The Fairest of Them All (21 page)

After, we lay there together, in each other’s arms. I watched him sleep, his body warming me as the cool early autumn air swept in
through the window.

His discontent worried me, cutting through the haze of my own happiness.

I placed my hands over my flat belly. For months now I’d been drinking catnip and mugwort and casting spells to make me more fertile, and yet I was not with child. Josef had not said anything, but I knew he would soon.

As the hours passed and sleep evaded me, old anxieties began to creep in, too. I
wondered if I was unable to have a child, if
somehow what had happened before had rendered my body unfit, like a stalk of wheat with no grain. I thought of my twisted son, buried in the forest.

The old grief moved into me, and I threw off the covers and walked over to the mirror. My face loomed up in it, a white moon in the black night. I stepped back and looked at my naked body, my belly. My
hair was like a storm raging on all sides of me.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” I whispered. “Who’s the fairest of them all?”

“Rapunzel is the fairest,” it responded, in a whisper to match my own.

“Will I have a child?” I asked. “Will I give birth to the king’s heir?”

The mirror rippled. I thought I heard a voice, very faint, but it did not seem to be coming from the glass.

I turned back
to the bed. “Did you say something?” I asked.

“Hmm?” He opened his eyes.

“I thought you spoke to me. I’m sorry, go back to sleep.”

“Come to bed,” he mumbled, but was instantly asleep again, his breath loud and heavy.

I looked back at the mirror. For a moment I was sure my hair was wrapped around my throat, and I started with surprise.

A
s the air grew colder, and the rain did not stop falling, Snow White and I rode out into the kingdom
nearly every afternoon with baskets of herbs mixed with bones and leaves, throwing handfuls of the mixture onto the gardens and wheat fields. We’d dismount our horses and run through the wet fields, sprinkling the mixture onto the ground, stomping it into the earth with our feet. I kept my hair pinned up, though I longed to let it loose over the soil, let the vibration of earth move into me. But
we had a great task before us, and I could not endure the distractions.

It did not take long for the farmers and peasants to take note of our efforts, and they began watching and waiting, coming out of their houses to bow to us, running up to throw flowers or ask for alms.

One day a woman holding a sick child ran out of a rickety cottage with a sparse garden in front of it. My instinct was to
shield Snow White from them, but to my surprise the princess stepped around me and walked right up to the infant.

“Oh, your baby is sick!” she said. She laid her hands on the child, took it in her arms. I watched in wonder, surprised that she could even hold him, she was so small herself. The mother
watched with her own kind of wonder, clearly believing that the touch of the princess might be
enough to heal the child.

“Did you say that yarrow and mint will cure a fever?” she asked, turning to me. “Can we find some?”

“We can,” I said, taken aback. “We can bring some tomorrow.”

She nodded, and then looked up to the woman. “Do not worry,” she said. “We will bring you what you need.”

Snow White handed the child back, and then walked purposefully over to her horse to retrieve her basket.
Carefully, she sprinkled the mixture over the woman’s garden, as tears streamed down the woman’s face.

“God bless you, Your Highness and Your Majesty,” she said, attempting to kneel down in front of me.

I rushed to take the infant myself, worried she might drop him in her supplication, despite her tight grip.

The baby melted into my chest, looked up at me with glazed eyes. He was burning with
fever. I almost couldn’t bear it as I held him to my chest, how right it felt to hold that tiny body.

Snow White walked back, rubbing her hands to clean them. “We will take our leave now, and come back tomorrow.”

When I handed the child back, I almost felt as if a piece of my own body went with him.

We returned the next day, as she’d promised, and after that we began to do more and more in
the villages and countryside. Along with our usual mixture, we brought a variety of plants and oils that could aid with any number of ailments, and we took a larger retinue of guards to carry our supplies. Gilles was often with us, quietly riding his horse and taking care of the hawks. The king trusted Gilles, and insisted he accompany me,
especially out in the open countryside with his daughter,
the heir to the kingdom. The hawks overhead comforted me, and Gilles did not seem to mind taking them out and training them in the open air. I’d wanted to go hawking myself, when I’d first met him in the mews, but this was more than enough: watching them overhead, these magnificent birds that reminded me so much of my life before. This gorgeous man and child pressing forward on either side of
me, atop hooved, gleaming beasts. It satisfied me, that part of me I’d left behind.

O
ne afternoon, after we returned our horses to the stable and said good-bye to Gilles, Snow White asked me to walk with her.

She was holding a bundle of wildflowers I hadn’t noticed her gathering. She took my hand and led me through one stretch of the garden to a small graveyard, still
blooming with flowers despite the autumn chill in the air. I’d seen it before, but stayed away. The palace portraits were bad enough; I did not like so much unfamiliar death right in front of me, all the time.

The stones were scattered all around us, blackened and covered in moss. A guard stood off to the side, watching us. Other than that, we were alone.

“It’s beautiful here,” I said, to be
kind.

“This is my . . . My mother is here,” she said. She stood there, her skirt flapping around her ankles, strands of her hair in her face. “I wanted you to meet her. She was a very good mother.”

Suddenly the late afternoon air seemed especially cold. A hawk screeched in the distance, from the mews.

Queen Teresa Chauvin,
the stone read. Underneath was a quote in Latin.

I felt like I was
going to be sick. I dropped to the ground, holding my stomach.

“Are you all right?” Snow White asked. She was concerned, innocent, as she reached out to touch me. I had killed her mother, yet here she was trying to comfort and steady me. The whole world spun around me. My teeth chattered from the cold.

I nodded, wincing up at her. “Yes,” I said. “I’m just tired from the ride.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” I positioned myself cross-legged on the wet grass, willing the sickness to pass. My skirts flounced into a circle around me. “Thank you for bringing me to meet your mother. That is very kind of you.”

Snow White’s face relaxed, and she sat beside me. I could see how important this was to her, and was determined to act as calmly as I could, despite my intense, overwhelming discomfort. She
was
right there
. Her body, in the ground beneath us.

Snow White placed the flowers delicately over the stone. She leaned against me then, brushing her small body against my arm, a strand of my hair tangling down. I braced myself as her grief pummeled into me, laced with images of her mother’s arms wrapping around her, her mother lying sick in her bed, her face thin and pale, her eyes wild.

I breathed out, grabbing a flower from the ground and pinching it in my fingers, twisting the stem, watching the soft petals flaking off in my hands.

Her grief became my grief, and I mourned for her mother—for what I’d done to her—as well as my own. I’d been Snow White’s age when Mathena had rescued me, but the mother I’d lost hadn’t loved me the way Teresa had loved Snow White. Still,
I could
not help but wonder. Was my mother buried somewhere now, too? Was she still alive, perhaps living in one of the cottages we’d passed, that day or another? Were there other children now?

There were tears running down Snow White’s face, sparkling like little gems.

I glanced up. There was a woman standing there, at the edge of the graveyard. I started in surprise.

“What is it?” Snow White asked,
alarmed.

I turned back and the woman was gone. But her black hair and her red lips seared into me.

“Nothing,” I said. Of course it was nothing. I smiled at her reassuringly.

“You saw her, didn’t you?”

“Saw who?” I asked. My heart was racing.

“My mother,” she said.

There was an intense expression on her face. Her brows furrowed, her eyes shining.

I didn’t know what to say. It was a trick
of the light, I was sure of it. A trick of my own mind, riddled with guilt.

“I see her,” she said. “Father Martin says it is wrong to speak of such things. He says my mother is in heaven. But I see her. Do you believe me?”

So many feelings coursed through me. Guilt and love and despair and loss and a kind of terror I’d never felt before. I focused on that lovely, worried little face and tried
to smile.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course I do.”

O
ver the next days, as autumn began to strip the trees, Snow White and I continued distributing herbs until we were too cold,
even with heavy furs draped around us. I found it soothing to ride through the kingdom, my hair unspooling behind me, letting all thoughts of Teresa fade into the blur of the countryside, until I convinced
myself that I’d imagined her standing there.

It did not take long for rumors to start up at court. In Mass, Father Martin spoke more adamantly about the sin of witchery, and I could feel the thoughts and suspicions swimming around the minds of everyone around me.

One evening the king himself asked me about it.

“It’s wonderful, to see my daughter flourishing,” he said, leaning over to speak
in my ear, in the great hall. “But I’m worried about what I hear. There’s talk that the queen and princess are practicing magic openly in the kingdom.”

“She’s only helping me feed the people, my lord.”

“People?”

“Your royal subjects,” I said, “in the countryside and villages.”

He looked at me blankly.

“Have you not seen the failed crops?” I whispered.

“No.”

“The wheat is all blighted,”
I said. “I fear that people will starve come winter, with no bread. Half the fields I pass are filled with dead plants. It’s all the rain.”

“What have you and Snow White to do with this?”

“We’ve made herb mixtures to help the soil, that’s all. Your daughter has a kind heart, you know. She wanted to help.”

He waved his hand, as if to dismiss any discussion of rain and soil. “There’s talk of
unrest.”

“In the villages? The people are grateful, my lord.”

“No,” he said. “In the East. Some estates near the border are threatening to rebel.”

“Oh, but that’s a different thing, is it not?”

“There are rumors of the sinfulness of this court,” he said. “That we practice magic here.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” I said, trying to sound convincing. Of course there would be such talk. Mathena
had warned me about all of this.

“They’re looking for a reason to go to war with us,” he said. “Ever since Teresa died. They whisper that I killed her to marry you.”