A/N Yet another cracky idea I got. Bear with me on other stories, new inspiration is flooding in and I'm just going with the flow. Ideas and suggestions are very helpful, and thank you to VivaLaVida1704 who put up with me babbling about this story in lunch-break today.


Part One


Once below a time, in a land not that far away, there lived a Good King and a Beautiful Queen named Gustave and Antoinette. They were very young when they married, as is the way of things, in a beautiful ceremony of white rose petals and flute music.

It was a marriage arranged by their fathers, but soon after, they fell in love, and not long after Gustave became King, Antoinette announced that she was going to have a baby.

The child was born in midwinter, when snow was drifting from iron grey clouds, and the icy winter wind howled outside the walls of the castle. Nevertheless, the village at the foot of the battlements built a huge bonfire and set off fireworks in honour of the royal birth, dancing until their feet blistered and their hands were chapped with cold.

The princess was the most beautiful baby that had ever been born, declared her proud parents. With a small face peeking out of soft white blankets, and a shock of hair that was neither brown nor gold nor black but the strangest mixture of all three, her gummy smiles won over the hearts of everyone in the castle, from the lowliest spit boy to the mother of the King herself.

"She shall be called Christine," Queen Antoinette smiled weakly as she cradled her daughter, propped up by fluffy pillows in the great bed of state. But, as normally happens, the baby's real name was pushed aside in favour of a nickname. The commons called her Snow White, since she was the fairest babe in all the land, and born on a night when the snow tumbled from the sky.

But with great joy often comes great sadness, and it was only days later when Queen Antoinette succumbed to the childbed fever that claimed so many new mothers. The King was heartbroken, and wept over his wife's body, the tears falling on her still, cold cheeks and their squalling daughter held tightly in his arms.

The whole land mourned for the beautiful, kind queen who had always had a smile for anyone who visited her and a magic way of solving anyone's problems, be it illness or strife or feud.

When Princess Christine, or Snow White, as we should refer to her, reached the tender age of two years, the King's mother decided that the child needed a real mother, and searched the kingdoms around for a suitable woman to marry her still-grieving son.

In the Kingdom of Opera, the other side of the great land, the King and Queen had five beautiful daughters, and it was the youngest that the mother of King Gustave settled on for the next Queen of Garnier.

The Princess Carlotta arrived in a swirl of red silk and trumpets, her crimson-painted lips curved up to reveal straight white teeth. King Gustave had his doubts, but as his mother was old, he humoured her, kissing the Princess' hand and promising to marry her within the week.

Then he called for his small daughter, Snow White, to be brought in by her nurses, and he watched with what could have been approval as his bride-to-be gathered the cherub-faced little girl into her arms, and cooed over her angelic prettiness and pretty smile.

They were happy together, well, as happy as can be when the husband is still sad over the death of his first and most beloved wife. Carlotta settled into her role as Queen, mothering little Snow White with fond affection and putting on gentle smiles for her weary husband.

With Snow White's third winter, an illness broke out in the castle, first claiming the King's mother, and then the King himself. Carlotta adopted an air of inconsolable grief, dressing herself and the little princess in deepest black mourning attire, and wailing at the end of her dead husband's bed.

But, as things go, she was secretly pleased to be rid of a husband who, whilst kind to her, had never been much more than an old bore, and talked to the folk of the towns more than she cared for, playing his violin for anyone to hear. She had been brought up by a grasping mother with a fondness for power as one might have a fondness for pastries, and despised the common people with all her heart. Carlotta, who took after her mother, rather liked having regency of the kingdom, and was determined to keep it that way, pushing the little Princess Snow White out of her place in the succession.

She handed the child over to a mother in the village who already had five children, and whilst providing a measly stipend for Snow White's clothes, pushed the girl out of her life. The child was heartbroken over the death of her dearest papa, and sobbed for weeks and weeks into the little blanket her surrogate mother had made for her.

Mistress Sorelli was a kind woman who had once been a dancer in the big town miles north of the castle, and had taught all of her children, three girls and two boys to dance with varying degrees of success. Little Snow White, or Christine as was her real name, took to dancing like a duck to water, even though she was all elbows and knees and not that much grace at all.

So the little girl grew up, knowing she was a princess but not knowing exactly what that was…and it was not long before she caught her former stepmother's attention once more…