My Snow White Queen #1
Alone in the snow is where our story begins
It’s odd, the things we think about before we die. I want to think about my sister and the hours we would spend searching for fairie rings in the forest. Or, the late nights we filled with a single candle and our hands creating the most magnificent shadow creatures. I cannot explain our obsession with finding or creating these fearsome beasts when we lived in a world plagued by real monsters.
Briefly, I do think about my sister but I don’t see her golden hair catching the sun in the forest, or her dark brown eyes shining in the candlelight. It is her grey skin and unseeing stare my mind conjures and refuses to release.
“I’m sorry, Mary.”
These had been her final words, whispered to me from her dry lips. When I closed her eyes and took her dead hand in both of mine, I thought I would never feel anything so cold again. My hands claw into the snow beneath me, burning my skin with a fierce and painful cold. Yet, I would endure it a thousand times over if it meant that I could hold my sister’s hand again. But she is not who waits for me now.
If I do not want my sister’s dead face to be my final thought then I must move onto the only other memory my mind is willing to hold when fear has taken all else from me. It is a no more pleasant one but it is slightly easier to bear.
It was not a surprise when the village council arrived at our cottage moments after my sister had taken her final breaths. However, it was a shock when they forced their way through the door and tore me from her. I did not struggle but their rough hands dragged me through the blizzard to the village hall.
Over the weeks in which my sister’s sickness had worsened, I had become well acquainted with the place. The wooden podium situated at the front of the square room between two stained glass windows was a familiar sight, as were the villagers filling the few rows of pews before the podium. What was unusual were the extra faces peering down at me from the balcony that circled the upper half of the room. The meetings that had been held in the village hall so far had only been interesting enough to attract the attention of friends and neighbours. Now that a decision was to finally be made, even those who lived on the fringes had come to witness my fate.
Once inside the warmth of the hall, I was not taken to my usual place somewhere on the first row of pews. Instead, I was led down the pantry stairs and left with an old woman I had never seen before. The men of the council turned their backs as the woman began to undress me. I let her, barely feeling the loosening of my corset or the slide of my skirts as they pooled on the floor. She did not touch my underclothes and remained silent as she redressed me in heavier, furlined garments. It was only when she was fastening a cloak over the thick overcoat she had pushed my arms into that she spoke.
“Don’t go quietly,” she whispered so the men standing guard would not overhear. “Dry your eyes and determine your own fate.” She wiped my wet cheeks and then returned me to the councilmen.
Again, I was not taken to the place where I had silently sat for weeks and listened to increasingly red-faced men debate my future. The head of the village council was already stood at the podium. The councilmen walked me behind him and pushed me down into a chair that obscured me from the eyes on the floor. Those in the eaves, however, looked down at me with a mixture of pity and fear.
“The girl is dead,” the head councilman announced bluntly. “We must reach a decision tonight.”
“What other decision is there?” a deep voice called from the crowd. “The girl’s sister must become the sacrifice in her place.”
“Her blood is not pure,” another, shriller, voice said from further back in the room. “Do we want to risk the wrath of the Snow Queen?”
“We risk her wrath if we offer no sacrifice!”
“Can we not simply leave the girl’s body in The Glade?”
“Would you do such a thing if it was one of your own daughters?”
“You know the sacrifice must descend from the Ashburn bloodline.”
“She’s not a full Ashburn!”
“Yes, she is. She has her mother’s blood. That is enough. Her father’s lineage matters not.”
Their overlapping shouts filled the room and I let them wash over me as best I could. It was the exact same arguments I had endured for weeks as my sister lay on her deathbed. Never before, in the history of our village, had a sacrifice for the Snow Queen died before her day of offering. Never before had the villagers needed to debate if the sacrifice’s half-sister would be a satisfactory replacement.
“She’s the eldest daughter. It would have been her anyway if her mother wasn’t a slut!”
The sound of my chair crashing to the floor as I stood up silenced the room.
“I would like to speak, if I may.” My voice was not loud but it was strong, a true show of how these long conversations had left me disconnected from the discussion of my own death.
No one protested as I stepped up to the podium, not even the head councilman. He just stumbled slightly away from me.
“While it is true that my sister and I do not share the same father, we do share the same amount of Ashburn blood. The same amount as every Ashburn who has been sacrificed on The Glade. My father may have been a stranger to this village, but I was raised here as an Ashburn and therefore understand the duty I must perform.”
My hands lightly gripped the podium as the first shiver of fear danced through me. It was only a small tremor but it settled like an icy dagger in my stomach. The old woman had told me to determine my own fate and so I would. But, the heavy clothes she had dressed me in made it clear where my fate was leading me. All I could do was stop them from throwing me to the wolves and speak the words myself that would put things into motion.
“I know, in my blood, I must be offered as sacrifice to the Snow Queen. It’s…It is an honour to bring Spring to our village once again.”
There was very little ceremony between my removal from the village hall and my arrival at The Glade, other than the traditional slicing of my palm to spill the required Ashburn blood. The usual feast hosted the night before the sacrifice had been forgotten in the panic of my sister’s sickness. It has been fifty years since the last but, after a Winter this long and unrelenting, it would have been little more than a thimble of wine and crust of bread.
The Glade is silent despite the wind that bites my cheeks. Every so often I think I can hear the whispers of the blood that was spilled before. My blood, my mother’s blood, scattered around me in the snow. I am not sure how long it has been since they left me alone on The Glade. It has been long enough for my body to forget what warmth ever was, for it to only know a life of violent shivers. I begin to wonder how many of my ancestors were taken by the Snow Queen when they were still breathing, or was it a final mercy for us to perish in the snow before?
Just as my eyelids are beginning to grow heavy, I sense her. A chill arrives on The Glade that sinks deeper than bone, freezing me to my very core.
“Our burning ashes blacken the day. A world of nothingness, blow me away,” I whisper.
My prayer is echoed back to me as I give into the heaviness weighing on my eyes. I lose sight of the world just before the Snow Queen takes me from it.