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The queen called a huntsman, and said, “Take the child away into the forest; I will no longer have her in my sight. Kill her, and bring me back her heart as a token.” The huntsman obeyed, and took her away; but when he had drawn his knife, and was about to pierce Snow White’s innocent heart, she began to weep, and said, “Ah dear huntsman, leave me my life! I will run away into the wild forest, and never come home again.”And as she was so beautiful the huntsman had pity on her and said, “Run away, then, you poor child.” The wild beasts will soon have devoured you, thought he, and yet it seemed as if a stone had been rolled from his heart since it was no longer needful for him to kill her.
THE BROTHERS GRIMM
His gloved hands, hard and steady at her waist, help lift her up into the saddle. She looks down into his face searchingly as she finds her seat, but he doesn't linger, snatching his hands away like they've been burnt, quickly crossing the cobblestones to his own horse. She arranges her spill of plain dark skirts with cold fingers while her horse shifts uneasily beneath her then lifts her head and watches as he swings himself into his saddle. His back is straight, his face canted away from hers.
Alba clears her throat; he lifts his head a little her way.
"Where are we going, sir?" she says, her voice ringing out louder than she'd meant it to in the still air.
He doesn't answer, but then, she hadn't expected him to. His eyes meet hers for the space of a heartbeat and then quickly flick upwards at the leaden grey sky as he gathers his reins in his hands.
Alba's heart is a dead weight in her chest. "Ah," she says. "I see." She wonders if the chance to run has passed her by. The staff who would normally be tending to the stables at this time of the morning have disappeared; in the shadows, back in the stalls, she can see a cluster of the queen's men lurking and whispering together. That would be a no, then.
"Come," the huntsman says. His horse, restless as hers, springs to life under his hand; he paces around Alba, coming up beside her as her horse shies nervously away. She brushes down the skittish creature's neck, and it calms.
"Please," Alba whispers. Her lips are numb, and the huntsman's eyes are blank. Alba flicks a look sideways; the queen's men are emerging from the shadows, blades glinting at their waists or already in their hands.
"Come," the huntsman repeats, and she drags her gaze away from them, looks back up at him.
They ride out together through the great heavy doors and down the narrow road, northward, to the forest. The minute they are beyond the protection of the castle's massive tall ramparts the bitter wind lifts, whipping Alba's black unbound hair around her; her face is frozen in seconds, eyes streaming with the cold, and she wishes she'd thought to dress more warmly in her haste.
Not, she reflects as they reach the far side of the plains that stretch out from the castle walls, that she will be uncomfortable for much longer.
She wonders if she will see the queen watching them at a window if she were to look back over her shoulder.
At her side, the huntsman spurs on his horse still faster, jaw clenched. Alba steels herself and spurs her horse on to match his. The forest rises up before them.
Alba remembers:
that she was only a girl when she met the huntsman for the first time, and he not much older than her, a grave, silent young thing who held the bridle of the queen's horse when she went on procession, who delivered the choicest cuts of meat for her table, who rallied her hounds for the hunt. He was a curiousity, and no one knew quite where he was supposed to have come from, or what his place in the household was supposed to be—
Their way is rough going in the woods and it is not long before their horses slow to pick their way through the ice and snow and fallen trees. Alba loses sense of time, after that; even if the sun were out, it would be impossible to track through the black tangle of branches above her head. It is cruelly cold, though at least the thicket of trees cuts most of the wind from here. She curls her hands up to her mouth, blowing on them through the kid of her gloves, then drops them to grip the pommel of her saddle. She will not let her teeth chatter. She will not.
Something heavy settles around her and she sits up straighter, whipping her head round. The huntsman's hand falls from her shoulder, his horse veering away from hers; he's given her his own cloak.
"My thanks," she says. She pulls the fur lining of it up close to her chin; it is warm with his heat, with the breath from his mouth.
He nods stiffly, eyes fixed on the path before them.
The forest is still and noiseless: no people, nor even any animals in sight.
Some said he was a woodsman's son, born somewhere deep in the heart of the forest, back when there were still people who would dare to live within its boundaries; others said a disinherited prince from some far-off kingdom. Others less kind, or less inclined to romance, talked only about how close he stood at the queen's elbow at feast, and whispered more low about the neat hand he took with a knife.Alba merely watched.
"It's nothing," he says now, abruptly, without warning.
"Mmm?" Alba says.
"The—" He gestures to her, to the cloak tucked around her. "I don't feel the cold so much as you. I'm used to it."
It's more words than she thinks she's heard him string together at any one time before.
She doesn't respond; they push on.
She watched, too, his face at the funeral of her father under gently falling rain, watched and wondered.But she was more concerned about watching the queen's face that day, to be strictly fair.
"Well, I appreciate it anyway," she says. "Though I fear it's a hollow kindness."
The huntsman looks at her sharply.
"I'm not stupid," she says; her voice falters, and she hardens it. "I know why she's sent us."
The forest is too dense here to wheel her horse about and flee, as she would like to do. She has seen him ride; she has seen him hunt.
"Your mother—" he says.
"She is not," Alba bites out, "my mother."
He looks like he would say more, but he doesn't.
She was only two weeks from her sixteenth birthday and out riding to the south with the court on a sunny late autumn afternoon when her horse fell lame and she had to drop to the back of the retinue, clucking over the limping mare and rubbing her shoulder gently.
They've ridden all day. Twilight has fallen and is fast-deepening by the minute.
"And I am not," the huntsman says, almost conversationally, as though picking up where they left off speaking an hour ago, "so bad as you think me, you know."
Alba tilts her head. "Yes," she says.
Alba went to dismount but the huntsman was already there; he helped her clamber down without ceremony and bent to lift the hurting hoof without comment."Hold her head?" he said.
He'd been part of the queen's household for years by then, and that was the first time Alba had heard him speak.
She had nodded, surprised, and stood at the mare's head, waist-high in the yellowing grass as it hushed in the soft breeze. Alba smoothed her hand down the mare's nose, murmuring soothing nonsense at her while the huntsman pulled a blade from the top of his boot and prised out the offending stone, hands moving so quickly the mare didn't even have time to react.
Alba smiled as the mare whuffled happily over her hands, looked at the huntsman as he straightened and said, "Thank you."
He nodded wordlessly, and Alba wondered at the sight: was that a flush on his face? Only the sun, no doubt, but she looked over him appraisingly, for he'd grown, since he'd come to the castle. His shoulders broadened, a rough thatch of beard across his cheeks, his hair a darker gold than the rolling fields around them. His shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal forearms threaded with tendons, a faded blue etching she cannot read on the pale skin at the underside of his arm, proof of some history she does not know and will not ever understand.
Something hot and sick had uncurled in the pit of her stomach and she'd looked down at her feet, face hot, and—
It is night. They've reached a small clearing in the forest; the heavy bank of clouds that have dogged them all day seems to have finally lifted, for the snow is lit a pale blue by the fat waxing moon.
"My lady," the huntsman says. "We should stop."
"Oh," Alba says dismally. "Is it time, then?"
He reaches over, takes the reins from her hands and urges her horse to a stop. Alba wavers for a moment: to stay mounted in a futile show of defiance, or to submit passively to her doom? She decides she would rather not be dragged out of the saddle kicking and screaming, and chooses, instead, to dismount with dignity.
She slides off her horse and lands knee-deep in a snow bank, rather spoiling her plans. She tugs the heavy cloak free of the snow and settles it around herself, stamps her booted feet a little get the blood flowing once more.
"Well, sir," Alba says, "shall we get this over with?"
He is coming around his horse. She cannot see his face in the dark, but the knife in his hand glints silver and blue: a pigsticker, wicked and well-used, with notches of age along the edge of the blade. This will not be pretty or swift, she knows. Alba heaves in a breath to steady herself and
—then her gaze fixed on the crest of a far hill where she saw the queen, seated on the back of her beastly enormous stallion, the mass of her curls lifting in the breeze, her red lips merrily pursed.Alba ducked her gaze away to look at the huntsman, whose eyes are resolutely fixed on the blade he turns over and over, and something in the moment makes her bold and she tosses her head recklessly.
the huntsman dashes up his sleeve and twists his arm and slices wildly across the tattoo she'd seen so many months ago. Alba stares, confused, as he shudders, his shoulders slumping, and then he says, clapping his hand across the wound to staunch the spreading dark blood, "We don't have much time. You must go."
"What?" Alba says.
The huntsman grimaces. "A spell," he says, gesturing awkwardly with his wounded arm. "A—a compulsion. I couldn't do anything about it 'till we'd gotten far enough away, nor speak of it. Her power only extends so far from her person, you see."
Alba's eyes, she's sure, are wide as saucers. "You're not—"
"Not her man?" The huntsman grins, teeth white. "I am. Don’t make that mistake, my lady. But not by my own free will."
"Is it as they say? Are you the queen's lover, then?"And the huntsman had hissed in a breath and stared at her outright for the first time, his blue eyes wide with some emotion she could not name, and though she'd meant to say more her shame had throttled her and she'd turned away to take up her mare's bridle and lead her away back towards the castle, leaving him standing there alone in the waving grass.
"You were meant to kill me," Alba says.
He nods. "She said," he tells her, words laden with distaste, "not to return till my blade was blooded and I had your heart in a sack."
Alba is shaking her head. "This is mad," she says. Her hands fly nervously, and she reaches back, pulling her hair into a sleek knot at her neck before hitching his cloak back up around her face. "What do you mean for us to do?"
"I will return to the castle with a heart," he says. "And you will flee. There's a house, an hour's walk yonder—"
He gestures some distance into the forest but at the same time there comes a rustling noise and a deep, terrible sound of some animal larger than she's ever seen. Alba's heart (her own, her own, her own) turns sickeningly; her horse beside her rears with a terrified whinny. I thought this forest was empty, she thinks; I thought she drove everything out.
The huntsman is pushing her back with one hand. "Go," he says, blade out before him. "Can you get up a tree?"
"Well—yes—" Alba says, but he's already disappeared into the woods.
The horses are dancing wildly, too frightened to be calmed, and Alba leaps up on a snowy outcropping of rock out of their way. She clutches the cloak around her and stares into the darkness, listening to the crash of branches and beast. She doesn't know what to think. She can't know what to think. She remembers how
she looked back over her shoulder to see him one last time in that sun-touched field, watching the line of his back as he trudged up the hill to the queen
and her blood is pounding in her ears as she waits for him, holding the low-hanging branch of one tree, ready to swing herself up.
Do you trust him, she asks herself.
The huntsman emerges at last, hair loose around his face, breathing hard. There is something black and terrible in his hands, dripping more black blood into the snow, and she looks away, stomach heaving.
"It's done," he says. "The boar—it's dead. I'm sorry I didn't give you more warning—"
"How?" Alba demands, stumbling off her rock into the clearing as he soothes his horse and pulls it to heel. "How do you know these things?"
He smiles horribly, pulling open his saddlebag. "I'm the huntsman, my lady," he says, stuffing what she guesses is the heart in before turning back to her. "No more questions. We have to move."
"You're not really going back," she says. "The spell—she will only do it again, will she not? Won't she know? What will become of you?"
"I have to," he says. "Else she will know you're alive."
She opens her mouth to speak, cannot.
"As I said," he tells her. "That way, through the woods. There's a house—well, I call it a house, that might be a generous term—there are some men living there, highwaymen, lying low for the winter. They're not a bad sort, I promise. And they're expecting you. Just tell them I sent you."
"Tell them who sent me?" Alba cries. "You must—I can't just go—"
"I can't," he says. "Not now, anyway."
The huntsman reaches a hand out as though to touch her cheek and then pulls it back at the last moment, as though seeing for the first time the blood shining black on his gloved fingers. Alba shivers in a breath, and his eyes flick up to hers.
"Soon," he says. "I'll tell you everything. Soon."
"If you're still alive," she says.
He smiles, sharp and merry. "Have a little faith, my lady," he says.
"Your cloak," she says, fumbling to unclasp it from around her throat. "Here, you'll need it for the ride back—"
"No, keep it," he says, and then he presses his still-bloodied blade into her hands. "And this, for protection; I'll tell her it was broken on the beast's hide. Or better yet, think it a loan, hmm? And one I'll return to claim, so you'd best keep good care of them."
"You promise," Alba says, one hand knotting into the fur, the other fist clutching the knife tight against her breast.
He smiles once more then swings into his saddle, gold hair lit silver by the moon. "You can find your way?"
"My father the king was a good hunter, sir," Alba says, chin lifting with pride. "He taught me well."
The huntsman nods. "Till later, then, my lady."
She licks her lips. She would send him off with some grand words of farewell, like a lady in a song; but she's not, and all she can think of is to say, "Good luck." But her voice is too soft and he is already riding off into the trees, leading her horse behind his.
When the sound of his progress is swallowed up by the great awful silence of the trees, Alba looks up at the sky. It is blue and empty, laced with the reaching fingers of black bare trees at the edges; the moon is a distant glowing whisper somewhere far in the distance.
Alba lifts the cloak and her skirts together and steps forward into the forest.