White As Snow (Fairy Tale) (29 page)

Authors: Tanith Lee

Then she hid her face. “Don’t took at me. I’ve grown old and foul.”

“You’re lovely. Just as you were. My Queen-in-the-Wood. My Demetra by day, my Persapheh by night.”

“No—no …”

“Come then,” he said, “I’ll show you.”

The wood was closing to the wave of night. Stars gemmed between the boughs where birds and spirits rustled. The waterfall rippled like glass. The grass was soft beneath her flawless feet.

They looked down into the mirror of the collected water, and Arpazia saw herself as she had been at fourteen, at twenty, in the beauty of her flesh. And Klymeno, handsome and a god, standing by her.

“What fell from me?” she said.

“Everything.”

“Now can I be with you?”

“Where else?”

“Forgive me,” she said.

“For what?”

“God’s law,” she ventured, “my sins—His Hell—”

“Ah,” he said. “Let that fall, too.”

“But are we real?”

“More real,” he said. He held her. It was so.

Hadz stared down at the girl. She lay stretched on his yard. In her wonderful blood-red artifact of robe, which seemed to have pulled her right over.

He was displeased.

“What is wrong with her?”

Juprum said, “She swooned. She didn’t like your show, though devised for her.”

Hadz spat on the ground. For a second he looked like what he was.

“I am disappointed in you, Persapheh. No, she doesn’t deserve that name.” Scowling, he walked away from her, and back again. (Dimly Hadz noted that dwarf servant of hers, that he had been told of, squatting there beside her, like some dog.) “She wasn’t worthy of this gown I gave her. No. The wonderful coffin was
spoiled, and that was her fault. She was meant to be dead but she revived; such a fuss, I had to tell them to let her out. It was ruined, the coffin. And now, see here, the mirror’s cracked.” He toed Coira’s prone body. A jewel rolled from the mantle, deep violet-purple, like another kind of blood.

Jurpum waited, eager, but too wise to prompt.

Hadz said, “Do you know, she isn’t perfect. Her arm is scarred. Little white scars. Most ugly. She was never worthy of me. Not Persapheh, I think.”

Juprum undid his lips to speak.

Hephaestion moved first. He went cartwheeling across the courtyard, stood on his hands, brought one leg, then another, over his head. Leapt upright and bowed low before Hadz in exact equilibrium.

“How quaint,” said Hadz, smiling again.

“Give her to
me,
lord master prince, prince of all princes, fairest in the world.”

Hadz, intrigued (childlike, fearsome) smiled more. “To
you
?”

“I’ll make her pay, master prince. She owes me a few blows—but it’s worse, to have been annoying
yourselƒ.
Think of her degradation, Lord, Me, after
you
.”

“Oh,” said Hadz. “But you’re a pretty fellow, now I look at you. Not like most of your kind.”

“Am I, master?” Hephaestion crept near. He put his hand upon Hadz’s thigh. “You are the most beautiful,” he murmured, “in the world. Who can compare to you? I’ll make her suffer for offending you, trust me. You should have only the loveliest things.”

Hadz considered. He said, reasonably, “You must earn her from me, then.”

Hephaestion, too, smiled, and midway became all one miraculous somersault. Hadz chuckled, delighted. “Are you cunning at other matters, half-man?”

Juprum drew in a noisy breath to remonstrate. Turning idly, Hadz smacked his faithful old servant in the mouth, hard enough, for once, to extract a tooth.

None of them attended the crone, still swinging from her chain. Or the girl lying on the yard, her hands folded in against her womb. Both seemed dead. Even Hadz’s scum of guards did not touch them, in case the prince might still have some use for them, when he was done screwing the dwarf.

B
EYOND KORCHLAVA, GREAT plains moved away, and then there were once more the mountains, like clouds which, while resting on the land, had been changed to granite.

Concealed in glassy air, the soul of the mirror watched.

What did the mirror see?

A young girl, a young woman, slender, clear and bright. Her companion, a black-haired man of the race of dwarves.

“How wide the plains are. Where do they end?”

“At the mountains. And then they say there’s another land.”

Both of them were on foot, but they were not quite unprosperous, for they had a donkey, which moved placidly behind them, with their meager goods on its back.

“You’re sad,” Hephaestion said, an hour later.

“Forgive me.”

“For what?”

“For—what was done to you.”

“Coira,” he said, “what he did was nothing. He wasn’t the first and may not be the last. It got me
you
. He was easy to deal with, in his happy mood.”

Coira said, “She’ll feel nothing now. She’s safe. The fire was—it was warm, quick. Perhaps she’s an angel, now.”

“Perhaps.”

“She meant no harm. No, she meant harm. But she was mine.”

“I’m yours.”

Coira smiled.

Later still, the evening began to come, blowing softly over the plains, on wings of damson cloud which might, if not careful, be changed too into mountains during the night.

They camped by a stream. The moon stole over a slope and shone in the stream like a face in a mirror.

“I have something to tell you,” said Coira.

“I thought so.”

She stared at him, then looked far off. “You can’t know it yet. I’m carrying a child.”

“I did know. I know you, my girl.”

“Then you must see—I’ve no means to know if it’s yours, or his.”

Hephaestion fed sticks into the fire. He was always so glad fire did not seem to remind her of the corpse’s cremation.

He said, “His or mine. Well, it’s yours.”

She sighed. “I know the proper herbs to be rid of it.”

“Then if you want that, you must take them.”

“Would you despise me for it?”

“Only if you did it for me. No woman should carry if she doesn’t want, can’t bear to. What’s the use of that?” Hephaestion said, “I heard this, in a church once. We come into the world blameless, whoever is father or mother. Even Eve and the Apple, this priest said, can’t mark first innocence. I remember the words—
Vestis pura niveo candore
. The sinless robe, brilliantly white as snow. So if it’s Hadz’s child, even then, it’s—new. New, unmarked snow.”

And later still, when they lay close in their bed of grass, with only the sounds of the donkey grazing and the night moths dusting over the plain, she said this:

“If the child’s his, yet it is mine. The poison almost killed me. It made my breathing invisible, and the beat of my heart—only someone who cared for me could have seen it. You would have done. In a way, you did, in your dreams. But they never knew. They shut me in a box of gems and glass. Yet here I am. And when he did that—to—my mother—I
ƒelt
the child’s life in me, its breath,
its heartbeat. It’s curled up inside me—it’s
mine
—it’s me—another me, myself born again in flesh, yet new and unlike and changed—I’m not a grave—I can give it the world. And I want my child. My motherhood. I want that.”

“Then have that,” he said again. Then: “Coira, will you let it be my child too?”

He knew, he thought, it could not actually be his. He had never sired an infant. But then, according to the talk of Elusion, neither had the tyrant Hadz.

They slept. Stars flew over. The sky grew thin.

Blood, that dye of war and butchery, announced it was also the color of life. It bloomed in Coira’s lips. It dazzled in flowers along the wide, adventurous plain.

Soon the watching mirror saw in the East, that always-rising place of renewals, advents, a brightness like itself. The mirror offered neither question nor reply. The mirror’s dialogues were done.

And when the sun rose, it rose blood-red.

T
here’s a special kinship between the new and gibbous moons; fit them together and they complete a circle. Behind the full moon there’s only the dark, empty sky.

—Mavis HAUT
“Phases of the Moon”
The Necessary Virgin

Nota Bene

Herbs—whether going by recognizable names or not; their preparation and dosage—as mentioned in this book, relate to old texts and methods, and are any way specified only in connection to characters. Needless to say, no prescription should ever be attempted without the guidance of a qualified herbalist or other professional dispenser.

Tor Books by Tanith Lee

Black Unicorn

Gold Unicorn

Red Unicorn

White as Snow

THE FAIRY TALE SERIES
CREATED BY TERRI WINDDLING

ONCE UPON A TIME …

… fairy tales were written for young and old
alike. It is only in the last century that they
have been deemed fit for children
and stripped of much of their original
complexity, sensuality, and power to frighten
and delight.

Tor Books is proud to present the latest
offering in the Fairy Tale series—a
growing library of beautifully designed
original novels by acclaimed writers of fantasy
and horror, each retelling a classic tale
such as Snow White and Rose Red, Briar
Rose, Tam Lin, and others in interesting
—often startling—new ways.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

WHITE AS SNOW

Edited by Terri Windling

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com