The queen watches my sour, snarling mouth for a moment before sighing and dragging her chair to face me. She sits, her kidney-colored gown falling in another perfect sweep around her feet, her face tired beneath the makeup. “Please understand that I will do whatever I must to get what I need.” Her eyes are concerningly sincere. “No one will interrupt me. No one will save you.” Her accent is lightly burred, her words blunt, nothing like Prim’s vaguely British, grammatically suspect speech. I wonder if Charm has finally removed the word whence from her vocabulary, and then quickly stop wondering, because thinking about Charm is like thinking about an amputated limb.
“And really,” the queen continues. “It is no great favor I ask of you. I only need to know how you do it.”
I curl my lip and ask scornfully, “How I do what?” But there’s only one thing she could possibly want from me, however unlikely it seems. The hunger has returned to her eyes, and it strikes me, with a sudden, plunging chill, that I’ve seen it before: staring back at me out of every mirror since I was old enough to understand my own story.
“I want to know how you get out,” she grates, and for the first time her voice is something less than perfectly calm. “I want to know how you leave your world and find another.”
A heartbeat of silence. Another, while her eyes bore into mine and my brain produces nothing but strings of panicked question marks （？？？？？？？？？）。 I try very hard not to look at her mirror.
“Tell me,” she says, imperious, barely leashed, and I feel my chances of getting out of this with all my fingernails and teeth declining precipitously.
I swallow hard and say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean,” because I’ve seen enough Marvel movies to know that it’s generally frowned upon to hand the obvious villain the keys to the multiverse. I don’t have a clear idea what she’d do with the ability to zap herself into other versions of Snow White, but I doubt it’s anything good, and more importantly, fuck her.
The queen’s mouth flattens. She holds my very twenty-first century backpack by one fraying strap, her eyebrows raised very slightly.
“Oh, that? I got it from a wizard in a kingdom far from here. I’m happy to draw you a map, if you’d like to talk to him.” All I need is about two minutes un-shackled so I can prick my finger and peace the hell out of here, preferably with that magic mirror in tow. I would like to know where it came from, and how the queen found out about multiple worlds in the first place, and why her eyes are so ravenous, so familiar, but it doesn’t seem worth lingering to find out.
“I am not,” she says gently, “a fool.”
“Okay, fine, you got me! I’m from another world. But frankly”—I rattle my chains at her—“I don’t see why I should tell you shit.”
She rises from her chair, face twisting. The air seems to gather and darken around her like a personal thunderstorm. “Because if you don’t, you writhing maggot, you miserable louse, I will feed your beating heart to the carrion birds. I will knap knives from your bones and use them to flense the fat from your breathing body.” She pauses, perhaps to appreciate her own alliteration. “I am the queen.” There are no sibilants in that sentence, but she manages to hiss it anyway.
My lips peel back from my teeth as I look up at her, not fearless but pissed enough to do a good impression. “Oh, please, you’re just the bad guy. The villain, the evil stepmother. You’re the Wicked Witch of the East, bro.”
She opens her mouth, but I interrupt, entirely unable to resist. “You’re going to look at me and you’re going to tell me that I’m wrong? Am I wrong?” At least Charm will be proud of me if these turn out to be my last words.
I watch the queen teetering on some internal precipice, perhaps deciding between the thumbscrews or the pliers. Instead, she tucks her fury carefully away. It’s like watching a woman shove a mattress into a pillowcase. She strides to a crowded bookshelf and asks abruptly, “What’s your name?”
“Zinnia Gray. Of Ohio.”
She takes down a slender volume with a bright red spine, incongruous in the gloom of her workroom. “Aren’t you going to ask me my name, Zinnia Gray? Or do they not have manners in Ohio?”
“Whereas here it’s customary to chain your visitors to the wall.” She studies my face with finite patience, one fingernail tapping the book, until I sigh. “Fine. What’s your name?”