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9.
Comfort the girl - help her understand
no memory, no matter how sad
no violence, no matter how bad
can darken the heart, or tear it apart.

Eyes darkened by poverty and mistrust glared out at me from the pale grey flesh of sunken sockets. Frown lines pulled grotesquely at mouths and brows. Dirt lay unheeded between the grooves of wrinkles, under yellowed malnourished fingernails.

Each hunger-warped face was turned on me, and none of them looked joyous at my arrival. I stood at the centre of the small, stricken village I had ridden through what felt like aeons ago. It was probably something more like two weeks.

The reign of terror was over, but these people had not miraculously healed. Not like Ravenna's army had so easily submitted to my victory with more than relief.

The battle for my castle was over. But the war for my entire kingdom had only begun. My stepmother had made certain of that. Everywhere her poison and neglect lingered, like second phantoms of her own self, her imprints upon the world that would never really be wiped away. I saw her in the accusing glances of the citizens I was trying to help. In their shabby clothes and world-weary expressions, in their poking bones and their sagging shoulders.

How do I inspire? How will I lead men? I had asked William - what I'd thought was William.
I had been desperate then. Afraid of my inabilities, afraid of the people I needed to trust me. It all came surging back to me now, nervously fidgeting in front of these three score victims of Ravenna's greed.

How will I ever revive them?

Most of them appeared half-dead already. Many swayed on their feet, eyes glassy with starvation.
They didn't need me stalling and stuttering. They needed nourishment, and sustenance was exactly what I had come here to give them.

"The princess Snow White has need to speak with you. You will listen." Duke Hammond's deep, commanding voice rang out across the tiny square - the crowds shifted a little, their furtive looks telling me what I dreaded the most. The Duke's authoritative approach was having the opposite effect that we wanted; these people didn't sympathise with those who ordered them about. They had had enough of that treatment to last them lifetimes.

My throat was tickling with anxiety. I coughed, trying to clear it, and suddenly all eyes were on me.
But once again, almost as much at the back of my mind as behind me physically, I could feel him guarding me. He hadn't come from this village, but he knew the people as well as he knew himself, and he would protect me from their thoughts as much as their hands.

He was my invisible coat of armour.
For a moment, I wished that I could simply step into him - step inside his skin, and let his gruff tone and his towering muscular frame carry out my every task, so much more efficiently than I ever could. How simple life would be if we were one and the same person.

How simple life would be if we were together.

That thought leapt out of nowhere. It invaded my mind like a predator, too swift to chase away or hold at bay. It scoured through me, burning through my every part, looking for a trace of negativity in my body.
But there was none. None at all.
It scared me.

My entire being seemed to warm and glow softly as the notion crept through me, smoothing out my tense muscles and numbing my fear.
I welcomed it, as one welcomes a familiar friend, with no hesitancy or regret.
As though it were exactly right. As though that was the way it was supposed to be, and always had been.

As this realisation struck me, more profoundly than any real declarations or confessions ever could, I felt the entire world humming with energy for just an instant. As though something were happening beyond me, coming from me, linking me into a circle of something that I didn't fully comprehend.

But it wasn't a thought I was allowed to have.

Slowly, painfully, I extricated myself from it. Held it at arm's length to observe it fully.
It looked balefully back at me like the solid, hard face of truth.
It frightened me so much that I threw it from me, like a poisonous snake. I took a single, shaking breath, trying to rid myself of this, trying to concentrate on the real task in front of me.

Thoughts like that were dangerous.
Thoughts like that were to be ignored, as I had been ignoring them so far. They were to be carefully locked away in a safe, forgettable place. In the tower prison of my mind. Along with all those years of memories in the real tower.

"Hello." I stammered, finally, to those people who didn't have time to think about love or belonging. Only food, where their next meal was coming from. "I have loaves for you. And game. And broth, though I'm sorry it's cold."

And that was it. My collection of soldiers began to empty the cart, encouraging my village citizens to queue in an orderly fashion for their first good meal in forever.
And I was redundant. Except to oversee the handing out of goods, and long to do it myself. Long to place bread into the open palms of my new friends, and to see a faint spark of hope in the contact of their eyes with mine.

Instead I hovered, and the heart-wrenching notions that I was fighting to hold off buzzed around me, relentlessly. No matter how I batted them away, they always realighted on my shoulders, weighing me down.

I briefly allowed myself to look his way, and my heart jerked out of its place as his sky-blue halos brushed against my gaze. For a second we were communicating, thinking the same thoughts, knowing one another all too well.

I wondered if he knew what I was thinking.

The pull that he exerted sickened me, and I had to look down for fear that he would take me right off my feet and haul me towards him on strength of allure alone.

I couldn't handle this.
I felt dirty, as though I were already a traitor in deeds as well as in my imagination.
William could never know. Could never suspect.

But as I turned my stare towards him instead, I caught a glimpse of his expression. It was subtly but unmistakeably disconcerted, envious, angry.
And it was directed at the huntsman.

Now the war for my kingdom seemed so effortless. There was only one choice to be made; to do the right thing.
In these unfamiliar waters, the right thing danced and swirled out of my reach. Perhaps it was more than one thing. Perhaps there was no right.

In either case - I dropped my eyes from William and concentrated on my many neutral subjects - no matter which path I chose or swerved from, I couldn't prevent pain this time, and I could never see myself as a worthy leader of anything.