A Fair Account of the Traitors Snow White and Rose Red

To Kill the Elf or Keep Him? A Princess's Dilemma

"I would've noticed if the woman I've called 'Mother' for the last eleven years was an imposter," I insist.

I've allowed Snow to lead me into the trackless silver groves of the Wildershade. The Orune follows close behind us obligingly carrying the unconscious Jack slung across his back. I'm thoroughly lost in these tangled woods, but even more confused inside the maze of suspicions that Snow and Micah's claims have planted in my mind.

"Oh? Did you notice when the Queen allowed the Green Guild to poison Albemar's farmland with toxic amounts of lucidium?" Snow demands. "Or gut the Wildershade, the most sacred forest of the Leonesse?"

"Mother wouldn't, I mean, I'm sure she doesn't know—" I counter stubbornly.

"She knows full well and is playing us all for fools." Snow interrupts. "That stranger killed Father and let me take the fall. I don't know why yet, but how she did it is not so hard to guess. Any half-decent gloriphage can create an illusion-class token to imitate another's appearance."

"But no one can mimic your ice." I shock myself by blurting out my deepest reservation. Even if someone had copied Snow's appearance with gloriphagy that still didn't explain the ice knife that had glittered in the assassin's hand. Snow is the only geomage in Albemar! The only one who could create such an elemental weapon in the dead of summer's heat that night . . . .

Snow's blue eyes never waver as they challenge mine. "Did you test it, then? Match your warmth against the blade's crystal cold?"

"No," I admit. I was only five then, and blubbering over my Father's body in a pool of his blood! I never even had the chance to examine the knife's icy shards; Nana Lune had pulled me away from the study and servants had scrubbed clean all evidence of Father's murder. I'd always assumed the weapon and its lethal frost had eventually melted away. But surely, others must have examined the evidence before it evaporated . . . hadn't they?

"Somehow, a gloriphage stole my face and my Grand Bane that night." Snow's voice pushes persistently against the down spiral of my thoughts. "Every gloriphage aura is unique, yet Micah swears that the color of the Queen's soul has changed. Haven't you ever wondered about the dramatic magnification in Estelle's abilities after Father's death?"

She's right—Mother went from spending hours to shine a single pebble into a lumpy pearl to shattering palace windows and reframing them within a single breath. Everyone at court had accepted Estelle's rapid acceleration in gloriphagy as the result of the trauma of Father's death. But there were so many other little changes, too—her sudden coldness towards me, her withdrawal from all former pleasures; yet, weren't these all the proper markers of a grief-stricken widow? But now a traitorous worm of doubt wriggles in my skull.

I throw my hands into the air. "If the Queen is not my mother, then where, pray tell, is my true mother?"

Snow folds her arms as if even she could shiver. "Now that's the real question, isn't it?"

Jack chooses this suspenseful moment to slide, well, more or less fall off the Orune's back. He strides towards my half sister only to freeze midstep as Micah growls ominously, teeth clacking together in a dagger-lined maw.

"Not yet," Snow says, shooting a severe glance at the bear. "I owe him for Isabeau's brooch, after all."

Yet? My alarm rises as I wonder if they still mean to kill the elf. Jack seems oblivious to their debate as he launches into his customary sarcasm.

"Nice to see you princesses are peapod cozy now," he says, "but while you're quarreling over the true hue of the Queen's gloriphagy, my people suffer. I seek your aid in freeing my kin, Snow White." His quick sarcasm flows into sudden earnestness as he bows on bended knee before my half sister and pours out the tale of his enslavement on the black orchid plantation.