Snow White's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Three days of searching had turned up nothing. Snow White sat alone in her chamber, the apple still untouched on the sill. Every hunter she sent returned empty-handed. Every day she lost, Rapunzel warned, the witch's darkness crept deeper into Rosenwald's villages. Crops rotted. Blue birds died on doorsteps. She had no lead to the one who healed Kassurina, and no way to strike. So she went to the one thing she had kept from the wedding, eighteen years ago. The iron shoes sat in a locked chest beneath her bed. She lifted them out. They still held the shape of her stepmother's feet. The metal was cold and etched with fine scrollwork. She had ordered them forged red-hot for the dance that killed Kassurina. Now she turned them over in her lap, looking for anything she had missed. Inside the right shoe, pressed into the rough iron, she found a mark. Three thorns crossed in a ring. A stain, dark and old, burned into the place where Kassurina's heel had rested. Witches left their marks behind, Rapunzel had told her, and strongest of all in death. This was not her stepmother's mark. It belonged to someone else. A coven. She called for Jani. He came fast, his fur cape still damp from the yard. Her husband had hated witchcraft since a witch turned his brother into a frog. He saw the shoe in her hands and his face darkened. "Burn it," he said. "Why keep the thing at all?" "Look." She held the lining to the candle. "Three thorns. A coven mark. She did not come back alone, Jani. A coven brought her back." He studied the mark. His jaw tightened. "Then we hunt the coven. All of them." "We cannot hunt what we cannot name." She closed her hand around the shoe. "But someone in this kingdom has hunted this very mark. For several years." Jani frowned. "The baker's children. The ones from the candy house." "Hansel and Gretel." Snow White stood. "They found a mark like this once, burned on a cloth. Three thorns in a ring. I thought it an old grief. I was wrong. It is the same coven." A guard waited at the door, red cape over his armor, the rose crest bright on his chest. Snow White pressed the iron shoe into his gloved hands. "Bring me Gretel Müller," she said. "Tonight. Tell her I have found her thorns." The guard bowed and went. Jani watched him go, then turned to his wife. "If she knows the coven, she knows where the tears come from." "Yes." Snow White looked at the empty chest. The lead she had begged for lay in a stranger's grief. "We stop chasing shadows. We follow the mark." Outside, the blue birds had gone quiet. For the first time in three days, she had a name to summon and a thread to pull.