The Evil Queen: A Snow White Story

Word throughout the land is that I’m evil, heartless, vain, the persecutor of an innocent girl. The gossips say so in every tavern and marketplace around. But the truth is that my stepdaughter is a vampyre with the ability to influence the hearts and minds of those around her, and she has poisoned everyone against me with that ability because I refused to let her drink from me and make me her thrall.

I know it sounds crazy. I know I’m fighting an uphill battle, trying to convince everyone that my side of the story is the truth. The vampyre they call Snow White is beautiful and charming, and she looks for all the world like a teenage girl. Even my magic mirror thinks she’s more beautiful than I am, and while that stings a bit, I swear that’s not the point. I’m not just jealous of a teenager’s looks–I’m trying to save my kingdom from falling captive to an army of bloodsucking undead.

Some of you will say I shouldn’t even call it my kingdom, and maybe you’re right. After all, I wasn’t born here. I came to this land as a girl of fifteen, sold by my parents to marry a man I’d never met who already had a daughter, only a few years my junior, from a previous marriage. I didn’t even speak the language here when I arrived, not fluently. But my new husband, despite our age difference, was considerate of me. He made this place feel like home. And when he died with no son or male relative to succeed him, the throne passed to me. Some will lay the blame for his death at my feet, but he died in a hunting accident, away from our castle, somewhere deep in the dark, dangerous forests of our kingdom.

I didn’t go on that hunting trip. I was pregnant with his child. Grief for him caused me to miscarry. For months Snow White and I mourned him, separately, each in our own way. Ruling the kingdom in his absence kept me busy. I will admit I failed to care for Snow as perhaps I should have, but between my grief and my duties as Queen, I simply did not have the time or the energy or the strength to do so. Perhaps I assumed that the maids and others close to her would care for her. I never dreamed that this negligence on my part would allow her to become a monster.

She was always pale before her father’s death, with dark hair and comely lips. I always thought she’d grow to be a beauty. And before the king died, she was no monster. She had no fangs, she ate all her meals, and her eyes were always warm brown rather than sinister, glowing red. It’s only been in the past year or so that she…changed. I don’t know who turned her or how it might have happened. Her father was no monster of her kind, that I know for certain, for I knew him intimately, and I was trained in my homeland by the best of our vampyre hunters. The bloodthirsty undead have been a scourge there for many years, and every member of the royal family is trained in hunting and dispatching vampyres to a permanent grave. I am grateful that I was not treated differently, despite being a girl–grateful that I had the knowledge to recognize evil when it crossed my path.

I noticed the change in Snow White at supper one night, when I asked her how she had been faring. She sat in the shadows and did not eat anything that was set in front of her. When I inquired about her health, she fixed me with a red-eyed glare that made my blood freeze in my veins from fear. Her lips had become blood-red, her skin snow white, and her hair was inky black. I had thought the latter two changes, which I had noticed before, were from staying indoors and mourning. But the lips, and those eyes, convinced me that this was something different entirely.

She got up from her seat and glided across the floor towards me, hardly seeming to touch the ground. I rose from my chair in alarm. The servants were nowhere to be found.

“I am the rightful Queen,” she hissed, and her fangs glinted in the candlelight. “Bow to me and swear your fealty, usurper.” Her aura was powerful, menacing, demanding obedience–but I stood firm.

“You are not the girl I knew,” I answered, steeling myself to keep my fear from showing. “Vampyre, I rebuke thee in the name of the Holy One!” My fingers slipped into my pocket, wrapping around the holy symbol I always kept there; now, after this experience, I always have multiple on my person.

Snow White backed away from me, baring her fangs like an angry cat. “You will regret this.”

“Begone, creature of the night!”

After a moment’s pause, she left. Not long after, I rushed to my chambers and wept from fear and shock. Even as I sobbed on the bed, I knew I was racing against time. The staff in the castle had always preferred her, except for the few attendants I brought with me from my homeland. Vampyres are almost always skilled in charming or seducing their victims. It would only be a matter of time before she turned the staff against me.

And so I drew on my roots. My training in my youth included some mastery of magick meant to ward off the forces of evil and the undead, and so I began to cast charms of protection–on myself, on my rooms, on my personal attendants. I wanted to cast such spells on the kingdom, but I lack the skill and the power for that.

That night was also the first time I asked my enchanted mirror who is the fairest of them all. I admit that I was flattered when it told me, “You are;” what girl or woman wouldn’t be? But I promise you that this question was not born of vanity. The term “fairest” in my mother tongue denotes power as well as beauty. I started asking the mirror this question daily as a means of measuring Snow White’s influence, not just her beauty. As long as the mirror told me that I was the fairest of them all–or really, anyone other than Snow White–then I still had time to prepare, some modicum of safety.

Last week, that period of safety ended when the mirror told me that Snow White is the fairest of them all. Perhaps I should have acted sooner, when my power still eclipsed hers. But I knew I could tarry no longer when the mirror delivered that verdict. I called my most trusted huntsman to a private audience with me and told him what I needed him to do. I had never been in the field, never fought a real monster or beast myself, and I was frightened.

“Cut out her heart?” my huntsman repeated, unable to believe the instructions. “But she’s just a lass!”

“Cut it out or drive a wooden stake through it,” I insisted. “She’s a vampyre in the guise of a lass. A monster. I know it is difficult, but it must be done. Will you do it?”

“For you, my queen? Anything.”

At least, that’s what he told me, after only a moment’s hesitation. But the next night he returned to the castle sobbing, telling me he just couldn’t do it, she was too innocent and beautiful. Instead he left her in the woods, thinking that the forest would do the job for him. But I know better; evil lurks within those trees, and she will only become more powerful now that she’s away from me, completely unfettered and unsupervised.

I suppose that’s what I get for relying on a man.

They say if you want a job done right, you should do it yourself. So that’s what I intend to do. She’d recognize me if I approached her as myself, so I’ve disguised myself as an old woman, using extra charms to obscure my aura. I’ve packed a basket of blood-apples, attractive vampyre bait created using my grandmother’s recipe and laced with holy water. My mirror has told me where Snow White has fled: a cottage in the woods, known to be inhabited by duergar of the mining persuasion. I will go myself, with stakes and silver daggers hidden in my clothes in addition to my basket of bait, and I will destroy Snow White myself. The fate of our kingdom depends on it.