Authors: Tanith Lee

White As Snow (Fairy Tale) (13 page)

BOOK: White As Snow (Fairy Tale)

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I
F THE SORCEROUS LOOKING GLASS looked out to find the first Full Moon of winter, did it also see, that night, an image and that image’s reflection, curiously moving—not toward each other—but one following the other, with the spaces of the dark between?

Traces of mauve winter sunset still lit the sky. Candacis saw them, and the coming nightfall, and excitement sang through her after all. She had lived nearly like a nun, domestically, routinely. But she was young, and here was change, and unknown things.

Ulvit took her through corridors, along back stairs, across a part of the elder palace. Then a broken staircase went lurching down, between terraces of orchards where, in summer, sheep and goats grazed, but now the orchards were vacant and bare. Frost sugared the boughs on which oranges had burned and lay like silver dust on the turf.

They passed through lower savage gardens. Statues glimmered with their own luminescence. The sun was down, the moon not risen. Branches and fronds dipped low.

“There’s viper’s root that takes off pain. And Moly, that enchantresses use at the moon’s waning.”

Nothing bore flowers in the winter cold. The hints of whiteness were only from phosphorous over stone. But berries grew on briars, purple-black and scarlet. Candacis heard the wind’s slow scythe, and in its intervals, the sea.

Torches like summer poppies stood high in the meadow. Laughing girls gathered round Candacis, giving her their names, nodding or bobbing to her, because, Candacis assumed, they knew her to be Draco’s daughter. Even in the palace, she sometimes had such courtesies. Indifferent yet gracious, Candacis acknowledged them.

They crowned her with ilex, the dark green spikes catching in her long, loose hair. Under her winter cloak: the samite gown, the necklace of gold. But these girls too had on their best, and were crowned with garlands. She made nothing of it. Besides, she quite liked the laughter, the red warmth of the torches shining on all the faces, as they ran now up the hill.

When she stared in at the window of the mirror, the mirror returned her stare, as it always did.

The mirror had heard her mumbling a chant her nurse had sung, in her father’s castle.

Mirror, mirror, tell me true—
Who is the fairest?
It is you.

Queen Arpazia had brushed the black kohl into her lashes and brows, and touched her lips with the rosy salve. Her hair hung in a raven’s wing across her gown of black velvet. It was her grandest dress. Prince Tusaj had sent it to her at the summer’s end. He had been honoring her birthday, having somehow learned its date. Arpazia herself had forgotten.

Torches came and went in the early dusk. Arpazia took a torch in her hand, as she had to on such dark nights since she never chose an attendant to accompany her. And by now, all Belgra Demitu was accustomed to seeing Draco’s castoff queen maundering about the palace, the countryside, and the town.

She slunk through the garden by her former apartment (who lived there now?), the way she always went to the woods. She opened the garden’s door and trod down the broken old stair which, with ten further years, had grown worse; whole chunks of it pushed out and rolled away, and a poplar seeded in the seventieth step.

When Arpazia moved off the stair, and got down through the wild gardens, she had a dreamlike sense of recognition. She knew the route well by now, through all four seasons, and at most times of evening and night—or dawn, when she came back. It was not that.

Among the tall plants, the bare white nightshade, the frost-limned hemlock trees, Arpazia turned and peered at the lighted palace above.

Once before she had descended like this, in darkness, a torch held high in her hand, and with just this ominous awareness of searching and loss … It had been a dream, the dream after childbirth, but she did not know that. She gazed about inside her brain,
and not finding what she sought, turned again and went on.

Where the stones had stood, the lewd statue had long since toppled, or been overgrown. She walked along the avenue of cypresses. They pressed closer now.

Beyond, the meadow was empty.

An icy wind was blowing, and the high grass rushed like tides. Above, the stars blinked blue between thin clouds.

Mirror, mirror, tell me true—

Arpazia climbed toward the woods. The hillside drummed as if others had been running over it not long since.

In her head, she began to hear the voice of the priest she had not listened to, shouting about poisoned fruit. And then instead she heard the old castle priest of her childhood, who said, unhappily, “We are
born
clean, and white as snow, but go to our ends in garments all red and black with sin.”

Then, as the ascent became more demanding, Arpazia did not hear either of the voices. She was intent on the slope, which seemed tonight far steeper than she recollected.

By the waterfall in the woods, Candacis paused a short while. The fountain shone into her eyes, so they sparkled.

As she and Ulvit continued, a badger rambled across their path, a beast of two kinds, its bundled body and striped serpentine head at odds.

Birds pattered above in the cold cages of the trees. This year, hardly any leaves had been left; only the needled pines, the larches, the flagged hemlock, the spurs of the ilex, to hold off so much sky.

The moon showed late. She was a hunter’s moon, ripe like a peach.

On the lawn between the tree trunks, great bonfires blazed. The gathering there made way for Ulvit, and the maiden. Candacis saw how some bowed to her, some dipped their eyes. She was not afraid of these people, did not hate or scorn them. Others were real enough to her, and she was seldom unkind. She would hurt none,
if she could help it, for she knew what being hurt entailed. Nor would she love a single thing.

But the sacred and uncanny wood,
that
did command her emotional attention. She felt again an intimation of what she had felt here in childhood, the sharp tremor of electric fear that was not fear at all.

Arpazia, passing the natural fountain, stayed a few seconds to look down into the basin of the water. She saw her own figure, but could not make out her face. Perhaps because of this, the reflection did not seem to be her own, but that of another, left behind.

A white owl skimmed high between the open boughs,. As she went on, a fox screamed miles away but sounding near as her left hand.

The torch cast fire and shadow-shapes everywhere, as if she were one of a score of women. Then the fires of the avenue grew visible, and she saw the dancers were already making their patterns there. And the yellow moon stared.

Go down and dance then. Find some new rough lover, let him roll you in the grass, you slut, like his sow.

“Hush,” Arpazia said aloud to the reviling voice in her head.

But, Why else are you here? What else are you seeking? The disgusting game foul Draco taught you—was that why you never escaped him? You wanted what he did? If he were here, wouldn’t you gladly welcome him? You whore. You would be better off dead.

Dancing, the fingers of Candacis met with those of young men, and mature men, and old men. And, going another way, of women—also youthful, mature, and old. Ulvit had taught her the dances of the court and the wood. Candacis, so graceful, liked to dance.

Soon, in the hot firelight, she pushed off her cloak, as others did; and the white dress rang out like a clear bell.

“Oh, my darling sweet,” a young man breathed to her as they
clasped hands for an instant. Her face was not unfriendly, only grave, and did not alter. She was not insulted, nor enthused. Another man whispered, “I’d die for one kiss, White Queen.” Her face was grave. The same.

The line of dancers swung aside, Candacis with them. She turned to the women’s side in the dance, and one by one they went by each other, hands and skirts brushing over and away. Maidens and matrons and grannies. Some were bare-breasted under the moon, on naked feet. It was not indecorous, here.

There was one woman—there, all in black, her cloak, her gown, which was a rich one, and her long hair.

As she drew nearer, and Candacis. nearer to her, the girl saw this woman was vastly strange, beautiful and terrible like the winter wood, and the firelight found after all a tinsel-white tracery in her hair, as if the frost had scorched it.

Hands met, and parted. Candacis arrived before the woman. They were of equal height. Extraordinary eyes were fixed on her own.

Hands touched. Her hand was narrow and chill, lifeless. It had three rings that clinked together, as if grown slightly too big.

In the dance, Candacis must slide by. The woman slid away.

Two faces, both the same. The lips drawn in, the eyes wide and set like ice.

Then, both turning, to look back, and the eyes clashing against each other with a flash.

Candacis moved out of the dance, and looked up and down for Ulvit. But Ulvit was not to be seen. the Woman too had left the dance. She stood under a tree and stared on at Candacis, as Candacis stared.

The image and its reflection. But which was which?

An awful sensation, like a well of tears about to burst, but reasonless, for they felt nothing, either of them, for the other, except a confusion worse than heartbreak.

Candacis thought,
Why is the queen here? Why didn’t Ulvit warn me of this?

How could it be she had never seen her, through all these ten years, not once in the byways of the palace or the town, on the terraces, in the orchards? Not once even in the great Church of St. Belor, to which every Christian, even the pagan sort, must go?

Oh, they had seen each other. But expurgated each other, not
known
each other. Not until this hour in the wood, beneath the Scorpion Moon.

It was the moonlight. It was Time. Candacis had become herself, and Arpazia lost herself entirely.

Like two awesome planets they gleamed, ray into ray, and the dancing unraveled between them.

Just then the moon marked the end of the avenue, and a being appeared there.

It was the King of the Wood, Orion the Hunter, Dianus, Klymeno, in his winter robe of blood and diadem of bramble and berries.

Arpazia became aware of him first, and her eyes left the mirror image of her daughter. She scanned the Hunter King and knew he was no longer hers. Indeed, it was shown to her very clearly. For it was to her other self he went, the maiden in her white. And he took her hand, and Candacis was gazing up at him, for a moment overwhelmed because here was her memoried dream.

He led her away, toward the boulder thrones. King and Queen.

The Woods People followed, leaving the castoff queen to stand there by her winter tree.

How is she alive? I had her killed.

The Hunter King was bearded, good-looking enough, but nothing like her lover. This did not matter, then?

Yes, but it did.

Arpazia dragged herself after the others, to watch from the edge of the grove.

So she saw them seated on the boulders which were thrones. She saw her daughter’s face had regained its gravity. If she did not mind any of this, she did not thrill to it. (Candacis had swiftly seen this king was not the one she recalled.)

Would this girl let him have her, after? As Arpazia had. As Klymeno had done. Would this one lead that girl into the depths of the trees? Tonight there would be a sacrifice. Already they were bringing the creature to their altar, this year not a boar, but a calf, black for Hadz. Drugged, it was gentle and not distressed.

When the king efficiently killed it, and made the vows and offering to the god of the dead, Arpazia saw that Candacis did not flinch or look away, though she grew incredibly pale. A true queen. A dutiful
^-queen.

Presently the king brought her the revolting bowl of lights and blood, and the girl tasted of it—gravely, still.

Arpazia decided he would have the girl in the wood. Yes. It did not occur to her Candacis might say no.

A wolf was howling miles off, but close as Arpazia’s heart. The moon pushed up out of the blood and offal, stained.

But
she,
the human moon, was beautiful, and the blood had not splashed her at all.

Gold glowed at her unlined throat. The necklace was familiar to Arpazia. Once it had been hers. Draco had taken it, given it back. Then she gave it to a carter … in the town. But here it was again, on her daughter’s neck.

Why was she so beautiful? Why was she so young?

She is me. I am there, not here.

BOOK: White As Snow (Fairy Tale)

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