I froze. “What?”
Judi signed something frantically. Ayane sighed.
“The wood talks. Haven’t you heard it whispering? It tells
you to let the Snow White side of yourself get stronger, because she’s older
and wiser than you are, she’s been here before, she’ll keep you from making
mistakes that you’ll regret later.” Ayane shook her head. “Judi can’t hear it. It’s
not … smart the way a person is smart, you know?”
“Be quiet,” hissed Tanya.
Ayane ignored her. “It doesn’t adjust the way it approaches
people just because its usual tactics don’t work on them. So it whispers to
Judi constantly, and she can’t hear it, and she spends a lot of time frustrated
with the rest of us over the things that we can’t say.”
“Oh,” I said, slow realization dawning. “And there are
things that you can’t say, is that it?”
Ayane nodded silently.
“Well, it seems to me that if you’re translating for Judi,
you’re not
saying
them. You’re just doing your job as a translator—and
your duty as a part of the same story. We’re here because we’re supposed to
learn from each other, right? Well, what does it say about us as a narrative if
we shut Judi out just because she can’t hear us? That’s not fair. We have to
let all our Snow White sisters participate.” I felt like a snake oil salesman,
peddling a bill of goods that wasn’t actually good for anyone.
It seemed to work, at least. Ayane smiled, a relieved
expression peeking through her frown as she turned back to Judi and signed
something, hands flying too fast for me to follow. Judi signed back, and for a
moment the world narrowed down to the two of them: Judi explaining what she
wanted Ayane to say; Ayane making sure she understood.
A hand caught my arm. This time when I turned, it was Tanya
who was looking at me with concern. Snowflakes were caught in her bangs,
unmelting. Had we really all become so cold? “She’s not going to say anything
you should want to hear,” said Tanya earnestly. “All she’s going to do is make
it harder for you to accept what you are, and to accept that you belong here.”
“I thought you were supposed to be teaching me,” I said,
pulling my arm out of her grasp. “Wasn’t that what you promised me that you
were going to do?”
“I
have
been teaching you,” she protested. “I haven’t
told you any lies, and I haven’t withheld any information that you genuinely
needed to have.”
“You didn’t tell me the forest talked to us!”
“I thought you knew,” she said, with a shrug. “All the rest
of us figured it out eventually, although some of us had to do it more on our
own than others. The oldest Snows don’t come out of their clearings anymore. They
stand and talk to the forest, and the forest talks back to them, and that’s all
they really need out of the world. I think—no, I
know
—that there were
white-skinned, black-haired girls before those Snow Whites came to the wood,
and that they
are
the wood now, and someday we’ll all be the wood, and
we’ll talk to the girls who come here after us. We’ll tell them not to be
afraid.”
I stared at her. “But you told me to break the narrative. To
end the story.”
“Yes, and we meant it. We’re tired of being a parasite on
the monomyth. But there will always be girls who find their way here, even if
they don’t know the name ‘Snow White.’ Places like this don’t die. They just
get repurposed to serve a different storyteller.”
“Henry?” Ayane sounded more hesitant than she ever had
before. I turned toward her. Judi was standing with one hand on the shorter
woman’s shoulder, like she was afraid that if she let go, Ayane would turn and
run into the trees, rather than delivering her message. “Judi has something she
wants to tell you.”
“I’d really love to hear what Judi has to say,” I said.
Ayane took a deep breath and said, “‘The forest speaks to
the girls who find their way here. It tells them not to be afraid, because this
is the place that comes after fear, and that’s good; some of us were afraid for
far too long in our lives before. But it also tells them to be good and to be
patient and to wait for their Prince to come. It makes them weak if they listen
for too long. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? It’s talking to
you now.’”
“How?” I asked, directing my word to Judi. Ayane echoed it
with a gesture.
Judi nodded and signed back, saying something that must have
been fairly complicated, since it involved both arms and most of her upper
body. It was beautiful, like watching someone dance their way through a
paragraph.
“‘It talks through the snow,’” said Ayane. “‘The snowflakes
are words, the blizzard is its voice. You can hear it if you listen closely,
but you shouldn’t listen, and you shouldn’t stand still when the snow is
falling, or it will tell you things you shouldn’t hear. It makes you soft. It
makes you scared. Why are you still standing here? You aren’t the kind of woman
who stands and waits to be protected, but that’s what you’re doing, because the
forest wants you to do it. It wants Adrianna to take you. It doesn’t like
having her here—she’s a disruption, she makes things dark and frightening, and
so it wants her to go away, even if it has to sacrifice you to accomplish that.’”
I stared at her for a moment before I turned back to Judi
and asked, “What should I do?”
She made a small, declarative gesture with her hands. I
barely needed Ayane’s translation: “‘Run.’”
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 410 (“Sleeping
Beauty”)
Status: ACTIVE
Sloane slipped into the room the way a knife slips into a
wound: silently, and with the potential to do a lot of damage to anything that
happened to get in her way. Birdie and her people were standing next to Henry’s
desk, digging through an open file drawer and piling its contents carelessly atop
the nearest desk. Sloane gritted her teeth and forced herself to hold her
ground.
Birdie was down to two men inside, both of them larger and
stronger-looking than Sloane herself. That was fine: that just meant they’d put
up a decent fight before she put them down. Most of her attention was reserved
for Birdie herself. The ex-dispatcher was still short, plump, and crowned with
a corona of fluffy blonde hair, but there was an air of menace about her that
Sloane had never noticed before. Birdie was playing the villain, finally, and
she was loving every second of it.
Sloane hadn’t been sure up until that moment that she would
be able to kill someone who she used to work with. Looking at Birdie gloating
over Henry’s motionless body, she stopped worrying about whether she’d be able
to get the job done.
Killing her would be easy.
“How long is this spell supposed to last?” asked one of the
men, looking anxiously toward the briar-wrapped body of Priya Patel.
“A better question would be ‘how long is our protection from
the spell supposed to last,’” said Birdie. “Now that she’s out, our Sleeping
Beauty will slumber for a hundred years, or until she’s awakened by true love’s
kiss. She’s actually manifesting brambles. That’s not common anymore; I blame
the narrative concentration in this building, since it warps the laws of
reality in some very exciting ways. Anyway, no one expects a thorn hedge to
have a chewy princess center anymore. I doubt anyone’s going to fight their way
to her rescue. She’ll sleep the full century, and die of old age five minutes
after she finally wakes up.”
The man frowned at Birdie. “You mean you’re not kidding
about this fairy tale mumbo jumbo?”
“You’re asking me that
now
, after everything that we
had to go through to reach this point? Oh, my dear hired goon.” Birdie actually
reached up and patted the much taller man on the cheek, murmuring, “The ability
that humans have to block out what’s actually happening around them will never
fail to astonish me,” in a tone that implied she was speaking to no one in
particular. Then she sharpened, and continued, “Yes, dearie, all that ‘fairy
tale mumbo jumbo’ is real, and we’re going to help it become even
more
real, because once the rules of the world are rewritten into something more … pliant … people like me and our benefactor will be as gods.”
“What about us?” asked the other man.
Birdie looked at him coolly. “As long as you continue
following orders, you’ll be the ones that the gods look upon with favor. Now
pick up those files. Some of what we came here to get is missing. We need to
check the deputy director’s office.”
“So what about
them
?” asked the first man, indicating
Henry and the others with the back of his hand.
Sloane tensed. She didn’t want to blow her camouflage yet,
but if she had to, then she had to. She was capable of a lot of things. Under
the right circumstances, she was even capable of murder. What she wasn’t
capable of was standing idly by while a demented Mother Goose archetype told
her hired goons to wipe out the only family that Sloane had left. If anyone was
going to kill Sloane’s team, it was going to be
Sloane
.
Birdie sniffed dismissively. “It smells like apples in here,
didn’t you notice?” she said. “The little tart decided to go full-on fairy tale
in order to fight me, and she failed. I know where she is now. Killing her
would be a mercy, and I’m not feeling very merciful.”
“So we leave them?” asked the man.
“We leave them,” Birdie confirmed. “Come on.”
Sloane tensed again as the trio turned to go. If they took
the hall that connected to Dispatch, they’d see her handiwork soon enough; not
even a Cheshire Cat could hide that much evidence that someone was awake and
fighting back. Luckily, Birdie started instead for the door at the back of the
bullpen that would lead her to Deputy Director Brewer’s office. Sloane didn’t
know what he would have there that was so important, and she didn’t care. She
just cared about getting back to her people and waking them the fuck up before
she ran out of tricks.
Birdie and her two goons vanished through the door. Sloane
held her position, counting slowly backward from thirty before she dared to
move. Safety was better than sorrow, or so the saying went.
Her feet left little red marks on the floor, bloodstains
that looked more like paw prints than footprints. She stopped when she reached
Henry, leaning in close and inhaling. She
could
smell apples when she
got in close enough.
“Wait a second …” Sloane straightened, eyes going wide.
There were only two confirmed ways of waking a Sleeping
Beauty—true love’s kiss or childbirth, neither of which was on the table, since
Priya was a stranger and not visibly pregnant. Sloane would have needed a
turkey baster and nine months to put childbirth on the table, and while the
situation was dire, it wasn’t quite that bad—not yet, anyway. She couldn’t
speak for how she’d feel if the Bureau was still wrapped in an enchanted sleep
at the end of the week.
There were other offices, of course, other field teams and
directors who could be counted on to make logical decisions about illogical
situations, but none of them were
her
team. None of them understood her,
or gave one good goddamn about what happened to a would-be Wicked Stepsister
whose story had somehow managed to shoehorn her into the villain’s role such
that the Beauty’s spell had missed her. And that, possibly, was the solution.
“I’m not your true love and I’m not going to kiss you,” said
Sloane, delivering a kick to Henry’s ankle. “I want you to remember this if you
wake up and think I have hands in bad places.” Then she knelt, and began
undoing Henry’s belt.
Tanya shouted something behind me, her voice washed out and
muffled by the snow. Now that I was aware that it was speaking, the whiteout
wood seemed to have lost all desire to keep quiet: I could hear the voices
whispering with every flake that fell, telling me to be good, to be meek, to be
merciful and dutiful and all the other qualities that the kings of frozen
kingdoms must work to imbue in their princesses. I wanted to listen, deep down,
in the place where I was more fiction than flesh. And still I ran.
Where did it begin? If Snow White was just the latest face
of this eternal winter, what was my story before the modern narrative got to
work on it? I was direly afraid that I knew, and that I even understood why the
latter-day whiteout women would be content with what they had. There are names,
after all, for stories that involve running into the wood with a huntsman
chasing after you, his knife naked to the wind. There are stories about the
meaning of blood on the snow. The snow whispered for me to be still, and the
wood whispered for me to be calm, and I thought of temporary kings and divine
figures killed to bring the springtime back around again.
The snow fell so fast behind me that it filled my
footprints, covering them up in the veil of endless winter. That would make me
harder to track. That was a good thing; I just hoped that it would be good enough.
My socks were soaking through with snowmelt, and my shoes
offered little protection against the cold. I normally didn’t feel it that
much—but I normally stayed safe with Tanya and the others, didn’t I? I did what
the wood wanted.
For the first time, I started to think that maybe that
so-noble command to break the narrative, end the story, was something other
than altruistic. None of the harvest tales started out as parasites. They were
the most powerful pieces of the narrative, once upon a time. We fought back,
turned them tame, gave them names and labels that pinned them like butterflies
in the textbooks of religious studies professors and folklore teachers all
around the world.
It didn’t have to be like that,
murmured a voice in
my head, and I couldn’t tell whether it was the wood speaking or my own inner
Snow White.
It doesn’t have to be like that.