Snow White: A Fairy Tale Sleep Story

Full transcript

Snow fell past a window framed in black ebony, and behind it, a queen sat sewing. Her needle slipped. Three drops of blood stood upon the white sill against the black wood, and that is where Snow White begins, not with a curse and not with a spell, but with a slipped stitch on a winter afternoon and a small hurt that drew blood. She did not cry out. She sat looking at what her own hand had spilled, at the three small round marks holding their color on the snow, and out of that ordinary wound, there rose in her a longing that would set the whole story turning and that would come to its end long after she herself was in the ground, with a woman dancing herself to death in iron shoes lifted red hot out of the coals.

If these old tales help you rest, subscribe so the next story can find you beside the fire. Stay close to that window a while, for the room she sits in is very quiet. The fire has sunk low behind her. The shutters of the other windows are already closed against the weather, and in all that great house, there is no sound but the small pull of thread through cloth and the endless soft touch of snow against the glass. She lifted her pricked finger to her lips, but her eyes stayed on the sill, on that meeting of colors she had never quite noticed until this moment.

The linen lay forgotten across her knees. The snow was the purest white she had ever seen, without mark or shadow, cold and clean. The blood upon it was a deep and living red, warmer than anything the winter held, and the wood of the window frame beneath both was black, a smooth, dark ebony that made the white whiter and the red more red. She sat very still and let the picture settle into her, and as she looked, she spoke aloud, softly, to no one in the empty room. "If only," she said, "I had a child as white as this snow, as red as this blood, and as black as this ebony wood." The words hung in the cold air, and then were gone, and the snow kept falling, and she took up her sewing again as though nothing had changed.

Yet something had. A wish spoken over blood and snow and black wood is not an ordinary wish, and the winter seemed to have heard it. The season turned, as seasons do, and the queen's wish was answered in full. Before the year had run its course, she bore a daughter, and when the midwife laid the child in her arms, she saw that the wish had come true down to its smallest part. The little girl had skin as white as the snow that had fallen past the window, soft and pale and clear. Her lips were as red as the three drops of blood upon the sill.

And her hair, when it grew, came in as black as the ebony wood, dark and fine against the whiteness of her brow. The queen looked at her daughter and remembered the winter afternoon and the longing she had spoken into the cold, and because the child was the very image of that wish, she gave her a name drawn straight from it. She called her Snow White so that the girl would carry the memory of that first snowfall in her name for as long as she lived. But the tales that begin with a granted wish do not often let the wisher keep her joy for long.

The queen who had longed so gently for a daughter did not live to raise her. Soon after the birth, she grew weak, and her strength did not return, and before Snow White had grown past infancy, the good queen died. E, so the story sets its two halves side by side at once. A child gained and a mother lost. A wish fulfilled and a wish undone. The king was left alone in his castle with a motherless daughter, the halls grown quieter, the window where the wish was made now only a window, with the snow falling past it each winter and no one at the needle to watch it fall.

Only the ebony frame kept faith with what had happened there. Every winter, the snow came back and lay along the black wood exactly as it had lain on the afternoon. The blood fell upon it, and the servants who closed the shutters saw nothing in it worth remarking. And the child who had been named out of that sill grew up beneath the window without ever being told what her own name was made of. A year went by, and the king, who could not bear his empty house forever, took a second wife. She was a beautiful woman, there is no doubt of that, tall and handsome and proud of her beauty as of a possession she owned.

But her beauty was the whole of her care. She was vain in a way that left no room for anything gentler, and she could not endure the thought that any other woman might be counted lovelier than herself. Beneath the fine surface she kept another kind of knowledge, for she practiced in quiet the old arts of witchcraft, the spells and charms that the tellers of the tale name plainly and pass over quickly. Into the castle where the first queen had made her tender wish, this new queen came with her pride and her secret craft, and the halls that had lost one kind of woman gained a very different one.

Among the things she brought with her, or perhaps had always owned, was a mirror, and it was no ordinary glass. It was a magic mirror, and it could not lie. Whatever question was put to it, it answered with the plain truth and nothing else, and this was a thing the queen prized above her gowns and her jewels, for it fed the one hunger that ruled her. Each morning she would go and stand before it, and she would look at her own reflection, and she would speak to the glass the same words she spoke every day. "Mirror, mirror on the wall," she would say, "who is the fairest one in all the land?" And each morning the mirror gave her the answer she desired. "You, my queen," it would tell her, "you are the fairest one of all." And hearing it, she was content, for she knew the mirror could not flatter and could not deceive, and so its word was as good as proof.

She would turn from the glass satisfied, her pride settled for another day, certain of her place at the very summit of all beauty in the kingdom. And while the queen kept her morning ritual before the truthful glass, the child grew. Snow White lived in the same castle, small and quiet, moving through years that the queen scarcely marked, for the queen's eyes were fixed on her own reflection and on the answer it gave her. The girl grew as children do, and with each year the fairness she had been born with deepened and settled and became more clearly what it was.

She was gentle by nature, giving no one cause for anger, drawing no attention to herself, and so for a long while the danger in her beauty slept undisturbed. The queen asked her mirror, and the mirror named the queen, and Snow White went on growing beneath that answer like a seedling beneath a wide tree, unseen and unthreatened, until the year came when she could no longer be overlooked. By the time Snow White was seven years old, she had grown as fair as the clear bright day, fairer than the queen herself, though no one yet had said the words aloud.

Her skin kept its snow white paleness, her lips their blood red color, her hair its ebony darkness, and to all of this, the years had added a brightness that was her own, a loveliness clear and open as morning. She did not know that she was beautiful in any way that mattered, and she did not compare herself to anyone, least of all to the proud woman who now sat in her mother's place. But the mirror kept its own reckoning, and it did not care whose morning it spoiled. And so it was that on a certain morning, the queen came to the glass as she always came, and asked the question she always asked, and the glass gave her an answer it had never given before. "Mirror, mirror on the wall," she said, "who is the fairest one in all the land?" And the mirror answered her, and its answer had changed. "You, my queen, are fair," it told her. "You are fair, it is true, but Snow White is a thousand times fairer than you." The queen stood before the glass and heard the words, and for a moment she did not move at all.

Then something turned over inside her. She felt it come, a coldness and a heat together, a sickness that was not of the body. The tellers of the tale say that her heart turned green and heavy in her breast, that envy rose in her like bile, and from the instant she heard the mirror's changed answer, she could take no pleasure in anything. She could not argue with the glass. She could not call it spiteful, nor mistaken, nor bought with somebody's coin. It wanted nothing from her. It had never wanted anything from her, and that indifference was the worst of it.

Somewhere beneath her own roof, a child had grown fairer than she was, and that knowledge lay down in her like a stone dropped into a still pool, and the rings of it went out and out and would not settle. From that morning, the queen had no peace. Envy is a restless thing, and hers gave her no rest by day and none by night. Wherever she looked, she seemed to see the girl who had surpassed her, and whenever she thought of Snow White, her heart rose up against her own breast, so heavy with hatred that she could scarcely breathe.

She could not bear to share the same air, the same house, the same country with a beauty greater than her own. The thought grew and darkened and hardened until it had shut out every softer feeling, until there was room in her for one purpose only. The child must not go on living. If Snow White were gone from the world, the queen reasoned, then the mirror would once again name her the fairest, and the sickness would go out of her as a fever goes, and she would have peace. So envy, which had begun as a sick and secret feeling, sharpened itself into a plan.

She sent for a huntsman, one of the men who served her, who knew the deep forest and its ways, and who was accustomed to obeying without question. When he stood before her, she gave him his order plainly in a voice that left no room for mercy. "Take the child away," she told him. "Take Snow White out into the forest, far from the castle, deep among the trees where no one goes. I never want to set eyes on her again. And there," she said, "you are to kill her." The huntsman listened, and perhaps something in him went still, but she was not finished.

She wanted more than his word that the thing was done. "Bring me back her lungs and her liver," the queen commanded, "as a token, as proof that you have obeyed me." For the queen meant to have those parts cooked with salt and to eat them herself, and there was a horrible reasoning in it, as though beauty were a thing that could be taken off a plate and kept. The huntsman bowed and went to do as he was bidden, and he found the child and told her they would walk out together into the forest, and she went with him trusting, having no reason yet to fear.

The trees closed around them, tall and dark and full of the small sounds of the wood, the castle falling away behind until it could no longer be seen. He carried his hunting knife at his belt and his errand at his heart, and the girl walked at his side under the great branches, white and red and black against the green, unknowing, while the man beside her turned over in his mind the terrible thing his queen had sent him there to do. At last, they came to a place where the trees stood close and the light fell in thin bars through the branches, and the huntsman stopped, for he could go no further without doing the thing he had been sent to do.

He drew the hunting knife from his belt. The child watched him draw it, and understanding came into her face, and she began to weep. She did not scream, and she did not run, for there was nowhere in all that dark wood to run to. She only looked up at the man she had trusted and pleaded with him out of a small and shaking voice. "Spare me," she begged him. "Dear huntsman, let me live." She promised she would run away into the wild wood and never come near the castle again, never trouble the queen, never let herself be seen.

"Let me go into the forest," she said, "and I will never come home." The huntsman stood over her with the knife lifted, and he found that he could not bring it down. She was so young, and she was so beautiful, and she wept so quietly that his arm would not obey the order it had been given. Something in the plain honesty of her fear undid the cruelty of his errand. "Go then," he said at last, and his voice was rough with the effort of saying it. "Run away, poor child." He lowered the knife and turned his face aside, and in his heart, he thought that it made little difference in the end, for the forest was wide and full of wild beasts, and a child alone in it would not last long.

The wolves would find her, or the bears, or the cold, and the thing the queen wanted would be done without his hand to do it. Yet even as he thought this, a great weight seemed to lift from him, as though a stone had been rolled off his chest because he would not be the one to strike the blow. Snow White did not wait for him to change his mind. She gathered her skirts and ran, and the trees swallowed her at once, and the sound of her small feet grew fainter and then was gone. The huntsman stood alone in the clearing with the empty knife in his hand and the queen's demand still waiting to be answered, for she had asked for proof, and proof he would have to bring.

As he stood there, a young boar came crashing through the undergrowth nearby, and he took it as a gift given to a man in need. He killed the boar quickly and cleanly, and he cut from it the lungs and the liver, and these he wrapped to carry back to the castle. It was a poor and secret bargain he had made with himself, a life traded for a life, the beast dying so that the child might li ve a little longer in the wide green dark. He shouldered his burden and turned back toward the towers he had come from, leaving the forest to keep the girl or take her as it would.

When he came again into the queen's chamber, he laid the lungs and the liver before her, and he told her that the thing was finished, that Snow White was dead in the forest, and here was the token she had asked for. The queen looked at the proof upon the cloth and was satisfied, for she had no reason to doubt him and every reason to wish him true. She called at once for the cook, and she gave orders that the lungs and the liver should be salted well and boiled, and she waited for them to be made ready.

When the dish was set before her, she ate it, every part, believing with each bite that she was consuming the very flesh of the child who had surpassed her, taking the girl's life into her own body as a wolf takes a lamb. She ate slowly. She asked twice for more salt, and the cook who carried away the emptied plate noticed nothing except that his mistress l ooked rested for the first time in a month and went down to his kitchen thinking the winter had been hard on everyone. So the fever in her cooled, and she felt herself at ease, and she slept soundly that night with nothing left in the world to trouble her, sure of the morning and of what the glass would say when she asked it.

She did not know that the flesh upon her plate had come from a young boar in the wood, and that far away, under the same darkening sky, the child she thought she had eaten was still running, for Snow White was indeed alive and alone as she had never been alone in all her seven years. The great forest that had seemed only a green distance from the castle windows was another thing entirely once she was inside it and small beneath its trees. She ran on because she did not know what else to do, and the wood grew wilder as she went.

Sharp stones lay in her path and cut her feet, and thorns reached out from the thickets and caught at her clothes and her skin. Wild beasts moved in the shadows and passed close to her, and she heard them and feared them, but not one of them touched her, as though the very creatures of the wood took pity on so small and gentle a thing. On she went over the stones and through the brambles, as far as her legs would carry her, and the light thinned and the shadows lengthened, and evening came down over the trees.

Just as the last of the day was failing, she came out from among the trunks and saw before her a little cottage standing quiet in the gathering dusk. She had no strength left to be careful. She went to the door, and finding it open, or finding that it opened to her, she stepped inside to rest. Everything within that house was small, and everything was neat, more neat and clean than words can easily tell. In the middle of the room stood a little table spread with a white cloth and set for a meal.

Upon it were seven small plates, and beside each plate a little spoon, and seven small knives and forks, and seven little cups all in a row. Against the wall stood seven small beds side by side, each one made up with sheets as white as snow, waiting in the last light like seven still boats drawn up along a shore. Snow White was faint with hunger and thirst, for she had eaten nothing since the morning and had run the whole day long. She did not wish to take a whole share from any one place, for that seemed a hard thing to do in a stranger's house.

So from each of the seven little plates, she ate a little of the bread and a little of the vegetables, a small bite here and a small bite there. And from each of the seven little cups, she drank a single drop of wine, taking only a taste from every setting so that none should be left quite empty. When she had eaten, she was very tired, and she wished to lie down. She went to the row of small beds to find one that would suit her, but this was not so easily done. The first was too long, and the next was too short, and she tried one after another all down the row, and each was wrong in some small way until she came to the seventh.

The seventh bed was right. It fitted her exactly as though it had been made for her and had only been waiting. She said her evening prayer as she had been taught to do, and she lay down in the seventh little bed, and sleep came over her at once and carried her far away from the fear of the day. The house stayed quiet while she slept, and the dark came fully down, and then, when it was altogether night, the owners of the cottage came home. They were seven dwarfs, and all day long they had been away in the mountains, digging with pick and hammer for ore and the bright metals hidden in the rock, and now they returned tired to their little house.

They lit their seven small lamps, and as the light filled the room they saw at once that someone had been there while they were gone, for the tidy house they had left was not quite as they had left it. "Someone has been sitting in my chair," said the first. "Someone has been eating from my plate," said the second. "Someone has taken a bite of my bread," said the third. "Someone has been at my vegetables," said the fourth. "Someone has used my fork," said the fifth. "Someone has been cutting with my knife," said the sixth. "Someone has been drinking from my cup," said the seventh.

And then, one by one, they went to look at their beds, holding their lamps up in the small rooms, and each of the first six found the print of a small body upon the covers, some sign that a stranger had lain there and risen again. But the seventh dwarf, coming to his own bed, held up his lamp and did not find it empty. There in his bed lay a child, fast asleep. He called out softly to the others, and they came with their lamps and gathered around, and when the light fell full upon the sleeping girl, they raised their seven small voices in wonder.

They had never in all their days seen anything so lovely. Her skin was white as snow, and her lips were red as blood, and her hair was black as ebony, and she slept on gently in the seventh bed, knowing nothing of the seven faces bent above her. Such was their delight and their care that they would not wake her, though it was the seventh dwarf's own bed she lay in, and he was as tired as any of them. He took his rest instead by dividing the night among his companions, an hour with each, so that all could sleep and none be disturbed, and the child could lie undisturbed until the morning.

So the small house grew quiet again, and the lamps were dimmed, and the seven dwarfs and their unlooked-f or guest passed the night under one roof, while the queen, far away, slept the contented sleep of a woman who believed her rival dead. When morning came, Snow White woke, and she opened her eyes upon seven small faces watching her, and at the sight of them her old fear returned, and she started up in the bed. But the dwarfs spoke to her kindly, and their gentleness quieted her, and they asked her who she was and how she had come to their house in the deep wood.

So she told them everything she knew, and it was less than they had expected. She told them that she was a king's daughter, and that her own mother had died when she was too young to remember her face, and that the woman who had come to sit in her mother's place had turned against her at some hour the girl could not name. She could not tell them why. She had given no offense that she was aware of. She had not been struck, nor scolded, nor sent from any room. She had only come to feel, the way a child feels a change in the weather, that the air of the great house had altered and was no longer willing to hold her. She told them of the huntsman who had led her out among the trees with a knife at his belt, and of the moment he stopped walking and drew it, and of how he had taken pity on her weeping and let her run.

She told them how she had fled the whole day over sharp stones and through the thorns until, at evening, she had found their door standing open and had come inside to rest. The seven dwarfs listened to the whole of it, and when it was done, they looked at one another over the child's head, for they carried their ore down into the towns, and they heard what was said in the market and the smithy. And it was said there that the queen kept a glass upon her chamber wall that would answer whatever it was asked, and that she asked it the same thing every morning of her life.

They did not tell the girl that. They could see no good in teaching a child the reason she had been hated, and so they kept the knowledge between them, and after a few low words together, they made her an offer. If she was willing, they said, to keep their house for them, to cook their meals and make their beds, to wash and sew and knit, and to keep every room neat and clean and in good order, then she might stay with them, and she should want for nothing at all. Snow White agreed with all her heart, for she had nowhere else in the world to go and had found kindness in the last place she might have hoped for it.

So the bargain was struck by the small hearth, a home offered and gladly taken, and she settled into the life of the little cottage. In the morning, the dwarfs would go up into the mountains to dig for ore and for gold, and in the evening they would come home again, and their supper had to be ready for them when they came. And she kept that bargain well, better than seven men living alone had any right to expect. She learned the trick of their hearth, which drew badly in a north wind, and how much wood to lay on it at noon so that a coal would still be living at dusk.

She swept the little room and scoured the seven plates and set them out in their row. She carried water, and she washed their working clothes and hung them by the fire, and she sat in the afternoons with a basket at her feet, mending the places where the rock had worn their sleeves through at the elbow. She kept a pot at the edge of the ashes so that the supper would be hot the moment the latch lifted. And she learned to know the hour of their coming by the light on the mountain rather than by any clock.

And every evening, they came down out of the stone with the gray dust standing in the creases of their hands and their faces, and found the door shut against the dark, and the fire up, and the table laid for seven, and a child in the middle of it who had made a house out of an empty one. All the long day, the girl was alone in the house. And so, before they went out that first morning and every morning after, the good little men gave her a warning, and they gave it sternly because they loved her already and were afraid for her. "Be on your guard against the queen," they told her. "She will soon know that you are here.

Let no one into the house while we are away in the mountains," they said. "And take nothing from any stranger's hand, no matter how kindly the stranger seems." And Snow White promised them that she would be careful, and she meant her promise with all her heart. And the seven dwarfs shouldered their tools and went out to their work and left her alone in the little house at the edge of the wide and watching wood. Far away in the castle, where the fires were larger and the rooms were cold in a different way, the queen came again to the wall where her mirror hung.

She was easy in her mind now and pleased with herself, for she believed she had eaten the lungs and the liver of the fairest girl in all the land, and that with them she had swallowed the last of any beauty that could rival her own. So she asked her question as she had asked it a thousand mornings, "If expecting the old and comfortable answer, the answer that had always warmed her like a hand laid gently against her cheek. "Mirror, mirror on the wall," she said, "who in this whole land is the fairest of all?" And the glass did not give her the words she wanted. "You, my Queen," it answered, "are fair, it is true.

But Snow White beyond the seven mountains, in the house of the seven dwarfs, is still alive and well, and she is a thousand times fairer than you." The Queen stood very still when she heard it. She did not doubt the glass for a moment, and so she understood at once that the huntsman had betrayed her, that the thing she had eaten with salt had come from some beast of the wood and not from the girl at all. A great trembling took hold of her, and her face changed, and the envy in her rose up until it filled every corner of her, the way black water fills a well.

She thought of the girl living, breathing, growing lovelier with each day that passed beyond the mountains, and she could not bear the thought, and she could not rest beside it. She would not trust the work to another hand again. She resolved that she herself would go, in secret, in a shape no one would know, and that she herself would put an end to the child who had escaped her. So she went down into the hidden rooms of the castle, the rooms where she practiced the arts that no one was meant to see, and there she made herself into someone else.

She stained her honest color from her face and painted the years upon it, and she dressed herself as an old peddler woman, poor and bent, with a pack of bright wares upon her back. In this shape, not a soul in the kingdom would have known her, and she scarcely knew herself when she passed the dark glass of a window on her way out through the yard. Over the seven mountains she went, across the long day, until she came at last to the house of the seven dwarfs, and there she knocked upon the door and cried her goods aloud in the cracked and pleasant voice of a woman who has walked many roads.

"Fine wares for sale," she called. "Pretty wares, laces of every color." And within the little house, Snow White heard her. The girl went to the window and looked out, and she saw only a poor old woman with a friendly face and a basket full of color, and there seemed no harm in her at all. The warning of the dwarfs was in her memory, but it had grown faint with quiet days, and the wares were very pretty, and she was a child of seven years alone in a house in the wood. "Good day, good woman," she called down. "What have you to sell?" "Silk and ribbon and staylace," said the old woman, "the best that any peddler carries." And she drew out a lace woven in bright strands, red and green and gold together. "Surely," thought Snow White, "I may let this honest old soul come in." And she drew back the bolt and opened the door and let the stranger cross the threshold.

She bought the pretty lace, and she stood turning it in the light, admiring the colors of it. "Child," said the old woman, "what a sight you are, and how badly you are laced. Come, let me lace you properly in the way a young girl ought to be laced." Snow White suspected nothing, and she stepped in front of the woman and let her thread the new lace through her bodice. But the old hands were quick and strong, far stronger than they seemed, and they drew the laces tight, and then tighter still, until the breath was pressed out of the girl and she could not draw another.

Snow White gave a small sound and no more, and she fell down upon the floor as though she were dead. "There now," said the queen to herself, looking down at her, "you were the fairest." And she turned and went out at the door and was gone across the mountains before anyone could see which way she went. Not long after, when the evening came on, the seven dwarfs came home from the mountains, and they found the door ajar and their dear Snow White lying stretched upon the floor, and she did not stir, and she did not breathe.

They lifted her up in great fear, and when they saw how tightly she was laced, they took their knives and cut the laces through. Then the breath came back into her by little and little, and the color came back into her face, and she drew a long breath and opened her eyes and told them what had happened. When they heard it, the little men were grave. "That old peddler woman was none other than the wicked queen," they told her. "Take care and be on your guard, and let no living soul into the house while we are away." And Snow White promised again, more earnestly than before, and the house grew quiet, and the small beds received their weary owners, and for a while there was peace under the roof at the foot of the seven mountains.

But the queen, when she was safe again within her own walls, went straight to her mirror, for she could not keep herself from it. She washed the age from her face and put on her own shape and asked the glass her question, and the answer struck her like cold water thrown in the dark. "Snow White, beyond the seven mountains," it told her, "in the house of the seven dwarfs, is still alive and well, and she is a thousand times fairer than you." So the girl had been brought back from the very edge of death.

All the blood in the queen's body ran to her heart with the horror of it, for she understood that Snow White had lived again. "I shall think of something," she said aloud in the empty room, "something that will make an end of you for good and all." And with the witchcraft that she knew, she made a comb, a fine and pretty comb, and she steeped it in a poison that no waking could undo. Then she stained her face once more and dressed herself as another old woman, a different old woman, and went again across the seven mountains to the house of the dwarfs.

She knocked upon the door and cried her wares. "Good things for sale," she called. "Good things, cheap." Snow White looked out from the window and told her to go on her way. "For I dare let no one in," she said. "I am forbidden." "But surely you are allowed to look," said the old woman, and she drew out the poisoned comb and held it up so that it caught the light, and it was so pretty a thing that the girl forgot her caution and could not help but wish for it. She had learned nothing that would save her, and she opened the door once more and let the woman in.

When they had agreed upon the price, the old woman said, "Come, let me comb your hair properly for once." And Snow White, thinking no harm, bent her head. But the moment the comb touched her black hair, the poison in it did its work, and the girl fell down senseless upon the floor and lay there without moving. "There, you paragon of bea- beauty," said the wicked woman, looking down at her, "now you are finished." And she went away. Yet it happened by good fortune that the evening was near, and it was not long before the seven dwarfs came home.

When they saw Snow White lying upon the ground as though dead, they thought at once of the queen, and they searched her, and quickly they found the poisoned comb caught in her hair. Scarcely had they drawn it out when Snow White came to herself again, and drew in her breath like one who has been held under water, and she sat up and told them all that had happened. Once more they warned her to be on her guard and to open the door to no one, and this time the girl swore it to them with her hand in the hand of the eldest.

And the little house settled back into its evenings and its mornings, its supper laid and its beds warm, and the wood kept its long watch outside the window, as it always did. But no promise given at the foot of the mountains could be heard within the walls of the castle, and there the queen went again to her glass and asked it who was fairest. And again, it gave her the same answer it had given twice before. "Snow White," it said, "beyond the seven mountains, is still alive and well, and is a thousand times fairer than you." When the queen heard the mirror speak so, she shook in every limb with rage, and she cried out that Snow White should die if it cost her own life to bring it about.

Then she went into a still and secret chamber that no one else ever entered, and there she made an apple, and it was a work of terrible cunning. To look upon it was to long for it, so white was it upon one cheek and so red upon the other, and anyone who saw it wished to taste it. But she had made only the red half full of poison, and the white half she left wholesome and safe, and in this lay the whole of her trick. When the apple was ready, she stained her face and dressed herself as a farmer's wife, a country woman with apples to sell, and she went once more over the seven mountains to the house of the seven dwarfs.

She knocked, and Snow White put her head out at the window and said, "I dare not let anyone come in. The seven dwarfs have forbidden it." "It is all one to me," said the farmer's wife. "I shall soon be rid of my apples either way. But here, let me make you a gift of one." "No," said Snow White. "I dare not take anything." "Are you afraid it is poisoned?" said the old woman. "Look here, I will cut the apple into two halves. You eat the red cheek, and I will eat the white." And here was the cunning of it, that the apple was so made that only the red half held the poison.

Snow White looked at the fine apple, and when she saw the countrywoman eat a piece of it with no harm at all, she could resist no longer. She put out her hand from the window and took the poisoned half. Hardly had she a bite of it in her mouth when she fell down upon the floor, dead. The queen looked at her with a dreadful stare, and she laughed aloud, and she said, "White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony, this time the dwarfs cannot wake you again." And when she was home once more and asked the mirror at last, the glass gave her the answer she had hungered for through all those days, and told her that she, the queen, was the fairest in the land.

Then her envious heart had rest, so far as such a heart can ever come to rest. The dwarfs, when they came home that evening, found Snow White lying upon the ground, and no breath came from her mouth, and she was dead. They lifted her up, and they looked to see whether anything poisonous could be found, and they unlaced her bodice, and they combed her hair, and they washed her with water and with wine. But nothing they did was of any use, for the dear child was gone, and she stayed gone. They laid her upon a bier, and all seven of them sat down beside her and wept for her, and they wept for three whole days together without ceasing.

Then they made ready to bury her, but when they looked at her, they could not do it, for she did not seem dead at all. She looked instead as though she were only sleeping, her mouth still soft, her cheeks keeping all their gentle color as if the warmth had never gone out of them, and a person watching long enough might have sworn he saw her breathe. "We cannot lower her into the dark ground," they said to one another, and they could not bear the thought of the cold earth closing over so fair a face.

So instead they made a coffin, and they made it all of clear glass so that she could be seen from every side as she lay within it. They laid her gently inside, and upon the glass they wrote her name in letters of gold, and beneath her name they wrote that she was a king's daughter so that any who passed should know what manner of child slept there. Then they carried the coffin up to the top of the mountain, and from that day, one of the seven always stayed beside it and kept the watch so that she was never left alone.

And the creatures of the wild came to mourn her as well, for the birds too had loved her. First came an owl, and then a raven, and last of all a dove, and each in its turn sat by the glass and grieved for the girl who slept and would not wake. And so she lay upon the mountain, and the seasons turned about her without touching her at all. The snow came and settled on the glass and melted again in the thin spring sun. The grasses greened along the slope and browned once more, and the owl and the raven and the dove kept their turns beside her, and the one dwarf who watched was changed each day for another so that never was she left without a keeper.

A long time passed in this way, longer than anyone kept count of, and through all of it she did not alter by so much as a hair. The years went over the glass and left no mark on what lay under it. And each morning that a watcher came up the slope, he found her exactly as the last had left her, as though the whole of that time had been a single quiet hour and she had only just closed her eyes. It happened at last that a prince came riding through that wood. He had lost his way among the trees, or perhaps he had only followed the deer higher than he meant to, and the path he took brought him up the mountain to the place where the dwarfs kept their long watch.

He saw the coffin standing clear upon the height, catching the light along its edges, and he drew his horse to a halt and came near on foot to see what manner of thing it was. Inside lay a maiden, and she was more fair than anything he had looked upon in all his life. He bent to the glass and read the golden letters written there, and he learned that she was a king's daughter and that her name was Snow White, and something in him would not let him ride on and leave her. He turned to the dwarfs who stood about the coffin, and he spoke to them gently, for he could see the grief that had gathered in that place.

"Let me have the coffin," he said, "and I will give you whatever you may ask for it." But the dwarfs shook their heads and answered him, "We would not part with it for all the gold in the world." "Then give it to me as a gift," he said, "for I cannot live without looking upon Snow White. I will honor her and hold her dear as the thing most precious to me in all the earth." He spoke so earnestly, and there was such sorrow and such tenderness in the way he said it, that the good little men were moved in their hearts.

They looked at one another, and they looked at the young man who could not take his eyes from the sleeping girl, and at last they took pity on him, and they gave him the coffin. The prince called his servants to him, and he bade them lift the coffin upon their shoulders and carry it down the mountain that he might bear Snow White home with him. So they raised it up between them and began the long way down among the trees, moving slowly over the rough ground, mindful of their burden. And as they went, one of them stumbled.

Whether it was a root grown across the pa th or a low bush that caught at his foot, no one could afterward say, but the man lurched, and the coffin jolted hard upon his shoulder. And with that jolt, the piece of poisoned apple that had lain caught in Snow White's throat was shaken loose, and it came free of her. In a little while, she opened her eyes. She lifted the lid of the coffin and sat up, and she was alive and whole again, and the color that had never left her cheeks was now the color of the living. "Good heavens, where am I?" she said, and she looked about her at the trees and the sky and the strangers gathered round, and she did not understand.

The prince came to her, full of joy, and he could hardly speak for the gladness in him. "You are with me," he said, and he told her all that had happened, how she had lain sleeping, and how he had found her upon the mountain. Then he said to her, "I love you more than anything else in all the world. Come with me to my father's castle and be my wife." And Snow White looked at him, and her heart went out to him, and she said that she would go. So it was settled between them, and a great wedding was made ready, with feasting and with music, and the whole country was bidden to come and rejoice.

Now, among all those who were invited to the wedding was Snow White's stepmother, the proud and wicked queen. She did not know whose wedding it was, only that a young bride was to be married, and that all the great folk of the land were called to it. Before she dressed herself in her fine clothes to go, she stood before her mirror as she had stood so many mornings, and she asked it the question she had asked all her life. "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?" And the glass gave her its answer, and the answer was this: that she, the queen, was fair, fairer than most, but the young bride was fairer still, a thousand times more fair than she.

When she heard it, she cried out, and a cold dread went through her, and she was so troubled that for a while she did not know what to do with herself. She did not wish to go to the wedding at all, yet she could find no peace where she stood, for the thought of that unknown bride, fairer than she by a thousand times, gnawed at her and gave her no rest. In the end, she could not keep away. She had to go and see the young queen with her own eyes, though every step of the way she dreaded what she would find.

So she dressed and she went, and she came into the hall where the wedding was held, and when she entered and looked upon the bride, she knew her. It was Snow White, the child she had sent into the forest to be killed, the girl she had laced and combed and poisoned, alive and grown, and standing there in her happiness as the bride of the prince. The queen was struck through with terror. She stood rooted where she was and could not move a step, so great was her fear and her fury, and the two of them warred in her until she was frozen there like a thing of stone.

But there could be no mercy for her now, and the punishment that had been made ready was carried out. Iron slippers had been set upon a fire of coals until they glowed red with the heat. They were brought to her with tongs and set before her, and she was made to put her feet into them, and she was made to dance. She danced in the burning shoes, and she could not stop, and she went on dancing until she fell down upon the ground and did not rise. And so the envy that had ruled her came at the last to its own bitter end.

That is the shape the tale wears now, and it was a long while settling into it. Two brothers set it down in ink, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, scholars of the German lands who went gathering the old stories from whoever would sit down and tell them one. They wrote this one into a manuscript in the year 1810, printed it two years later in the first gathering of their household tales, where it stood fifty-third of all the stories they had saved, and then kept working at it for the rest of their lives.

What they first wrote down was a harsher thing than what we have. In that earliest telling, the woman who hated Snow White was not her stepmother at all, but her own mother, the one who had borne her, and it was only in revising that the brothers parted her into two women so that a good queen might die at the window and a wicked one come in after her. In some tellings, no huntsman ever appears. The mother takes the child out herself, driving into the wood in a carriage while the king is away at his wars, bidding the girl climb down to gather red roses and leaving her there among the trees.

And in the manuscript of 1810, the waking turns on no stumble and no dislodged apple, for the girl dies of the poisoned half and lies in the glass past all help her friends can give her until her father comes home from the wars and will not give his daughter up and sends for his physicians, who bind the still body at its four corners, hand and foot, and by that strange doctoring, draw the life back into her. Even the loosening of the apple has worn more than one shape, for in the first printed book, there is no root across the path and no honest mishap at all, only a servant who has carried that coffin further than he cares to and strikes the sleeping girl between the shoulders out of plain ill temper so that the piece of apple flies from her throat and bad manners do what tenderness could not.

It was later that the brothers took the blow out of his hand and gave the work to a root so that nothing unkind should touch her at the end. Even the three colors have moved about. In that first manuscript, the child is not dark at all. Her hair is yellow as gold, and it is her eyes that are black as ebony, so that the black sat in her look rather than on her head and only afterward traveled to her hair and settled there for good. What has held through every hand that carried the tale is the counting and the glass.

It is always seven: seven little beds and seven mountains and seven years of age, and no teller has ever thought to make it six, and the glass has never been taken down off the wall. There is always a woman standing in front of something that will not flatter her, asking it a question she has no business asking, and the whole story hangs upon that one fixed point and can be built around it almost any way at all. What is stranger still is that the tale did not come up out of the fields, as we might like to think, out of cottages and spinning rooms and the mouth of some old countrywoman at her wheel.

The brothers took it from people close at hand and comfortably placed, from the daughters of educated households in the town of Kassel, several of them from families of French descent whose forebears had come as Huguenots and brought French storybooks over with them. These were readers who knew their letters and their printed collections, and the same story had already been traveling for generations in ink, in French and Italian books made for people who could afford books. So what the brothers did was less a rescue than a patient reshaping, forty years of smoothing the joints and planing down the borrowed elegance until it sounded old, until it sounded like something told at a winter fire by a woman with wool in her hands and a wheel turning under one foot.

The plainness of it was made on purpose, and it was made very well, and perhaps that is the whole reason it holds. Even in a warm parlor with the candles lit and the servants gone down to their supper, the wants are the same wants. Nobody there had a truthful mirror on any wall or a vein of gold in any hill. What they had, and what anyone has, is a latch to drop and a house to hold in order against the weather, and in the little cottage at the foot of the seven mountains, they heard their own evenings handed back to them, made strange and made lovely.

Before the fire burns low, look once at the people of the tale as they stand now, each of them left in the place the story set them down. The first queen is still at her window with the needle in her hand and her wish barely cold in the winter air, and she will never learn whether it was granted kindly or cruelly. Snow White is on the far side of a wedding feast, carrying three colors the way another child carries a family name, made dangerous by nothing she ever chose and asked to answer for a loveliness she never once put to use.

The huntsman is halfway home through the trees with a wrapped bundle on his shoulder and a lie already shaped in his mouth, the one man in the tale who disobeyed an order and the only one who saved anybody by it. The seven are coming in from the mountain with their lamps held up, men who would sooner cut a night into seven pieces than wake a sleeping child, and who could not bring themselves in the end to give her to the ground. The mirror is still hanging where it always hung, in a chamber where nobody comes anymore, bright and level and perfectly ready, waiting to tell the truth to an empty room for as long as the wall will hold it.

And there is that other glass upon the mountain, the one that answered nobody and only kept faithfully what had been laid in it, and it was the silent glass and not the speaking one that held her safe until the morning she opened her eyes. The prince is on a mountain path he took by accident, having come up it after a deer and gone down it with a bride. And the second queen is standing in the doorway of a hall full of music, looking at a face she buried three times, unable to move a step, with the coals glowing on the hearth behind her and the tongs already lifting the iron shoes.

The story closes over her there in the light and the noise of another woman's feast and says no more about her at all. So let the night come down over all of it now. Let it come first upon the castle, where the high windows go dark one after another and the fires sink in their grates and the long halls hold nothing but cold air and quiet. Let it come upon the forest, where the trees stand black and still, and the sharp stones and the thorns that once tore at a running child lie harmless under a soft fall of needles and leaves.

Let it come upon the seven mountains, upon the shafts and the tunnels, where the picks are laid down and the tools stand leaning by the door for the morning. And let it come upon the little house at the foot of them, where the lamps are out and the latch is dropped and the row of small beds is full of sleepers. Nothing in that country is awake now. Nothing in it is looking for anyone. Even the three colors are letting go of their meaning and going back to being only themselves. The white is nothing now but snow on a hillside, deep and soft and taking the sound out of the air.

The red is nothing but an ember at the bottom of a grate, banked for the night, giving off its small, steady warmth. The black is only the dark of a winter evening with no wind in it, the plain and friendly dark that has been waiting patiently all this while for the story to be finished, snow and warmth and quiet dark. There is nothing in any of the three to keep a person awake. And now let all of it begin to draw away, growing smaller and quieter, the way a country looks from the last hill before the road turns and takes it out of sight.

Everything sharp in that country stays exactly where it lies, and not one thing of it comes down the road after you. Watch how easily the distance takes it. First the small shapes go, and the winter kingdom is only a dark line of forest lying under a paler sky. Then the line itself thins to a smudge, and the smudge to nothing, and the snow comes quietly across the road behind you and fills in even the marks of your going. No sound reaches out of it now, not a bell, not a hoof, not a voice. Whatever cold was in that country cannot travel so far, and whatever was cruel in it has no road left to come by.

All of it belongs to the tale, and it may stay inside the tale, folded shut between the covers like pressed flowers, harmless and still. Let the last of that cold slip from your shoulders. Feel how warm you are by comparison, the blanket lying heavy and easy over you, the pillow taking the whole weight of your head, your hands resting open with nothing left in them to hold. Let the mirror stay silent. Let the wood stay still. Let the small, kind men keep their watch without your help now, for the watching is done and the tale is whole.

In your mind, reach back across all that distance and take hold of a single door, an invisible door set in the air at the edge of the winter kingdom, the last door out of the story. Close it now, slowly and without effort. Feel it swing shut on silent hinges, wide and smooth and soundless, sealing the tale in calm and order behind it. Behind that door, it is always the same hour and always the same weather, and everything in there knows its own place and keeps to it, and the whole of it runs from beginning to end without needing anyone to watch.

The story is on that side, finished and quiet and asking nothing of you. You are on this side, in a warm room with nothing at all left to carry. The room around you is warm and dim. The tale has been told to its last word, and the last word has fallen quiet. And now, in the soft dark before you, see a single candle, its flame steady and small and golden, unwavering in the still air. It has burned beside this whole long story, patient all the while, and it has nothing left to light. Look at it gently, that one calm flame in the darkness, and let your breathing grow slow to match its stillness.

Let each breath come longer and easier than the last, drawing down and down toward sleep. With a slow, gentle breath, blow that candle out and let the last curl of light fade into the night. Rest well, sleep deeply, and let the old tales carry you into the night.