There was once a king, and he had two little girls. The first was barely two years old when her mother died in childbirth; the second was barely two years old when her father married his second wife. The king was moved to marriage more than anything to provide his daughters with a mother; that end acknowledged, he could fain have chosen a less matronly woman to marry.
She was a young Lady of bewitching beauty from his court; her family recently ennobled by virtue of service to the king's late father. The Lady's grandfather received the Barony of Tanadin, and after the untimely demise of his older brother the her father became the third Baron of Tanadin. Her mother came from no noble family at all; in fact, the woman was an orphan. But she had been the courtesan of the late king, and upon his death settled for marriage to the Baron's younger (and considerably poorer) son. This woman, by no description unattractive, left whispers of ambition in her wake where e'er she walked. She committed suicide in the same year and but a month earlier than the queen died.
So it was that Lady Clara of Tanadin wed the king and, to the extent that all stepmothers do, his daughters. Years passed, in which Clara could be little bothered with the rearing of two little girls, but showed no disinclination to occupy herself greatly with matters of fashion, cosmetics, and potions to improve her nonexistent fertility. The king overtook the raising of his daughters with pleasure, and left his wife to her frivolity. Although boisterous affection kept him young, he could not bring Time to heel as well as he could his daughters. At fourteen and sixteen, his girls donned black gowns, and wept silently at his funeral. Neither presented a speech; they faded into the general mourning of the country, and no one noticed that no tears fell from Clara's eyes.
That evening, following the funeral feast and the memorial ball (which neither of the girls had attended; they preferred to sup in the privacy of their own chambers), Clara shed her black gown and wrapped herself in a white silk dressing gown embroidered with little butterflies that her mother had left her. She padded over to her vanity table, and drew back the cedarwood panels to reveal the only other object bequeathed to her by her mother: a great mirror. She had not made use of this particular mirror for quite some time, but seeing her husband's creaséd face frozen in death sent her running to the comfort that only the mirror could provide. She sat before it, and reached a hand out to stroke its smooth frame. "Mirror, mirror on the wall," her mouth shaped the words her mother had taught her, "who is the fairest of them all?"
"Princess Anne," came the reply.