She could have told them, oh yes, she could have told them. She could have told them about redheaded sisters who decided they didn’t like their stories anymore, who dyed their hair and went looking for a different life. She could have told them about accidents, and comas, and princes who never came. It was surprisingly easy for a Rose Red to become a Sleeping Beauty, if the situation was orchestrated carefully enough and if that Rose Red’s Snow White wasn’t around. The narrative will have its due.
No matter how hard you fight, no matter how cunningly you rewrite the world around you, the narrative will have its due. Adrianna had learned that the hard way when it cut her sister down, and if she had reacted poorly, well. It was no more than could have been expected of her.
The wood might shame and disdain her for what she’d done, but it couldn’t keep her out. She was a Snow White, just like all the pretty porcelain princesses who’d chosen to live and die within the structure of their story, and the whiteout wood would always be open to her. She knew how much it hated her presence. It treated her like a disease, blackening the ground under her feet, sweeping the sky free of clouds and replacing them with plumes of smoke, like all the world was burning. Snow White could come in ash and ember as well as in ice and apples.
Let it do its worst. She was still its child; she belonged within its borders, and it couldn’t keep her from knowing when another sister in story was born. The latest was just a baby, barely a day in the world, unaware of what destiny awaited her. She’d have plenty of time to learn to hate the narrative before she was old enough and strong enough to serve Adrianna’s purposes.
Really, it wasn’t theft, no more than it was suicide. The girl would grow and learn what a terrible hand she’d been dealt. By the time Adrianna came along, she would be pathetically glad to get out of her life and into the whiteout wood, which would love and welcome her as one of its own.
“I’m coming for you, little doorway,” whispered Adrianna, slipping the golden noose around her neck. “Just be patient, and I’ll open you wide.”
The guards didn’t find her body until morning. While no one said it, they all secretly agreed that it was a good thing that they wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore. She upset the other prisoners.
In the whiteout wood, the clouds began to change.
# # #
Adrianna’s first blow had managed to catch me from behind, sending me sprawling and helpless into the snow. I’d even blacked out for a few seconds—which, ironically, was probably what saved me. She couldn’t use me as a door into the waking world if I wasn’t awake.
I awoke to find her shaking me viciously back and forth, slamming my head down so hard that I would probably have suffered a concussion if not for the snow that covered everything. “Wake up!” she snarled, princess-pretty features distorted with rage. “I did not bring you this far just to have you slip away from me now!”
I responded with a fist to her jaw, followed by a shove that sent her reeling backward, away from me. I scrambled to my feet. There was a black branch on the ground nearby, its thicker end red with blood. My blood. I grabbed the branch with one hand as I reached back to feel the base of my skull. My fingers came away sticky. I narrowed my eyes.
“You are a piece of work, you know that?” The branch was a good weight, almost like a baseball bat. It would serve me well. It had already served her.
Adrianna was standing slightly hunched over, her permanently bloody mouth twisted into a cruel line. She glared at me. I glared back.
“You have no idea what you’re doing when you fight me, little doorway,” she snapped.
“That’s not my name.”
“Neither is ‘Henrietta.’” She spat it out, letting the wind whip away the syllables that defined me. “Your mother would never have given you such an ugly name. You should have been a Nieve or a Bronwyn or something else elegant and lovely. But they named you ‘Henry,’ and you tried to grow into your name rather than making your name grow into you.”
Both the names she’d suggested meant “white.” I remembered when some of the girls I’d gone to school with had looked up the same names in the library, bringing them to me on a sheet of paper along with a dozen others, all sharing the same insipid, predictable meaning. We were eight at the time. They’d been making fun of my corpse-like complexion. “Did you never mature past second grade?” I asked. “Mocking my name doesn’t make me like you.”
“Reject me all you like: deep down, you know I’m right. They’ve been trying to limit you since you were born. You should have been more than what you are. They took that away from you.” Adrianna’s smile was sudden and feral. “All I want to take are the scraps they left behind.”
She had no weapons. She had no superior ground. Something about the look on her face told me it didn’t matter. Still clutching the branch she’d used to ambush me, I turned and fled deeper into the wood.
# # #
The whiteout wood had boundaries. It had to: without them, it could never have touched the other narrative preserves, the hazel wood of the Cinderellas or the rose briars of the Rose Reds. As I ran through the trees, skirts billowing behind me, hair snapping in the wind, it felt like those borders were the real fiction. Every other lie I’d ever been told had just been preparing me for the big lie, the lie that claimed the wood had limits. I would run forever, and I would never be free.
Worse, my dress—my warm, wine-red silk dress—stood out against the black trees and white snow like a flag, betraying my presence to anyone with eyes. I looked back. Adrianna was nowhere in sight. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. Unlike me, she was dressed in sensible black and white. I didn’t know what inspired the wood to dress us in specific colors, but in that moment, I hated it for not foreseeing that I might need to get away from a serial killer who looked just like me.
There was a thick copse of trees up ahead. I put on an extra burst of speed and threw myself into their shadow.
“She’s your problem, not mine,” I whispered. My voice sounded too loud to my own ears. “If you have any control over what’s happening here, you need to help me now. You owe me.”
The wind whistled around me, but if the wood gave any answer beyond that, I couldn’t hear it. I dropped my branch into the snow and hauled my dress off over my head, revealing a white silk slip that was distinct from my skin only in that it had a faint, translucent sheen to it that I lacked.
“Thank you,” I whispered, kicking off my red slippers. I wrapped my dress around the nearest tree, where it would hopefully snap and dance in the breeze and attract Adrianna’s attention. Then I grabbed my branch, turned, and ran in a new direction, seeking to lose myself in the wood. It was funny: my coloring had always marked me as a freak, something to be gaped at and avoided in public places, like a lack of melanin was catching. Here and now, that same lack of color might be the only thing that saved me.
Too bad I shared it with Adrianna. If my black and white nature concealed me from her eyes, her nature did the same from mine. She could have been anywhere, hiding between any two trees, and I wouldn’t have known. I might have run past her a dozen times in that initial headlong flight. I didn’t stop to find out.
I just kept running, barefoot and half naked, through the snow.
# # #
Time didn’t work the same way in the whiteout wood. Neither did bodies: most of the girls here were either dead or sleeping in the waking world, and they didn’t have the physical needs they once had. Even so, I was still among the living, and I was beginning to tire. I stopped in the middle of a clearing, panting as I bent to rest my hands on my knees. My feet were numb, and while I knew intellectually that I should have been dealing with severe frostbite by this point, even that small and creeping numbness was terrifying. If I didn’t keep running, she was going to catch me. If she caught me . . .
She’d called me “little doorway” since the moment we met. If she caught me, she was going to do whatever it took to open that door. I wasn’
t certain what the consequences would be, but I could make an educated guess, and I didn’t like what I kept coming back to.
All Snow Whites were connected. The whiteout wood was proof of that. It was the physical manifestation of our monomyth, the place where blood on the snow meant something bigger and more important than death. We were the heralds of spring and this was our frozen fastness, where the sun never warmed but flesh never chilled all the way down to the bone. Every magic mirror was a Snow White who had “gone bad,” turning her back on the story that shaped her. The wood protected itself. Adrianna hadn’t become a mirror yet, but that time was coming. She had to see her future in every reflection, every skittering bolt of color cast through ice. She wanted a way out.
She wanted a doorway.
Some Snow Whites didn’t want their lives back after their inevitable stay in the glass coffin, whatever shape it took. When the story had been young and princesses had been expected to marry the princes who kissed them awake with no questions asked, it wouldn’t have mattered if the girls who fell asleep and the girls who woke up were the same person. There would have been no basis for comparison. Once your black and white girl was in your arms, smiling up at you with her bloody lips, what did it matter whose body she was wearing?
There were always girls who didn’t want to go back into the waking world, who didn’t want to wear the shape the story had created for them. And there were always girls whose bodies didn’t survive their personal versions of the apple—girls like Ayane, who died on an airplane, too far from land for any glass coffin to have saved her—who wanted nothing more than to be alive. To be a citizen of the whiteout wood was to be involved in a great square dance of bodies and birthrights.
I was here. My body was empty. Adrianna was here. She wanted to fill it. I didn’t know why, and frankly, I didn’t care. She wasn’t going to take me. She wasn’t going to steal my life. I was going home.
I put a hand over my mouth to block the red slash of my lips as I straightened and backed up, squeezing into a gap between two trees. Branches tangled in my hair, claiming it as their own. The wood was silent. The blizzard had died down while I was running, and I had to interpret that as the wood trying, in its curious, narrative way, to help me. The snow had allowed me to escape from Adrianna more easily, covering my footprints and obscuring her vision. Now that I needed to see her coming, it was tapering off.
My heart was a steady drumbeat against my ribs, beating almost hard enough to hurt. I forced myself to breathe slowly, watching the trees for any signs of movement. I was black and white and perfectly still against a landscape that mirrored me in all but form.
Adrianna stepped out from between two trees on the other side of the clearing. I hadn’t seen her approaching; I didn’t know if she had seen me move. She had another branch. This time she’d gone to the effort of sharpening it, creating a vicious-looking spear. I didn’t know whether Snow Whites could die in the whiteout wood, but I knew—from both past and recent experience—that we could be hurt. It seemed unfair, that we should have to hurt to bleed in a place that was all about emptying us out onto the white page of winter, but it was how the world was made, and I didn’t have the authority to revise it on my own.
“I know you’re nearby, because the wood keeps telling me you’re far away,” she said, her eyes scanning the clearing. For a moment, they paused on me, almost as if she’d picked my silk-clad form out of the landscape. I held my breath. Her gaze moved on. “It doesn’t have to be this hard, little doorway. Come to me. Let me stroke your hair and kiss your brow and slit your throat and steal your skin. It can be pleasant for both of us.” Her voice never changed, not even as she talked about effectively murdering me.
My stomach lurched. The urge to charge her was strong. But I had a single blunt branch, and she had a spear. I had everything to lose, and she had everything to gain. I stayed where I was.
“Come on, little doorway, little princess with the terrible name. Your mother would have come to me by now. She loved me better than you can imagine, and she left me anyway. They always leave. You know that, don’t you? Your sister left you too.”
It was only the presence of my hand over my mouth that kept me from gasping.
“My sister is the reason we know stories can be changed. She couldn’t escape hers, but she could massage it into something new. Trade the thorn for the spindle; it’s still a prick, and she still gets away from the bear.” Adrianna stalked forward. “It’s not her fault she forgot how that story went when it was new. The narrative is a vengeful god. It didn’t like her changing the rules it had decided she would live by. So it made her pay for what she’d done, and I made everyone else pay for what it had done to her!”
On the last word she whirled and hurled her spear into the space between two trees, a space shaped vaguely like a woman, all curves and soft angles. Had that space been shaped that way when I took shelter here, or was the wood doing what it could to protect me? I couldn’t be sure one way or the other . . . but I suspected the latter. The whiteout wood didn’t want Adrianna to win any more than I did, even if we had different reasons.
Adrianna glared at the trees as she stalked forward to retrieve her spear. “You can’t hide from me forever, little doorway. You’re only making things worse for yourself. You know that, don’t you? Give up, give in, and let me open you, before you make me mad.”
She kept going after she had her spear back, vanishing into the black and white distance. I stayed where I was, not moving, and began counting silently down from five hundred.
I had just reached three-fifty when she appeared again, leaping from between two trees and looking wildly around the clearing. I didn’t move. She muttered something and left again, slipping out of sight as easily as a shadow.
This time, I moved immediately, taking two steps backward and whirling around before I ran for the other side of the whiteout wood. I didn’t look back. I didn’t dare.
# # #
It was some indefinable amount of time later, and I was digging a pit with my bare hands, scything through layer after layer of snow as I sought the earth beneath, when I realized I hadn’t seen a single Snow White, apart from Adrianna, since she had appeared. I hadn’t even seen the oddly-spaced trees that signaled the presence of another Snow’s clearing, where I might have been able to find temporary shelter, if not an ally.
“Is this because they don’t want to get involved, or because you won’t let them?” I murmured, keeping my voice low. I didn’t want to attract Adrianna by talking to myself, but the stress and fear were getting to me. I needed something to anchor me to the world.
The wind gusted around me, caressing my cheek as it blew. There was a whisper there, like the faint voice of the wood trying to answer my question, but I couldn’t tell what it was saying. I was still enough of an outsider that the wood couldn’t speak to me directly. That was a good thing—a very good thing, considering I wanted to go home more than I wanted almost anything else.
Home. It was already starting to feel like a foreign concept, like the life I had lived was the fairy-tale dream, and this frozen, virtually monochrome wood was the reality. I couldn’t tell if exhaustion was wearing me down or if my memories were actually changing, twisting to suit a more storybook narrative. Either way, I didn’t like it.
So I was digging holes.
This was my fifth. Dig deep enough that a leg could get stuck, then cover the opening with a thin sheet of ice pried up from a frozen snowbank, and cover the ice with more snow. If Adrianna tried to follow me, she’d risk breaking a leg. Maybe the wood would heal her and maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, the injury would slow her down.
Something snapped in the trees up ahead: the sound of a small branch breaking. I froze. I was out in the open, too far from the trees for their bark to camouflage my hair. There was only one thing I could think of, and so I dropped onto my back on the snow, hastily shoveling armfuls of the stuff above my head. My eyebrows and eyelashes were also a risk
. I slathered a fistful of snow over my forehead and eyes, clapped a hand over my mouth, and waited.
Anywhere else, this solution would have been useless. Lying on my back in the snow, trusting the villain to pass me by? It was so simple as to be completely impossible. But this was the whiteout wood, and fairy-tale logic reigned supreme. I was a black and white girl, and I had covered my hair with snow the exact color of my skin. I may as well have been invisible.
I heard Adrianna walk past me, her feet crunching in the snow. When silence fell again, I opened my eyes and looked warily around, waiting for an ambush, looking for Adrianna. It didn’t come. I didn’t see her. But I saw something else: flecks of red beneath the snow, uncovered by my frantic shoveling. How they’d appeared after something so simple, when they hadn’t been uncovered by the wind or by my frantic running, I didn’t know and wasn’t going to ask. If I was going to use fairy-tale logic to survive, I had to trust fairy-tale logic to steer me truly toward safe harbor—if such a place even existed anymore.
I reached for one of the red specks, digging my fingers into the snow until I could grip it and pull. It came away easily. A strawberry. The flesh wasn’t frozen; it was as soft and pliant as anything from a grocery store. I placed it on my tongue, where it melted into sweetness and the taste of frost. Winter strawberries weren’t usually a part of this story, but I recognized them from other places in the narrative, other stories of girls and snow and isolation. I swept more of the snow away with the palm of my hand, uncovering a riot of strawberry plants with leaves sculpted from delicate glacial ice and berries as red as my bloody mouth.
“Okay,” I said, and started picking.
When I had a handful of berries I stood, placing a second in my mouth as I began to walk. I didn’t watch for Adrianna. I didn’t look to the left or right. I just ate strawberries and walked through the wood, letting it guide me, trusting it, for this little while, to take me where I needed to go.
The maze appeared when I placed the final strawberry in my mouth. One moment the way ahead of me was clear, the snowy ground spattered with black-branched trees, and then there was a labyrinth stretching all the way to the horizon, walls made of blue-white glacial ice. I knew salvation when I saw it. I broke into a run, heading for the safety of the maze.
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 15
