Queen Snow

Snow married the prince after the Day of Alexandria celebration. The townspeople had never known such celebrations to come in such quick succession. It was spring, but it was as if two Christmases fell in following months and with snow on each. The new Princess delegated most of the work of her wedding, employing friends she knew before she began to learn the trade of seamstress. Snow was tied down in the responsibilities of new love and her introduction to government.

And it was a good thing that she took so earnestly to her new endeavors, for by the winter next the King and Queen were dead. It was a horribleness. A Sickness swept the land, a Sickness that was caught by three of four in the kingdom and left none a chance to recover. Children left their parents and parents their children and uncles left aunts and cousins were never heard from again. It was swift, the Sickness, so that you had to say goodbye at the first cough in the afternoon for that night they would not cough or breathe again and would be gone.

The first order of Snow's queendom was to arrange for massive funerals. The Sages of about advised her to bless the fresh dead from her tower each day. They said she could do it with a handkerchief of the brightest color waving before her, and another one in front of her mouth so that the Sickness could not enter her spirit. But she would not. Snow would not allow anyone to slip from a kingdom this way, most of all hers, and so she walked among the kingdom with her guards and helped to lay to rest the rest, one by one. She traced back through her old neighborhood, and then those that surrounded it, and finally them that she had only heard of before her time going to work for Mrs. Hargraves.

When she thought she could not reach a new level of sadness, there her heart slipped again, down and down. Their shovels always busy, they put the dead love in pits in front of their houses, too scared to venture further out, too frightened to take their new dead to the fields. The new Queen's guards protested her presence near these corpses for three days, but relented when they saw there was no use in it. Or even, as was often the case, one of the guards themselves died during the endeavor.

After three months of this, when Queen Snow was down to just one guard and the Sages were all long dead, the Sickness ended. It was not known for three days, as the counters of the kingdom were gone too, but Queen Snow and her last guard on that third afternoon could see for themselves that none were left to bury. There were no celebrations then, none rejoiced. The surviving recoiled from their horror only by resting their shovels against the doors of their houses. The living sat on benches or stools and cried.

And on the next day, the Queen took her tower finally. The kingdom looked up, her subjects, and could see in her hands the most colorful cloth ever cut. Rainbow streamers whipped from her hands, and she yelled with all her voice that they could all go back now, that it was all over. She told them that it was the time of the seed, the time to rebuild.