“All right,” I said, and focused on the snow.
There are lots of stories about snow. Match Girls freeze in it. Snow Queens create and manipulate it. Sisters who speak in jewels search through it for strawberries, and sisters who speak in toads freeze their toes off on their way to the witch’s cabin. Snow is one of those images that shows up again and again, universal and eternal. But the Snow White story, my story, is not about snow. It is snow. It is the story of all those girls who walked into winter not knowing if they’d come out the other side. We are the point between Persephone and Pandora, and ours is the frost and the frozen world that never, never thaws.
I looked at the snow in my hands. Felt the weight of it, traced the edges of the tiny snowflakes that clung to my fingers without melting. I’d always had cold hands, ever since I was a little girl, but this was a step past “cold,” moving into “frozen solid.” I was still flesh and bone. My heart was beating too fast. The snow didn’t care. It knew me as its own, and it would not hurt me. I just had to hope it liked me better than it liked Adrianna.
“Can you do this for me?” I asked, and when the snow whispered wordless assent I threw it into the air and watched as it caught the wind. For a moment it hung there, suspended, creating a frozen prism around us. Then it swirled away, gathering mass and momentum as it picked up more and more snow from the frozen ground. Everywhere it touched the illusion was stripped away, replaced by the blighted reality of Adrianna’s bolt hole.
“I think I liked it better before,” said Demi in a small voice, looking around us. She tightened her grip on her flute. “Would it help if I piped away the snow?”
“It might weaken Adrianna,” I said. “It would definitely weaken me. Leave the snow for now. Be ready to remove it if you need to.” I turned, looking around this new landscape.
For the most part, it was as Carlos had described. There was a castle on the far hill, built of gray stone and blue slate, with towers so tall that they couldn’t have served any useful purpose; even lookouts wouldn’t want to be that far off the ground. Their bases were too narrow. They looked like they’d collapse if someone breathed on them too hard. It was a fairy tale made concrete reality, and it was where we needed to go.
“Come on,” I said. “Adrianna’s waiting.”
We began wading through the snow, toward the distant stronghold where one of these stories was going to end. I only hoped it wasn’t going to be mine.
# # #
“Do you feel like talking yet, dear, or should I get the nettles?” Birdie leaned close, putting her eyes on a level with Sloane’s. Sloane turned her face away. Birdie sighed. “This isn’t how a princess behaves, you know. This isn’t regal or royal or even in the least bit charitable of you. I’m offering you your heart’s one true desire. Shouldn’t you listen to me?”
“I don’t want anything you have to offer me,” said Sloane. Her voice came out thick and red. She coughed. Bloody bubbles formed at the corners of her lips. “I’m not your toy.”
“Not mine, dear, no. You belong to the story. The story’s been trying to get its hands on you for a long, long time. It’s offered you so many openings, and you’ve refused them all! I’m sure that seemed like strength at first, but there’s a point past which it becomes nothing but rudeness. You need to be kind to the hand that feeds you. Otherwise, it may turn into a fist.”
Sloane glared, mute hatred radiating from her eyes. Birdie laughed, apparently delighted.
“You can despise me, if you like. Loathing is a powerful force, especially since I’m one of the heroes of the piece. I’m Mother Goose. If you hate me, if you want me dead, you must be a villain. We could write you into a better role, my love. Something truly terrible. Put your poisons and your knives aside, and learn how to be the killer you were always born to be.”
Sloane closed her eyes.
“I wish you wouldn’t be like that.”
Sloane didn’t say anything.
“You don’t have to be a villain. Only talk to me, tell me what you want, let me spin you a story you can be proud of, and the world is yours. We’d rather have you on our side than against us, Sloane. You have no idea how much potential you have. How much stronger you could be, with the right story at your back.”
Birdie stroked Sloane’s cheek. Sloane shuddered. Birdie didn’t pull away.
“I won’t promise you anything I can’t deliver. I couldn’t make you a mermaid if I wanted to, my darling, or turn your skin as white as snow. You can’t be a sister-story, because your sisters have been dead so long that their graves hold only dust and memory. But I could make a monster out of you, set you in a remote castle, and let you wait for your Beauty to come along. I could give you clever hands and a clever mouth—cleverer, really, you’ve never been a slow student—and a candle to light your way, change your name to ‘Jack,’ and give you the world to roam. There are so many options! You still look young enough to be someone’s stepdaughter if you wanted a Cinderella story all your own, or there’s the poisoned thorn and the long, sweet sleep before the happy ending . . . I’d prefer you not choose that one. We want you to join us, and sleeping people are so dull, don’t you think? Much more fun when you’re awake, and primed to kill to keep the story you’ve been given.”
“I like the story I have,” whispered Sloane, voice still thick, now with longing as much as misery.
Birdie smiled. “Ah, but my little breadcrumb, my little crumpet, if you liked the story you have, you wouldn’t still be talking to me, now would you? I think it’s time we dug a little deeper into your narrative.”
The screaming began again, higher and shriller than before. And like before, it seemed to last a long, long time.
# # #
We trudged through the snow in a loose diamond. I was at the front of the group, purely because I was the only one who wasn’t slowed down by our environment: while I couldn’t quite walk on top of the snow, it seemed to shift out of my way as much as possible, making the trek feel more like a light stroll. Demi and Carlos flanked me, him with his eyes fixed on the castle, her occasionally playing quick trills on her flute to clear the way a little more. I considered asking her to stop, and decided there was no point. Adrianna knew I was here. A little light musical accompaniment wasn’t going to give away anything she couldn’t figure out on her own.
Andy brought up the rear. He was shivering near-constantly. I cast a nervous glance back at him.
“You okay?”
“Just cold,” he said, shaking his head. “Didn’t dress for an unplanned trip to the land of frozen shit.”
“We’ll start keeping warm socks and heavy coats in the car after this,” I promised. “Live and learn, right?”
Andy managed to crack a smile. “I think the key word there is ‘live.’ Let’s manage that part first, okay?”
“You got it,” I said, and turned to face forward, focusing on where I was putting my feet. The castle still seemed impossibly far away. I cast a glance at Carlos. “Am I missing something?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not getting any closer.”
“Well, why the hell not?”
“Because it doesn’t want to.”
I groaned. “Sometimes I hate living in a world where masonry gets to have opinions. Demi? Can you change a castle’s mind?”
“No,” she said, after a moment’s contemplation. “I can’t pipe away the distance either. Distance is . . . it’s an idea, not a thing.”
“Delighted as I would otherwise be to hear that you have limits, this is a problem,” I said, and stopped walking. The others did the same. I eyed the castle. “Any thoughts on why the castle isn’t getting closer?”
“You’ve been fighting your story from day one, even when you embraced it,” said Andy slowly. “Doesn’t that normally come with an element of narrative rejection?”
I hesitated before pulling the crystal Ciara had given me out of my pocket. It was still glowing. There was still something here for it to fight. If
I let it go, my story might get stronger, and the castle, which was a Snow White’s stronghold, might stop keeping us out.
“Adrianna is a Snow White too,” I said, watching the stone sparkle and gleam in my hand. “She’s not a fuzzy little fluff-brain who just wants to wash underwear and sing with bunnies. She’s managed to hold on to herself. She’s tapped into the monomyth. But how?” Beneath the dizzy Disney girls were the girls who bled out in snowy fields, who opened their eyes in a world gone black and white and red, that would never see spring, never see harvest, never thaw. They came first, those girls, when “Snow White” was another word for “sacrifice,” and “fairest in the land” was the phrase spoken to grieving parents who needed to know that their daughters hadn’t died in vain.
“Hold this,” I said, and handed the crystal to Carlos.
The story slammed into me as soon as I pulled my hand away, driving me to my knees in the snow, which caught me and kept me from hurting myself. This wasn’t like eating the apple: That had been ripping away a scab and exposing the unhealed wound beneath. This was like cutting into the flesh of that wound, opening it wide to let the pus drain out.
I could hear voices in the snow. And yes, they spoke of hearth and home and service to others. But what I did for the Bureau was a form of service, wasn’t it? Maybe I didn’t wash windows, but I saved lives, and that wasn’t “just as good.” That was better. I was better for my story because of what I did.
The knife cut deeper. Distantly, I heard Demi saying, “She’s bleeding!”
“Blood on the snow is important for her,” said Carlos. “Don’t touch her.”
I was bleeding? I forced my eyes open and saw the blood dripping into the snow in front of me. I raised one hand and touched my lip, finding it hot and sticky. “Oh,” I whispered, and closed my eyes, and pitched forward into the cold whiteness that was the entire world.
# # #
You’ve fought me for a long time. I do not see why I should help you now.
The voice of the story was ice and apples, the black brushstroke of a raven’s wings across a winter moon. It was as cold and unforgiving as the frost, and the only things I knew about it with any certainty were that it loved me, and that it would kill me if it could. Those things weren’t a contradiction, not really: The story of blood on the snow has always been a story of sacrifice. For her to love me, she had to be willing to kill me. Anything else would show that her heart was untrue.
I was standing in the middle of a frozen field. My dress was the color of dried blood, made of a material that felt as light as gossamer, but hung around me like samite and velvet. I didn’t think about it too hard. Sometimes the only way to handle fairy-tale logic is to ignore it.
“You should help me because she’s going to twist the story if you let her,” I said. “If she wins, she’s going to turn the name ‘Snow White’ into something that children are afraid of and parents don’t dare speak. How much power will you have when no one tells you? How many of the forgotten stories are still able to reach the waking world the way you do?”
She is just one paragraph. I am the page. I am the chapter and the verse.
“A line—a word—can change the meaning of an entire book. Biblical scholars live and die debating over commas. You want to tell me a paragraph can’t distort you? Rewrite you? Because I always knew you were dishonest, but I never took you for a liar.”
The story swirled around me, black and white at the same time, an eclipse in motion. It was the snow and the storm, the feather and the fall, and it was beautiful, and it was terrible, and I wasn’t sure I’d be making it back into the waking world alive.
You were a rare gem to me, a fallen apple that rolled from one orchard to another. You should have grown in my sister-soil, a Snow White beside her Rose Red, and never come to the blood or the snow or the apple’s sweet perfume.
“But I did.” The Snow White archetype who stood with her sister against the world wasn’t defined by appearance the way the Snow White who stood alone was. I shouldn’t have been born bone and coal and rubies; I should have been a normal little girl, maybe a little pale, but still allowed to look like everybody else. “Why? Why me, and why Adrianna?”
We are not paragraphs, to be bound by short phrases and shorter lives. We see the shape of the story. Neither of you walked from one end to the other in the company of your shadow-self. Hers left her; yours was never what the first story wanted him to be.
It was comforting, in a way, that my narrative didn’t misgender my brother. It was also telling. Snow White and Rose Red had to be the same gender, or at least had to be able to fall in love with the same handsome prince. Had Gerry been gay, we might have stayed with our initial narrative, which had probably claimed us at conception. Sometime between then and birth, the forces that drove our lives had realized Gerry was a boy, and everything had gone strange.
I don’t blame you, brother, but oh, sometimes I envy the life we might have had, I thought, and said, “So Adrianna and I are the same. We’re both aberrations.”
Yes.
“And that’s why I have to be the one who stops her.”
Yes.
“So why won’t you help me?”
The swirling storm around me seemed to slow and still for a moment. Then, without changing in the least, it became a woman. There was no contradiction in the fact that she had been mist and darkness a moment before: she was here now, she had always been here, and when she went away again, she would never have been here at all. I knew all those things, even as I knew who she was, even though she didn’t look at all like she should have. She was too young, for one thing, fifteen at most, with a child’s half-formed figure under her rough, homespun clothes. Her skin was pale, but it was nowhere near as white as snow. Her hair was dark brown, not black, and while her lips were very pink, they weren’t as red as blood.
“Because no one helped me,” she said. “No one even knows for sure whether or not I existed. I don’t remember anymore. I could be a fiction about a fantasy about a fairy tale, the pretty village girl who caught the eye of a nobleman and enraged his mother, for how dare I be so beautiful when her own beauty had been spoiled by the pox? So she sent her men to take me to the forest when it was time to call the sun back into the sky, and I brought an end to winter, and I never saw the spring. That was where the red and white began. With blood on the snow.”
“I know,” I said softly.
She tilted her head, looking at me as her skin paled. Not all the way, but enough to bring her closer to the arctic creature she would one day become. “Do you really? You haven’t bled out yet, not for me, not for anyone. Not even to prevent the winter from lasting forever. You’ll have to, if you continue in the way you have been. That’s what happens to girls like us, when we refuse the narrative the world would lay upon our shoulders.”
“You’re the one who decided what my story was going to be,” I said. “You’re the one who has to help me now.”
“Do I?” She smiled. It was terrible, and beautiful, like an apple filled with worms. “I don’t think that’s in the story. And no one helped me. They say I was a king’s daughter, that he never let me walk outside, because he was afraid I would die the way my mother had. Maybe if I’d seen the sun, I might have learned that beautiful things could be cruel. It would have burned my skin and taught me caution. But he kept the curtains drawn, and when he took a new wife who saw me as the reflection of the youth she’d lost, I saw her only as a new mother, someone who would love my father after I was married to another man. She sent me to the woods with her favorite servant. He cut me open and brought her my heart and lungs, as proof of what he’d done. It would be a hundred years or more before he let me go. A hundred years of my story playing out, warning little girls not to trust the women who came into their homes with ice in their eyes. I was the first to fear her stepmother in the night. All the others came later, when those clever boys wrote their stories down wrong.”
“I don’t ha
ve time—”
“You have as much time as I give you, Henrietta Marchen. You have all the time in the world.” Her clothing was changing, becoming finer, shifting through the centuries as she began to walk a slow circle around me. I recognized none of the fashions my story wore. They were all older than anything I had reason to know. “My mother sat by the window, mending my father’s cloak, because that was a thing queens did, then: they worked, they ran the household, they had calluses on their fingers and blisters on their toes. She sat by the window, and when she pricked her finger on the needle she remembered the stories about blood on the snow, about the girls who went into the woods to summon back the sun. She promised me to the altar and the blade before I was even born, if only her lord would come back from the war. She put the knife to my throat herself, and there was no contradiction between her and the interloper with the broken reflections in her heart. Mother, stepmother, it didn’t matter. As long as I went to the wood, it didn’t matter.” Red began blossoming over her lips, turning them the color of fresh arterial blood. “It would be a long time before people agreed on why I had to die. Sacrifice or slaughtered lamb, the result was always the same. That’s the thing about being destined to become a beautiful corpse. No one ever looks too hard at how you wound up that way.”
“My friends need me.”
“Your story needs you. Your story has always needed you.” Her hair was darker now. One inch at a time, she was slipping toward the archetype she had always been. Something told me I didn’t have much longer to argue with her: that when she was done remaking herself in her own image, she would shed her girl-skin and return to the wind. “My dwarves came later. The apple, the girdle, the coffin of glass, those were all added when no one could remember the child in the village, the one who never hurt anyone. She deserved a happy ending more than the princess they made me out to be did, and yet she never had one. I never had one. Not until I left her so far behind as to never have existed in the first place.”
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 32
