In the moment before hands close around my arms and my phone is dashed to the floor, crashing into a dozen useless plastic pieces, and this shitty story takes me in its jaws again, I manage to type nine characters and press send: atu 709 sos
7
A CONFESSION: I was totally expecting her to be ugly. Which is pretty fucked up of me, but in my defense, Western folklore persistently and falsely equates a character’s physical appearance with their inner morality, so like, it was a pretty safe bet that the evil cannibal queen would look like Anjelica Huston after she peels off her mask in The Witches.
But when her goons wrench my arms behind my back and spin me to face her, it turns out she’s not ugly at all. She is, in fact, one of the least ugly things I’ve ever seen （yes, including Prim, who is so beautiful that people squint and blink when they talk to her, like they’re trying to have a conversation with the sun）。 The queen is young and doe-eyed, with long, soft lashes and gently rounded cheeks. Her skin is the phosphorescent white of a Renaissance angel, and her lips are a bright, arterial red, as if she’s just eaten a bowl of fresh cherries or, perhaps, the raw hearts of stolen children.
I think, intelligently: Huh. And then I think, slightly more intelligently, my stomach sinking fast: I know who you are. “You’re—Snow White!” I’m aiming for a nice j’accuse! moment, but it’s clear from the expressions around me that I’m literally the only person who didn’t know.
Snow White smiles at me. It’s a very good smile, sweet as springtime, but her voice is pure ice. “You may address me as Your Majesty.”
My eyes move of their own accord to Eva. She’s putting up a much better fight than me, struggling against three huntsmen as they wrestle her wrists behind her back. One of them knocks the backs of her legs and sends her crashing to her knees. Another buries his fist in her hair and wrenches her face upward, baring the fragile column of her throat. She doesn’t look much like a queen compared to Snow White—her face is hard and plain and a little too old, her teeth bared in bitter fury—but looking at her, I feel a big, weird rush of loyalty.
“Sorry,” I tell Snow White. “I’ve already got one of those.”
Snow White’s sweet smile doesn’t falter when she orders her men to strip us of our belongings and lock us up, awaiting punishment for our crimes against queen and country.
So here I am, in the dungeons again. Naturally.
I’ve seen a decent number of dungeons in the last five years, but these are among the least pleasant. It’s the meaty smell of human remains, probably, or maybe the gelatinous burble of the sewers beneath us, or maybe the extreme unlikelihood of our escape. Both our arms are shackled above us and the huntsmen took everything up to, and partially including, our clothes. I’m barefoot and hoodie-less, shivering sporadically in my T-shirt, and Eva’s kidney-colored gown is gone. All she’s wearing now is one of those shapeless, colorless under-dresses that I’m pretty sure is called a shift, or maybe a chemise, laced up the front with a limp green ribbon. It ought to be at least a little bit sexy, but it just makes her look small and vulnerable, like something recently shelled.
“Okay, so.” I cough wetly. “That could have gone better.”
Eva’s head is tilted back against the wall, her eyes closed. She doesn’t respond, so I add a small, insufficient, “Sorry.”
She exhales in the manner of someone who is counting slowly to ten before replying. “You’re sorry.” Her eyes are still closed. “You forced me to accompany you on a mad, doomed mission to rescue a girl I barely know who didn’t even need rescuing. You promised me a way out and I risked everything to get it, as I always do—” She pauses, perhaps to count to ten again. “And now I’ll die, just like I was always going to. But you—you’re sorry.”
“I mean, I’m also going to die, by the way.” Well, probably, depending on how pissed Charm is, and whether she remembers the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index, and whether I can get my hands on the damn mirror again. “So yeah, I’m sorry. But honestly, it feels like you’re failing to take responsibility for your own actions here? Like, maybe if you hadn’t decided to murder a kid for the crime of being hotter than you, everything would’ve turned out great. You could’ve lived to a ripe old age in your own world.” I try and fail to keep a green thread of envy out of my voice. I can’t imagine the privilege of a long life, but I know I wouldn’t waste it with petty, vaguely un-feminist villainy. I’d—