I snap the sentence in half, but the images come anyway, unbidden: Mom’s roses blushing in spring, family game night, Charm forcing us all to get matching tattoos on her thirtieth birthday. And—maybe, someday—a place of my own: a houseplant, or even a pet, a daily commute, a savings account because I would have something to save for. A whole life that I’d never have to leave.
I’m breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, trying not to cry, when Eva says dismissively, “You don’t know what happened.”
I lose the pattern of my calm breathing. “You know that red book of fairy tales you found? It belongs to me—belonged, I guess, since you left it behind in your stupid world. My dad gave it to me when I was a kid and I read it at least fifty times and then got a folklore degree and read it fifty more times. I promise, I know how the story goes.”
“Of course you do,” Eva says to the ceiling. Her voice is mocking, almost smug, as if no one could possibly understand her.
“Hey, I’ve got nothing but time.” I try to spread my arms invitingly and succeed only in rattling my chains. “If you want to give me a long, sympathetic speech about your motivations, be my fucking guest.”
Eva answers whip-fast and vicious. “Or maybe you could just think for two consecutive seconds. My Snow White was a pretty little girl who sang to songbirds and trusted old women selling apples. I am a witch and a queen who has devoted her life to the accumulation of power. If I’d wanted to kill her, don’t you think she would be dead?”
I open my mouth, and then close it slowly. Fairy tales are riddled with illogical coincidences and obvious plot holes, but most of us learn to skip over them, like you skip the squeaky step on the staircase. “Okay, I’ll play,” I say. “Why didn’t you kill her?”
Eva is looking at me now, her mouth framed by those bitter lines, her freckles like pinpricks of blood in the dim light. “Because I didn’t want to. She was only a child, and I’m not a monster.” A defiant lift of her chin. “But I couldn’t allow her to stay, either. She was the king’s only legitimate heir, and I’d failed to give him any others. After he died, but before she came of age … I had power. Real power—not whispers behind the throne or politicking in the shadows, like my mother had before me. I alone sat on the throne, I alone wore the crown. I was the queen.”
It’s the kind of line the scheming, power-mad queen might deliver in a fantasy novel, but Eva doesn’t look mad. She looks wistful and sad, like a woman recalling the golden days of her youth. “And I knew all of it would vanish the second my stepdaughter married. Or maybe sooner—there were already nasty rumors that I was a witch rather than a woman, that I’d murdered Snow White’s father.”
“But, like…” I run my tongue over my bottom lip, trying to decide if there’s a tactful way to ask and resolving that there isn’t. “Did you?”
Her shoulders move in what I interpret as a shrug, although it’s hard to tell at this angle. “Yes.”
“Why?”
Eva’s eyes harden. “I already told you. Everything I did, I did to survive.” Her lashes shutter. “My husband married me because I was young and he needed heirs. When I failed to give him any, he was…” A hideous, weighty pause here. “… Displeased.”
Oh, Jesus. I’m suddenly sick of these faux-medieval worlds and their shitty gender politics, all the pretty stories we tell about ugly worlds. A terrible sympathy crawls up my throat and lodges there, just behind my tongue. “You’ve used that word twice now. Failed.” I fumble in my grab bag of therapist terminology and emerge with a pathetic “You didn’t fail.”
Eva has met my insults and jabs with bared teeth, but now, when my voice is low and sincere, she flinches. “What would you know about it?”
I meet her eyes. “Well, for starters, I can’t. Get pregnant, I mean.” She stares at me for a long time, her eyes wide and suspiciously glassy. I give her my best manacled shrug, because she strikes me as the kind of person who would be forced to kill me if I saw her cry. “Bodies are a real roll of the fucking dice, dude.”
She swallows. “They—yes.” She swallows again, visibly compartmentalizing, wrenching her story back on the rails. “Anyway. The princes began to arrive before she was fifteen. They lounged around my castle, eating from my table while they wooed my stepchild and plotted to take my throne. She was so young … but they came anyway. Every hungry second son who wanted a kingdom of his own.”