The Queen Mother

The rumors will tell you that I tried to kill my stepdaughter, Snow White–daughter in everything but blood–but I was just trying to mother her right and keep her safe. 

Drip. Drip. Drip.

"Mother!" Snow cries, leaning into the bars of my prison cell. "Mother, why are you here? What happened to you?" 

I don't answer for a moment, watching water drip from a stalactite in the ceiling. I do not know exactly why I am here, although I have a guess. I do not know why I have been chosen to be villainized in this story, except maybe that the people of Niveum have always cared about blood and lineage a little too much and it always feels like I am walking on a tightrope–trying to do what's best for the kingdom and trying to remain in the public's favor at the same time. I suppose I have finally fallen off of this impossible tightrope. 

I turn around to see my daughter's fingers go white as she grips the bars so tightly. I have tried to protect her from politics, ever since Snow's blood mother died and I was the only one left to be a mother to her. Perhaps I shouldn't have. Perhaps her heart would be harder then, and she would not be so easy to manipulate. "Snow, listen carefully. Prince Florian is the prince of a kingdom called Germonia."

"I know," she says slowly. "He introduced himself to me like that. Prince Florian of Germonia." She is starry-eyed, thinking about her prince, and that's when I know my life is almost certainly coming to an end. 

I sigh, once, twice. Snow is too naive, and I can't protect her from her own consequences, but I can try. "Do you remember when you were young, when you tried to sit in on my council meetings?" Snow's father is dead, has been dead for a very long time now. I never remarried after him. I kept all the power I had to myself, and served as a 'temporary regent'–not queen, or even just regent, because Niveum has never had a queen and never will–and as such, Snow tried to follow me around, even to the council meetings. 

She nods. "That was not so long ago, Mother. It was only three years ago." It doesn't seem so, I think. You’ve grown so much since you were eleven. 

"Germonia," I say slowly and carefully, "is the same Germonia that threatened war on us, that tried to steal our trade routes and kill our people."

 Snow blinks, once, twice. Then she shakes her head. She shakes her head vehemently. "No, Mother. You must have gotten something mixed up. Florian is nice to me. He promised me we'd get married! I was going to invite you to the wedding, but when I asked the guards, they pointed me here. But I'm sure it's a mistake! Florian wouldn't have done this, or threatened war!!"

Snow is only fourteen. Prince Florian is thirty-one. Prince Florian has found the alliance that Germonia has been looking for. She is easy for him to manipulate, and perhaps I should have let her learn through trial by fire when she was younger how to defend herself. Yet, I didn't, and I will pay now. "Yes. He and his father, this is what they did." I don't say that I have done that and worse in return. It's not like it would do much for my credibility at this moment. 

Snow gathers her skirts and a fire ignites in her eyes. She spins around and huffs, storming away ungracefully. I snort and roll my eyes as she goes. But I have better things to do than try and deal with a manipulated teenager who won't listen to me. By custom of Niveum, there will be a trial for me and I will have to get a chance to speak and recount my side of the story. I have to get my story straight now. I am an old woman whose memory is fading and if any of the obvious facts I state are false, the entire story loses credibility. I cannot afford this if I hope to make it out alive. 

The prince has read out my crimes to me already before putting me in this cell. I know the story he will feed to the people, and I need to address them and deny them, or it will look like I am accepting the lies as truth. 

I close my eyes in focus and attempt to remember.

Snow White and her parents were a happy family for a couple years, but as we all know, her mother unfortunately died when she was young, and her father met me and we married. 

I was the best mother to Snow White as I could be, although her father's death two years after we were married truly saddened my spirits. For a long time, I hid away in my chambers, appointing a regent to reign over the kingdom as Snow and I grieved. 

The palace was becoming more and more dangerous, and I couldn't let my daughter stay in a place where there were traps lurking around every corner. With a heavy heart, I sent Snow away in the middle of the night, with only those I most trusted knowing of the operation, including a huntsman for her protection. The prince will tell you I had the huntsman try and kill Snow, but he was simply there to guard her against any dangers she might have encountered on her trip. He'll tell you that I had a magic mirror, that I am a witch, that I am so vain that I was jealous of my eleven year old daughter's beauty, and tried to have her killed for it. The prince is a liar, and this is another one of his outlandish lies that I hope you will not believe. I called in a few favors from some miners I knew so they would keep my daughter and feed her and teach her everything I could not from the palace. 

 I couldn't bring her back because the political unrest was simply too bad for me to bring her into such a tumultuous scene. Although I never confirmed it, people started to assume Snow was dead. A rumor began to spread that I was so vain that I had her killed for being beautiful! Utter propaganda, but I was disliked enough for it to work. I visited her as often as I could, in disguise of course. The prince will tell you I am a witch, a demon who can change her appearance, but it's amazing what cosmetics and a few drawn-on wrinkles can do. I hunched my back and took a cane, and I was unrecognizable. People say I gave her “poison combs" when I just thought they were pretty. I brought her a lace bodice and dresses and cosmetics and everything I thought she might enjoy. I didn't try to kill her, I was just trying to be a good mother. 

I remembered that she loved apples, so I brought her a basketful. I left her with them, and I would only later learn that she choked on one, ultimately killing her. The grief nearly destroyed me when I heard the news. The miners put her into a beautiful coffin, and now here is the question I raise to you. 

How could a trip over a branch and the dislodging of a fatal apple chunk in the throat bring a corpse back to life? Science doesn't care if that's what killed her: a stopped heart, a heart that has been stopped for hours or days on end, cannot start beating again. If you put blood back into someone who has already bled out, there is no chance that the corpse is coming back to life. I am so, so glad that my daughter is alive, but it raises the question: how? 

Prince Florian, I say, is a witch. A man in his thirties, so ready to marry my daughter who is not even a decade and a half! There are easier ways to bring peace to our two kingdoms than this. As my daughter's only parent, the only one who will negotiate her marriage on her behalf, I say this: I will not let my daughter marry a witch such as this. 

Oh, I want to continue my spiel. But Prince Florian is something I am not. He is royal by blood and his word, combined with Snow on his arm, will always be believed over mine. I am doomed. I only want to give my speech so that maybe someone, someone reading the court records, will hear my story and begin to doubt the sugarcoated story Prince Florian will undoubtedly feed to the public. He will cut me off, and they will believe him. And that's exactly what happens.

Bloodlines and lineage: two things Prince Florian has and I do not, two things that the public has learned to value above all else. It does not matter that I have spent half of my life fighting for this kingdom. What matters is that at the end of the day, I married into this throne, and now I have been forcefully ejected from it.  

 "Former Regent Regina," he says at the end of it all. "Because of my kind and merciful fiancee, I offer you mercy. Instead of execution, I will exile you. Before, however, I'd like to invite you to my wedding, which is happening in a week. My fiancee would like you, as her mother figure, to attend, and who am I to say no?"

I agree. I don't have a choice. I'm led back to my prison cell to wait out my days. I don't hope–I would be foolish to. He will find a way to kill me, in exile or sooner, somehow. And he will kill the kingdom I have spent my life trying to help. So I wait. And I wait. 

Drip. Drip. Drip. 

When the wedding comes, as I leave, I am gifted with a pair of shoes that go perfectly with the outfit Snow has chosen. There is no card, no indication of who it's from. It gives an air of anonymity, even though I know exactly who gave it to me. 

When I put them on and arrive at the wedding, they glow red-hot and I begin to dance and I cannot stop. I make eye contact with Florian and he raises his glass to me, like he's toasting someone in my direction. He's telling a story and Snow is hanging on to his every word. When he glances away to look at me, so does she. She smiles, and mouths, 'I'm glad you're enjoying the party so much.'

I wonder if it's only me who can see the redness of the shoes, and if it's only me who notices that I am dancing to my death.