Toad Words(24)

“Try it on,” said the seamstress. “Oh please, Snow, try it on.”

Snow sighed. It was an absurd dress and she was certain that she would look ridiculous in it, but if it would make the old woman happy…well, it was little enough. And the other skirts had been very good. She bowed her head like a horse to the harness, and allowed the seamstress to pin her into the dress.

“Ohhhhh,” said the old woman, pulling the last pin out of her mouth. “Oh, Snow, you look like a queen!”

“Ha!” said Snow. She turned to look in the mirror and found that the dress made her look much more ridiculous than she feared—what was going on with those sleeves?

“Of course, your hair should be longer…” the seamstress said, pulling Snow’s thin, flyaway white hair back against her neck. “Perhaps with a dark blue ribbon…”

Snow sighed heavily. She supposed the color was all right. She didn’t look quite so wretchedly pink, and since it was winter, she had not been out in the sun all day and her last sunburn had faded, and at least her awful white eyebrows had started to darken a bit in the last few years.

But the sleeves were regrettable. There was no getting around that.

“You’re beautiful,” said the seamstress firmly, picking up another handful of pins.

“Can I go now?” asked Snow.





It was sheer bad luck that at this moment, the queen sat in front of her mirror and asked “Who?”

The mirror yawned. It was bored. The queen’s vanity was only occasionally amusing. “I hear the goosegirl is very lovely,” it said.

The queen tapped the bone handle of her hairbrush on the table. “Don’t waste my time, mirror. The goosegirl is pretty, but she is simple, and will spread her legs for anyone who brings her a sugar cookie. I am not concerned about the goosegirl.”

The reflection in the mirror looked more or less like the queen, but it seemed to have a great many more teeth, and they were longer and narrower, although the demon would have considered it quite gauche if they were actually pointed. It also seemed to have rather more tongue than was normal, so that its smile was a mass of crimson and ivory.

The demon cast its mind out, searching for a way to needle the queen’s vanity… and came back with something unexpected.

“Snow,” it said, sounding a little surprised itself. “Snow is fair.”

“Snow?” said the queen. For a brief moment, all she could think of was real snow, the white powdery stuff settled like a blanket over the forest. Then she remembered—“Snow? The girl?”

“Your daughter,” said the demon, pleased. “Yes. She is very fair in her new gown of blue.” (It decided not to say anything about the sleeves.)

The queen went red, then white. Even in her paleness, however, she was not so pale as Snow, and the mirror knew this, and grinned even more widely.

“She is a child,” said the queen, her voice grating in her throat. “She is what—twelve? Thirteen?”

“She is seventeen,” said the mirror. “You are growing older, my queen.” And its grin spread so wide that it seemed to stretch beyond the bounds of the mirror, as if it must crack the walls on either side.

“I must go,” said the queen, in a high voice. She set down the hairbrush with a click on the vanity, and for the first time in her life, she went in search of her daughter.





She found Snow in the little room off the kitchen where the herbs were put to drying. She swept through the kitchen—“My queen!” said the cook—and followed the stirrings of her witchblood, like calling to like, until she found herself in the doorway of the herb room.

“It will be just a moment,” said Snow, who had her back to the door and thought that it was the midwife. “I’m just bottling the last batch up now.” She was bottling nothing more complicated than oil with herbs to give it flavor, but it had been an excuse to get away from the seamstress, who was already having visions of another gown, perhaps with enormous slashed sleeves belling away from Snow’s wrists.

The queen said nothing. Snow was wearing one of the new kirtles, which fit snugly around her breasts and waist, and the light was the generous and flattering light of a half-dozen candles. The shadows fell kindly across Snow’s cheeks and her hair seemed to glow in the darkness.

Snow held up the last bottle, stuffed with dark green leaves, and turned towards the door, smiling.

The queen saw that she was fair.

The smile wavered for a moment, as Snow searched her memory for who this woman was, and why she seemed familiar and somehow terrible, and then suddenly she thought the queen, it is the queen, here! and her smile died completely.