The Last Huntsman: A Snow White Retelling

by Page Morgan

  Then spun around.

  The shape had already dissolved. He reached for the tasseled rope and the velvet drapes fell. Still on the rug, I buried my head in the crook of my arm, my mind numb. Someone was in the mirror?

  No. No, it can’t be.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised.” The emperor came down into a crouch before me. “Your mother didn’t know of it either.”

  Still cloaked in a cold sweat, I forced myself to look at him. “Know of what?”

  “Of gold’s binding properties,” he answered. The words didn’t make sense. My ears buzzed. “Silver, bronze, steel, stone…a mirror set in any of those casings is safe for you. But gold does the opposite. It absorbs your magic. And it will eventually absorb you. Your power, your soul.”

  I tried to stand, and I staggered back onto a sofa. Gold. Trina’s compact had been made of gold, the loft mirror of silver.

  “Absorb me.” The figure in the mirror. I shook my head, but the movement set it spinning again.

  “Do you want to know where your mother is?” Frederic whispered, a teasing lilt to it. I forced my vision to steady.

  “She’s dead,” I said. “If she were still alive, you wouldn’t need me.”

  The emperor’s nostrils flared once more. I was aware of how close he was, of the throb of his pulse in his neck and how easily the blade of Tobin’s hidden knife could slice into it. But the gold mirror had made my arms weak. I couldn’t do anything more than half-heartedly prop myself up.

  “She did it to herself,” he said. “Refusing my commands, not showing me what I asked for. With every defiance, she weakened herself. Until finally, she stopped appearing altogether.”

  I kept my expression blank, but inside, my mind seized on one word: appearing. She stopped appearing?

  Frederic glanced at the mirror, and then back at me. “I suppose her soul might still be in there, somewhere. Perhaps that is why the glass is black. But if so, it’s as useful to me as her corpse was when I removed it from those chains.”

  I stared at Frederic, my eyes and the tip of my nose stinging. He’d put my mother in those chains. He’d let the mirror absorb her soul, and her body, die.

  The figure I’d seen behind the glass… I knew who it was now. My mother wasn’t gone. She was in the mirror, right where the emperor had put her.

  30

  Tobin

  Lael fell into a broody quiet when we saw the spires of Yort poking through the thickly forested valley. It was all I could do to stop myself from walking up into the heights to see the burnt out foundation of my old home.

  “Where do they rest?” I had asked as we—Ben, Lael, and myself—stared down the tree-covered hillside, at the city none of us truly wished to enter.

  She hadn’t replied, choosing instead to walk on ahead of us. My sister hadn’t yet come forward with an account of that day. She wasn’t ready to talk about what she’d seen, and I wouldn’t push her.

  The carillon bells rang at dusk, and with the women and children back inside their homes, the city grew quiet. Citizen men and Morvansk warriors would fill the streets and taverns of the lower village once they finished their suppers, so, even though it wasn’t quite dark, Ben, Lael, and I skirted the village and found a place to huddle behind a three-foot tall stonewall in one of the many farms. An hour slipped by, then another. We waited until the stars had come out fully.

  I laid my hand on Ben’s shoulder. It was a relief to find him not shaking or sweating.

  “Use the side gate,” I whispered. “The cooks, the pages, handmaids, the attendants…they all use the side gate, and usually there are only two warriors standing guard.”

  Ben exhaled loudly, and my hand sensed the smallest of shudders. “It will take only one suspicious warrior to do in this shoddy plan of yours.”

  Ever’s father knew as well as I did that if one thread of this hastily arranged plan went awry, all of it would unravel. But there was no way around it.

  “You’ll only be out of my sight from the time you enter the fortress to the time you arrive in the kitchen. It’s less than five minutes,” I assured him.

  The last two days and nights I’d thought of nothing but this. Of the routes inside the fortress, of the hallways, doors, guards. Of the ways Ben and I could climb to the top floors of the fortress, where Frederic was no doubt holding Ever. He’d want her close to him, his prize somewhere easily accessible.

  “They’re skilled warriors. You’re a hunter. Forgive me if being in your sight at all times isn’t very reassuring.”

  I shrugged off Ben’s comment. I hadn’t told him the things I’d told Ever, about who I was and what I’d been to the emperor.

  “I’ve got pretty good aim,” I said before turning toward Lael. She sat against the stones.

  “I should be doing something to help,” she said.

  “Your face is too well known. It’s safer for you here.” I placed my hand on her kneecap. She jerked her legs aside, dislodging what was meant to be brotherly affection. It made me want to pummel something, hard. Getting out of the fortress alive was not something I anticipated. If these were to be my last moments with my sister, I wanted them to mean something.

  “I know it might be impossible, but someday...I hope you can forgive me. I never intended to hurt you. Or mother or Kinn.”

  Speaking their names was like breathing fire, and nearly crippling. Lael wouldn’t look up at me. Frederic had to have told her about me. She’d already suspected, I knew, but I hated that she’d learned I was a killer from him.

  “You’ve already been through enough,” I went on. “I don’t want you anywhere near Frederic again. Let me take care of this.”

  “Every moment I sit here waiting for the signal to go, is another moment that I doubt your plan,” Ben grumbled.

  I tightened the rope around my waist, fashioned into knots that held the weaponry from Ben’s bag of revenge that he’d hidden under his bed for sixteen years.

  “On your feet, old man,” I said. Over the last few days, I’d learned I could harass Ben, so long as I let him harass me in return. I hopped over the stone wall and into knee-high field grass.

  “Tobin?” Lael’s voice wavered from where she sat, hunched against the other side of the wall. I held still. “Thank you.”

  I’d never heard those words from my sister before. They were a gift, and they gave me strength. I breathed in deeply and turned toward the darkened streets of Yort.

  At the edge of the moat, hidden by tall brambly plum thickets, I saw Mara’s chamber windows and wondered at the light coming from them. Was someone using her chamber? No one belonged in there. The anger sparking like a flint inside me wasn’t what I expected, though. It wasn’t as formidable as before. I breathed in the brackish scent of the stagnant moat waters, surprised.

  Mara was not the reason I was here. She had been my reason before, along with my family. But my reason had shifted from revenge to rescue. It was Ever who filled my mind now.

  Ben’s stocky figure ambled along the dirt path lining the moat farther up from the thickets. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock, and the bridge was still down over the water, lined with two flaming torches on either side. Ben was doing well, keeping his pace steady and confident as he crossed the planks. The moat was high, just below the underside of the bridge. The water reflected the torchlight up onto Ben’s expressionless face.

  “Hold there.” The husky call of a guard traveled over the stale water. Ben came to a standstill.

  “Your business?” asked the guard. I didn’t breathe while Ben gave his practiced reply.

  “Ulrich hired me this morning for night sentry in the kitchen. Name’s Harlen.”

  Ulrich did all the kitchen hiring, a position in the fortress that turned over employees faster than the plague. It wouldn’t be uncommon for the kitchen to have two or three new workers every fortnight.

  “I wasn’t told anyone would be coming in,” the guard replied. My mind clicked to what Ben needed to say next.
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  “Well, I was told I had a job and that it starts tonight.” I took a steady breath, happy with the annoyance in his voice.

  “Bloody Ulrich,” the guard grumbled.

  Ulrich was notorious for hiring people without following proper procedure. In addition to this, he was never on duty past seven o’clock each evening. Even if this guard wanted to, he couldn’t ask Ulrich to verify Ben’s claim. It was the guard’s level of dedication to his position that would be the determining factor. He turned his head, draped in a wig of mesh, to confer with the other guard in tones I could not hear.

  Breath after deep, long breath, I readied my lungs, preparing for my move should Ben be permitted inside the fortress. This was it. My final target. As the warrior faced Ben and nodded, relief flooded me.

  The warrior signaled to the engineers in the stone barbican, and the great iron chain clanked into motion. The screech of metal, iron, and cogs masked the splash of the water as I dove into the moat.

  31

  Ever

  The moment I was alone in Mara’s bedchamber, I went to the oblong mirror. The extra pulse from this one, set in carved wood, nearly made me sob in relief. The golden frame had been a trap, the mirror within it a black depth of pure terror. Of death.

  She was there, in Frederic’s mirror. My mother—or at least her soul—had shown herself to me, not him. I’d combed through everything Frederic had said on my way back to Mara’s bedchamber, my nausea completely gone, that strange, tugging sensation having vanished. He’d shackled her to the mirror long ago and allowed the gold to draw her soul into the glass, where she’d what…remained as a prisoner? Completely confined to the flat plane of glass? Frederic had said something like it while I’d been trying not to retch on the carpet. He’d said we had more acquainting to do before my confinement.

  So, he planned to send me into the mirror as well. That’s what that tugging sensation had been, then—my soul, tearing free from my body? I couldn’t get the image of my mother’s corpse lying on the golden dais, still in chains, out of my mind. He’d murdered her, and without a doubt, would do the same to me. After we were acquainted. Whatever that entailed.

  In the safety of Mara’s empty room, and with a mirror that wouldn’t harm me, I asked once more to see my mother. But again, the mirror churned with gray haze. With a kinked stomach, I then asked to see Frederic’s mirror. But the drapes had still been closed, obscuring it, and thankfully, I didn’t feel ill.

  I shivered and pulled a quilt, stitched with tiny pink rosebuds, higher around my shoulders. I’d curled up in the chair by the fire, unable to sleep. The flames were low, the draperies and tapestries hanging in the chamber now set in blackness.

  A silver tray on the rug at my feet held the overwhelming amount of food that I hadn’t been able to eat. My stomach wouldn’t stop churning, my heart drumming. My mother…she’d been absorbed by a mirror. Absorbed. I closed my eyes to the firelight.

  She’d weakened herself by refusing to show Frederic what he wanted: me. And he presumed her trapped soul dead and useless. But she was still there. Hiding.

  I sank lower into the chair. After looking into Frederic’s mirror, I’d been so ill. Even before I’d stated my command, I’d felt the pull of the gold frame. How was I supposed to kill him if just being in his chambers weakened me? But I had to, and it had to be done before he shackled me to that golden frame.

  Perhaps I could get him to come into my bedchamber. I stuck one of my newly buffed nails between my teeth and bit hard. He would. He’d come to me, I was sure of it. But not if I beckoned him. No, that would be too forward, too obvious. The emperor was not a fool, and he liked to be in command of a situation. I needed him to think of it all on his own.

  I stared into the embers in the grate and wracked my brain for the answer. It wouldn’t come. My mind was blocked, reeling with images of Tobin in the languid river, of my mother trapped behind the glass of a mirror, of Princess Mara, whose ghost seemed to linger here in her bedchamber.

  Had she known who Tobin was? Really was? If she’d known he was a killer and befriended him in spite of it…well, I’d understand. I cared for him in spite of it, too. It felt as though I’d left a part of myself back in that woodshed.

  The rapping on the chamber door brought me out of the trance I’d formed on the hot, red and blue hearth coals. The rose quilt slipped from around my shoulders as I set my bare feet on the rug, a furry white circular pelt. The door opened a chaste inch. A guard.

  “Mistress? The emperor wishes to see you.”

  My heart lurched. Again? Perhaps he wanted to spend time getting acquainted. I tasted something sour on the back of my tongue.

  “I’m nearly asleep just now,” I said. The guard paused for me to change my mind. Refusing the emperor’s request was certainly not acceptable.

  “Mistress, the emperor strongly wishes to see you.”

  “Then tell him I am sorry, but I must fiercely decline.”

  The door opened wider, and the guard came into view. “The emperor will not be pleased.”

  I pulled the quilt higher around my neck, knowing what I risked. He could easily have me dragged to his chamber and forced into those shackles. But I couldn’t give in. My mother hadn’t, and I wouldn’t.

  “I don’t care about his pleasure at all.”

  The guard stood still another moment until I truly began to fear his orders upon my refusal were to pick me up and haul me to the emperor’s chamber. He only shook his head.

  “It was fair warning,” he said, then closed the door after leaving.

  His words chilled me. Frederic would be humiliated. And angry. Enough to seek me out himself?

  I lifted my feet from the soft fur rug and tucked them beneath me once again. Letting go of the quilt, I felt under the hem of my nightdress, to where Tobin’s blade was tied around my bare thigh. I’d removed it from the petticoats of my silk dress before the handmaids could discover it. The bone handle was warm from where it had rested against my skin.

  He would come. I would simply have to wait.

  32

  Tobin

  The moat water shocked a cold current through my veins. Slimy weeds twined around my fingers as I cut through the water toward a series of thin gaps along the base of the fortress. The moat’s water crossed through these gaps, forming a kind of cavern beneath the fortress. It was there that the emperor kept a small craft in the event he needed to escape by way other than the drawbridges. The hidden escape hatch was only able to open from the inside, or else I would have used that to enter instead.

  I stayed beneath the water, not wanting to cause a ripple of life on the surface. The eels stocked in the moat might have made such splashes, but I didn’t want to give the warriors on guard any reason to check.

  Still underwater, my hands swept out to cut another stroke. They hit stone. I felt along until my fingers slipped inside one of the gaps. My lungs burned for air. The opening was two hand spans in breadth. I wriggled inside with only a scrape along my ear, my shoulders wedged for less than a moment.

  I broke the surface as quietly as possible. A guard would be posted inside. The dungeons were right off the cavern, and at night, the watch doubled to four. Refilling my lungs, I spied the warrior seated on a stool by the dungeon’s arched entrance. The only light came from a torch next to him. Beneath the water, I peeled off my clothing and boots and let them sink; I’d already moved my knives to the rope belt around my waist.

  Skin bare and feet free, I glided through the icy cavern water, keeping all thoughts of eels at the back of my mind. I concentrated on the guard’s lack of motion instead. His eyes were closed, arms crossed over his stomach—sleeping. He wore mesh and linen in place of battle armor, and a head covering of mesh drape. I’d be wearing them soon.

  A trickle of unease dropped into my gut. Having luck right from the start only promised a maze of challenges to come. I’d rather have had luck last.

  I reached for the bone-handled knife. It
felt at home in my grasp, an extension of myself. Soundlessly, I moved onto the ledge of the cavern behind the sleeping guard. His inner alarm woke him too late. My blade slid across his throat before he could even sit forward on his stool. I caught him before his mesh scraped against the stone floor, and then braced the stool with my leg to stop it from clattering sideways.

  Knife back in the makeshift belt loop, I undressed the guard as swiftly as I could. His black leather boots first, then red wool trousers; his white linen undershirt with billowing sleeves, and then mesh tunic. I donned them all, tying the rope of my knives and the hand crossbow again around my waist. The chainmail head covering fell over my brow, ears, and hair, and even the fresh blood staining the shirt collar. I wrapped the chain connecting the two spiked balls from Ben’s bag around the guard’s ankles and submerged him into the water. I tamped down a surge of guilt and regret as I took up his pike, propped against the wall, and entered the dungeon. There was no other way. It had to be done.

  The prisoners’ moans crawled along the damp floors. Hanging saucers of flaming coals sent a wavering light over the barred cells on either side of me. Grimy fingers with long, yellowed nails clutched at the bars; filthy cheeks pressed against the iron, low to the floor where the prisoners sat. Could Ever be in here? I slowed to glance inside the cells. Another guard came around the corner near the door that led up into the heights of the fortress.

  “Where’re you going?” he asked.

  I glanced behind him, but no other guard trailed. He came closer.

  “You know there’s no break ‘til midnight,” the guard said. Before he could see that my face didn’t match the guard he knew, I brought the pike up and lodged it in the center of his throat. The laments of the caged prisoners fell quiet as the guard rasped and collapsed. Just then, the third guard on duty rounded the corner, a gleaming sharp mace in his hand.