Rosa Telya Jeriria tirVardossa and Snow White Harmony Grace tirVardossa both grew, as is the nature of children. Rosa the elder's dying curse proved true at least in part; Charlta was unable to get a child on anyone else, no matter how hard or how often her tried.
Young Rosa's presence constantly reminded him of his late second wife, a woman he had learned to hate after he had killed her. In fury, he changed her name to Sarra, not wanting to even have to speak his wife's name aloud. The name did not stay changed for long, however.
At the age of five, she stood up at the dinner table, announcing quite proudly, "My name is not Sarra. My name is Rosa. From now on, I am going to ignore anyone who does not call me Rosa." She sat back down and calmly continued her meal--and that was that.
Her name wasn't the only thing about her mother that Rosa shared. True, she had her father's silvery blonde hair--which was almost to her knees by her twelfth birthday--and his jade green eyes, but the rest of her was entirely her mother's. Dark lashes, soft, full mouth, charming freckles, peaches and cream complexion, stubbornly pointed chin--and womanly curves that were only slightly modest, even at the age of twelve.
Snow (as Snow White insisted upon being called) proved to take after her own mother, as well. Her ebony hair she wore short--the longest it ever got before she cut it again was just touching the top of her shoulder blades. Her emerald eyes were large, frank, and honest; they looked (and were) entirely incapable of deception. She went outside constantly, and was always forgetting to wear a hat; consequently, she had a healthy tan and freckles that looked as though a painter had dipped his brush in fawn-colored paint and splattered it across her face. Her nose was too straight and too long, her ears too big, her feet far too big for the rest of her body--although her nurse said she'd grow out of that. She was almost as tall as her father, even at only thirteen.
Simply put, Rosa was beautiful, and Snow was merely pretty. The elder of the sisters might become more beautiful with age, but it was highly doubted.
They both had an instinctive dislike of both their father and each other--not a result of Rosa the elder's dying curse, though, for their feeling couldn't exactly be described as active hate. It was entirely at the level of instinct; some subconscious part of their brains knew very well that he had murdered both their mothers.
Rosa was twelve--the same age her mother had been--when she discovered her powers.
The library was dark--pitch black, to tell the truth, darker than the night outside. Rosa didn't mind. Unlike Snow, she had never been afraid of the dark; her sister, on the other hand, had a completely irrational phobia when it came to darkness, and could never get to sleep unless someone left a candle lit in her room.
The candle Rosa was carrying now she shielded with her hand, so that it shone light only on her bare feet and the hem of her nightgown. She didn't want to let anyone know that she was up and about; it was well past her bedtime, and she had much past experience with Nurse's lectures on the importance of bedtimes.
Slipping into the library, she looked about her and grimaced. The huge collection of books belonged entirely to her grandfather, the thirteenth King of Torlemont; no one in the royal family had spent much time here since he had died. Consequently, everything was in disorganized disarray, and covered with several layers of dust. Snow was in the process of organizing and cataloging everything, but she had only gotten so far, and considering the size of the library, would probably never finish.
Snow was the only one that used the library anymore. She had a passion for books that Rosa would never understand, devouring them at a positively inhuman rate and immediately running back to the library for another one. Her favorites were novels and adventure stories--just another of the many things about her sister that Rosa simply couldn't comprehend. Books were fine if they were useful, but what good was a pack of lies about people that had never existed--and what was a novel but exactly that?
Rosa had a certain book in mind that she wanted to get tonight. It was a book that she had dismissed at the time, some really ancient tome that had once belonged to those of the ancient blood, the so-called sorcerers. Up until today, Rosa had been of the simple and commonly held opinion that the "sorcerers" had about as much magic as a common village hedgewitch.
But after today, she was starting to reconsider. She was even starting to think that--as radical as it sounded--she might be a sorcerer of the ancient blood.
There was one of the kitchen boys who was about her age, one who everyone called Jon--and who Rosa called a gigantic annoyance. He seemed to have a positive knack for saying just the right things to infuriate her, and he loved to make her angry. She'd been longing to find a way to shut him up for quite some time.
He'd been taunting her earlier this afternoon, saying how everyone had wondered when she was born if the King was really her father or not. She was born seven months after their marriage, which was far too early for the circumstances of her conception to have been socially acceptable. The only reason they had assumed she wasn't a bastard was because she looked like her father--but that wasn't really good evidence, because the only things they had in common where blonde hair and green eyes. And there were plenty of blonde-haired, green-eyed men out there, weren't there?
She had wanted very, very badly to punch him in the face. She didn't--she was a Princess, she was royalty, and there was no way she was going to soil her hands by touching someone like him, even if it was just to punch him. But, oh, she had wanted to.
And then an invisible fist had punched him, right in the nose.
And Rosa had never moved an inch.
Everyone else seemed to think she had punched him, and she didn't deny it; if she told them she hadn't, they would have demanded an explanation, and she had absolutely no idea how it had happened. But she knew for a fact that she had never touched him.
However it had happened, it broke his nose and he had to be rushed off to a Healer. Oddly enough, though, with dirt on his face--as was usual--and blood streaming from his nose, he'd actually given her an admiring look before running off to the Healers.
She'd sat up after she was supposed to have gone to bed, speculating over how she'd managed to punch him without moving a muscle. Then she'd remembered something she'd heard once about the sorcerers of old--that not all of them had conscious control over their powers, and the magic just responded to their will. And she remembered how very, very badly she'd wanted to punch him before something invisible did.
And so she'd gotten up out of bed, sneaked to the library, and was looking for the book on sorcery that she'd seen the other day but had passed by.
Tiptoeing carefully along the carpeted floor of the library, she froze at the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway. Darting in between two bookshelves, she crouched on the floor and wished as hard as she could that the candle would go out.
The flame flickered and guttered for a moment, but didn't go out.
So much for her great powers of sorcery. Pinching the wick of the candle, she winced as it burned the tender pads of her fingers--but at least it got rid of the light that was sure to betray her.
The footsteps turned into the library and headed straight towards the shelves she was hiding by. She crouched, preparing to run for it, then exhaled in a sigh when she saw huge bare feet and the hem of a nightgown exactly like her own. All this worry, and just over Snow.
Stretching, she climbed to her feet. Snow might be useless for most things, but she wouldn't tell on Rosa for being up past her bedtime--especially not when she was doing the same thing.
She didn't even notice that the candle in her hand had relit itself.
Scowling, she gazed up at her sister--she hated having to gaze up at anybody, especially at Snow. The only thing she truly hated about herself was her small stature, especially since she didn't have her mother's supposed presence; everyone always said that it was a surprise to remember that Rosa the elder had been short. The force of her personality had supposedly been such that one always came away from a conversation with her thinking of her as tall.
"What are you doing out here?" she demanded of her elder sister.
Snow blinked, surprised. "I couldn't get to sleep, so I was coming to get a book and read under the covers," she defended. "I thought that maybe if I got something boring enough, it would put me to sleep. What are you doing here?"
Rosa debated for an instant, then decided to tell a little white lie. She didn't want her sister knowing that she'd somehow punched a kitchen boy without moving a muscle.
"Same thing you are, actually," she lied, perfectly straight-faced. "I remembered seeing some book on the old sorcerers last time I was in here, and I figured maybe if I read something boring it would put me right to sleep. Reading always does."
"Oh." Snow shrugged, taking her story at face value, and headed past her only to pull a book off the shelves and head back out into the hallway. She paused for a moment in the doorway, whispering, "G'night," and then was on her way.
Breathing a sigh of relief, she looked toward the candle in her hand--and only then realized that it had been out, and she hadn't relit it yet. And yet there it sat, firmly clenched in her grasp, flame burning away merrily and throwing shadows around the library.
Apparently, she could only make things happen when she wasn't consciously thinking about it.
Shaking her head, she hunted through the shelves until she found the book she was looking for. Pulling it out from the shelf, she returned to her room, and crouched under the covers with her candle and her book, and read until the sun rose in the east and she had to hide both the candle and the book lest she be discovered.