Free White As Snow (Fairy Tale) by Tanith Lee Page A

chose—and which, if then disliked, she rent. Her hair was rubbed with silk, combed—God help them if they accidentally tugged, or a coil was misplaced. Collars of silver and gold rings were applied. Finery. Mask and mail. Anything disapproved of was cast on the floor or across the chamber.
    Then, only then, did she go to the mirror.
    She undid the lid of it, and sat before the glass. If they made any sound, she sent them away, usually after flinging something at them.
    Them, she despised. Her enemies. Servants, slaves, nobles—all women, all men, were now that. And she despised herself, what she had been.
    But in the glass, the young queen could see herself as she had become, and was. Not transparent in her flesh, the fetus—the growth —showing through and stirring in the cup of her breached womb. Now she was an icon. Solid, and impenetrable.
    She had learned her name and title. Before, it meant nothing. Now it was a part of her armor. Queen Arpazia.
    That year Draco did not return to Belgra Demitu until Almost the Midwinter-Mass. He had won another fight, and found that place he would come to want for a city—his “capital,” scent-marking like a wolf, not with glands, but buildings. When he came back, he was full of this, boylike and noisy in his happy humor. When the queen did not appear, and did not receive him, sending one of her females to say she was not well, he shrugged. (He did see the baby. It was not a son.) He summoned his favorite, the barren hill-girl, and lay all night with her in the king’s bed.
    But later he met his queen, and saw she had grown up. She was a woman. Taller, slim as a sword, with pale hands and a high white brow. Her beauty did not please him so much. Where she had been toothsome she had become gorgeous, where she had been bendable, breakable, she now seemed hard. Cold-water eyes—he did not like those, either.
    In the end, two nights after the Mass feast, he went to her rooms, out of common good manners, to show he still valued her as a wife.
    There had been a brief scene with his favorite. He had told the girl where he was going. Quite properly she never made a fuss if he took another. Now she only made over herself some peasantish sign.
    “Don’t do that, puss. You’re a Christian, and in front of your king.”
    “Pardon me, lord. But—they say things of the queen. Go cautious, lord.”
    “What? What things?”
    “That she casts spells. Has got an imp—”
    Draco hit the girl, lightly. “Stop that.”
    But the memory stayed close as he went into the apartment of his wife, and saw at once—in the absence of normal feminine things—embroidery, lap dog, trinkets, cradle—Arpazia’s vain-glass, that mirror, standing wide open, as if parading itself.
    Arpazia had risen from her chair.
    Yes, she was a beauty, but now she looked too old to him; he preferred very young women. By the Christ, he had been informed she was fourteen, a year back. She would be fifteen or so now. She looked more like twenty, thirty, and frigid as a nun.
    She had been difficult from the beginning. He recalled abruptly how she had led him that prance over the snow, and then cursed him. A witch? Very likely. But God, and his own male strength, had kept him sound.
    “Well, madam. Here I am.”
    A servant hurried to bring him a filled cup. Though he had had plenty, Draco drank it. He waved the servant out. Now they were alone, as man and wife should be.
    It was a freezing night. The mountaintops had changed to marble, the sea was almost white.
    Braziers and candles burned, but after the hall and his own chamber, this room was not warm. Chilled no doubt by her. He must warm her up.
    Draco crossed the space and took hold of his wife by the waist and drew her in. She did not resist, but her whole body, as he held it, had become inflexible, rigid as a pole.
    “Come, come on. Give me a kiss. The physician says you’re in good order by now. I’ve been at war. It’s a long while since we had
a dance.”