“Okay, fine, you got me! I’m from another world. But frankly”—I rattle my chains at her—“I don’t see why I should tell you shit.”
She rises from her chair, face twisting. The air seems to gather and darken around her like a personal thunderstorm. “Because if you don’t, you writhingmaggot,you miserablelouse,I will feed your beating heart to the carrion birds. I will knap knives from your bones and use them to flense the fat from your breathing body.” She pauses, perhaps to appreciate her own alliteration. “I am thequeen.” There are no sibilants in that sentence, but she manages to hiss it anyway.
My lips peel back from my teeth as I look up at her, not fearless but pissed enough to do a good impression. “Oh, please, you’re just the bad guy. The villain, the evil stepmother. You’re the Wicked Witch of the East, bro.”
She opens her mouth, but I interrupt, entirely unable to resist. “You’re going to look at me and you’re going to tell me that I’m wrong?Am I wrong?” At least Charm will be proud of me if these turn out to be my last words.
I watch the queen teetering on some internal precipice, perhaps deciding between the thumbscrews or the pliers. Instead, she tucks her fury carefully away. It’s like watching a woman shove a mattress into a pillowcase. She strides to a crowded bookshelf and asks abruptly, “What’s your name?”
“Zinnia Gray. Of Ohio.”
She takes down a slender volume with a bright red spine, incongruous in the gloom of her workroom. “Aren’t you going to ask me my name, Zinnia Gray? Or do they not have manners in Ohio?”
“Whereas here it’s customary to chain your visitors to the wall.” She studies my face with finite patience, one fingernail tapping the book, until I sigh. “Fine. What’s your name?”
Obnoxiously, she doesn’t answer. She slinks back over to me and stands, paging through her book. I crane my neck upward, expecting to see a book of hexes or poisons, something with embossed silver and dyed leather, but the cover is simple red canvas, lightly scuffed. It has a tatty ribbon glued to the binding as a bookmark and a purplish stain on the back, and there’s something very, very familiar about it. Like,distressinglyfamiliar. The kind of familiar that your brain refuses to process because it just doesn’t make sense, like seeing your first grade teacher in the grocery store.
I can’t read the title upside down and backwards, but I don’t have to, because I already know what it says. This book—thisexact copyof this book, with the tatty ribbon and the grape juice stain on the back cover—has been on my bedside shelf since my sixth birthday. It’s the 1995 reprint ofGrimm’s Fairy Tales,with Arthur Rackham’s original 1909 illustrations.
This is, I find, my limit. I’ve been sucked into a story that doesn’tbelong to me, garroted, chained up, and questioned by a queen, but seeing a fairytale villain with my favorite childhood book is apparently the place where my disbelief draws a hard fucking line in the sand and says:No way.
But the book persists in existing, solid red against the white of the queen’s fingers, whether or not I believe in it. She finds the page she’s looking for and turns the book around, kneeling before me. One page is a full-color plate of a sleeping girl with skin the color of chewed gum and seven small men gathered around her. The other page is dense text with a title in curlicued faux-Victorian font:Little Snow-White.
“You were right, of course,” the queen says, conversationally. “Iamthe villain, the stepmother, the wicked witch, the evil queen.” Her face is racked with furious grief, lips twisting with something far too dark to be humor. She leans past me, so close I can feel the heat of her cheekbone against mine, the slight stirring of my hair as she whispers, “I don’t have a name.”
3
THE QUEEN DRAWSslowly back from me. She meets my gaze for a long, taut moment, her expression fierce but her eyes full of the impotent ache of someone who knows how their story ends and can’t change it. I see, or think I see, the faint sheen of furious tears before she whirls away. The door slams as she leaves and I remember, for the first time in several minutes, to exhale. I suspect I’d feel that way even if the queen hadn’t been threatening to rip out my beating heart; she has that kind of presence, an intensity that thickens the air around her.
I knock my head ungently against the wall and order myself to get it together. Luckily, or unluckily, I’ve been in enough perilous situations by now that I don’t waste too much time panicking or regretting my life choices or shoutingSHITSHITSHITin all caps. I’ve developed a simple system.
Step one, which turns out to be equally useful in staving off panic attacks and escaping dungeons, is to make a list of your physical assets. I have a bookof fairy tales that shouldn’t exist on this narrative plane, a piece of spindle in my back pocket, two bobby pins tucked in my shoe, and a finite number of minutes before the queen returns.
Step two is to make a plan. The obvious choice is to wrangle the splinter out of my jeans, jab my finger, and whisk myself back to the Sleeping Beauty–verse. But I could also go for the bobby pins and try to pick the lock on my shackles (don’t laugh—once I realized how often various kings and fairies were going to be tossing me into dungeons and throwing me in the stocks, etc., I spent a serious number of hours watching lock picking YouTube videos. I only have about a 50 percent success rate in the real world, but I’ve found that fairy tale locks are inclined to pop open at the first sign of narrative agency).
Step three is to get moving. I hesitate for a fraction of a second before going for the pins instead of the splinter. Partly because it would require some pretty uncomfortable contortions to reach my back pocket, whereas all it takes is a half split to grab my ankle, but also because I’m curious. Not about the queen—despite her hungry eyes and her silken hair and the way she looks at me, like I’m something vital, desperately necessary to her survival—but about everything else.
I waggle the bobby pin in the lock while I assemble a list of questions, including but not limited to: How did I pop into Snow White? How did my childhood book wind up in an alternate universe? Did the queen steal it, or did it spontaneously manifest? Is that mirror some kind of palantír/all-knowing orb situation that lets her peek into other worlds? If I steal it, will I be able to escape my story forever? And, PS, has my casual world-hopping had some unfortunate and unforeseen effects on the narrative integrity of the multiverse?
I can’t stop myself from picturing the slideshow Charm would assemble for the occasion:So There’s Something Fucky Happening to the Multiverse: Ten Implausible Theories. Or maybe,So You’re a Little Bit Hot for the Villain: We’ve All Been There but This Isn’t the Time, Babe.
But Charm stopped answering my texts six months ago, over basically nothing. The last message I have from her is two paragraphs long and calls me “a pretty shitty friend” and “an irresponsible lackwit,” among other things. Prim must be rubbing off on her.
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—”
