#which i did easily find even though the blog is unsearchable

[kedreeva]

Just so you know, the post about children’s toys that light up was made by a terf

Thank you for the heads up!

[alarawriting]

Inktober #11: Snow

Based on a post from @sparkingstoryinspiration that I cannot link to because Tumblr is such a profoundly broken web site (I mean I can, but it will make this post unsearchable), but I just reblogged it to this blog right before posting this, so you should be able to find it easily if you want to.

***

My mother was a witch, but she died when I was too young to learn her craft from her. My stepmother was a witch, but she hated me and taught me nothing. Everything I know, I have learned for myself.

When the prince awakened me with a kiss, he expected me to be his wife, and I had no idea there was any other possibility. No, even to say that implies more questioning than I did. I had been raised a princess, taught that my value would be in marrying the prince of another land and securing an alliance for my father’s kingdom. When the prince said he would marry me, I did not particularly want to – I wanted to return to my simple life in the cottage, with my dwarven friends – but if I had been asked, I would have said I chose the marriage freely. Because I had been taught, this was my value, this was the most important task of my life. This was why the huntsman had spared me, why the dwarves had found me and cared for me. This was my purpose.

He was handsome, and I thought he was kind. Certainly he treated me as something lovely and precious to be protected, at first. On our marriage night, he demanded a husband’s rights, and I had been left ignorant of such things by my stepmother and how young I’d been when I went to live with seven wifeless men who would have died rather than corrupt my innocence with a hint of such knowledge. It was painful, and somewhat frightening, but he was the man whose kiss had awakened me from the sleep of death. I trusted him.

I should not have.

He invited my father and stepmother to the festivities after our wedding. Father bent a knee to him, pledging allegiance and fealty, for my prince’s kingdom was far vaster and more powerful than my father’s, and with my marriage to the prince and the fact that my father had never managed to get any heirs on my stepmother, my prince was now heir to both kingdoms. Still, I did not understand why my father needed to swear fealty, until my prince confronted my witch stepmother.

He accused her of trying to kill me, the new queen-in-waiting of the land. He said that my father, recognizing his own culpability in letting his own queen have such free reign that she could arrange for my death without his knowledge, was abdicating to me… which meant, after our marriage, that he was abdicating to my prince, raising my prince up as the new king of our land, even though his father lived and so he was not king of his own land yet. And that meant that his word was law over my stepmother, the former queen.

He told her he had a gift for her, as the mother of his bride. His gift was a pair of red-hot iron shoes, and his men held her down and forced them onto her feet. She danced, screaming, trying to free herself from the horrible weights burning her feet. Witches have no power over iron. My prince made me watch until she fell over, the pain finally overwhelming her. His court physician declared her dead.

He thought he was giving me a gift. He thought I had wanted such a cruel fate for the woman who’d tried to kill me, the woman who, all my childhood, I had tried so hard to please and to imitate, to make her love me as my lost mother had loved me.

He did not want to hear that his gift had been unwelcome, that it had horrified and sickened me, that I grieved for that woman even after all she’d done to me. That I had hoped, now that I was married and no longer a threat to her power, that she could finally be a mother to me and teach me all the things my own mother had died before sharing.

I would like to say that it was that cruelty that hardened my heart against him, that I swore no forgiveness of his crime and stood firm against him for the rest of our marriage. But I was not so strong, then. Perhaps this horror was simply the way of kings and queens, the life I had been born to.

It soon became obvious that my new husband didn’t love me. He loved my beauty, he loved the lands he’d inherited by marrying me, but he had no love for me as a person. When I nearly died trying to bear our first child, and it was a daughter and stillborn besides, he had no comfort for me. He said that I had my mother’s weakness, that I would die in childbirth as she had, trying to bring forth my brother who lived five minutes after birth, and that I had better give him a healthy son before I died. Then he brought other women to his bed, so there would be bastard heirs to take the place of the child I’d never have if I died before a healthy babe came from my loins.

My mother’s books were my inheritance, of no interest to my husband. My stepmother’s mirror, as well, served me now, after I cut my finger on the single sharp edge on the top and let my blood run down the mirror’s surface. The mirror taught me, as my mother could not, as my stepmother did not.

First I wanted to know how to bring a healthy son to term. The mirror told me the ways I could ensure a healthy babe, but told me that whether it should be a son or a daughter was entirely the doing of my husband’s seed, and I could have no control. I demanded to know how my mother had created me, then, a daughter with skin as pale as snow and hair as black as night and lips as red as blood, if a man’s seed was what made a child a boy or a girl. The mirror told me it was done by sacrifice, and the price was too high. My mother had sacrificed my brother, unborn, unconceived, so that I would be the witch-daughter she wanted, and the magic that drained his life drained hers as well.

I could give my husband a son, by sacrificing my second-born child… which, given my family weakness and the near-death I’d already suffered bringing forth a dead child, might well take my own life. I did not love my husband – I had been prepared to love him, when he’d saved me, I had been eager to learn to love him, and then he had tortured my stepmother to death and beaten me for objecting afterward, because I hadn’t been grateful. I had no desire to die to fulfill his needs.

So I sacrificed something else. All the children I might ever have, all of the ability I would ever have to bring forth a child, for life and health. When he beat me, I healed. When he was cruel in our bed, I recovered. My womb did not quicken, but he couldn’t put me aside; I made his rule of my homeland legitimate. If I did not bear him a son, my father’s brother’s son, or his son after him, would take the crown when I died. His rage at my failure was great, but he couldn’t take out his anger at me as much as he wished; he didn’t know I had sold my future children for the ability to heal the hurts he inflicted. If I died with no heir, he lost my kingdom.

He found another way to hurt me.

I had no love for anyone in his court. His citizens were loyal to him alone, not me, for they knew where the power lay. The serving-women I’d brought from my own court blamed me for the death of my stepmother, the queen they’d been loyal to. But I had my pets, as I always had. The birds of the air and the beasts of the field came to me, just as they had when I’d lived with my dwarven friends. I shared my food with them, and gave them my love, and they returned it in full measure.

So my prince set his men to hunting the birds of the air, as they came to visit me, and he brought me their dead bodies as “gifts”, and dared me to show the “ingratitude” I had shown him when he’d given me the gift of a murdered stepmother. So many cruelties I’d held my tongue for, but this I could not bear. I let him see my anger, and my grief.

It was a mistake. He killed every animal he could find within range of the palace.

On that day, my heart turned as cold as ice.

I am a witch, the daughter of a witch, the step-daughter of a witch, and my mother bargained her life away to grant me power, and left me her books, and my stepmother left to me a magic mirror that could tell me anything I wished. I studied. I could not let my husband or any other person know what I was doing, or he would take even that from me. So I rose from my bed in the dark of the night, and found my way, without candle or lantern to light my way, to a secret room I had found, and there I made my studies.

People said the queen was ailing, wasting away. They saw the dark circles of exhaustion under my eyes, they saw how I fell asleep so easily during the day, and they said I was dying. This, at the least, led my husband to leave me alone. He had tormented me for daring to take naps during the day, but when he thought I might be dying, he feared the loss of my kingdom, so he let me be to gain my strength.

My nurses slept at night. They feared to admit to the king they had done so, and I was careful; I spelled them to sleep when it was too late for my husband to come and disturb me, and came back to my bedroom before the spell wore off. Neither was willing to admit to the other, let alone to the king, that they did not guard me in the night, so none knew I was unsupervised for hours in the darkness.

And when I knew. When I understood, when I knew what I would sacrifice, when I knew what I could do. I thought I could bargain with it. I snuck out of the palace and I took my horse and I rode back to where the dwarves had lived, where I had been happy. I thought I would take shelter with them, and blackmail my husband with the threat of what I could do if he should try to take me back.

But I found their cottage destroyed, the beds I had neatly made for them once upon a time chewed to pieces and infested with woodland creatures. I found the bones of two dwarves. It had been long enough that I couldn’t tell which two. I didn’t look for any more.

I returned home, and I shattered my mirror. And with the power I released, I created a swirling vortex that sent shards of the mirror throughout the land. Everywhere they touched the ground turned to ice. Everywhere they struck a person in the heart, they drained them of all love, of all feeling, and with that sacrifice fueled the spell.

In the palace, in the lands around the palace, in my homeland that I had suffered so much for and that had given me so little, in all the lands of my husband’s kingdom… the ground froze. The people froze. The snow fell, the snow I was named for, and it did not stop for forty days and nights.

The sacrifice I made was my humanity. My ability to love, to feel. The sacrifice I made was the lives of all the people in the two kingdoms that I supposedly ruled, that held me prisoner. The sacrifice I made was the humanity and the ability to love and feel of a hundred random men and women, girls and boys, scattered far outside my kingdom.

I will never have children, I will never have a love, I will never even have friends. All of this was true before my final sacrifice. By killing my last, dearest friends, my husband made it so.

He is still alive.

His arms are frozen in a block of ice. His legs are frozen. Ice covers his mouth and holds his head in place, so he cannot speak, or move anything but his eyes and their lids. But he can hear. No ice covers his ears. Or his eyes. He can see as well.

I stand before him, my black hair turned white with the power of my sacrifice, my lips once red as blood now bloodless and almost blue, but otherwise my beauty unchanged from the day he saw me in a sleep of death and decided he had to have me. And I laugh, and show off my wondrous kingdom of ice, and all of his subjects frozen and dead, and all of the treasures he held so dear mine now, mine alone.

The spell that turned my kingdom to ice keeps me alive, but my hate and my desire for revenge keeps me willing to live. As long as the Empire of Ice stands, as long as the Queen of Snow rules, my husband will suffer at the hands of what he created with his cruelty.

As for the people that my spell sacrificed, the ones who lost their ability to love when the shards of my mirror pierced their eyes or their hearts… I intend to find them, the people who can no longer feel, and bring them to my palace to be my servants, citizens of the new Empire of Ice. And I, the Snow Queen, will rule over only them. For I have that much compassion, at least… a memory of having been compassionate, once upon a time. I will not bring anyone who truly lives or feels to live in the land of endless snow and ice, the land where love and kindness can no longer exist.