The girl leads the way, striding past humped roots and clawing branches, and I follow her without consulting the queen, because it’s not like she’ll let either me or the mirror out of her sight. We haven’t made it ten paces before I hear her stomping and muttering after us.
The woods darken and thicken around us. Briars tug at our clothes and small, slinking creatures rustle just past the bright ring of lantern light. A few reluctant stars blink like filmy eyes through the branches, but the moon refuses to rise.
The young Snow White never slows down or hesitates. I wonder briefly what could scare a kid like this, who walks so fearlessly through the dark, and decide I’d rather not know.
Eventually another light shines through the trees: a pair of lit windows, warm and inviting, wildly out of place in the thorned and twisted wood.
I point Snow White toward the windows. “Okay, there’s probably somebody in there who can help you out. Just do whatever they say and stay away from strangers, and you’ll … be…” I trail away, because there’s a small bird silhouetted in one of the windows, the first we’ve heard or seen all night. Something about the shape of it rings a very distant and unlikely bell in my head.
It flutters toward us and perches directly above me, lit from below by the shuddering yellow of Snow White’s lantern. It fixes me with a single bright and clever eye and I know, suddenly, where I’ve seen this bird before.
I whisper, softly and a little desperately, because this is more than six impossible things and breakfast is still a long way off, “No way.”
But the multiverse in all its infinite weirdness, answers: Yes way.
The door of the hut opens and an old woman stands in the spill of light looking exactly as she did five years ago, when I sat at her table drinking tea with a different Disney princess.
I feel dizzy, suddenly uncertain, as if I might have fallen into the gap between stories and gotten stuck. “Z-Zellandine?”
Zellandine, for her part, does not look even slightly surprised to see me. She points her chin inside the hut and says tiredly, “Well, come on, then.”
5
IT’S THE YOUNG Snow White who moves first. She strides into the fairy’s house with a stiff spine and an expression suggesting that nothing in front of her could possibly be worse than whatever’s behind her. Zellandine welcomes her with a grandmotherly nod, gesturing to a seat around the table. There’s a rightness to the shape they make against the light, two silhouettes repeated in a thousand variations of a thousand stories: the old woman welcoming the weary traveler, the witch inviting the child inside, the fairy godmother sheltering the maiden.
Then Zellandine turns back to us and the rightness vanishes. We eye one another—three straying characters who have run off the rails of their own stories and collided in someone else’s—before Zellandine grimaces as if to say What a mess, and chucks her head toward the other three chairs around the table.
Her hut is exactly as I remember it, cottagecore with a witchy edge, blue-glass bottles on the shelves and herbs strung before a crackling fireplace. The only difference is that the kitchen table has four chairs now, and four cups of tea on mismatched saucers.
We sip our tea in uncertain silence, not looking at one another. Zellandine butters bread and sets it in front of our Snow White, who eats with the determined efficiency of someone who doesn’t turn down free calories. In the fuller light of the hut she looks even younger than I thought, her cheeks still gently rounded, but she lacks a little kid’s wide-eyed trust. Her expression is closed and watchful, precocious in the bleak, uncanny way of a child who has spent too much time thinking about how and when she’ll die. It’s the expression I’m wearing in every one of my school photos.
“You’ll find a bed made, upstairs,” Zellandine tells her gently.
Snow White’s eyes cut to the bright-lit windows, shining like beacons into the black sea of trees, and Zellandine adds, even more gently, “I’ll keep watch tonight.”
Snow White nods in grave thanks, one hand on her chest, then repeats the motion to me and—after a moment’s hesitation—the queen. The queen’s eyes widen very slightly. I suppose wicked stepmothers aren’t often thanked.
Zellandine clears the cups as Snow White climbs the steps to the loft, which I’m 98 percent sure didn’t exist the last time I had tea in this hut. “There are three beds up there,” Zellandine observes.
The queen makes a visible effort to un-slump herself from the table. “I thank you, but I’m afraid Zinnia and I must be on our way.” Her tone aspires toward chilly rebuke, but lands closer to very tired.