White Magic: A Tale Grimmly Told Read online

  WHITE MAGIC

  Belinda Burke

  White Magic Copyright © 2016 by Belinda Burke

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  Please purchase only authorized editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter One

  It was at the wedding that Snow White saw her stepmother for the first time, and was enchanted. Not by a spell, though the woman was a witch and the princess knew it in the first moment. No, the girl was caught by her stepmother’s presence, her brilliance, her stunning beauty.

  In white and gold, her silk robes heavy with embroidery, the gleam of the new queen’s gemstones and jewelry was not what held the girl’s attention, but the woman herself.

  This new mother was pale as fine ivory, her skin smooth, her eyes black as the bottom of a well. Her hair was spun copper, hot coils wound about her ears, long braids flowing into a mass of curls and every strand in motion, a thousand vermilion snakes erupting in a tangle of perfect beauty.

  A sensation like hot water, or sparks flung from a fire, prickled on Snow White’s skin. She smelled something sweet and sour, a violent, violet odor of blossoms and rust. Without knowing how or why, the awareness of what it was coursed through her, a living thing on its own.

  Magic.

  The wedding ceremony passed in a blur before the princess’s eyes, with one center, one focus, blazing bright and wild. Her stepmother was a witch. A witch! The knowledge beat in Snow White’s breast, alive, dancing, a fire with a heart of storm.

  Even at the reception, she thought her stepmother spilled the secret from laughing lips with every sound, but no one else cared to hear it, or no one could. Only Snow White stared at her, enraptured. Magic. It was here – it had finally come.

  She was the king’s daughter, it was true, but she wanted neither riches nor the kingdom. Only magic. To be a witch; to hold the power in her own hands.

  That night, and for several days after, Snow White watched the new queen’s treasures being brought in, across the white-stoned courtyards, beneath the shadow of green leaves and up the stairs of the empty western tower, where they were hidden behind a black door, freshly painted.

  Clothes and furniture, chests and cases did not much interest the girl, but there were other things. A bright steel cauldron, its bottom not black but white. Hangings for the tower walls, each one marked with strange embroideries, runes and symbols, vistas of foreign lands. A box of dark wood, ornamented with a single seal – a potted plant with forty brilliant blossoms, yet no scent.

  Last of all came a mirror, wrapped in cloth of gold, and on each of those things, Snow White smelled the magic-fragrance she had encountered at the wedding and the iron tang of blood.

  The girl made up her mind by the end of the fifth day. Why should she settle for a stepmother, when instead she could have a witch?

  Months passed, and though some things changed, more remained the same. Snow White was no longer allowed in the western courtyard, was not permitted past the black-painted door, or inside the tower rooms where the treasures she knew were magic had been hidden.

  It took less than a year for her childish patience to run out and send her after those secrets.

  Her father died of the summer sickness, leaving his new queen a widow, though she had barely been a bride. In the days after, silence erupted, then fell like ashes over the castle. The disruption of the funeral allowed Snow White to take the key to the tower from her father’s chamber.

  She left his empty wing smiling, with a new sparkle in tear-stained eyes.

  Just past dawn on the first day of autumn, she crept out of her bedroom, through empty corridors hung with black mourning and empty courtyards full of the sounds of waking birds. The black-painted door of the forbidden tower was cool to the touch, tingled against her fingers. Before she could do more than open it words came tumbling down the stairs.

  “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is fairest of them all?”

  It was the voice of the witch, and Snow White climbed the stairs with a slow rumbling in her bones, cascading around her, congealing out of the air. It was another voice, not her stepmother’s, the sound of it ancient as the castle stones.

  “My queen is fairer than many beauties, brighter than many lights; yet one more fair than thee there is, the young princess Snow White.”

  The girl thought those words, that response, pained the witch. The scream that came from the tower scared the ravens from the roof.

  It was a lie, that answer. Snow White knew herself to be a lovely girl, but the queen was grown, and magic. There was more than just fair in that. More than pretty or beautiful.

  She thought of going into the tower chamber. Of offering comfort. But a cold, black breath of power came down the stairs then and stole the breath from her lungs. Death. She knew the taste of that as she had known the taste of magic. It was instinct, though this time without desire. Snow White stepped back from it until she stood free of the tower, under the sunlight.

  That night, with frozen, stealthy fingers, the princess unlocked the black door again. She crept past it, closed it behind her, and slipped up the stairs this time. Whispers pulled her along, some unrequited, ghostly murmur. Perhaps it was that sound which had called her, sleepless, from her bed.

  Wondering, watchful, Snow White peered through the keyhole of the door to the tower chamber.

  In that narrow view, the princess saw smoke and fire above the scintillating gleam of something wet and silver. To the left, on a wood table, was a heart, still beating. The splash and crackle of something that smelled of salt and fury divided the room, became a wave that beat up over the door and changed the girl’s view with watery distortion, but the sea Snow White could see did not pass through the keyhole.

  In the midst of fury, she could see the witch standing alone, and now that the fire was dimmed by tide Snow White recognized the silver gleam behind her step-mother as that cauldron. Something that was not fire burned beneath it, and the surface was smoking even through the water.

  Above the steely rim was a shape of shadow, midnight congealed into a horned and flickering form. Words came like hammer blows from a fanged, snarling mouth. “Who summons me, and for what purpose? Who calls me out of the dark?”

  The voice shattered Snow White’s ears, stunned her tongue, drove her back from the door and down the long, dark stair. That was a demon. The witch had summoned a demon. She knew it as she knew magic, and death, and was, not terrified, but jealous. Hungry for secrets and their truth.

  It took a week of days, but when she dared the tower a third time, Snow White looked through the crack of the door instead of the keyhole. She saw, not a demon, not a smoking cauldron, but only the table on which had pulsed a living heart.

  On one side sat
the witch, her back to the door, the fiery cascade of her hair taking up a full third of Snow White’s vision. On the other side sat something, someone, like a man but not one. Ancient, rolled up in his skin as in vellum, two black eyes stared out from his face like chips of sword-edge suspended in mist. A wrinkled mouth without teeth opened below a jut of nose, shaping a thin-lipped square and not a circle.

  “The price may be high; indeed, it may be far beyond you, queen though you be.” Cackling madness floated around the creature’s words, but it seemed as much a veil as the flickering curtain of reality that hung across the table, dividing the queen from her guest.

  “You will name the cost of the silence I desire, regardless.” Iron-hard, steel-bright, it was not the queen’s voice as Snow White had heard it before, but it was still the woman who had spoken.

  “The things I have in my possession are rich and rare, cost more than mortals can afford, witch, but not more than what they think themselves willing to pay. And what would you pay with, what would you give?”

  The queen’s back curved as she leaned forward, and Snow White imagined her smiling now. “What would I give? Ask rather what you would take for your heart, still beating. Not the metaphor but the muscle in the palm of my hand. How much for wisdom? How much for god? These things are for me to ask, and you to answer, Old Man.”

  There was a movement, a spray of red that crossed the table in front of the witch, some offering Snow White couldn’t see as it consumed itself, became its own sacrificial fire.

  “Sssss.” Slithering, gem-scaled, more than serpentine, the sound wound out of the Old Man’s toothless, inhuman mouth, around the room and out of it. “So, you do know me.” The being smiled, cruel and crafty, reached out a crumpled hand and balled up the smoke of the offering. “I will give you the silence you ask for, witch.” A vial, black and stoppered, rolled across the table and stopped before it could drop to the floor. “Tell me, by whom will it be swallowed?”

  “My purpose is my purpose. I will use it in time.”

  And in the next moment the Old Man threw back his head and howled with laughter. “In time!”

  Snow White fled down the stairs, because as the Old Man moved, he stared at her, and she knew that whatever he was, he was aware of her presence there.

  The next morning, while the court was in session, Snow White climbed the tower knowing that the witch would not be there. She unlocked the door at the top of the stairs, entered the secret room and gazed in wonder.

  There were no stone walls in the tower chamber she knew must be there. It was an orchard. A garden. Another castle? A mountain—and yet it was a room, she knew that. “Oh, this is magic, this is. I knew.” She laughed at the thought of her dead father’s denial, the servants’ continual hushing. “Sillies. I knew, and someday…”

  The garden rustled in a wind that didn’t exist, blowing out of nowhere, curling around the base of that impossible mountain. A cottage? A castle? A mountain? Snow White still didn’t know. Dizzy, her eyes wide, the princess decided she wouldn’t look at it again, except—she must look at it again.

  An apple fell from a tree behind her as she stumbled backward, overcome by sudden vertigo. The fruit bruised against the ground near her feet. A soft wailing sound came from it, and one by one the seeds bored through the side and turned to smoking flowers on the grass.

  The sound of a step on the stair alerted Snow White to the return of the queen, but she had already revised her first impression, no longer cared if she was caught. This witch was a great sorceress, and the overflowing power of her presence examined the princess as she approached, slipping under her clothes, through her hair.

  It sipped at her skin and filtered through her awareness with that scent like sparks from hot iron. And yet…

  Cool. Delicate. Rapture, that was the magic—

  And then the witch slammed the door open, caught Snow White up in her arms and shook her. “You do not belong here! Not you, never you!” The shadow of the leaves intensified. The forest became a single tree, all the branches in the world hung with light and the remains of memories, the dream of the spider and the houses of a thousand glass and glittering birds. “Why have you come here!”

  The princess stared up at the witch and blinked her innocence, spoke her desire and her vulnerability in a single phrase. “To be a witch. To be like you. To see what would happen, this time.”

  If those words had meaning for the queen, she did not show it. Her stepmother did not flush but seemed drained of life, of color, even as she bit her lip and a drop of blood stood out against the painted red. “You want to be a witch? You want to be like me?” Intense brightness came into the witch’s eyes. “You have been as much witch as I have, since the day you were born. How else could you have known? How else could you compare? But I have prepared for this moment, and there shall be only silence for you. Silence, forever. Silence for whatever magic you might possess.”

  Madness was burning in her stepmother’s gaze, but Snow White did not know its source. Insanity, or anger, or both? Where had it come from? What was the reason? The princess did not know, could not imagine, but it was as powerful as the magic pressed against her skin.

  Glass shattered behind the witch as she staggered, held Snow White with one hand at her throat and fumbled behind her, though the girl did not struggle. Would it matter if she did?

  She had come to the tower, up the stairs to the witch’s garden, knowing that something would happen and wanting it. Whatever it was, unless it happened she would never know.

  It was a vial of darkness the queen finally grasped and uncorked. The girl had seen it before – purchased by the witch with some blood, some sacrifice, from that Old Man.

  . “Silence for every power, every hint of magic—every single one. Do you understand? You will never be a witch. You will never be like me, never. If I could take your beauty from you instead – but that is something for which the price has already been paid.” The witch laughed, and the madness of her eyes was in the sound and in her writhing hair. “The Old Man knew – and though you fled, you knew, too, didn’t you?”

  A white, hot hand held Snow White’s face still. “Didn’t you? But it is too late now. You should have known better than to come back.” One of the witch’s thumbs forced her mouth open, and the princess could not deny the liquid, black as the night and milky, that came pouring over her tongue.

  It tasted like the scent of the queen, and like quiet, and like mud. She remembered the laughter of the Old Man, choked on the flavor and fluid, but she swallowed regardless and a new kind of emptiness roared through her head, down her throat, into her blood.

  For a moment, the girl could see the tiny particles of whatever she had drunk, dancing inside her, caught up in the magic that breathed as she breathed, infected by it. Had it really been there all along? All along—

  Then it was gone. Gone, too, was the mysterious tree, the mountain, the castle within a room that had haunted her sight since she had stepped through the door. Only the queen remained bright to her eyes, alive with witch-power and deadly intent. “All…all gone?”

  For the first time, the queen touched her tenderly, stroked her cheek with the back of her hand. The venom was in her words, not her touch, laughter hiding in her words like the strike of a snake. “All gone. All of it. Now get out!”

  The moment continued, depthless, something stirring in it regardless, while the girl stared up at the queen with the promise of tears in her eyes. Disturbed, the queen looked back and forth between the princess’s face and her own mirror, could not tell which was brighter, which had more quicksilver highlights, more strange liquidity. The magic surface, or the stripped stare of the girl, Snow White?

  The girl, whose reflection did not appear in the queen’s mirror. Why was that? Why should that be?

  For the second time, the queen bit her lip. The story of the girl’s birth was already one of the kingdom’s local legends. Was there a magic in her that no demon, no summoned
sorcery, could remove or compel?

  Perhaps she was herself a summoning. Was that not the heart of her story, the myth as it was told?

  A drop of blood from the dead queen’s finger. So fair, as it had fallen upon the snow – as fair the snow against the dark of night. The dead queen had begged god or the devil for a daughter just as lovely. Her wish had been granted, but her own life had been stolen in exchange, a beautiful lady ravaged by the passage of nine months’ time.

  Quietly, they said, she had died. Without a complaint or a murmur, as if she had known in the moment of her daughter’s conception the terrible price. But the old queen had just been a woman, and the new queen was a witch…and she saw more in every passing moment the truth of her own torment, reflected in Snow White’s eyes.

  Too lovely, all unwary, overly interested in hearts and hidden things…and now the girl had come here. As her heart beat again and the frozen moment passed into another, the queen could not deny the truth of it.

  The mirror of the girl’s eyes was purer than the mercury stirring of the magic hung on her wall.

  In Snow White’s dark pupils, the queen stood out as the witch she was, her hair snakes and snarls, tricks and tangles, wild as the wood, light as the air, slick as imps laughing – a thousand spirals in the moving strands, knitting and knotting.

  She backed away, shaking her head, and pointed at the door. “Why are you still here? Did you not hear me? Would you die in this moment? Would you have me fling you from the tower window, down the stairs? Go!”

  Like a rabbit, the princess ran from her, finally giving into her tears. It was not the threat that had moved her, the queen knew, but the agony of what she had lost, what she would never have again. “Your existence was enough to steal my certainty, my purpose. How long have I spent, how many years, to become what you were born? But I could steal at least this much from you in return.”