women selling apples. I am a witch and a queen who has devoted her life to the accumulation of power. If I’d wanted to kill her, don’t you think she would bedead?”
I open my mouth, and then close it slowly. Fairy tales are riddled with illogical coincidences and obvious plot holes, but most of us learn to skip over them, like you skip the squeaky step on the staircase. “Okay, I’ll play,” I say. “Why didn’t you kill her?”
Eva is looking at me now, her mouth framed by those bitter lines, her freckles like pinpricks of blood in the dim light. “Because I didn’t want to. She was only a child, and I’m not a monster.” A defiant lift of her chin. “But I couldn’t allow her to stay, either. She was the king’s only legitimate heir, and I’d failed to give him any others. After he died, but before she came of age… I had power.Realpower—not whispers behind the throne or politicking in the shadows, like mymother had before me. I alone sat on the throne, I alone wore the crown. I was thequeen.”
It’s the kind of line the scheming, power-mad queen might deliver in a fantasy novel, but Eva doesn’t look mad. She looks wistful and sad, like a woman recalling the golden days of her youth. “And I knew all of it would vanish the second my stepdaughter married. Or maybe sooner—there were already nasty rumors that I was a witch rather than a woman, that I’d murdered Snow White’s father.”
“But, like…” I run my tongue over my bottom lip, trying to decide if there’s a tactful way to ask and resolving that there isn’t. “Did you?”
Her shoulders move in what I interpret as a shrug, although it’s hard to tell at this angle. “Yes.”
“Why?”
Eva’s eyes harden. “I already told you. Everything I did, I did to survive.” Her lashes shutter. “My husband married me because I was young and he needed heirs. When I failed to give him any, he was…” A hideous, weighty pause here. “… Displeased.”
Oh, Jesus.I’m suddenly sick of these faux-medieval worlds and their shitty gender politics, all the pretty stories we tell about ugly worlds. A terrible sympathy crawls up my throat and lodges there, just behind my tongue. “You’ve used that word twice now. Failed.” I fumble in my grab bag of therapist terminology and emerge with a pathetic “You didn’t fail.”
Eva has met my insults and jabs with bared teeth, but now, when my voice is low and sincere, she flinches. “What would you know about it?”
I meet her eyes. “Well, for starters, I can’t. Get pregnant, I mean.” She stares at me for a long time, her eyes wide and suspiciously glassy. I give her my best manacled shrug, because she strikes me as the kindof person who would be forced to kill me if I saw her cry. “Bodies are a real roll of the fucking dice, dude.”
She swallows. “They—yes.” She swallows again, visibly compartmentalizing, wrenching her story back on the rails. “Anyway. The princes began to arrive before she was fifteen. They lounged around my castle, eating from my table while they wooed my stepchild and plotted to take my throne. She was so young… but they came anyway. Every hungry second son who wanted a kingdom of his own.”
Eva’s eyes are narrowed now, her jaw firm. “So I did what I had to. I chased Snow White away, sent her running into the forest pursued by the only man I was certain would never harm her. Berthold came back with that pig’s liver, thinking himself so clever, and I thanked him so prettily.”
I recall Berthold’s handsome, affable, slightly stupid face. I suppose if I genuinely wanted someone assassinated, he would not be my first choice. It occurs to me that the queen must have known he wouldn’t hurt me, either, if I tried to escape.
Eva continues on a long sigh. “I’d hoped never to hear from Snow White again. But she didn’t run far enough, and soon there were whispers about a pretty girl hidden in the woods, and the princes were circling like damned vultures, and I thought—if she were dead, or seemed to be dead, they would desist.” Another sigh, even longer. “It seems I underestimated their appetites.”
Now feels like the moment to apologize or sympathize, or, ideally, to stroke her straggling hair away from her face and press my lips tenderly to her forehead. But we’re six feet apart and she probably hates my guts. “Look, Eva—Your Majesty, I—”
“All I wanted was power.” Her lips make a bitter shape. “I know how I must sound, what you must think of me, but I only mean powerovermyself. Power to make my own choices, and arrive at my own ends.”
“It’s called agency.” And they said my humanities degree would never come in handy. “It’s like, the power you exert over your own narrative.”
“It’s what protagonists have, then.”
“Sometimes even protagonists don’t get much of it. I mean, did you read Little Brier-Rose in that book? My story sucks ass.”
“Yes, I read it. It does indeed ‘suck ass.’” She pronounces the phrase with aristocratic precision, and I make a mental note to teach her more modern swears, provided the two of us survive our forthcoming execution. “But at least it belongs to you. Your name is right there in the title. The only name I have is”—her voice hitches, like a thread catching a stray nail—“the one you gave me.”
And, God help me, she sounds genuinely grateful. For a mean little nickname I invented just to annoy her. This strikes me as so backwards and awful that I find myself talking, the words falling out in a guilty, desperate tumble. “Charm—she’s my best friend—well, she was, until I screwed it all up—she says the key is narrative resonance.”
A flare of hope in Eva’s eyes, quickly snuffed. “The key to what?”
I take a short breath. “Moving between worlds.”
Eva says nothing, her eyes burning with the same desperate hunger that sent me tumbling into Prim’s world in the first place, that keeps me skipping from world to world like a stone across the cold surface of the universe. I find myself looking away, unable to stand the sight of so much hope, even secondhand. “So, the universe is like a book, right? And each world is like a page. And if you tell the same story enough times, you can bleed through to another page.”
“You mean—I must write down my own story?” Eva looks like she would open a vein and use her own blood as ink if I told her to.
“No, not literally.” Although the thought loosens something in the back of my skull, a question I’d been ignoring. I keep ignoring it. “You have toenacta familiar part of your plot. And then you can sort of slip between worlds and go somewhere else.” Charm is way better at explaining this stuff than me. I miss her, suddenly and fiercely, the way I haven’t let myself in six months and thirteen days. Or, if I’m being honest, five years.
I swallow a knot of snot. “But like, it only works in yourownstory, usually. I’d only ever zapped into other versions of Sleeping Beauty until you and your magic mirror landed me here.”
