Eva shrugs, performatively careless. “Why not? I would have.”
“But like, you didn’t. You could have, but you chose to stay.” Which means an actual storybook villain has more moral fiber than I do, apparently. “Anyway, Charm pulled me through the mirror. I wouldn’t have left you there, I swear.”
Eva looks away and says quietly, “I know.” She looks back. “Maybe that’s why I stayed.” The intensity of the eye contact following this statement makes me think she doesn’t hate my guts at all, actually, and if the multiverse stopped breaking and people stopped attacking us for a minute we could do a lot better than a couple of hurried, clumsy kisses.
“Here, sit down.” Eva gestures to a second chair. She isn’t blushing, but her throat is pinker than I remember it being. “If you’d stayed another thirty seconds or so, you would have seen Red and her people storm the courtyard, cast Snow White’s crown into the fire, and declare the glorious revolution.”
I blink a few times. I’m not sure any version of Snow White ends with an anti-royalist uprising. “No shit?”
“None whatsoever. Apparently, her parents were highly placed in the revolutionary movement, and Red convinced them to accelerate their plans on our behalf.” Eva’s smile is small and wry. “It never occurred to me that the person you save might save you in turn. Perhaps survival is less solitary than I’d thought.”
I think of Charm and Prim, who saved me, who are still hoping I’ll stick around and hold up my half of the bargain. “That’s been my experience, yeah.” My voice sounds thick in my ears.
“I believe they’ll crown Red as their new queen soon. I mean, I overheard some very dense discussion of the monarchy as a symbolic rather than political position, and something about a body of elected representatives, which all sounds rather messy, but”—Eva shrugs—“I suppose it’s close enough. The innocent girl sits upon her throne, the wicked witch is dead.”
“Is she? Dead, I mean.”
Eva looks at my face and then quickly away. “No,” she says softly. “I don’t know how her story will end, or whether redemption is possible for a creature like that, but I … asked that she be spared. They will build a glass tomb for her so that anyone who likes can see the proof of her defeat. And make sure she still sleeps.”
I have an urge to reach across the table and put my hand over hers, which I squelch before remembering that I’m not a dying girl or a hero anymore. I put my hand over hers. “So how did you end up here? Wherever here is.”
Eva’s hand turns palm-up under mine. Her neck is now a definite shade of coral. “I didn’t feel I should linger long in the castle. Red and her parents seemed grateful, but their friends didn’t seem especially fond of witches or queens, so I left. And I found a little house waiting for me in the woods, just like there always is.” Her smile this time looks like hard work. “So I suppose I shall rot away in a little hut, after all. It’s better than being tortured to death.”
I can hear the compromise in her voice, the same mediocre deal I cut in my own world. She’s not dead, but she’s still nameless and powerless, still trapped at the margins of a story that doesn’t belong to her. Not a happy ending, but then, she’s not the main character.
I find myself grasping desperately for alternatives. A voice that sounds very much like my therapist says, Bargaining again? I ignore it. “What if—maybe you could…” My eyes fall to the table, where she’s arranged a glittering jigsaw of mirror shards. She’s fit them all carefully back into the battered silver frame, with a single gap left for a missing piece. “You could come back to my world. With me. The mirror still works—”
Eva’s fingers tighten around mine, but her voice is wistful. “And who would I be in your world?”
“I don’t know, nobody in particular I guess?”
“Here I’d hoped to be somebody, one day. Isn’t that silly?”
I want to shake her. “I didn’t mean literally nobody, just like, not magical or royal or whatever. You could be a chemist or a fortune-teller or something, anything you wanted. I’d help.”
She sighs in a way that reminds me forcibly of Dr. Bastille. “I know. Thank you.” She slides her hand gently away from mine. “But I heard what Zellandine told you. I can’t go with you, and you can’t stay here without causing great harm.” Her voice lowers. “We can’t keep running from our stories forever.”