The Last Huntsman: A Snow White Retelling

by Page Morgan

  Before me, the emperor’s chamber glistened, as if behind a wet sheet of glass. And through it, standing directly in front of me…was me. Another me, with legs barely holding me upright, my shoulders drooping, my chin lolling toward my chest. But I wasn’t standing that way. The exhaustion, the dizziness, the slow, sticky beating of my pulse—I couldn’t feel any of it anymore.

  But the shackles on my wrists, and the chains… I felt those. Looking down, I saw that they’d followed me through the wet, rippling barrier between Frederic’s chambers and where I now stood. A dark place. Cold and vast. I could feel the gaping expanse behind me even before I turned. But when I did, it wasn’t utter blackness. Strings of mist threaded the nothingness, like a veil.

  A muted grunt and a hoarse oath vibrated in my eardrums. The air around me shook, a bone-touching pressure shuddering through me. Cringing, I turned back to the liquid-like barrier and saw the other me—I’d collapsed onto my knees. And below the dais, Emperor Frederic had doubled over, clutching his stomach.

  “No,” a voice rasped behind me.

  I whirled, the chains twisting around my stomach and hips, and there, parting through the mist, was a woman. Her long, dark hair flowed behind her, rippling like a cloud around her head. Her dress moved as if in a breeze, but it was her eyes that stabbed through me like twin knives. They were a searing blue, wide and disbelieving.

  I’d seen them before, sketched in charcoal in the rough portrait my father kept in his bedside trunk.

  “Mother?” I whispered, tears pricking the backs of my eyes.

  She shook her head as she came closer. Floated closer, really. She moved as if carried by the wind, too. “You can’t be here. I tried… Oh, my darling, I’m so sorry. I tried…” Her face crumpled as she surged forward and threw her arms around me. I couldn’t feel them though. I lifted my arms to try to catch her, to feel her and bring her closer, but the chains were too short, and I cried out in frustration.

  My mother scuttled back, her crumpled face smoothing as she gripped my wrists, her fingers traveling over the locked cuffs. Again, I felt nothing but air where her skin should have been, where I should have been able to feel the weight of her hand.

  “No, no, this is good. It’s good. He doesn’t have you yet. Not fully. Look.” I followed her eyes and saw my other self, still on the dais, still wavering on my knees.

  “How is it good?” I asked, noticing that my voice seemed to swallow itself. It didn’t ring and echo in here, like my mother’s.

  “Because you’re not a part of the mirror yet. You can fight it, my darling,” she answered.

  I swiveled around again to face her. My eyes drank in every part of her…her eyes, her nose, her lips, the shape of her face. Unlike before, when I’d seen her from the floor of Frederic’s chamber, her figure pressed up against the glass, she had definition. But there was still something not quite complete about her. I reached for her, my wrists jamming to a halt as the chains pulled taut. Her chin wobbled as her ghost-like hands took me by the elbows.

  “You’re so grown.” A sob strangled her voice, and her hand passed over my cheek and forehead. “So beautiful. I never dared look for you in the surface. I was too afraid…he has spies everywhere and if he’d somehow seen you, if I let down my guard for one moment…I couldn’t risk it. And when he commanded me, when I refused…” She placed her hands over her ears and grit her teeth, as if she were enduring a horrific noise that I couldn’t hear. “Refusing him, hiding from him, drained me. I thought I could save you from him, but he found you anyway. Oh, Eva—”

  I shook my head. “Eva?”

  She opened her eyes and lowered her hands. “Of course. Your father calls you something different now. I knew he would protect you.”

  Eva had been my name? It left me speechless for a moment. But then a louder grunt vibrated through the mirror’s surface. The sound shook the rippling glass, and when I looked over my shoulder, the emperor was on the carpet.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” my mother answered. Her voice hardened as her attention shifted back to me. “But this is your opportunity. You’ve got to fight the mirror. You must get up.”

  She meant the me outside the mirror, on the dais. I was wavering side to side, looking as if I was about to fall.

  “But the gold shackles,” I said. “How can fight if I’m still chained?”

  “The gold isn’t your enemy. The mirror is.” My mother paused. “You have to break it.”

  I spun around and stared at her, the sickening sensation whenever I saw or even thought about breaking glass churning my stomach. “What?”

  “Break the glass. After that, the gold will be just gold, it can’t hurt you.”

  “But…how? Look at me!” I gestured to the dais. “I’m practically dead!”

  “But you’re not. Not yet. My darling…you must free yourself.” She surged forward, coming to stand next to me. Her wraith-like hands, so pale and thin, wrapped around the shackles on my wrists. “Use the chains. Push yourself back out. You can do it, Eva. I know you can.”

  “Ever.” I let out a breath, my throat tight. “He calls me Ever now.”

  My mother’s eyebrows pinched. “Ever. It’s beautiful.” Her eyes glistened, and I knew there was so much she wanted to say. And I had so many questions, too. If I stayed here, if I didn’t do what she said, I could finally know her.

  But I’d be a prisoner. A slave. I’d eventually become like her: hardly real.

  “Beautiful and strong,” she added. “Go. Go, Ever.”

  “But what about you? I can’t leave you.”

  She shook her head, a sad smile turning her lips into a grimace. “I am already gone, my love. I am just a shadow now. Free yourself, and you’ll free me as well, and then…then I’ll be with you again. Just, not in the way we both want.”

  This wasn’t enough time. Minutes instead of years. “But I need you,” I said, my voice croaking the words.

  “What you need is out there,” she argued. And she was right. I needed my father. I needed Tobin. I needed to live.

  She tried to give me a push, but again, I felt nothing. “Don’t give up!” she cried, desperation twisting her face. And right then, I knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t disappoint her.

  Push yourself back out. I had to go through the mirror again. With a cry of might, I sprang toward the quivering barrier—and my shoulder slammed into something hard. It wasn’t inflexible, but it was tough. Nothing at all like the liquid surface it looked to be.

  “Keep going!” my mother shouted from behind me, even as my breaths began to turn shallow again, the blood in my veins slowing and thickening once more. Nausea attacked my stomach and my vision spun as the chill that had spread over me earlier returned. I kept pushing, shoving, shouldering my way forward. I screamed in frustration as the surface seemed to try to shoulder me back again, but even as my lungs felt as though they were filling with sand, as my head felt heavy and dense, I pushed.

  And then I was falling forward, onto the golden dais. My hands slammed down onto the platform, and Frederic’s groans tunneled into my ears with clarity.

  “W-what did you…do?” he rasped. Sweat shivered over my chest and back as I forced my eyes up from the polished gold floor.

  Frederic’s eyes bugged out, his body frozen in shock on the carpet. He parted his lips as his shoulders shivered in stiff convulsions. Whatever was happening to him, it had nothing to do with me stabbing him.

  I got to my feet with what felt like a mountain pressing down on my back. With my gasping breaths echoing in my ears, I turned to look into the black surface. Alarm sludged through me as my mother’s figure reappeared in the mirror, pressing up against the surface in a misty gray shadow, her features no longer distinct. Her fists pounded on the glass, and though I couldn’t hear it, I knew what she meant for me to do. A sob locked in my throat, I pressed my hand flat against the mirror. Her closed fist opened, and she slid her splayed finger
s against mine.

  Slowly, my eyes drifted to the golden shackles around my wrists. If I broke the glass, what would happen to her? I’m just a shadow now. That was no way to exist. I couldn’t imagine spending another minute in that prison, let alone sixteen years.

  It was up to me to set her free.

  My insides twisted and flipped as I raised my shackled arms, and with every ounce of my remaining strength, I slammed them against the glass. Again, and again, each strike more forceful and certain. I cracked the golden shackles against the mirror’s surface, first fissuring the glass, and then, with a howling scream and a final blow, the glass fractured into spidering lines, racing toward the gold frame. It all came crashing down, shards raining onto my feet and on top of my head in both small pieces and large. I crouched and threw my hands up to protect myself as the shrill, teeth-grating sound of glass shattered onto the dais and below, where the emperor had curled into a ball.

  And then, there was only my own breathing. Full breaths inflated my lungs and cleared my head. The invisible weight vanished from my back, and I leaped to my feet, heart pounding.

  The mirror’s glass was gone, leaving nothing but the stone wall behind the golden frame. I stared into the shards at my feet, and let out a heaving breath when I saw my bruised and bloodied face reflected in them. She was gone. It had worked. I’d set my mother free. And I’d lost her, once again.

  On the floor, Frederic’s limbs jerked uncontrollably, the muscles along his neck spastic. He stretched his fingers into the carpet, his nails digging at the wet stain from the spilled brambleberry wine. Blood and spit frothed at the corners of his mouth. My eyes narrowed on the wine stain. Poison?

  Outside the emperor’s chamber came a crash. A short scream. And then the red drapes to the antechamber flew aside. Two guards bounded into the chamber, and I nearly collapsed again onto my knees. Not because I felt weak. Just as my mother had said, the gold no longer made me feel sick. Without the mirror, it couldn’t absorb me. It couldn’t hurt me.

  I swayed in the chains toward the two guards, tears stinging my eyes, because I recognized them.

  “Father!” I sobbed. “Tobin!”

  My father bounded up the dais steps and took me into his arms, holding me upright as I sobbed.

  “I saw her,” I whispered into his stolen uniform. He went rigid, and then pulled back to look at me. “I can’t explain everything right now, but…I saw her.”

  “Where is she?” he asked, his voice cracking. So vulnerable, I was afraid to even breathe. I shook my head.

  “Gone,” I said. “But free.”

  He squinted against tears and seemed to see the shattered glass then. He nodded, his chin quivering only once. “I’ll get you out of these,” he said, grasping the shackles. “You’re both free now.”

  38

  Tobin

  A golden key was on the carpet next to Frederic’s convulsing body. I picked it up and tossed it to Ben, who hurried to unlock Ever from the chains. Her face was pale, her lips bloodless as Ben led her down the steps. She stumbled into me, and I crushed her against my Morvansk colors, drenched in sweat and blood.

  “Ever.” I breathed her name, her hair against my lips.

  “You came for me.” A sob rasped her voice. I held her away so I could see her. “Or…” She paused, flicking her eyes toward Frederic’s seizing body. Or for my revenge, she meant to say. I shook my head.

  “You,” I said. “Only for you.”

  A smile quivered over her lips before she buried her head back into my chest.

  Ben piped up from behind us. “We need to move.”

  There were still guards in the fortress that would try and stop us, though most of them were pursuing and fighting with the scores of prisoners Ben and I had released from the dungeons.

  “Huntsman!” Frederic was still alive, gurgling on blood that foamed over his lips and down his chin.

  It had been difficult to hold myself back from pouring both of Ben’s stored vials of poison into the emperor’s nightly wine decanter in the kitchens. Both vials would have killed him too quickly, Ben warned. He’d known we both wanted the emperor to suffer.

  I walked to the sofa and stood over him. A gaping wound gushed blood near his neck. And nearby, on the carpet, lay the blade I’d slipped into Ever’s boot. She’d defeated him, even though she must have been terrified.

  The day Frederic pulled me from the forest for poaching I’d been terrified too. Frederic of Morvansk had been larger than life, and there he’d sat upon his horse, staring at me, a scrappy dog from the lower village, contemplating whether he wanted to kill me or find a use for me. I’d wanted to live, but in those uncertain moments while Frederic had been deciding my fate, I’d also wanted to please him. I hated myself—and him—for that.

  “My name is Tobin Ivanov,” I said now. The emperor jerked, twisting into such a sharp turn I expected to hear the snap of his neck.

  “Put me…out…” He dribbled and choked on viscous blood. “…of my misery.”

  I crouched before him and tilted my head so I could see into his black eyes. I reached to the rope of loops and weapons at my waist. Next to one of the knives, I’d twined the silken threads of Mara’s pearl bracelet. I unwound the pearls and laid them on top of Frederic’s clenched fist.

  He stared at them as a last spasm of pain contorted his face. And then the emperor went still. His fist dropped to the floor, Mara’s pearls wrapped around his whitened knuckles.

  I stood and went to Ever and Ben. Ever took my hand and brought me to her side.

  “There’s an escape tunnel,” I said, putting her hand to my lips and kissing it. “Follow me.”

  39

  Ever

  Fine snow dusted the meadow behind Volk’s. The flakes looked blue in the light of a snowy dawn, like the smooth shell of a robin’s egg. I sat at the table in the kitchen, the air hot with the scent of cloves and burning cedar logs, and stared out the window. I wrapped my hands around the center of a mug of quass.

  “Ever?”

  I turned to Tobin, his chair diagonal to mine at the table. It had been only a day since we’d returned to Rooks Hollow—three days since we’d managed to escape from Yort. But I still couldn’t believe he was here. That I was looking at him.

  “I’m staying with you,” I said.

  Tobin was wearing some of my father’s old clothes again; brown trousers, white shirt. Plain. Unremarkable. Everything he was not.

  He pushed his curls out of his eyes, frustrated. “We’ve been over this. You and Ben need to go to Pendrak. Take on new names, new lives. If Frederic’s successor wants to, he can find you here easily.” He looked to my father, who stood at the head of the table with a mug of ale. It didn’t help that Father agreed with this plan, and that he’d already packed his things and mine.

  In the seat next to Tobin, Lael sat with her arms—still bruised in spots—around her legs.

  “And you and your father can take better care of Lael,” Tobin added. His sister didn’t flinch or shout as she had the first time he’d suggested the plan. The expression of hurt was still there, though.

  I put down my mug and took Tobin’s hand across the table. “You can come with us. We can hide your mark. No one has to know you’re a Mor.”

  But even saying it felt weak. In the single day since we’d been home, with Tobin and Lael hiding out in the upper rooms, Father and I had heard nothing but talk about “the huntsman who killed Emperor Frederic and Princess Mara.” Whoever remained of Frederic’s advisors had succeeded in twisting the tale in order to make amends with Prince Orin and Emperor Lucian. They claimed they’d wrongly accused the prince, when it was now clear the huntsman had been the one to frame the prince from the start. It wouldn’t be long before Tobin’s likeness would be sketched, copied, and passed around the empires. His face would be known to everyone.

  He squeezed my hand beneath the kitchen table. “I won’t put you in that kind of danger again. You, Lael, or Ben.”<
br />
  “But you’d endanger yourself by going into the Silent Ranges?”

  It was the only place no one would ever look for him.

  Without answering, Tobin pushed back his chair and got to his feet. I stood reluctantly, heavy with dread. Tobin brought my hand to his chest and covered it with both of his. Father set down his mug and turned away, pretending to be interested in the stew on the stove.

  “You had been planning on going to Pendrak anyway,” Tobin said softly. “Only now you don’t have to go alone. You get to take two more people with you.”

  I wanted to take three people with me. But he let my hand go and pushed his chair in under the table. A rucksack of clothing, food and water, flint and firesteel, and blankets was beside the leg of the table. Tobin slung it onto his shoulder before going to the stove and extending his hand to my father.

  Maybe it was exactly how Tobin said it was; that this truly was the only way. I knew he loved me. He hadn’t needed to confess it for me to be certain. Everything he’d done spoke for him. Even his leaving. But I still felt like I was doing something wrong, like I was making a horrible mistake letting him go.

  “I’m glad you plotted and practiced,” Tobin told my father. He shook Tobin’s hand.

  “I am too, considering your plan was terrible.”

  Tobin huffed a laugh. Even my father smiled. I looked away from them as they slapped each other’s shoulders, my throat tight. A muffled sob made me look back. Tobin had wrapped his arms around Lael and was holding her in the kind of hug I imagined every good big brother might give his sister. It was protective and tender and apologetic. They didn’t say anything at all as they parted. I supposed it was because they didn’t need to in order to know what was being said.

  Lael sat back down in the chair and refolded her legs up against her chest. Whatever had happened to her since watching her mother and brother murdered in cold blood had wounded her deeply. She needed help. She needed something I didn’t know how to give.