Snow White's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Snow White knelt on the floor of her chamber and scrubbed a stain that would not lift. Eighteen years she had ruled Rosenwald. Eighteen years she had told herself the witch was dead. She had watched Kassurina dance herself to death in iron shoes at the wedding. She had ordered the body thrown into the Dark Forest. Now a blue bird beat its wings against her window, and on the stone sill below it lay a single red apple. No servant had brought it. No one living would dare. She did not touch the apple. She had not touched one since the poison. Instead she stood and called for the two people who had never lied to her. Jani came first, her husband, Prince Consort, who had found her sleeping in a glass coffin and never forgiven the craft that put her there. He saw the apple and his jaw went hard. "Burn it," he said. "Then burn the forest. We killed her once. We kill her again." "We cannot," Snow White said. "We do not know how she lived. If I strike the same blow, she will laugh and strike back." Jani's hand went to his belt. "Then I find her and cut her head off. A head does not come back." "My stepmother's head did not come back," Snow White said. "Her whole body burned from the inside. I saw the shoes glow. I saw her fall. Yet here is her apple on my sill." The door opened and Rapunzel entered, arms full of cracked leather books. The princess of Nachtburg had spent her childhood locked in a tower by a witch, and she carried that witch's spell books still. Snow White had called her here because no one alive understood witchcraft better. Rapunzel set the books down and went straight to the apple, saying nothing soft. "Don't eat it. Tell me how your stepmother died." Snow White told her. The dance. The iron shoes. The cooling corpse. The Dark Forest. Rapunzel opened a book and turned pages fast. She stopped. She read, then looked up. "A burned witch is not a dead witch. Not if someone gave her healing tears." She pressed her own wrist. "Tears like mine. They mend any wound. Any burn. Poured on a corpse, they could bring the body back." "Then iron did nothing," Jani said. "Iron did everything," Rapunzel said. "It killed her. Someone undid it after. To kill her for good, you must destroy her faster than tears can heal her. Burn her to ash before anyone reaches the body." Snow White stared at the apple. The old killing blow had never failed. It had simply been reversed. "Then I need the one who holds those tears," she said. "Find who saved her, and I cut off her cure before I cut off her life." The blue bird struck the glass once more and flew into the trees toward the Dark Forest.