Free White As Snow (Fairy Tale) by Tanith Lee

when they spoke to her, it was generally a kind of nonsense.
    But above the king, drawn aside among the olive trees, the queen was standing with her girls.
    She was, as Coira had known she must be, totally apart.
    Coira drew in her breath involuntarily. Her eyes were wide.
    The queen was rather far away, and so made smaller, and somehow more absolute. She wore a dress of ivory silk, stitched with gold threads. Her hair was not unbound, but held in an openwork golden tower, which showed its glistening darkness. A veil poured from the tower like a soft red flame.
    The queen’s face was impassive. That is, it was empty. But so
beautiful, so fair, so perfect. Less a face than an instant of revelation.
    Physically unmoving, rigid as if bolted into chains and shackles, the child’s spirit galvanically strained to fly out of her body, to leap and hurl itself at the feet of her queen.
    And suddenly, exactly then, evidently the goddess Arpazia became fiercely aware of this intensity of worship.
    She did not move, did not turn or look about. It was not that at all. She seemed merely to straighten and grow taller, and her face tilted up into the light, and her eyes, though fixed apparently on nothing, widened with a flash, just as the eyes of the child had done a moment before.
    II.
    F ALLING TO LIFE, THEY WERE BORN on the same day of the same month; they also fell in love at the exact same moment—but not with each other.
    Arpazia had stayed three hundred and thirteen days in her first trance, until the violence of childbirth, in her fifteenth year, woke her up. Yet after she had given birth, she entered a second trance, unlike the first. This second trance was to last for seven years.
    That night of the birth (her birthday), when she would not let the baby suckle on her any longer, the women brought a wet nurse. She was a girl not many years older than the queen.
    Arpazia had lain back, not caring, and prepared to die.
    But she did not die. Her traitorous body grew well, thoroughly repairing itself. A morning came when the worst of the physicians had stood over her. “Madam, you’re quite yourself. The king, when he returns, may be admitted without fear. I assure you, you can give him many more healthy children.” Then, leaning near to make her particularly glad, he added, “Of course, of course you were disappointed. But the little girl does very well. And I don’t doubt your next will be the son you crave.”
    When he said this Arpazia had burst up from her bed shrieking. She had flown at him half naked, her hair like two great beating wings.
    Later, to excuse his own fright, he remarked generally that some women were dangerously unstable at such times. But also he was perhaps the first to compare the queen to a sorceress. “What true woman behaves in such a fashion to her doctor? She had an uncanny look. I’ve suspected things. She mumbled to herself, spells, perhaps against the baby—it came very late. The women say she hates the child. And she sits talking to that vain-glass of hers. She’s from out of the forests. She’ll have witch blood in her.”
     
     
    From the bottom of her second trance, Arpazia saw how they tried, from malice, all of them, to wake her.
    The women soon desisted. This second trance was different. She could reach up out of it and smite them, just as she had sprung at the physician, or pushed the baby from her breast.
    In the initial months of the second trance, Arpazia became a woman and a queen, a witch and a bitch, and left her mark in scarlet blows and purple bruises, in shards of broken things and torn garments.
    “She has the temper of a fiend!”
    “Another would only scold—she says no word but strikes like a snake.”
    “Best be wary of her. Look where her biggest ring cut my cheek, when she lashed out at me.”
    For, too, this trance had decided on the value of armor. Each day the queen, the bitch-witch, rose and was washed, perfumed, and clad in valuable stuffs, which she