The words wrapped around Snow White’s heart like chains and a blanket both. She nodded slowly. “All right.”
“Good,” Liora said, smoothing her tone again. “Then we understand one another.”
Within a week, every mirror in the castle, save the enchanted one, was gone. The great gilt frames in the hallways vanished, leaving ghost-pale rectangles on the stone where the sun had not touched for years. The little oval glass in Snow White’s room was smashed by a silent servant who did not meet her eyes. She begged him to leave the broken mirror, and he obliged the princess.
“Why?” Snow White asked, standing in the empty space where her mirror had hung.
Her mother’s answer was simple. “So you will not spend hours mooning over your own reflection like a tavern girl with a new ribbon,” Liora said. “Vanity is unbecoming.”
The castle changed around her as well. The bright banners were taken down, replaced with heavier, darker tapestries. The windows were draped in thicker curtains, shutting out more light. Music in the great hall grew rarer. Laughter in the corridors died away. Only in Liora’s chamber did the candles still burn twice as bright, reflecting in the single forbidden mirror as the queen asked, again and again, who was fairest. The answer never changed.
Even so, sometimes, late at night when the corridor outside her daughter’s room was quiet, Liora would pause and peer in at the sleeping girl. In the dim light, with her hacked hair mussed on the pillow and her mouth softened in sleep, Snow White looked heartbreakingly like the girl Liora herself had once been—before hunger and men and crowns.
“She will be beautiful,” Liora whispered once, to herself or the dark. “Too beautiful.” She shut the door softly and went back to her mirror.
Chapter four
The Fairest
BythetimeSnowWhite turned sixteen, the chopped hair and rags had stopped feeling like a punishment and had become a uniform. It didn’t matter. Nothing her mother did could hide what she was becoming. Liora had watched the girl bloom with a small, possessive smile, seeing her own features echoed in the girl’s face. But as the courtiers began to look past the queen to the princess, that smile thinned, then vanished entirely, replaced by the cold, unblinking stare of a predator realizing its prey has grown teeth.
Snow White stood in the shadow of the stable arch, rubbing a handful of straw between her fingers, and watched the thin line of light slide across the yard as the sun dragged itself over the eastern wall. The air was cool, damp with the faint promise of spring, and smelled of wet stone and horses. Her dress was still a shapeless gray thing that hung from her shoulders like a sack. Her hair, which Liora hacked off every few months with the same careless efficiency, barely brushed her jaw.
Grimm’s head snaked out of his stall window, lips questing until they found the rough wool of her sleeve. He tugged once,insistent. “All right, greedy,” she said, “I know what that means.” She ducked inside and found the little sack of apples she always kept hidden behind a bale of straw. The only person who pretended not to know it was there was the stablemaster, who had long ago given up trying to be strict with the king’s daughter in disguise. “You’re my only friend, you know that?” she murmured to Grimm as she poured a meager handful into her palm and offered it. He lipped them up with gentle enthusiasm, tickling her skin.The books, she thought,and you. That’s it.The mare in the next stall whinnied, begging for an apple.
Her days had settled into a dull rhythm since her mother’s new rules took hold. Mornings in the stables, grooming or riding Grimm around the castle courtyard. Afternoons, if she was lucky, in the corner of the library, losing herself in stories of far-off lands and forbidden love. Evenings, always in the queen’s sight—at meals, in the suffocating quiet of the tower, nothing to see, nothing to do, no one to talk to. Only the stables felt like a remnant of the life she’d had before. Only Grimm remembered the girl who had flown over snow-blanketed fields instead of walking circles within stone walls.
“Do you think I’m foolish?” she asked him now, brushing his neck in slow strokes. “To still dream about…all of it? About someone seeing me and not just seeing her shadow?” Sometimes she knew it was silly to talk to her horse as though he could answer, but Grimm shook his mane and munched on his hay. It was not an answer, but it wasn’t a no. Snow White smiled.
She had read about family, friendship, and most especially love in the stolen hours on the library floor. Pages that smelled of dust and ink had shown her princes who crossed oceans for their beloveds, warriors who laid down their swords at a single glance, girls with hearts so bright they melted curses. None of those heroines wore rags or had their mirrors taken away. Sometimes she pressed her hand to her chest and wondered what it wouldbe like to feel that sort of burn there. To have someone look at her as if she were the whole story, not just a character in her mother’s.
As she pondered, she heard a name she hadn’t heard in years that turned her world sideways again. She was walking through the courtyard back to her quarters when a whisper rippled through the servants crowding near the gate. The guards parted for a rider on a dark, mud-spattered horse. The man swung down heavily and pushed back his hood.
“Captain Hunter!” someone exclaimed. “By the saints, it’s really him.”
Snow White almost dropped her bundle. Hunter’s return was like seeing a ghost. He looked older, mid-twenties now, and stronger. The lines at the corners of his eyes were deeper, his jaw more sharply cut, his hair a darker shade of brown. But his shoulders were as straight as ever, his stance the same blend of readiness and ease. She had always considered Hunter a friend, since he was only around ten when she was born, they had sort of grown up together. Hunter taught her everything about horse care and riding. She was devastated when he left, losing her father and friend all at once.
He had disappeared the night her father died. One moment he’d been everywhere—on the walls, in the training yard, at Wilhelm’s right hand. The next, he was gone. Some said he’d ridden out in pursuit of the assassin who’d slipped in through the king’s window; others muttered that grief had driven him to the borderlands. No one knew for certain. Liora had ordered that his name not be spoken in the halls. She had wept and raged and then, very pointedly, not asked anyone to find him. And yet here he was, eight years later, riding through her gates as if nothing had happened.
Snow White ducked behind a pillar, heart racing, and watched as her mother swept down the stairs like a storm.“Hunter,” Liora said, her voice an odd blend of cool and something that might have been relief, or calculation. “You took your time.”
He bowed low. “I came as soon as I received your summons, Majesty.”
Snow White hadn’t heard what else they said; a sharp word from the steward sent her hurrying on. But later that day, she found herself crossing the training yard more slowly than usual, intrigued by this young man who had returned to her life.
Hunter was there, as if no time had passed at all, barking orders at a line of young guards with swords in their hands and fear in their eyes. “Again,” he said. “You’re not peeling potatoes; you’re defending a gate. Stance—good. Now swing with your whole body, not just your arm.” She felt her cheeks flush as she noticed his hair had gotten longer and the brown curls sat flat against his face from the sweat on his brow.
Snow White tried to slip past the edge of the field unseen. She had almost made it.
“Princess,” Hunter said, turning at just the wrong moment.
The title hit her like a forgotten song. Very few people still used it to her face. She stopped, clutching the book she’d been on her way to return to the library. “Captain,” she said, suddenly aware of the mud on her hem and the way her hacked hair refused to lie flat. Her cheeks blushed and she could smell dust and sweat as he approached. He took a step toward her, then another, dismissing the recruits with a jerk of his chin. Up close, she could see the new scars tracing pale lines along his knuckles. She had missed him so much.
“You’ve grown,” he said. It was such a foolish, obvious thing to say that she almost laughed, but something in his gaze stole the humor from it. His eyes, once she had thought them steady as stone. “Do you remember me?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said. “How I’ve missed you,” she murmured as she threw her arms around him. He wasn’t the young soldier she remembered. He was solid; he was a man. She was so happy he had returned that she didn’t want to let him go.
He smiled at her genuine warmth. Then his gaze dipped down, lingering just a fraction of a second too long at the curve of her chest where the rough fabric pulled against her.
