Grimhilde was falling apart.
Anxiety, dread, and boredom had each taken their tolls. She’d drawn and painted everything in sight, she’d read every book in her home, she’d cooked and eaten every item in her kitchen so that her grocer had to come twice a week. She’d wrought her hands raw, she’d bitten her lips so that they’d bled down her chin, she’d tapped her fingers on things until they went sore. Every day, she would go to the front door at least thirty times a day, waiting for someone to walk through the door, though she knew that was ridiculous.
Until the day it happened.
She was pacing the floor of her throne room, a habit that had become so common that she knew the room was about twenty-three feet wide and seventy-nine feet long. A sound came about, and it took her a while to understand what it was. When it was heard again, she dashed down the halls to the front door. She opened it to discover she’d been right: the noise was a knock. However, she never would have expected to see Snow White standing there.
For a minute or two, neither woman knew what to do with the other. It was Snow who decided that an embrace was long overdue.
Fighting through the tears, Grimhilde said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I shouldn’t have listened to Mirror.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Snow countered. “I overreacted. You were doing what was best for you and probably me, as well.” She pulled away from the other woman. “I think I have some explaining to do.”
Sitting at the dining room table, Snow White began, “My real name is Matilda Hemminger. My parents were English, but they moved here due to… hard times. They tried to gain passage to America, but couldn’t afford it with my mother’s pregnancy. So they came to this land in the hopes of a better life for me.
“They got the chance when it literally knocked on their door. The queen here at the time said that she was also having a baby. As in, at that moment. She needed my mother to nurse her. My parents said that they couldn’t possibly bring a princess into the world, but then the queen, seeing that my mother was also expecting, she promised to give her a huge reward for her child. They could not decline that. Well, a few years passed and the king and queen came back to our home. I could’ve been around six or ten. They said that their daughter was practicing magic, and a witch for queen was unacceptable. They offered me the kingdom.”
Grimhilde’s eyes widened in shock. Her parents had hated her, certainly, but to offer her birthright to a near stranger? She could see, however, how she had kept the throne from Snow, or, rather, Matilda. Her parents must have been waiting for their daughter to come of age, and then had found out the details of the arrangement, i.e. that the queen Snow/Matilda was replacing was a witch. Perhaps they’d been planning to take the throne by force (even though Grimhilde would have happily handed it over). Then there was a freak accident and her parents died and told Matilda the truth before they’d passed. Then she must have–
“Maybe I should explain what happened before you make all these assumptions.” Grimhilde, she must have noticed, had been staring into the distance fairly intently. “Mother and Father had been practicing witchcraft for years before they found out about you. They had said it was for self-defense or something, but even then, when I was ten or so, I knew that was a lie. I thought that they must have been afraid of something, but I could never figure it out. Then...I found out.”
“When you were out of my castle, I’m assuming?”
“Yes. I went to the dwarfs’ house, the ones that protected the one you fired, literally, and...well...”
Grimhilde nodded understandingly. “It was you.”
Matilda nodded. “They knew what I was capable of. They learned magic in the hopes that they could defend against me. Then, they wanted me to become the new queen because they hoped that my responsibilities would distract me from learning.”
Grimhilde laughed sarcastically. “If only. If anything, it makes you want to practice more so you can have some help. At least, it does when people actually come to you because they don’t think of you as a freak. But I guess I see where you’re going with this.”
“I was assuming you’d figured it out by now, but I will say it out loud anyway.” Matilda looked the older woman in the eye and said, “I’m going to take your crown.”
“Do you understand what you are implying?”
“The current queen has to be dead in order for a new one to be coronated.”
“So you’re telling me to die?”
Matilda smirked. “Not necessarily. You just have to seem dead. And I have a plan.”
“But I have a better one,” retorted Grimhilde, “one that I’ve been contemplating for years now. It involves the dwarves with whom you’ve been living, the animals that you’ve collected, and, of course, suicide.”
