Author: open_summer/emptysummer
Title: your heart m'dear
Summary: "You cannot have my heart." Snow says, loud enough to be overheard. She lays Ravenna down and whispers. "But you could have." 2.6k.
Rating: pg-13. Gen
Warnings: canon character death, canon shitty world. Basically, nothing that's not in the movie.
AN: SWatH and a children's rhythm. So I like the British spelling of saviour better. Fun shits and giggles, try reading this in your head (or out loud) in the Scottish accent Hemsworth had. More notes at the end.
Fic a day 15
There are magpies in the courtyard, four of them heralding her return. Her feet are bare and she is pristine in white. The image is shocking, shining girl overlaid with the courtyard, torches and an army surrounding her, all eyes upon her. She hesitated; fell back within herself for a moment, the people surrounding her too much.
When Snow White, heir to the land, regains her footing it is beautiful to behold. The Princess fills the courtyard with her voice and every last man would die for her today.
Some of them do. But that is tomorrow. Today the kingdom topples at the feet of a girl.
They whisper Saviour when she passes.
oOo
In her cell she created dolls out of her dresses as she outgrew them, replaced once a year when it was coldest. She wore the old gown under the new for warmth and when the snow melted off her sill she tore the old gown to shreds to stuff her mattress and dress her dolls. The summers are no longer as warm as they once were so her heavy winter dress sits comfortably on her year round.
Snow White keeps the company of beautiful fleeting girls imprisoned across the hall from her and a magpie.
Only one magpie will come to her tower. She thinks this might be Ravenna's fault, for the magpies have always followed her.
There is a rhyme she half-remembers. She thinks it started, one for sorrow. The other of the pair abandoned them when castle fell to the Dark Army.
oOo
The girls Ravenna drained always came to her tower, all beautiful, young, and gone so quickly.
At first there are many of them, later fewer and fewer each year. She memorizes their names, writes them on her walls with charcoal left behind by the fire with half remembered letters, a way to practice her ill formed literacy. Her dolls bare their names and she carries the weight of their souls. Gently now.
The kingdom did not wither and die with her father. The land takes a time to fade, which gives the people hope their princess survived. Snow is the land, and the land is Snow, such is the power of her blood.
The land is felled under the weight of her tower and a succession of beautiful girls, not yet women.
(When she was younger, she would lay her hands flat against the trunk of the apple tree and form apples in winter. They were her favorites. Now apples taste like poison on the tongue. Poison and memory, there is not much difference between the two.)
oOo
Snow cannot name her kingdoms neighbors, those conquered during the Queen's reign or those she let stand. She cannot tell you the history of her kingdom, her predecessors, or the traditional alliances. She cannot tell when a man is lying (though she can tell if a woman is). She cannot tell you which fork to use, or which foot to start with when waltzing.
But she can tell you the name of every girl who has passed through the tower, from the beginning of Ravenna's reign to Greta. She can tell you names of stepmother's victims, those imprisoned. Sometimes if a girl had long, she can tell you the names of Ravenna's collateral damage, siblings, parents and lovers.
(There are three Sarah's on this list, one blonde, two dark haired, all too young to be married. She will never tell the Huntsman this.)
She will not be good at being queen, but she will be a good queen. Advisors will be able to make up the difference, though she suspects there will be few she can trust.
oOo
Snow tamed the rats in the tower to come for scraps, and sung to the magpie that settled on her sill and the other birds that pass through. Sometimes they would hop into her cage and peck for crumbs. She would not trap them, though she could have.
She lets them leave and dreams of flying on black and white wings.
oOo
The first night after William found her, before Ravenna comes wearing his skin, he offers her the little food he has, plain flat bread and cheese. He winces when he offers it to her, like she deserves more. She does not tell him she has lived on bread and water for years now, memories of fruit and meat fond distant memories.
It would sadden him and she can live without his smile, ten years in a tower taught her as much but she'd rather not. Instead she thanks him, divides the food into three portions.
She takes the smallest portion for herself.
Overhead a magpie caws. She counts seven before turning her attention to the food.
oOo
The north tower overlooks the sea. She supposes it was a kindness that they gave her this cell, the only one with a window. But she cannot see the land and the longer she goes with without touching ground the more her connection fades. She cannot see nor feel the land die but knows it must without one of the blood to tend to it.
Throughout her stay the queen ordered only one man imprisoned in her tower, in the earlier years of her imprisonment. A soldier of the Duke, he tells her the fate of William and the Duke, how her lands are barren and twisted, the beautiful women all but gone. Only a few who were hidden had survived Ravenna's purge, that some women had taken to disfiguring themselves to save themselves.
His wife was one of those taken, an Alice who had come and gone in the space of a day, in the first year of Snow's imprisonment. She tells him this and he weeps.
"Little princess" The soldier says, "only those who will be executed are sent to the tower."
"I will not die here."
He looks to protest but the queen's soldiers are coming for him and they fall silent before their captors. He, like his wife, is gone in the space of a day.
oOo
She works on the nail for months, scraping her hands on the stone and breaking her nails trying to work the concrete out. She has nothing but time, though there is a new urgency in her attempts as Finn watches her pretend to sleep most nights. It frightens her, the look in his eyes.
It comes loose slowly, moving a bit more each day. The day she sees two magpies she knows that her escape is coming. (Her Christianity died a gentle death alongside the girls. She will not upset convention but that does not mean she has to keep the faith in her heart.)
These days she trusts the magpies most.
(One for sorrow, two for mirth)
She's certainly laughing as she slides out the drain, the pair of magpies having shown her the way. The exhilaration of escape, freedom, the feel of the sunis incredible.
It doesn't last long. She is cold and tired and wet. But she is also free.
oOo
She knows the reputation of the Dark Forest, and also knows that it is the only place Ravenna cannot touch her. That she has only the vaguest idea of where the Duke's castle is, half-remembered from her fathers maps, informs her decision to run for the heart of the forest. When her horse sinks into the bog she knows she cannot stop to pull him out, and mourns him, reaching out and hugging him as tight as she can.
Then she runs and when she falls into the mushrooms, she curses the lost time, not the forest. Perhaps that is the reason she is not eaten while she slept off the drug.
Magpies, nine, crow a raucous symphony to wake her as the hunting party grows near. They are too close for her to run so she hides and prays for the first time in years for a miracle.
The Huntsman might qualify as that.
oOo
After the woman's village, when the Huntsman knows who she is, she takes off her shoes to walk the forest. The land renews itself under her feet and she cannot feels the cold these days. He looks at her like she is a miracle.
She always looks away.
oOo
She does not tell him who she is because she wishes to trust him and knows she cannot afford herself that luxury. She tells him there will be a reward and little else.
The Huntsman hands her a blade without a second thought, and teaches her to use it. She thinks that had Finn not been a fool and revealed the limits of his sister's power, he would not have turned her over to them.
Wishful thinking no doubt, but the thought prevails.
So she does not hesitate when coming to his aid when the troll attacks them. The blood is a powerful thing. It obeys her.
The Huntsman looks at her differently after that.
oOo
She collapses after the troll. She is not as strong as she could have been and ten years of starvation and only what activity she could contrive in a tower has left her pale and weak.
They camp, having turned back from the outskirts of the forest. The Huntsman assures her that this is safer and she does not question him. He catches a rabbit and shows her how to skin it. She builds the fire, taking over when it fails to catch for the fourth time under his hands. She gets it in one go and he looks askance at her.
Snow shrugs him off and he lets it go. The rabbit is the first meat she has had in six years, maybe seven, since the cook was caught smuggling her food. The cook was gifted with food and incredibly plain. Being plain saved the cook's life, but there were no smuggled treats.
It makes her vomit, too heavy and rich for a starving girl. The Huntsman holds her hair and rubs circles into her back.
oOo
Snow admires the courage of the women, who took brands to their cheeks and rubbed salt into the wounds to ensure they scarred. She shows Lily how to create dolls and in return she is shown how to braid her hair back from her face. Her attempts are clumsy and fumbling, but she manages.
She asks Lily for a rhyme, and is taught one for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a wedding, four for a birth, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret not to be told, eight for heaven, nine for hell, ten for the devil's own self.
The Huntsman leaves, and she thinks she could live here. Touch a brand to her cheeks and weep for the salt. Magpies settle on the roofs and she counts eight before they fly away.
The village burns hours later and she knows this is her fault.
oOo
Maybe she is a miracle, born of three drops of blood. Muir tells the Huntsman he does not see, but she registers this distantly, the hart of the forest before her. The fair folk honor her as they have never honored one of her blood.
The arrow that strikes its heart is a shock, it's dissolving into butterflies even more so. She runs, but ten years in a tower have left her without the stamina to escape them. Gus saves her at the cost of his life. And she weeps for him, reaching for her blade.
(She told the Huntsman she could not kill, and she cannot. But she can fight.)
William, who she barely recognizes, saves her.
oOo
There have been ten dark years, of long winters and cold summers. Her lands are barren, her people dying. She walks barefoot over snow and it melts in her wake. In the villages and towns, flowers bloom. The children too young to remember what they looked like pluck them gleefully and carry them home.
Their mothers weep at the sight of flowers and their fathers gather their weapons.
oOo
"I remember this trick." She says, taking the apple in her hands, laughing. "Do you?"
A magpie, singular, cries. She ignores the warning and bites down. It rots in her hands, ten years old and she chokes on poison and betrayal. "Love," Ravenna says, wreathed in William's skin, wrapped around her, "will always betray you."
The snow is the color of her skin, the ravens the color of her hair, the apple's skin the color of her lips.
Her mother made a wish once and spilled blood to seal it. This is a magic as cold as Ravenna and far older.
oOo
In the years between the kingdom's fall and Snow Whites escape, Ravenna comes to her tower once, after the cook was caught smuggling her food. She brought a tray, laden with food, and she was beautiful, wearing black.
Snow was ill with a fever brought on by the winter and Ravenna fed her gently. More gently then she had imagined possible, having seen the woman over her father's corpse, framed in her memory as hard lines against candlelight.
Ravenna washes her hair, combs and braids it, as gentle as her mother ever was. She tells Snow a story as she does about a girl born, long ago and far away, in the cold lands. A beautiful girl ruined by a king because beauty is power, but whether that power works for you or against you is determined by the strong.
She loves the woman then, more the she had before the coup.
Ravenna leaves, taking the tray with her. She does not return. This was the last time Snow tasted meat.
The moral is this- beauty is power.
But the lesson is this- love will always betray you.
Lesson learned Stepmother- love will always betray you. She pities Ravenna for believing this.
oOo
William kisses her, familiar and gentle, mourning and she thinks not yet.
oOo
The Huntsman kisses her, drunk and weeping, angered and she thinks not yet.
oOo
A pair of magpies circles her body. They peck the tears from her face and crow harshly in her ears. Now, she thinks.
Her feet are bare and she is pristine in white. Two pairs of magpies, four for a birth, herald her.
oOo
She stabs the blade into Ravenna's heart and holds it there until she can see the tattered remains of Ravenna's soul in her eyes.
"You cannot have my heart." She says, loud enough to be overheard. She lays Ravenna down, and whispers in her ear, gentle and sad. "But you could have."
The look of shock on her stepmother's face hurts her, more deeply then she would like. Ravenna dies with that look on her face and her armies shatter to dust.
On the first day, the day she told Ravenna that she was beautiful, Snow would have given Ravenna her heart willingly. Her father was happy for the first time since he mother died, and she could have loved this graceful woman easily. She was halfway there when she sought her father the evening the castle fell.
oOo
She mourns Ravenna but does not defend her and the land blooms. Her people's Saviour Princess, Snow walks the villages and fields barefoot for the end of winter. In spring when the flowers bloom again outside of the unnatural cycle her escape created and the crops come in abundance, she is crowned Queen.
Six magpies attend them in the throne room.
And the crown is heavier then she imagined it would be.
She descends from the throne and a magpie swoops to her shoulder. One, she thinks, for sorrow and lifts her head defiantly.
This has always been her fate.
A list of the magpie's appearances for those who like to keep track of that stuff, in order:
-four for a (re)birth at the Duke's Castle after she wakes
-one for sorrow in Snow's cell
-seven for a secret when she's with William and the Huntsman
-two for mirth as she's escaping
-nine for hell in the Dark forest
-eight for heaven in the village of women
-one for sorrow with Ravenna and the apple
-two for mirth to wake her after the apple and kisses and four for a birth during the speech
-six for gold at the coronation scene and one for sorrow