“Run,” she said. “Far and fast. If you stay, the blood on your hands and the guilt on your face will do more damage than any blade. If you go, I can tell whatever story I like.”
He shook his head. “I can’t abandon you.”
“I already have what I need from you,” she said coolly. “A dead king and a hole in the succession large enough for me to slip through. If you stay, you are a liability. If you go, you are a convenient absence to blame things on later, if necessary.”
His jaw clenched. “So that’s it. Years of service. One foolish act. And now you throw me away.”
“Spare me your softness now,” she said. “I am trying to keep us both alive. If you ride to some distant border town, change your name, keep your head down, they may never find you. If you insist on standing at my side when the body is discovered,they will hang you by sunset. And I…” She let the sentence trail off, letting him fill in the possibilities.
He looked at her a long moment. He saw no love in her eyes, no trace of the softness he’d imagined. Only sharp calculation. “I did this for you,” he whispered.
“No,” she said. “You did this because you could not bear the idea of losing what you thought you had. Don’t make the mistake of confusing your needs with my wishes.”
The words sank like stones. At last, he nodded once, the movement jerky. “I’ll go,” he said.
“Good. Take the servants’ stairs. The less anyone sees you, the better. Wash your hands, change your clothes, don’t be seen. Then run.”
He hesitated by the door. “What will you tell her?” he asked quietly. “Shay. Snow White.” Hunter suddenly felt so used, so dirty.
Liora’s expression flickered, then smoothed. “I will tell her what she needs to hear,” she said. “As I always have.”
He thought of the little girl in the snow, laughing between king and queen, trusting them both completely. Guilt crushed him. “Good-bye, Majesty,” he said. Then he was gone.
Liora listened to his footsteps fading down the servant’s passage. When she was certain he was out of earshot, she walked to the center of the room and drew a deep inhale. The blood was mostly gone from her skin. Her hair was still a bit wild; she adjusted it with quick, practiced fingers. Then she crossed to the mirror.
“Mirror, soul of silver and glass,” she rumbled, eyes locked on her own, “who in this land shall I never surpass?” The glass rippled, showing her what she wanted to see: her reflection. “Good,” she said.
Then she dressed quickly, pinched her cheeks hard to bring tears to her eyes, opened her mouth, and screamed. The soundtore through the corridor, down stairwells, into the courtyard. Servants dropped trays. Guards jerked to attention. Somewhere in the lower halls, Shay froze with a brush in her hand, stroking Grimm’s mane. Within minutes, the queen’s chamber was full of people. Liora knelt beside the body on the floor, her dress hastily thrown over her nakedness, the skirt darkening where it lay in Wilhelm’s blood.
“My husband!” she wailed, tearing artfully at her hair. “My beloved! Murdered in his own room! Oh, merciful saints, who would do such a thing?” No one noticed the faint, satisfied glint deep in her eyes.
Shay rushed in to see her father’s body cold and lifeless on the floor.
Between theatrical sobs, Liora cried, “It’s just us now, my dear, Snow White.”
SixyearslaterwhenSnow White was fourteen, she still thought of that day as a sharp, clean wound. She sat on an upturned bucket in the stable, Grimm’s warm bulk pressed against her shoulder, and told him about it again, as she always did when the ache grew too heavy. “I miss him,” she said, scratching gently along his withers. “I couldn’t have gotten through it without you.”
Grimm snorted softly, tipping his head so that his muzzle nudged her shoulder. She swallowed. The stable smelled of hay and leather and horse, familiar and comforting. Outside, autumn rain drummed softly on the roof. “I heard her scream,”she said. “Everyone did. It sounded like the whole castle split in half.”
She remembered dropping the brush, stumbling as people rushed past her in the corridor, voices tumbling over one another—the king, the queen, blood, murder. She remembered the press of bodies around the chamber door, the way her mother had clung to Wilhelm’s still form, shrieking and sobbing until her voice went raw, the way Hunter was nowhere to be found, but he should have been there to protect her father. She remembered being held back by someone’s arms as she tried to push through, crying, “Papa? Papa?” over and over. Afterward, her mother had taken her in her arms, pressing Snow White’s face into her perfumed shoulder, and wept.
“He’s gone, my little Snow White,” Liora had said between racking breaths. “Your poor father is gone. Killed by some beast who crept in through the window. I will never rest until I find who did this. Never.”
Snow White had believed her. “I loved her for it,” she told Grimm now, voice small. “They said she collapsed from grief. That she ordered half the guard to comb the countryside. That she stopped the investigation only because it hurt too much to keep hearing about it.” She stroked Grimm’s neck, fingers tracing the familiar path of a scar there. “Everyone said she was so strong. So brave. A queen of iron wrapped around a heart of glass.” Grimm flicked an ear back, as if skeptical. At fourteen, Snow White believed that grief made people do strange things.
No one questioned that the investigation had ended with no culprit, no trial, no justice. At least not openly. The few councilmen who dared ask why the captain vanished on the same night were found floating in the moat or retired suddenly to distant estates with heavy purses. Fear, it turned out, silenced a court faster than loyalty ever could. No one remained but theghosts of what-ifs that sometimes hovered at the edge of Snow White’s thoughts at night.
She leaned her forehead against Grimm’s neck. “You helped me,” she murmured. “When they told me he was gone. You’re the only one I could be ugly with.” Grimm sighed, his breath warm against her hair. Snow White smiled faintly.
The stable door creaked. She looked up swiftly, half thinking—hoping—it might be Hunter come back after all these years. Some said he’d gone after the assassin. Others whispered darker things.
But the noise was only a stableboy, carrying a sack of feed. He bobbed his head and hurried past. Snow White exhaled, tension easing. She straightened from her perch and brushed straw from her dress.
Thatnight,asraintapped at the tower windows like insistent fingers, Queen Liora stood naked and oiled before her enchanted mirror and studied her reflection. “Mirror, soul of silver and glass,” she said, the words like a trance, “who in this land shall I never surpass?”
The glass rippled. As always, it showed her—the same flawless face, the same ageless skin. Time had not yet dared to leave its mark. “Good,” she breathed. But her thoughts did not stay on herself. They slid sideways, unbidden, to another face: a younger version of her own. The resemblance was growing sharper each year. Shay—Snow White, as the servants had taken to calling her by Liora’s decree—was no longer a child. At fourteen, she was all long limbs and coltish grace, her featuresjust beginning to settle into the kind of beauty that turned heads in hallways.
Liora had noticed the way a young page had stumbled over his own feet when the girl passed, the flush on an older noble’s face when Snow White smiled up at him, innocent. She had seen the way the sunlight caught on her daughter’s unbound hair as she ran across the courtyard, turning it into a black river. The queen’s fingers tightened on the edge of the dressing table. “Too soon,” she whispered to her reflection. “Too close.” The mirror did not answer. It never argued. It only showed her what she feared and what she wanted. Liora tapped the table once with a painted nail, decision crystallizing.
