The queen watches me count pills into my palm. “What is the nature of this … illness?”
I swallow a lump of steroids and blood thinners. “Did you read that whole book of fairy tales?”
A regal nod.
I make a ta-da gesture at my own chest. “You’re looking at the protagonist of a bleak contemporary version of Aarne-Thompson tale type 410.” My smile tastes bitter. “Little Brier-Rose.”
“The … protagonist?”
“The main character. In ‘Little Brier-Rose,’ the protagonist is Brier-Rose.”
The queen breathes an ah of understanding. She steeples her fingers and says delicately, “In that case, I would imagine you would have a certain sympathy with my situation—”
I cut her off. “And the book. Where’d you get that?”
She’s visibly annoyed now, the edges of her innocent act fraying badly, but her voice is still measured. “It appeared three days ago on my shelf.”
“No shit?”
Her brows lower several centimeters, in offense or worry. “It is not the only strange appearance in recent months. The cook found a golden egg in the belly of a goose she cut open for dinner, and a fortnight ago, the huntsman said he met a wolf in the woods.”
“I mean, isn’t that where wolves should be?”
“It…” The queen looks pained. “Spoke to him.”
“Huh.” Am I in some kind of fairy tale mash-up? Is Chris Pine about to pop out and sing Sondheim lyrics in a confused accent?
The queen gathers herself with the expression of a woman who is determined to regain the reins of the conversation. “People do not like strange things. Golden eggs, talking wolves … They are seen as ill omens, portents. Acts of witchcraft.” Her eyes flicker. “They will soon want a witch to burn.”
I make a show of looking around her workroom, with its skulls and pestles and unpleasant things floating in jars. “They won’t have to look very hard, will they?”
A flat look. “Quite. And if that book is to be believed, the people will get exactly what they want. You understand why I want out.”
And honestly, I do. I’ve spent most of my life trying to dodge the third act of my story, and the rest of it trying to save other sleeping beauties from theirs; I know exactly how it feels to find yourself hurtling toward a horrible ending.
The difference is what Dr. Bastille would call an issue of agency. I steeple my fingers. “Or—and I know this is a big leap for you—you could just stop trying to murder your stepdaughter. It would save everyone a lot of grief.”
The queen’s face flattens further, her mouth a grim red slash.
“Ah, I see. The chickens are already on their way back home to roost, then. How long has Snow White been in her glass coffin?”
The lips peel reluctantly apart. “A long time.”
“Bummer.” I throw the word at her with the same pitiless stare she gave me.
She doesn’t seem to find it as flattering as I did, because she says in a harsh monotone, “And do you know how my story ends?”
I elect not to explain about institutions of higher education and the department of folklore. “Snow White marries the prince who fell in love with a dead child in the woods—I mean, my story is yikes, but that’s double, maybe triple yikes—and they live happily ever after.”
“My story, I said.” Her lips twist in an expression that’s only distantly related to a smile and her voice acquires the stilted rhythm of recitation. “Then they put a pair of iron shoes into burning coals—”
“You don’t have to—”
“They were brought forth with tongs and placed before her. She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead.” She stares hard at me when she finishes, the lines on either side of her mouth like a pair of bleak parentheses.
I stare back, trying not to look grossed out. “Sure, yeah, the German peasantry liked a good comeuppance.” Or at least, the Grimms did. There were plenty of other stories floating around the European countryside at the time—weirder, darker, stranger, sexier stories—but the Grimms weren’t anthropologists. They were nationalists trying to build an orderly, modern house out of the wild bones of folklore.
“And you think that’s justice? That I should die dancing in red-hot shoes?” The queen’s voice is trembling very slightly, her fingers curling into the wooden arms of her chair.
“No, I mean, I’m not a capital punishment person—my mom’s into the prison abolition movement”—she’s into all kinds of activism these days, as if all the energy she’d been reserving to hate Big Energy on my behalf had been redistributed to every other modern supervillain—“but this feels like a ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’ situation, you know?”