Snow White has been eating her oats in determined silence, looking at the windows as if she’s waiting for something to emerge from the trees. At the sound of my voice, she flinches so badly she sends her bowl shattering to the floor. She doesn’t seem to notice, crouching in her chair with her eyes pinned on me.
“Oh, my bad,” I say mildly. “Is that not your name?”
She answers slowly, as if she half expects me to sprout fangs and pounce. “No. You don’t—” Her eyes narrow, moving from my face to my jeans to the backpack propped against my chair. “You’re not … from here, are you?”
“Nope. I’m an interdimensional tourist, just passing through.”
She stares for another long, hard second before saying tersely, “My name is Red.”
“Huh.” There are several Red-variants running through Western folklore—Rose Red and Little Red, for a start—but I’m not sure what any of them would be doing in a Snow White story. （Yes, there is technically a Grimm story titled “Snow-White and Rose-Red,” but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the other Snow White; yes, it is very confusing. Take it up with Jacob and Wilhelm.）
Well. The name Snow White always had uncomfortable implications about racialized standards of beauty; maybe in this world, her mother named her for the drop of blood, rather than the snow it fell on.
“Hi, Red.” I say it as comfortingly as I can, which isn’t very. “You should be safe now. Zellandine is a powerful fairy, and she’ll keep you hidden from your wicked stepmother.”
Red’s eyebrows scrunch together. “My what?”
“Or mother, or sister, or whoever—”
“Perhaps,” Zellandine suggests, with a touch of asperity, “the girl could tell her own story.”
After a beat, during which I stick my tongue out at Zellandine and the queen sighs as if she regrets every decision that led her to be sitting at this table, Red does. It takes approximately two sentences to confirm that we are very, very far from the singing woodland creatures and flower-strewn forests of Disney. We’re not even in one of the Grimms’ bloody fantasies, with their violent morality; we’re someplace darker and wilder and much older, where the villain has a terrible hunger, and the hero is the one who survives it.
Red, it turns out, is not a princess. She’s a shepherd’s daughter from a poor village at the edge of the woods. Every winter, the queen sends her hunters to snatch the strongest and healthiest children and drag them back to her lair.
“Nobody knows what she does with them. Ivy says she gives them candies and jewels, but Ivy’s stupid.” Red’s voice is flat and even. “I think she plucks out their hearts and eats them. Either way, nobody ever sees them again.”
A small, appalled silence follows this. It’s the queen—Eva, I suppose, since she’s not the queen of anything around here, and the name seems to annoy her so deeply—who speaks first. “But why would she do that?”
Red gives her a look suggesting the cannibal queen’s personal motivations are fairly low on her list of concerns. Zellandine speculates about the latent magical properties of innocent hearts and the power that could theoretically be gained through ingestion, but I miss most of it because I’m busy hissing back and forth with Eva. （“Hold up, Miss Moral High Ground, didn’t you ask for Snow White’s lungs and liver?” “Yes, but I wasn’t going to eat them! I’m not depraved!”）
I shush Eva, which she visibly hates, and turn back to Red. “And your family, your parents—they just let her take you?” I consider Red’s hair, pulled away from her face in pretty twists, and remember my dad braiding my hair every day before school, his fingers gentle. Someone must love her. “They didn’t fight for you?”
Eva makes a scathing noise that tells me more than I wanted to know about her own parents, but Red answers with a soft and terrible brevity. “They did.”
Eva seems to be struggling with something, her lips working until she says, almost angrily, “Why don’t you all leave? Or hide?”
“She always finds you,” Red says, her voice still soft. “She talks to the moon, people say, or maybe a magic mirror. And then…” Her eyes flick to the window again, and this time the warm brown of her skin goes ashen. “And then her huntsman come to fetch you.”
There’s something funny about the grammar of that sentence, but it’s only when I hear the crunch of many pairs of boots through the woods, then the thud of many fists on the door, that I understand I misheard her. She didn’t say huntsman, with a singular A; she said huntsmen.