Snow, Glass, Apples

The Queen and The Princess

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 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 chamber.  My husband the king,  he had his own room 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 room.  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?"

"Im hungry," she said,  like any child

It was winter,  when fresh food is a dream if warmth and sunlight ; but i had strings of whole 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 apple,   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 finger,  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 drunk,  when she was finished,  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 pocket-knife in ny 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,  confused. 

He could no longer make love as a man makes love;  and he would not permit me to pleasure him with my mouth: the one time I tried,  he started,  vuolently,  and began to weep.  i pulled my mouth away and held him tightly,  until the sobbing had stopped,  and he slept,  like a child.

I ran my fingers across his skin as he slept.  It was covered in a multitude of ancient scars. 

But i could recall no scars from the days of our courtship,  save one,  on his side,  where a boar had gored him when he was a youth.

Soon he was a shadow of the man I had met and loved at the bridge.  His bone showed,  blue and white,  beneath his skin. 

I was with him at the last: his hands were cold as Stone,  his eyes milky, -blue, his hair and beard faded and lusterless and limp. 

He died unshriven,  his skin nipped and pocked from head to toe with tiny,  old scar.

He weighted near to nothing.

The ground was frozen hard,  and we could dig no grave for him,  so we made a  cairn of rocks and stone above his body,  as a memorial only,  for there was little enough of him left to protect from the hunger of the beasts and the birds.