A Fair Account of the Traitors Snow White and Rose Red

The Wish that Burns Alive

I take it back! A hundred thousand times, I take back my wish—too late.

All my life I've envied Mother and Snow's Grand Banes, dying for just one measly drop of their power to set me on equal footing with the rest of my family. But oh, what a regal dunce I've been to desire such exquisite misery! My limbs twitch uncontrollably as I thrash on the cave floor, a howl splitting my teeth against the blue heat ripping through my pores.

Snow pins me to the ground. "Hold still, Rose! Let me help you," she soothes, seizing my fiery hand in her fist.

The air surrounding us glitters as frost crystals bite into my skin. But her ice only seems to fan the ember inside me. My throat grows raw with screaming as the root energy of my soul unravels into a torrid aura that blazes from my fist and erupts in sapphire flames over my entire body. The sheer force of the explosion blows Snow backwards. Only then do I realize—Snow's geomagy isn't still weak from the mines of Kadith—I am just too hot to feel her cold anymore.

But Snow isn't ready to give up on her winter front. The ground crackles and booms with a frost quake as the temperature of the water in the surrounding earth drops suddenly. A halo of snowflakes swirls around Snow as she raises her hand overhead. But before the halo can fall, Snow is jerked backwards as a catbrier vine coils around her wrist, yanking her from my side.

"Stay away from her, Snow White!" Jack orders sharply as he steps between us. "Your geomagy is only making her torment worse. Can't you see that your sister's gloriphagy is reacting to your cold?"

No—not Snow—I just got her back! How can her presence be poison to me now?

The snowflakes shatter at Snow's feet in a tinkling cacophony of shards. "I—I did this to her?" she whispers, backing against the side of the cave.

"Don't flatter yourself," Jack says as he kneels beside me. "The spark was always hers; you're just the tinder."

My shaking limbs still as the elf coils catbrier tendrils around my wrist that draw the heat away from my skin, soaking the flames into their vines. But the catbrier's leaves quickly wither under the blue heat of my aura. Jack grimaces as his corverum disintegrates, clutching his hand as the remnant retracts into the glowing seed embedded in his palm.

"Her gloriphagy's too strong to quell," he says between ragged breaths. "I can't—"

"Only the Queen can reseal her aura now," Snow interrupts. Her voice rings curiously flat and void of emotion in my ears as she steps towards me. "Common phantom moth silk won't bind such power, but Estelle has the finest cloth at her disposal. Rose must be brought back to the palace at—" Sudden alarm blanches her face as she stares beyond me into the inner cave. "Micah, no!" she shouts.

Ice lances shoot from her hands and rim the ledge behind me with a jagged barrier. The Orune slams into her frozen fence just before it finishes crystallizing, a massive paw smashing through the stakes. I flinch as his claws rake the dirt a hair's reach from my throat.

"Micah, please, remember who you are," Snow pleads. Her palms shoot a second wave of ice lances even as the Orune tears through the first with brutal efficiency.

Tears slide free from my eyes only to rise and evaporate in the air in misty gems. It's my fault Micah's trapped in this mindless rampage now. No doubt my accidental blast of wild aura has damaged his gloriphage seal even further. "I'm so sorry," I whisper. "I never meant to hurt—"

"Shhh, Rose Red." Snow spares a dazzling, smile-edged lie for me even as she binds Micah to the cave's wall with yards of ice chains. "Everything's going to be all right."