White As Snow (Fairy Tale) by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online

two sorts of reality, what you credited, and what was true.
    Arpazia lived in a limbo where none of this was possible. And she lived the reality, where each day and dark she was among the army, and her belly swelled with a child only fourteen years her junior.
    Did she ever consider her father—her nurse—coppery Lilca, who had betrayed her and died, for even if Arpazia had not witnessed the hanging, the camp women had carefully described the event. To Arpazia, these people, though dead, were alive still. And unimportant. They could not assist her; they never had.
    In the same way, even Draco, instigator of this nightmare, became mislaid. She recalled only his heat and beard and smell and mantle, as if a violent hairy suit of clothes had raped her.
     
     
    The thaw was beginning when the march reached a country above the sea, and looking down beheld the great town and the mystic ruins and palace of Belgra Demitu.
    Here, it was said, at time’s start, the earth had opened, and a young goddess was snatched into it in. one volcanic moment, from which drama the seasons had begun. Though many other places boasted this same spot, Belgra Demitu was named for it, and for the goddess-mother of the abducted maiden.
    Arpazia knew the legend, but not well. It had come to her outside its classical framework, some untidy tale of the castle.
    In the wet mist of that morning, she saw the land dropping in wide steps, and bare woods, and the always distant mountains, and a gap which held, as the sun shed the mirage of its new light, a filled void. The sea? All around her, shouts confirmed: The sea.
    The town sprawled on and on, and on the terraces rising from it, was a temple built in another dawn, and the ancient palace, its columns and olive trees scorched by winter. The second palace grew out of its toppled stones.
    A thin smoke rose from the town, and from one place on the terraces—there it was, the arcane Oracle of long ago, still fuming up to tell its riddles. A woman tended the Oracle, although the Christ had his church nearby. There was, too, a sacred spring. It had been the goddess Demetra’s once, or her daughter’s, having leapt from the soil at her clutching hands, when she was dragged underground. Now, the spring was sacred to Christ’s Mother, the Virgin Marusa.
    Climbing the hill, the women crossed themselves, all at once demure and pliant, wanting God to like them.
    Arpazia did not notice the spring.
     
     
    Her malediction had not reached him, but perhaps he felt it draw close, then turn aside. As they approached the palace by the sea, Draco began to think about the girl. He remembered forcing her, and that aroused him. Then he thought of her blood on the snow and was perturbed. He did not know why, for he had seen plenty of blood, some quantities of which were female.
    Bad dreams hovered over Draco. He could not recollect them on waking, but he kept their feel, like a low sound in the ear. There was no menace to them, no compunction even, it was simply that they did not go away. He decided he had offended his own high codes. He should have taken more care of her. She had been gently reared, was royal, with the same watered royalty that ran through
his own veins. But then, he did not bother to seek her out, and contrasting with this laziness, his sense of wrongness waxed. Was she a witch? Had she somehow affected him? Best go to God then, take God like the bath he would have at Belgra Demitu, to scour off the muck of campaign.
     
     
    Draco stood before the priest, looking angry, and the worse for a night’s banqueting and drinking; miserable.
    These powerful men were like little boys, the priest thought, partly to leaven his own unease. But one must be cautious.
    “Father—I require a penance.”
    “My lord Draco, you are to have your coronation here in a month. There will need to be many cleansings—”
    “No, Father.” Impatient. The priest waited, covering himself with a calm skin against Draco’s