Snow (21 page)

Snow thought the comparison a bit overdone, but it was interesting to hear the usually concise duchess wax eloquent.

“In my madness, I believed that eating your heart would enable me to have a baby,”

Snow choked.

“And for that, I am terribly sorry,”

The duchess could have been talking about how she had punished Snow unjustly, or told a vicious lie about her, or any one of a number of more prosaic things.

“But understand this: As mad as I was, there is some truth in what I am about to tell you,” Anne leaned forward. Her eyes were cold, “My desperation to have a child, my obsession with my looks—these are merely a mirror for society at large.
Society
has
only two uses for women: as young and beautiful things, and as baby machines. You are only wanted or useful as long as you fill one of those two roles.”

“That’s not true,” Snow blurted out. “Women are wanted for the same thing as men—to be kind, to be wise, to work hard—”

“Maybe in a perfect world, Jessica, but not here. Not now”

“What about your experiments? What about yourself, Anne? You have done great things—”

“All of which I have had to keep secret or publish under a man’s name.!” the duchess hissed. “Like Georges Sand, Margaret Murray Huggins, Nettie Stevens—all in the shadow of their husbands or of fake masculine names.”

“What
is
your latest work, there?” Snow asked pleasantly, trying to change the subject. She stirred her tea neatly and delicately, the way she knew the duchess liked. Inside, her mind was racing.
I don’t think she is completely cured, after all There is something broken there
. She didn’t disagree with anything the other woman had said, but the look in her eye as she said it was mad.

She had chosen the right subject. The duchess’s eyes lit up and she smiled.

“Ahhh. I’m glad you asked. This fits right into our discussion.” She indicated the golden orb that had been sitting tantalizingly close to Snow. “Pick it up.”

An inkling of doubt slowed Snows hand, but she reached for it anyway.

“It’s too late for me to have children, and perhaps too late to remain as beautiful as I once was,” the duchess said, “But not for you”

“Why do you care about remaining beautiful?” Snow asked distractedly, turning the orb over in her hands. It was warm, not quite the temperature of flesh, and very pleasant to hold.
Rather like a skull,
she thought despite herself. “Father loves you”

“Perhaps, But you do not know your father very well”

“What do you mean that its not too late for me?” Snow suddenly asked, looking up from the golden ball.

The duchess smiled, and hit a switch.

T
he orb grew hot, but she was unable to let go. Licks of invisible flames climbed up Snow’s arms.

“My latest experiment—the
chronofin
. I realize the mixing of languages is a little gauche,
chronos
from the Greek for ‘time’and
fin
from the French for ‘end,’ but it has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

The flames crawled up her neck, through her scalp and into her head. She felt her hair being lifted and separated by forces she couldn’t see. Her mind slowed down and could not force her mouth to move, but one overriding thought was clear:
She is mad. She is
still
mad
.

“There are energies coursing through your body now, fixing it. They are putting a halt to the things that age us; they are cleansing your body of any traces of time. Your humours will be filtered, your muscles and filaments washed clean.”

The duchesss spoke casually, but her eyes were intently watching Snow for some outward signs or symptoms.

Snow concentrated on her hands, willing them to open, to drop the golden orb. She saw her fingers twitch, but that was all. She couldn’t move her neck and had to strain her eyes to see.

“I really hope this works,” the duchess said, with just a touch of nervousness. “Then you shall be always as you are now—a young, beautiful woman. That should more than make up for my violence toward you in the past.”

While the thought of remaining young forever was of passing interest to Snow, still she panicked. A woman who thought that eating someone elses heart would confer upon her the victims youth and abilities would obviously not make a very good scientist. Ever, Snow wondered if she was going to die. The licks of heat and tingles of things she couldn’t see came down through her head like she was fainting, and cricked her neck. Horrible things like ants crawled over her eyeballs, which she was no longer able to move. She was forced to stare at the duchess.

“And if it
doesn’t
work—it seems to be taking longer than it should—well, then at least you are a link in the chain of progress. Better you than me, as it were.”

The duchess rose and moved out of Snows vision. She could hear clicks and whirs as the older woman adjusted dials and knobs. She tried to scream, forceing herself so hard she thought she would wet herself, but nothing happened. The flames ran down her throat. In their wake they left a deep peace, a silence after the fire, buzzing, and storm. An absence of feeling.

The duchess moved back into her sight.

“It should be done by now.” She clicked her
tongue in exasperation, a habit Snow had never seen before, “Katherine!” she called.

The old house woman shuffled into view, and from her walk Snow suddenly realized why she had seemed so familiar.

The woman from the orphanage!
she realized. Her thoughts were muzzy and circuitous, like the moments just before sleep.
But the orphanage isn’t here, is it? And shouldn’t she be running it …?

There is no orphanage. It was a trick. The woman is just the duchess’s servant. It was all a trick to lure me here. There was no trip to a sanitarium, no doctor from Prussia. No one hack home knows what she tried to do to me.

But why me? Why not some other victim?

How did she find me?

How did she find me?

How did she find me …

The duchess was giving orders.

“We must go to their—
lair
—immediately. Whether or not this” she said, indicating Snow, “works, I can give her a cantrip that will cloud her mind and leave her a fuzzy memory of what occurred. But if it fails, this might be our only chance to catch them,”

Lair?

The Lonely Ones?
She knows about them?

Her legs burned with the remaining fires, but the rest of her was dead with lethargy. She could not even feel the orb anymore; her skin was dead. The cold followed, closing around her eyes with a will to sleep….

The duchess turned to her.

“I think we can call this a failure« I was really hoping it would work, and you would thank me, and I could use it on myself safely; and we would all live happily ever after» Alas, I think we had just better make you forget about everything, just in case you actually ever recover.” The older woman took a forked golden wire and stuck two of the ends into her own mouth so they hung out the sides of her lips. Snow couldn’t see what she did with the other metal tail. The duchess’s tongue stuck out a little, and she lisped a strange language.

Snow strained to listen, but she was already falling asleep. Her vision dimmed, but she couldn’t tell if it was from her lids closing or from something scarier.

Have to stay awake! Must warn …

The duchess was rolling her sleeves up, and she put her glasses down on the table. “I’ll be back in an hour. If you re dead,” she said, frowning, “well—we’ll give you a proper burial, back home, I promise. The streets of London can be so cruel….”

And Snow was alone.

She thought; she silently screamed.

Minutes or seconds passed. She tried to blink.

Shadows flowed into the room.

Everything was still.

Cat’s face appeared before her.

“She’sss not talking,” Snow heard the familiar hiss, “Hey, wake up!”

Snow felt vague echoes of taps as Cat slapped her on the cheeks, and slight tremors as she shook her.

“Hey!” Cat began to panic. Her claws came out, and she scratched Snow across the face, near her mouth.

The pain finally came through. It wasn’t as searing as the flames that put her to sleep, but it was enough to stir her.

“Stop it, Cat!” That was Raven’s voice. “You’ll hurt her!” His face appeared before Snow, pushing Cats out of the way. The world spun; she was vaguely able to tell that he was cradling her in his arms.“Snow?”

“Hideout … danger …” It took all of her will.

“What? What are you talking about?” In the background, Cat was blurrily wrestling with the cords attached to the orb.

“Go home,”
Snow! wheezed. “Duchess … destroy …”

“Stay awake! Snow! Cat—go back. Ill take care of Snow. Warn the others—”

Cat looked unsure for a second, then scampered away, fully cat, little human.

“Snow …?” Raven stroked her hair.

And the world went black.

Sleeping; Waking Up

S
he slept.

Once upon a time a queen and a king had a baby girl whose skin was as white as snow, lips as red as blood, hair as black as the windowpane. They named her Jessica, and raised her with wisdom and love. She never married, but took care of her parents when they grew old, inherited the kingdom, and ruled as wisely as she had been raised.

Once upon a time a woman bore a child whose skin was as pale as snow, hair as black as death, eyes as red as blood. The mother howled with pain and fury; the father did his duty and dashed the monster to the ground, grinding its head under his heel.

Once upon a time a wicked stepmother had a daughter who was not hers. Understanding the inevitable confusion, the king arranged to have the baby exposed on a nearby mountainside. Unbeknownst to him, however, the child was adopted by a family of woodland creatures: a cat, a sparrow, a mouse, a rat, and a raven. Together they lived in the wild until they were old enough to build a house. And there they lived happily until their end of days.

* * * *

Once upon a time a girl got caught in a snowstorm.

“These snowflakes aren’t real” she said, catching one and shaking her head.

“Come on,” said her brother the fiddler, all bundled up against the cold. He held out his hand. “I’ll help you. Mum’s going to make us a big pot of stew when we get home. Rabbit, your favorite.”

The girl took his hand, ignoring the white world and trudging along behind him. His hand was very warm.

A young woman sat on a rooftop, talking to a raven.

“As far as Constantinople, well, I’ve never been,” it was saying.

“But we weren’t talking about that,” she said.

“I wish I could fly,” the raven said sadly.

“Jess, look,” the boy said.

He had dark eyes and eyebrows, and leaned in to reveal the secret the bird would not tell her. His lips were warm and brushed against her ear. Then he laughed, loudly—it was a prince with blond hair and blue eyes. She screamed and threw herself from the roof, falling … falling …