Snow - By Deborah M. Brown

Dedication

To Bronwen. You know why.

The Queen

Queen Anais knew the exact moment when she had begun to hate her stepdaughter. It was not when she first arrived at court to marry the king. Then she had barely noticed the pale, silent child. The king was old, far older than Anais, and the child had been born late into his first marriage. He doted on her, but Anais knew that as soon as she could provide him with a son, this first child would lose her significance in his eyes. Such a pallid, silent child, she was easy to ignore, especially early in the marriage when the king was so enamoured of his beautiful, young wife and so eager to prove himself upon her. Anais endured his old man’s fumblings, consoling herself with the thought of the sons she would bear and the riches and power that were hers as queen.

As time passed, the king became increasingly desperate to plant a son in Anais’s belly. It became harder to endure the hot weight of his body atop hers, his hands pawing at her breasts or between her thighs. The taste of sour old man as he made her take his semi-erect phallus in her mouth and suckle him, trying to make him reach that state of hardness that came to him less and less. Trying to make him hard enough to ram himself inside her like a weapon and stab and stab against her dry flesh. Fortunately those times were few and blessedly short, the king spending himself after only a handful of savage thrusts, crying out as though it was he who was in pain and not the woman who lay so still beneath him.

Anais never made a sound.

Time passed. There were no sons, and the king came no more to her bed. As the possibility of a male heir diminished, his attention was refocused on his daughter.

“My Snow White,” he would call her, and indeed she was. In a land of fair-haired, pale-skinned people, she was the fairest of them all. Her hair was silver blonde, her skin white as alabaster. Her eyes were grey, light and clear as water; her lashes covered them like clouds, keeping her thoughts hidden. Even so, Anais didn’t hate her then, not when her own golden beauty was still evident in the lustful looks of the court nobles and the jealous glances of their ladies.

Although she could have had any of them as her lover, Anais refused. She was content to be worshipped from afar, enjoying the machinations of those nobles who still thought that one day she would succumb to the temptations they offered. She had only to catch her husband’s eye and see the bitterness there to bring to mind how a man lay with a woman and what they offered was dust in her mouth. Occasionally she would see her stepdaughter at feast days or formal occasions, but her existence barely registered with her. The girl would sit on her throne beside her father, watching everything but never speaking. Anais and her ladies would whisper about her behind their fans.

“So thin. So pale.”

“An ugly child.”

But men’s eyes told another story that Anais refused to acknowledge.

For her sixteenth birthday, the king gave his daughter seven new attendants. They were dwarves from the eastern mountains, grim, golden men with eyes like black glass.

“Seven of them to protect you from all harm,” the king said. From then on, wherever Snow White went, her silent attendants went too. Some women of the court found them fascinating, for although not as tall as most of the southern ladies, they were perfectly formed and comely enough, but they made Anais uneasy. They were as silent and inscrutable as the mistress they served.

Anais’s contentment with her life changed late one winter’s afternoon. She had been sitting in her bedroom, gazing into her silver mirror and admiring the golden waterfall of hair as it fell over her bare shoulders. Outside in the courtyard there was a sudden commotion, dogs barking, the clatter of hooves and the shouts of men. Frowning, she went to her window and looked out. A hunting party, she thought, eyeing the carcass of a deer which was flung over the back of one horse. Disinterested, she turned away when the sudden screech of a large bird of prey and a man’s voice cursing drew her gaze back to the window.

Below her, a man wrestled with the falcon that bated madly upon his wrist and with the