A/N: Everyone in this retelling of Snow White got a name: The Evil Queen, the Huntsman, Prince Charming - so I only thought it fair that Snow White has a 'civilian name', too. According to Aunt Google, the Welsh name Gweneira literally means Snow White (gwen "white" + eira "snow"), so I went with Gwen.
The first time Gwen Touches the heart of an animal, she's six years old. She doesn't know what exactly she's done, but as she runs through the fields towards the castle, William trailing her, futilely calling for her to wait for him, she knows that it's not the little fluttering thing thumping against her palms that she had reached out to. It's something else, something more intangible, and she has no words for it, so 'heart' is the closest thing she can think of.
The magpie she found has a broken wing, her mother tells her. Gwen patiently nurses the bird back to health, and for many years after that, she believes that she has a special bond with it. Her bird finds a mate, and the pair takes residence in the highest tower of the castle, raising little black-and-white menaces that swipe any sparkling thing lying around unattended for a second, never to be seen again.
They're her only company while she languishes in the tower. She knows the queen expects her to die there — from lack of sunlight, lack of exercise, lack of company, from boredom. If not for the birds, she probably would have died; if not her body, then surely her mind would've shut down.
Instead she discovers a new thing: she can't just Touch the heart of a magpie, but also Borrow its mind.
At first she thinks she's dreaming — it happens in the wee hours of morning, on the cusp between sleep and waking, that she somehow slips into the bird's mind. She's not taking over — in fact, she knows with a dreamer's certainty that she'd plunge into the courtyard if she tried, breaking her wings, her legs, her neck — she's just quietly huddling in a corner, looking out in awe at the world below her as the magpie takes wing.
But as riding along becomes easier, she finds herself slipping out during all hours, whenever the walls around her become too suffocating. She is careful not to examine too closely how she does it. She fears she might lose her only means of freedom if she does. It's like taking a seat while looking straight ahead; approaching a seat that she only dares to look at out of the corner of her eye.
Once she's settled, though, that precarious feeling of walking a tightrope vanishes. She melts into the magpie's mind, and together they spread their wings and escape.
She never considers what she's doing to be magic. Magic is what the queen does; magic is taking and taking and taking, and never giving back.
Riding in the back of the mind of the magpie, looking out through her eyes on the world below, isn't taking anything but a bit of space; but the space is in the mind, and so it's not really space at all. It's sharing the bird's experience for a bit, nothing more.
Oh, she begins to steer her host a little bit after a while, if something interesting catches her eye. They fly over the orchard once where she used to play with William. But the trees are all blackened and dead, their life force taken by the ever-hungry golden queen. Gwen thinks that Ravenna is like the sun: too beautiful and terrible to look at, scorching everything in her realm with the oppressive power of her beauty, sucking the water of life from the ground until there's nothing left but ashes.
The only thing that burns brighter than Ravenna's beauty is the hatred in Gwen's heart. But she's powerless, no more than a human thought in a bird's skull. And so they avoid the orchards from now on.
They perch on the battlement of the castle instead, and watch the black guard doing their drills. When she's back in her tower, despairing at the bare walls circling her, Gwen mimics their movements; the jumps and push-ups, the kicks and faints and sword-forms mean nothing to her, but they tire her out and make the thoughts stop for a while.
The queen's brother is there, sometimes, watching her from the shadows. She knows he's there just like she knows when the magpies are strutting outside her window, and during those times, she lies down on the rags that make up her bed, lies utterly still and pretends to sleep. She doesn't dare to leave her body behind then, although she has no clear idea what he might do to it if she left it unattended.
But he never enters her cell.
Until one day, he does. And she doesn't know what made her grab the nail beforehand, unless it was some premonition, or some strange, new manifestation of her gift — something that let her Look into his heart instead of Touching it.
She never wants to touch any part of him again, not even with a nail.
The magpies are there when she surfaces from the icy waters of the sea, and she manages to reach out to them and Touch one of them. Just the barest brush of mind to mind — she can't leave the awareness of her own body behind, or she'll drown. But it's enough to see where she can go ashore.
They'll catch up with her. Ravenna has certainly sent out her guard already, Finn must be crying for her blood (whatever's left of it, once the queen has cut her heart from her chest). The magpies won't save her this time — they can carry her mind away, but not her body. And the beach is utterly, bleakly, empty.
So great is her need and desperation that she finds a new movement of her mind in that moment. She doesn't make a wish — she has made hundreds, thousands of wishes in the years of her imprisonment, and none of them ever came true.
She doesn't make a wish. But she Reaches with her mind, reaches out and out until she Touches... light.
Not the harsh light of the sun. Not Ravenna's light, golden and blinding. Silver light like water, like the moon on the lake. Whatever it is, it Touches her back. The connection is so alien that it makes her dizzy, a feeling of falling sideways and backwards all at once.
When she opens her eyes, a white mare lies in the sand. She hasn't been there a moment before, and Gwen knows — knows — it's not really a horse. Real horses don't lie around on empty beaches, waiting for a princess on the run to stumble upon them.
The horse-being feels solid enough when she mounts it, but when they reach the Dark Forest, it dissolves in the first puddle of black water. A shimmer of silver light on the surface is all that remains; then the swamp swallows that, too. No light can prevail against the darkness that has crept into this part of the land.
She cannot linger to try and make sense of what just happened; of what she's done. The guard is at her heels, and she has no other choice but to flee into the twisted monstrosity that was once the green heart of the kingdom.
She can't run away from the fact that this — this Calling of the moon-horse — was magic. But she insists, to nobody but her guilty conscience, that it was nothing like the things Ravenna does.
Neither her gift, nor her new-found magic are any help against the Huntsman. She has to fall back on human ways of dealing with big, brute men: pleading and cajoling, and offering coin. For all that he reminds her of an angry, wounded bear, he is human, and if she wants to be different from Ravenna, she cannot, will not Touch a human the way she does with animals.
Besides, she doesn't like him. Doesn't trust him. He's a drunkard, he stinks of mead and old sweat, and he's perpetually angry at her, the forest, and the world. She thinks she can understand the anger and the grief — she had years to nurse both without any distraction — but she also knows that they make him unreliable. Someone just needs to dangle the promise of bringing back his dead wife in front of his nose (and be more convincing than Finn), and he'll hand her over in a heartbeat.
But he's the only guide she has, so he'll have to do.
Something in him changes after they flee the village in the lake. He's brooding even more, and not yelling at her anymore. Although that might be because they both need their breath for running. She wonders if she's Touching his heart without meaning to, sensing his mood, because she sees now that his anger is nothing but the desperate thrashing of a wounded animal. 'A man's sorrows are his own' she'd told him when they first met, but now that she knows the loss he's grieving, she can't help but feel it within herself, too. A stranger's pain, to add to her own. And she knows he's afraid — afraid to fail again, fail her, fail the kingdom.
She knows his thoughts too intimately. She knows not how it happened. She knows not how to stop it.
When the troll attacks them, she can't run away. She can't let Eric die thinking that he failed everyone. He needs to live; he needs to take her to the baron, he needs to look at her and know he didn't fail this time.
He mustn't die a hero; he must live as one.
The troll is magical in a different way than the moon-horse. It's not something she Called, and she's not sure it would even possible for her to do that; it feels old like the Earth itself. Rock and Root come alive, and the Earth is angry, just as angry as Eric is.
But underneath the rage, there is sorrow, and a longing for the days when the old King ruled, when the forests were golden and green, and the hills slept in the summer breeze. She remembers the cuckoo's call, and the scent of pine wood, and the sound of small brooks hurrying through moss-covered clearings.
She remembers how different life felt then, and the troll remembers it with her.
Eric looks at her differently afterwards — as if she's wielding a power that can match the queen's vile magic. And Gwen starts to believe that she can really win her kingdom back from Ravenna's scorching hands, if only she can manage to touch all of it, the forests and meadows, the animals and the people, even people as wounded and wary as the Huntsman, touch the hearts of everyone at once, and remember a life unspoiled by Ravenna's all-consuming hunger.
She is no longer running from the queen. She's running towards her now, gathering strength with every heart she touches on the way.