Snow, Glass, Apples
  by Neil Gaiman, 1994.
  First published as a chapbook by DreamHaven Press.

I do not know what manner of thing she is. None of us do. She killed
her mother in the birthing, but that's never enough to account for it.

They call me wise, but I am far from wise, for all that I foresaw
fragments of it, frozen moments caught in pools of water of in the
cold glass of my mirror. If I were wise I would not have tried to
change what I saw. If I  were wise I would have killed myself before
ever I encountered her, before ever I caught him.

Wise, and a witch, or so they said, and I'd seen his face in my dreams
and in reflections for all my life: sixteen years of dreaming of him
before he reined his horse by the bridge that morning and asked my
name. He helped me onto his high horse and we rode together to my
little cottage, my face buried in the gold of his hair. He asked for
the best of what I had; a king's right, it was.

His beard was red-bronze in the morning light, and I knew him, not as
a king, for I knew nothing of kings then, but as my love. He took all
he wanted from me, the right of kings, but he returned to me on the
following day and on the night after that: his beard so red, his hair
so gold, his eyes the blue of a summer sky, his skin tanned the gentle
brown of ripe wheat.

His daughter was only a child: no more than five years of age when I
came to the palace. A portrait of her dead mother hung in the
princess's tower room: a tall  woman, hair the color of dark wood,
eyes nut-brown. She was of a different blood to her pale daughter.

The girl would not eat with us.

I do not know where in the palace she ate.

I had my own chambers. My husband the king, he had his own rooms also.
When he wanted me he would send for me, and I would go to him, and
pleasure him, and take my pleasure with him.

One night, several months after I was brought to the palace, she came
to my rooms. She was six. I was embroidering by lamplight, squinting
my eyes against the lamp's smoke and fitful illumination. When I
looked up, she was there.

"Princess?"

She said nothing. her eyes were black as coal, black as her hair; her
lips were redder than blood. She looked up at me and smiled. Her teeth
seemed sharp, even then, in the lamplight.

"What are you doing away from you room?"

"Im hungry," she said, like any child.

It was winter, when fresh food is a dream of warmth and sunlight; but
I had strings of whole apples, cored and dried, hanging from the beams
of my chamber, and I pulled an apple down for her.

"Here."

Autumn is the time of drying, of preserving, a time of picking apples,
of rendering the goose fat. Winter is the time of hunger, of snow, and
of death; and it is the time of the midwinter feast, when we rub the
goose fat into the skin of a whole pig, stuffed with that autumn's
apples; then we roast it or spit it, and we prepare to feast upon the
crackling.

She took the dried apple from me and began to chew it with her sharp
yellow teeth.

"Is it good?"

She nodded. I had always been scared of the little princess, but at
that moment I warmed to her and, with my fingers, gently, I stroked
her cheek. She looked at me and smiled -- she smiled but rarely --
then she sank her teeth into the base of my thumb, the Mound of Venus,
and she drew blood.

I began to shriek, from pain and from surprise, but she looked at me
and I fell silent.

The little princess fastened her mouth to my hand and licked and
sucked and drank. When she was finished,  she left my chamber. Beneath
my gaze the cut that she had made began to close, to scab, and to
heal. The next day it was an old scar: I might have cut my hand with a
pocketknife in my childhood.

I had been frozen by her, owned and dominated. That scared me, more
than the blood she had fed on. After that night I locked my chamber
door at dusk, barring it with an oaken pole, and I had the smith forge
iron bars, which he placed across my windows.

My husband, my love, my king, sent for me less and less, and when I
came to him he was dizzy, listless, confused. He could no longer make
love as a man makes love, and he would not permit me to pleasure him
with my mouth: the one time I tried, he started violently, and began
to weep. I pulled my mouth away and held him tightly until the sobbing
had stopped, and he slept, like a child.

I ran my fingers across his skin as he slept. It was covered in a
multitude of ancient scars. But I could recall no scars from the days
of our courtship, save one, on his side, where a boar had gored him
when he was a youth.

Soon he  was a shadow of the man I had met and loved by the bridge.
His bones showed, blue and white, beneath his skin. I was with him at
the last: his hands were cold as stone, his eyes milky blue,  his hair
and beard faded and lustreless and limp. He died unshriven, his skin
nipped and pocked from head to toe with tiny, old scars.

He weighed near to nothing. The ground was frozen hard, and we could
dig no grave for him, so we made a cairn of rocks and stones above his
body, as a memorial only, for there was little enough of him left to
protect from the hunger of the beasts and the birds.

So I was queen.

And I was foolish, and young -- eighteen summers had come and gonce
since first I saw daylight -- and I did not do what I would do, now.

If it were today, I would have her heart cut out, true. But then I
would have her head and arms and legs cut off. I would have them
disembowel her. And then I would watch in the town square as the
hangman heated the fire to white-heat with bellows, watch unblinking
as he consigned each part of her to the fire. I would have archers
around the square, who would shoot any bird or animal that came close
to the flames, any raven or dog or hawk or rat. And I would not close
my eyes until the princess was ash, and a gentle wind could scatter
her like snow.

I did not do this thing, and we pay for our mistakes.

They say I was fooled; that it was not her heart.  That it was the
heart of an animal -- a stag, perhaps, or a boar. They say that, and
they are wrong.

And some say (but it is _her_ lie, not mine) that I was given the
heart, and that I ate it. Lies and half-truths fall like snow,
covering the things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape,
unrecognizable after a snowfall; that is what she has made of my life.

There were scars on my love, her father's thighs, and on his
ballock-pouch, and on his male member, when he died.

I did not go with them.  They took her in the day, while she slept,
and was at her weakest. They took her to the heart of the forest, and
there they opened her blouse, and they cut out her heart, and they
left her dead, in a gully, for the forest to swallow.

The forest is a dark place, the border to many kingdoms; no one would
be foolish enough to claim jurisdiction over it. Outlaws live in the
forest. Robbers live in the forest, and so do wolves. You can ride
through the forest for a dozen days and never see a soul; but there
are eyes upon you the entire time.

They brought me her heart. I know it was heres -- no sow's heart or
doe's would have continued to beat and pulse after it had been cut
out, as that one did.

I took it to my chamber.

I did not eat it: I hung it from the beams above my bed, placed it on
a length of twine that I strung with rowan berries, orange-red as a
robin's breast, and with bulbs of garlic.

Outside the snow fell, covering the footprints of my huntsmen, overing
her tiny body in the forest where it lay.

I had the smith remove the iron bars from my windows, and I would
spend some time in my room each afternoon through the short winter
days, gazing out over the forest, until darkness fell.

There were, as I have already stated, people in the forest. They would
come out, some of them, for the Spring Fair: a greedy, feral,
dangerous people; some were stunted -- dwarfs and midgets and
hunchbacks; others had the huge teeth and vacant gazes of idiots; some
had fingers like flippers or crab claws. They would creep out of the
forest each year for the Spring Fair, held when the snows had melted.

As a young lass I had worked at the fair, and they had scared me then,
the forest folk. I told fortunes for the fairgoers, scrying in a pool
of still water; and later, when I was older, in a disk of polished
glass, its back all silvered -- a gift froma merchant whose straying
horse I had seen in a pool of ink.

The stallholders at the fair were afraid of the forest folk; they
would nail their wares to the bare boards of their stalls -- slabs of
gingerbread or leather belts were nailed with great iron nails to the
wood. If their wares were not nailed, they said, the forest folk would
take them  and run away, chewing on the stolen gingerbread, flailing
about them with the belts.

The forest folk had money, though: a coin here, another there,
sometimes stained green by time  of the earth, the face on the coin
unkown to even the oldest of us. Also they had things to trade, and
thus the fair continued, serving the outcasts and the dwards, serving
the robbers (if they were circumspect) who preyed on the rare
travelers from lands beyond the forest, or on gypsies, or on the deer.
(This was robbery in the eyes of the law. The deer were the queen's.)

The years passed by slowly, and my people claimed that I ruled them
with wisdom. The heart still hung above my bed, pulsing gently in the
night. If there were any who mourned the child, I saw no evidence: she
was a thing of terror, back then, and they believed themselves well
rid of her.

Spring Fair followed Spring Fair: five of them, each sadder, poorer,
shoddier than the one before. Fewer of the forest folk came out of the
forest to buy. Those who did seemed subdued and listless. The
stallholders stopped nailing their wares to the boards of their
stalls. And by the fifth year but a handful of folk came from the
forest -- a fearful huddle of little hairy men, and no one else.

The Lord of the Fair, and his page, came to me when the fair was done.
I had known him slightly, before I was queen.

"I do not come to you as my queen," he said.

I said nothing. I listened.

"I come to you because you are wise," he continued. "When you were a
child you found a strayed foal by staring into a pool of ink; when you
were a maiden you found a lost infant who had wandered far from her
mother, by staring into that mirror of yours. You know secrets and you
can seek out things hidden. My queen," he asked, "what is taking the
forest folk? Next year there will be no Spring Fair. The travelers
from other kingdoms have grown scarce and few, the folk of the forest
are almost gone. Another year like the last, and we shall all
starve."

I commanded my maidservant to bring me my looking glass. It was a
simple thing, a silver-backed glass disk, which I kept wrapped in a
doeskin, in a chest, in my chamber.

They brought it to me then, and I gazed into it:

She was twelve and she was no longer a little child. Her skin was
still pale, her eyes and hair coal-black, her lips blood-red. She wore
the clothes she had worn when she left the castle for the last time --
the bloule, the skirt -- although they were much let-out, much
mended. Over them she wore a leather cloak, and instead of boots she
had leather bags, tied with thongs, over her tiny feet.

She was standing in the forest, beside a tree.

As I watched, in the eye of my mind, I saw her edge and step and
flitter and pad from tree to tree, like an animal: a bat or a wolf.
She was following someone.

He was a monk. He wore sackloth, and his feet were bare and scabbed
and hard. His beard and tonsure were of a length, overgrown, unshaven.

She watched him from behind the trees. Eventually he paused for the
night and began to make a fire, laying twigs down, breaking up a
robin's nest as kindling. He had a tinderbox in his robe, and he
knocked the flint against the steel until the sparks caught the tinder
and the fire flamed. There had been two eggs in the nest he had found,
and these he ate raw. They cannot have been much of a meal for so big
a man.

He sat there in the firelight, and she came out from her hiding place.
She crouched down on the other side of the fire, and stared at him. He
grinned, as if it were a long time since he had seen another human,
and beckoned her over to him.

She stood up and walked around the fire, and waited, an arm's length
away. He pulled in his robe until he found a coin -- a tiny copper
penny - and tossed it to her. She caught it, and nodded, and went to
him. He pulled at the rope around his waist, and his robe swung open.
His body was as hairy as a bear's. She pushed him back onto the moss.
One hand crept, spiderlike, through the tangle of hair, until it
closed on his manhood; the other hand traced a circle on his left
nipple. He closed his eyes and fumbled on huge hand under her skirt.
She lowered her mouth to the nipple she had been teasing, her smooth
skin white on the furry brown body of him.

She sank her teeht deep into his breast. His eyes opened, then they
closed again, and she drank.

She straddled him, and she fed. As she did so, a thin blackish
liquid began to dribble from between her legs...

"Do you know what is keeping the travelers from our town? What is
happening to the forest people?" asked the Lord of the Fair.

I covered the mirror in doeskin, and told him that I would personally
take it upon myself to make the forest safe once more.

I had to, although she terrified me. I was the queen.

A foolish woman would have gone then into  the forest and tried to
capture the creature; but I had been folish once and had no wish to be
so a second time.

I spent time with old books. I spent time with the gypsy women (who
passed through our country across the mountains to the south, rather
than cross the forest to the north and the west).

I prepared myself and otained those things I would need, and when the
first snows began to fall, I was ready.

Naked, I was, and alone in the highest tower of the palace, a place
open to the sky. The winds chilled my body; goose pimples crept across
my arms and thighs and breasts. I carried a silver basin, and a basket
in which I had placed a silver knife, a silver pin, some tongs, a gray
robe, and three green apples.

I put them on and stod there, unclothed, on the tower, humble before
the night sky and the wind. Had any man seen me standing there, I
would have had his eyes; but there was no one to spy. Clouds scudded
across thesky, hiding and uncovering the wandering moon.

I took the silver knife and slashed my left arm -- once, twice, three
times. The blood dripped into the basin, scarlet seeming black in the
moonlight.

I added the powder from the vial that hung around my neck. It was a
brown dust, made of dried herbs and the skin of a particular toad, and
from certain other things. It thickened the blood, while preventing it
from clotting.

I took the three apples, one by one, and pricked their skins gently
with my silver pin. Then I placed the apples in the silver bowl and
let them sit there while the first tiny flakes of snow of the year
fell slowly onto my skin, and onto the apples, and onto the blood.

When dawn began to brighten the sky I covered myself with the gray
cloak, and took the red apples from the silver bowl, one by one,
lifting each into my basket with silver tongs, taking care not to
touch it. There was nothing left of my blood or of the brown poweder
in the silver bowl, nothing save a black residue, like a verdigris, on
the inside.

I buried the bowl in the earth. Then I cast a blamour on the apples
(as once, years before, by a bridge, I had cast a glamour on myself),
that they were, beyond any doubt, the most wonderful apples in the
world, and the crimson blush of their skins was the warm color of
fresh blood.

I pulled the hood of my cloak low over my face, and I took ribbons and
pretty hair ornaments with me, placed them above the apples in the
reed basket, and I walked alone into the forest until I came to her
dwelling: a high sandstone cliff, laced with deep caves going back a
way into the rock wall.

There were trees and boulders around the cliff face, and I walked
quietly and gently from tree to tree without disturbing a twig or a
fallen leaf. Eventually I found my place to hide, and I waited, and I
watched.

After some hours, a clutch of dwarfs crawled out of the hole in the
cave front -- ugly, misshapen, hairy little men, the old inhabitants
of this country. You saw them seldom now.

They vanished in to the wood, and none of them espied me, though one
of them stopped to piss against the rock I hid behind.

I waited. No more came out.

I went to the cave entrance and hallooed into it, in a cracked old
voice.

The scar on my Mound of Venus throbbed and pulsed as she came toward
me, out of the darkness, naked and alone.

She was thirteen years of age, my stepdaughter, and nothing marred the
prefect whiteness of her skin, save for the livid scar on ther left
breast, where her heart had been cut from her long since.

The insides of her thighs were stained with wet black filth.

She peered at me, hidden, as I was, in my cloak. She looked at me
hungrily. "Ribbons, goodwife," I croaked. "Pretty ribbons for your
hair..."

She smiled and beckoned to me. A tug; the scar on my hand was pulling
me toward her. I did what I had planned to do, but I did it more
readily than I had planned: I dropped my basket and screeched like the
bloodless old peddler woman I was pretending to be, and I ran.

My gray cloak was the color of the forest, and I was fast; she did not
catch me.

I made my way back to the palace.

I did not see it. Let us imagine, though, the girl returning,
frustrated and hungry, to her cave, and finding my fallen basket on the
ground.

What did she do?

I like to think she played first with the ribbons, twined them  into
her raven hair, looped them around her pale neck or her tiny waist.

And then, curious, she moved the cloth to see what else was in the
basket, and she saw the red, red apples.

They smelled like fresh apples, of course; and they also smelled of
blood. And she was hungry. I imagine her picking up an apple, pressing
it against her cheek, feeling the cold smoothness of it against her
skin.

And she opened her mouth and bit deep into it...

By the time I reached my chambers, the heart that hung from the roof
beam, with the apples and hams and the dried sausages, had ceased to
beat. It hung there, quietly, without motion or life, and I felt safe
once more.

That winter the snows were high and deep, and were late melting. We
were all hungry come the spring.

The Spring Fair was slightly improved that year. The forest folk were
few, but they were there, and there were travelers from the lands
beyond the forest.

I saw the little hairy men of the forest cave buying and bargaining
for pieces of glass, and lumps of crystal and of quartz rock. They
paid for the glass with silver coins -- the spoils of my
stepdaughter's depredations, I had no doubt. When it got about what
they were buying, townsfolk rushed back to their homes and came back
with their lucky crystals, and, in a few cases, with whole sheets of
glass.

I thought breifly about having the little men killed, but I did not.
As long as the heart hung, silent and immobile and cold, from the beam
of my chamber, I was safe, and so were the folk of the forest, and,
thus, eventually, the folk of the town.

My twenty-fifth year came, and my stepdaughter had eaten the poisened
fruit two winters back, when the prince came to my palace. He was
tall, very tall, with cold green eyes and the swarthy skin of those
from beyond the mountains.

He rode with a small retinue: large enought to defend him, small
enough that another monarch -- myself, for instance -- would not view
him as a potential threat.

I was practical: I thought of the alliance of our lands, thought of
the kingdom running from the forests all the way south to the sea; I
thought of my golden-haired bearded love, dead these eight years; and,
in the night, I went to the prince's room.

I am no innocent, although my late husband, who was once my king, was
truly my first lover, no matter what they say.

At first the prince seemed excited. He bade me remove my shift, and
made me stand in front of the opened window, far from the fire, until
my skin was chilled stone-cold. The hen asked me to lie upon my back,
with my hands folded across my breasts, my eyes wide open -- but
staring only at the beams above. He told me not to move, and to
breathe as little as possible. He implored me to say nothing. He
spread my legs apart.

It was then that he entered me.

As he began to thurst inside me, I felt my hips raise, felt myself
begin to match him, grind for grind, push for push. I moaned. I could
not help myself.

His manhood slid out of me. I reached out and touched it, a tiny,
slippery thing.

"Please," he said softly. "You must neither move nor speak. Just lie
there on the sontes, so cold and so fair."

I tried, but he had lost whatever force it was that had made him
virile; and, some short while later, I left the prince's room, his
curses and tears still resounding in my ears.

He left early the next morning, with all his men, and they rode off
into the forest.

I imagine his loins, now, as he rode, a knot of frustation at the base
of his manhood. I imagine his pale lips pressed so tightly together.
Then I imagine his little troupe riding through the forest, finall
coming upon the glass-and-crystal cairn of my stepdaughter. So pale.
So cold. Naked beneath the glass, and little more than a girl, and
dead.

In my fancy, I can almost feel the sudden hardness of his manhood
inside his britches, envision the lust that took him then, the prayers
he muttered beneath his breath in thanks for his good fortune. I
imagine him negotiating with the little hairy men -- offering them
gold and spices for the lovely corpse under they crystal mound.

Did they take his gold willingly? Or did they look up to see his men
on their horses, with their sharp swords and their spears, and realize
they had no alternative?

I do not know. I was not there; I was not scrying. I can only
imagine...

Hands, pulling off the lumps of glass and quartz from her cold body.
Hands, gently caressing her cold cheek, moving her cold arm, rejoicing
to find the corpse still fresh and piable.

Did he take her there, in front of them all? Or did he have her
carried to a secluded nook before he mounted her?

I cannot say.

Did he shake the apple from her throat? Or did her eyes slowly open as
he pounded into her cold body; did her mouth open, those red lips part,
those sharp yellow teeth close on his swarthy neck, as the blood,
which is the life, trickled down her throat, washing down and away the
lump of apple, my own, my poison?

I imagine; I do not know.

This I do know: I was woken in the night by her heart heart pulsing and
beating once more. Salt blood dripped onto my face from above. I sat
up. My hand burned and pounded as if I had hit the base of my thumb
with a rock.

There was a hammering on the door. I felt afraid, but I am a queen,
and I would not show fear. I opened the door.

First his men walked into my chamber and stood around me, with their
sharp swords, and their long spears.

Then he came in; and he spat in my face.

Finally, she walked into my chamber, as she had when I was first a
queen and she was a child of six. She had not changed. Not really.

She pulled down the twine on which her heart was hanging. She pulled
off the rowan berries, one by one; pulled off the garlic bulb -- now a
dried thing, after all these years; then she took up her own, her
pumping heart -- a small thing, no larger than that of a nanny goat or
she-bear -- as it brimmed and pumped its blood into her hand.

Her fingernails must have been as sharp as glass: she opened her
breast with them, running them over the purple scar. her chest gaped,
suddenly, open and bloodless. She licked her heart, once, as the
blood ran over her hands, and she pushed the heart deep into her
breast.

I saw her do it. I saw her close the flesh of her breast once more. I
saw the purple scar begin to fade.

Her prince looked briefly concerned, but he put his arm around her
nonetheless, and they stood, side by side, and they waited.

And she stayed cold, and the bloom of death remained on her lips, and
his lust was not diminished in any way.

They told me they would marry, and the kingdoms would indeed be
joined. They told me that I would be with them on their wedding day.

It is starting to get hot in here.

They have told the people bad things about me; a little truth to add
savor to the dish, but mixed with many lies.

I was bound and kept in a tiny stone cell beneath the palace, and I
remained there through the autumn. Today they fetched me out of the
cell; they stripped the rags from me, and washed the filth from me,
and then they shaved my head and my loins, and they rubbed my skin
with goose-grease.

The snow was falling as they carried me -- two men at each hand, tow
men at each leg -- utterly exposed, and spread-eagled and cold,
through the midwinter crowds, and brought me to this kiln.

My stepdaughter stood there with her prince. She watched me, in
indignity, but she said nothing.

As they thrust me inside, jeering and chaffing as they did so, I saw
one snowflake land upon her white cheek, and remain there without
melting.

They closed the kiln door behind me. It is getting hotter in here, and
outside they are singing and cheering and banging on the sides of the
kiln.

She was not laughing, or jeering, or talking.  She did not sneer at me
or turn away. She looked at me, though; and for a moment I saw myself
reflected in her eyes.

I will not scream. I will not give them that satisfaction. They will
have my body, but my soul and my story are my own, and will die with
me.

The goose-grease begins to melt and glisten upon my skin. I shall make
no sound at all. I shall think no more on this.

I shall think instead of the snowflake on her cheek.

I think of her hair as black as coal, her lips, redder than blood, her
skin, snow-white.

