A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables #2)(13)
“Then tell me how to get out of this damned story.” The queen’s voice is ragged, pushed far beyond exhaustion but still unwilling to bend. It would be admirable if it weren’t extremely annoying. “Tell me, and I swear I’ll stop.”
“Bite me.”
“Now is not the time for your crude fantasies!” She climbs unsteadily to her feet, takes two wavering steps in my direction. “You have no idea what it’s like to fight for your own right to exist. To know yourself doomed, yet to keep striving—”
I throw a wad of leaves at her. “Cry me a fucking river, woman. You just found out how your story ends last week. I’ve spent my whole life under a death sentence.”
The queen is clawing wet leaves out of her hair, teeth flashing white in the gloom. “You think I haven’t?” Her voice is a strangled hiss. “I may not have known about the iron shoes, but I was always headed for a bad ending. I was an ugly second daughter with uncanny power, and then I was a foreign bride who bore no heirs. Now I am a queen who is feared only slightly more than she is hated, and my time is up. But I have fought tooth and nail to survive, and no pretty little princess is going to stop me.”
This little monologue leaves me with two not entirely comfortable sensations. The first is the sudden, lurching shame of my worldview being wrenched out of shape as it occurs to me that Snow White might not be the only victim here. The second comes from the word pretty, which the queen tried to hurl at me like a slap, but which faltered mid-flight and landed quite differently. I find myself struggling to form a sufficiently scathing response, or any response at all.
But she’s not even looking at me anymore. She’s staring into the abyssal black between the trees with a long-suffering expression. “Oh, not another one.”
There’s a fragile amber light flickering closer, like a candle held in a shaking fist. Scurrying footsteps. The terrified panting of someone running for reasons that are not recreational.
The queen looks inclined to melt into the shadows and let this character pass us by, their narrative uninterrupted, but I stand woozily and say, “Hello?”
I catch a glimpse of a young girl with brown skin and terror-struck eyes before I realize the lantern has left her night-blind. She slams into my diaphragm and we go down in a pile of limbs and elbows while the queen gives a small, pained sigh.
The girl scrambles to her knees, already trying to launch herself back into the tangled dark of the woods, but I catch her shoulder. “Hey, it’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you.”
She shrugs my hand away. “I have to hide—they’re coming—”
“Who? The huntsman?”
She nods, wheeling to look behind her as if she expects to find a henchman lumbering out from behind a tree. The woods are perfectly still.
I know she’ll be all right on her own—she’s due to find a friendly bunch of dwarves or fairies soon, and the huntsman probably isn’t even chasing her—but she’s a lot younger than the other Snow Whites we’ve seen, and much more frightened. I find myself saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll help you find a safe place.”
The queen makes a strangled noise of protest and I shoot her a repressive look. “Won’t we?”
“I don’t see why I should,” she huffs.
“God, you’re the worst.”
“You think you’re such a hero, but you won’t help me—”
“Maybe if you acted just a smidge less evil I’d consider it.”
The queen lunges, fangs bared, but I raise her mirror and waggle it warningly. “Ah-ah. You wouldn’t want to break this, now would you?”
It’s at this point, when the queen’s face is a twisted rictus of fury, her eyes fixed on her precious mirror, that the young girl shoves between us.
She raises her lantern high and says, “I’ll find it myself,” over one shoulder as she passes us.
I pause long enough to give the queen a “now look what you did” face before hurrying after Snow White. I rummage in my pack one-handed and produce a battered wooden box. “Here, this’ll tell us where to go.” I open the compass and wait for the needle to wobble to a stop, directing us northeast.
The girl leads the way, striding past humped roots and clawing branches, and I follow her without consulting the queen, because it’s not like she’ll let either me or the mirror out of her sight. We haven’t made it ten paces before I hear her stomping and muttering after us.
The woods darken and thicken around us. Briars tug at our clothes and small, slinking creatures rustle just past the bright ring of lantern light. A few reluctant stars blink like filmy eyes through the branches, but the moon refuses to rise.
The young Snow White never slows down or hesitates. I wonder briefly what could scare a kid like this, who walks so fearlessly through the dark, and decide I’d rather not know.
Eventually another light shines through the trees: a pair of lit windows, warm and inviting, wildly out of place in the thorned and twisted wood.
I point Snow White toward the windows. “Okay, there’s probably somebody in there who can help you out. Just do whatever they say and stay away from strangers, and you’ll … be…” I trail away, because there’s a small bird silhouetted in one of the windows, the first we’ve heard or seen all night. Something about the shape of it rings a very distant and unlikely bell in my head.