I admit it, I was not a nice person, I’m still not a nice person, but don’t go thinking that girl, that ‘Snow White’, was any better. And really, what kind of mother calls their child Snow White?
I’ll tell you. A foolish, flighty girl who finds a child in the snow and brings it home (what, you think she actually got pregnant? Not her, not with that husband), then goes out to try and find another one. The king wants a boy after all.
Instead, she dies, and I end up in her place. In a palace that serves as a monument to the untouchable beauty of that first wife. Her portrait in every room, her taste in all the furnishings, her initials carved or painted onto every item I use at the dinner table every damn night.
And her daughter, who, despite being a foundling, looks uncommonly like the dead queen, but with the King’s dark hair. I have my suspicions about the dead queen’s former maid. Whispers speak of an illegitimate sister, forced to serve the true born one, but each as lovely as the other. Did she go to the king’s bed willingly? And if so, was it for love of the man, or the sister? She’ll never say, for she’s dead too, died in childbirth according to my sources.
And so both sisters were gone, the beautiful baby left behind, and a king who cares only for appearances in need of an heir.
Yes, I am beautiful, I would never have become queen otherwise. But my position was never secure, especially once I became pregnant, and therefore ugly. For the record, it took five years, and not through lack of effort on my part.
Thankfully I birthed a boy, with the ink-black hair of the king, and my green eyes. I named him Jareth. But my body had altered, I was no longer perfect and was only retained as the mother of the prince. Other women took my place as the king’s preferred companion. All of them scheming for my crown.
But then, my baby died. My darling boy, one minute cooing and giggling in his cradle, the next still, cold, silent. It was the wet-nurse who found him, setting up a scream like to send terror through the entire kingdom.
My maid had seen Snow White enter the nursery that day, then leave a while later with a smile on her face that she said made her shiver.
Can I prove anything? Of course not. And I’m not stupid enough to even try. The entire palace worships the little brat, image that she is of her sainted, departed mother, and so kind and sweet and soft-spoken, except when she’s not, to people who will never tell, for they’ll never be believed.
