Free Lustfully Ever After by Kristina Wright Page B

She is farther gone, and luster takes longer to paint, even with magic.
    Old becomes young, grey blooms to pink, flesh shifts and plumps. Her eyes are the one thing that don’t change—black as her raven, deep as the end of the world.
    “Girl, my red dress,” she says. Red for blood, red for mourning, red for death.
    “Perhaps a bath first, your Highness?” I venture. She doesn’t need one, not with the potion, but we are in no hurry. She is the queen; the world will wait.
    “Ready the bath, then,” she says as though it were her idea.
    “I’ve done so,” I say. I’ve learned a few things from her too. How to be still like a spider in a web. How to keep a bath warm at all hours of the day. How to be someone I am not.
    She pushes back the covers and reaches an arm out so that I may help her from bed. She’s naked, her body still shifting, breasts filling, hips growing rounder. Even as I let her lean on me, inhale the scent of stream water and crushed petals, I have to look away from her so that I don’t drop her. Only the raven notices, his beady black eye watching.

    I lead her to the tub, its steam rising to cloak us both. Her skin is soft and warm, tingling with magic. She leans back, and I soap her curves, the hollows of her shoulders, the gorge of her breasts. Her nipples pucker in the steam. Faint pink lines crisscross the upper half of her back, a few graying bruises show on the inside of her arms, between her thighs.
    Poor work, really. An amateur is what she had in Snow, although I doubt she knows it. Still, I scrub those pained places harder, just to hear her soft moans of protest, the quiet whimpers. When I run the cloth over her tight nipples, into the closed space between her thighs, she shudders a little, splashes on my white cotton dress, and I let the warmth sink into my skin, imagine it’s something other than water.
    The magic is doing its work, and soon she is stronger, doing the work herself, relegating me to hand her soap, a new cloth, a dry towel.
    As she dries, I pull the red dress from the not-secret closet. It’s one of her proper dresses, fully covering her in its scarlet sheen, the headdress imposing and regal. It’s a bitch dress, a top dress. A queen’s dress. Not like the dresses farther back, the purple one that is corset top and black embroidered sheer along the arms and legs. Not like the emerald one with the cut-out cups, the waist straps for tying her wrists together. Not like the one in the very back, the one I’ve only seen her in once, its tiny bits of fabric the same alabaster as Snow’s skin, the splashes of red the colors of rubies, of lips, of blood.
    Naked, she stands and faces the mirror. Its surface has been covered since Snow disappeared. Every day, she lifts the cover and watches her own reflection, just as she’s doing now.
    “Mirror, mirror…,” she begins. She can’t finish. She never finishes anymore. She is afraid to ask, afraid the mirror will tell her the thing her heart knows to be true. That Snow is not dead,
not, after all, murdered by the handsome and wicked huntsman for her trophy heart, but that she’s run off with him. That Snow is still out there, beautiful and living, without her queen.
    “Let me prepare you, Your Highness,” I say.
    She acquiesces, lowers the drape back over the mirror and sits at her dressing table. There’s a mirror here, too, but it’s not magic. It isn’t forced to tell her the truth, and so she can eye herself in it, slyly, from the side with half-closed lips while I powder her pale skin and lipstick her mouth in red. She doesn’t need the makeup—the potion has done its work fully, and it will keep her until tonight, at least—but this is part of the ritual, and it means she does not yet have to leave her room. I wrap her hair the way she likes, two tall black cones that will fit into the circle of her crown. It’s how I first came to be her girl, my deftness with her hair and later, with Snow’s, and I