Neil Gaiman - Snow, Glass, Apples

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SNOW, GLASS, APPLES

by NEIL GAIMAN

[first published by DreamHaven Books, March 1995]

I do not know what manner of thing she is. None of us do. She killed her mother in the birthing, but

that's never enough to account for it.

They call me wise, but I am far from wise, for all that I foresaw fragments of it, frozen moments caught

in pools of water or in the cold glass of my mirror. If I were wise I would not have tried to change what I

saw. If I were wise I would have killed myself before ever I encountered her, before ever I caught him.

Wise, and a witch, or so they said, and I'd seen his face in my dreams and in reflections for all my life:

sixteen years of dreaming of him before he reined his horse by the bridge that day, and asked my name. He

helped me onto his high horse and we rode together to my little cottage, my face buried in the gold of his

hair. He asked for the best of what I had; a king's right, it was.

His beard was red-bronze in the morning light, and I knew him, not as a king, for I knew nothing of

kings then, but as my love. He took all he wanted from me, the right of kings, but he returned to me on the

following day, and on the night after that: his beard so red, his hair so gold, his eyes the blue of a summer

sky, his skin tanned the gentle brown of ripe wheat.

His daughter was only a child: no more than five years of age when I came to the palace. A portrait of

her dead mother hung in the princess's tower room; a tall woman, hair the colour of dark wood, eyes nut-

brown. She was of a different blood to her pale daughter.

The girl would not eat with us.

I do not know where in the palace she ate.

I had my own chambers. My husband the king, he had his own rooms also. When he wanted me he

would send for me, and I would go to him, and pleasure him, and take my pleasure with him.

One night, several months after I was brought to the palace, she came to my rooms. She was six. I was

embroidering by lamplight, squinting my eyes against the lamp's smoke and fitful illumination. When I

looked up, she was there.

"Princess?"

She said nothing. Her eyes were black as coal, black as her hair; her lips were redder than blood. She

looked up at me and smiled. Her teeth seemed sharp, even then, in the lamplight.

"What are you doing away from your room?"

"I'm hungry," she said, like any child.

It was winter, when fresh food is a dream of warmth and sunlight; but I had strings of whole apples,

cored and dried, hanging from the beams of my chamber, and I pulled an apple down for her.

"Here."

Autumn is the time of drying, of preserving, a time of picking apples, of rendering the goose-fat. Winter

is the time of hunger, of snow, and of death; and it is the time of the midwinter feast, when we rub the

goose-fat into the skin of a whole pig, stuffed with that autumn's apples; then we roast it or spit it, and we

prepare to feast upon the crackling.

She took the dried apple from me and began to chew it with her sharp yellow teeth.

"Is it good?"

She nodded. I had always been scared of the little princess, but at that moment I warmed to her and,

with my fingers, gently, I stroked her cheek. She looked at me and smiled - she smiled but rarely - then she

sank her teeth into the base of my thumb, the Mound of Venus, and she drew blood.

I began to shriek, from pain and from surprise; but she looked at me and I fell silent.

The little princess fastened her mouth to my hand and licked and sucked and drank. When she was fin-

ished, she left my chamber. Beneath my gaze the cut that she had made began to close, to scab, and to heal.

The next day it was an old scar: I might have cut my hand with a pocketknife in my childhood.

I had been frozen by her, owned and dominated.

That scared me, more than the blood she had fed on. After that night I locked my chamber door at dusk,

barring it with an oaken pole, and I had the smith forge iron bars, which he placed across my windows.

My husband, my love, my king, sent for me less and less, and when I came to him he was dizzy, listless,

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