Snow White

Chapter 25

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Snow White shuddered as she was led towards the dark, almost black, cell she would be staying in for the next few days, or even the next few weeks. It was a criminal's cellar, not the kind of thing she usually dealt with. Although she tried to cover her sobs, the guards heard her and they sneered and laughed as they thrust her down onto the bloodstained floor, swinging the gates of freedom closed behind her.

The prison wasn't one one would expect to find in a palace.  As the palace was the most secure place in the country, there was nowhere better to hold the murderers or those who have committed treason. But it was damp and dark, where the air reeked of rotting food and other unpleasant things Snow didn't want to think of, she was almost certain the Queen would be willing enough to use implements of torture that made smells like rotting, diseased, decaying flesh. Snow wasn't sure whether the screams, moans and screeches from other cells was the worst feature of the prison or whether it was when some individual screams stopped abruptly, followed by the noise of bodies being dragged down the halls.

Then the guards stopped at the tallest tower, flinging open a window to let a harsh gust of wind pelt through and strangle her. They grabbed her wrists and she allowed them to be tied behind her back submissively, holding her breath tightly in her rib cage to mask the gasp of pain she felt when they were clicked harshly against her soft skin.

Snow White was not a coward, she never had been and hoped that she never would be a coward. She would never submit to the notion of ever being cowardly. She would rather face her death than escape her fate.

But something about the way Snow White was cowering in the corner of her cell, holding her breath whenever the jingle of keys clanged past her as a guard ambled past, probably taunting every person he could in the least amount of distance. Snow would flinch whenever she heard the crack of a whip on human flesh, but thank God it was them and not her. Selfish Coward, she thought. Something about the way she stood, leaning against the wall to keep herself upright, made her feel like a coward. If Snow White had seen the way she was standing now five months ago, she would scream at herself and deny she would ever become like that or ever be forced to feel that way.

Did it make her cowardly to hide from the guards? They had taken so much away from her; the Gone, her family, her fiancé and, most of all, Peter, the boy she loved. They had put her through so much excruciating pain, but did that give her the right to cower from the future? Would cowering even help? Probably not. The guards would give her more lashings if she stood firm and glared into their eyes, but they would still hurt her if she was a coward.

With a depressed sigh, Snow lifted her injured, broken wrist as high as she could take it in order to slacken the chains on her right palms. The higher she moved them, the less the tension on her wrists. They were already bruised and bleeding, there wasn't much more they could do to hurt her short of killing her. And she would never take her own life to make the Queen the fairest of them all.

Her skin felt like it had been stabbed by a million sun-spears and scraped by sandpaper. Her tongue was cloven to the roof of her mouth. It was like there's a dry, leathery in-sole wagging away at the back of her throat. Her throat itself had the sensation that a reticulated python was trying to squeeze the life out of it. Even her eyes felt like they had melted into the back of her mind, making everything seem mirage-like.

But none of that mattered. The dehydration, the nerves, the hunger, the pain, the blood, the sweat. Nothing mattered but this: the end game.

Everything felt strange and untrue. Her body ached, her skin felt cold and Snow felt exhausted. But it didn't matter because, for the first time in three days, Snow was desperate enough to imagine Peter watching her from the outside of the prison cell. He wouldn't speak or move for half an hour. He just looked at her.