The gardener stifled a laugh. It was true. The midwife did not like children. But as Snow didn’t like them much either, it worked out well enough.
Snow was a pleasant, biddable child right up until she wasn’t. Once she made up her mind about something, gods and devils could not move her. “Stubborn like a rock,” the midwife said to the gardener. “It’s not that she argues with you. Everything just bounces off her, and then she goes and does whatever she was planning to do anyway.”
“The apple tree,” said the gardener.
“The apple tree,” said the midwife, sighing.
There was one apple tree in the courtyard outside the castle gardens. It was a single tree with a gnarled and splitting trunk, caged in a little ring of cobbles. Snow loved it.
She climbed it. She hid in it, as well as one can hide in an elderly apple tree. The hunters grew used to riding in and seeing a pink face with very white hair peering at them from between the leaves. First the gardener and then the midwife had tried to ban her from the tree—she would fall and break her neck, she would damage the tiny budding apples, she would be stung by the bees that crowded around the blossoms in spring. Snow agreed solemnly to all of these things, often while in the act of climbing the tree again.
Eventually, they gave up. Snow was allowed the run of the apple tree. In earliest autumn, she would stuff herself on green apples and become violently ill, and the midwife would make up a nasty-tasting potion from the herbs in the garden and force her to drink it down.
“And it’s no more than you deserve,” she said severely, watching Snow, who for once had gone much whiter than her hair.
“I know,” said Snow, pleasant and biddable as ever, drinking the potion and planning her next escape.
After Snow was born, the queen barred the king from her bed. Don’t ask me how. The demon in the mirror may have told her a way. It was old and cold and had been bound in the mirror-glass for a long time, and had seen many witches come and go. A few of them had even been queens.
The queen’s witchblood came from an ancestor many years removed, who had loved a troll and been loved in return with little thought for the consequences. The blood of trolls and mortals mixes strangely, and such is the nature of witchblood that it twists and turns and doubles back on itself, so that one child may grow up strange and fell and not a drop be found in the veins of her siblings.
The queen’s blood ran thin and hot, and when she had found the mirror, she had no thought but to use it. The demon did not have to seduce her with words or visions; she came essentially pre-seduced. This offended the demon’s notion of its own craftsmanship, but it did save time.
Other than the mirror, there were very few signs of the queen’s nature. The touch of iron did not burn her, although she disliked it, so she avoided knife blades and the great wrought-iron candelabras in the great hall. A sword or a plow might have caused her actual pain, but she stayed in her bower and the issue did not arise. Banishing her husband from her bed also banished the last bits of iron that she came in contact with regularly—buckles and snaps and studs and so forth—and so she continued in greater comfort.
The king, who now spoke three or four words a day, if that, said nothing of this new arrangement. Perhaps it suited him as well.
He was not kind to his daughter, nor unkind. Snow was not actually sure that he knew she existed.
She would have been surprised to know that he was very aware of her existence, and that it troubled him. If he had died childless, the kingdom—for what little it was worth—would have gone to a distant cousin. An annoyance, but there it was.
Having a daughter complicated things. Ruling queens—queens who ruled in their own name, that is, rather than by proxy for a son or absent husband—were rarer than hen’s teeth in that age. Unless Snow could have swept in as a warrior queen with an army at her back, she was unlikely to hold the land at all. So the kingdom would go to whomever Snow married, and the king, who had a very bitter view of marriage by now, did not like to think of it.
When Snow was fifteen, the king left the castle. It was said by some that he went on crusade, but in the stables and among the king’s huntsman, they said that the crusade he had gone on was to find a new wife, one who could bear him an heir.
I do not know what their leave-taking was like. The great oaken door to the queen’s bower was closed. The noises that came behind it caused the servants to cross themselves and hurry past. The king rode out the next morning without speaking, and the queen kept to her bed for two days.
On the third day, she began her rule.
It was a bad time in the castle. One would think that the servants might leave, but in fact, few of them did. Most of them had nowhere to go, and some of them owned their own small cottages outside the castle walls—owned them free and clear, by grant of the king’s great-grandfather—and the thought of leaving and condemning their own children to live as serfs was a hard one.