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.

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.