White As Snow (Fairy Tale) Read Online Free Page B

taken to see her father.
    Arpazia had no memory of her mother. She had died, they told Arpazia, at the child’s birth. From the beginning, too, she had not had a father, only this remote figure called a father, old to her even when she was an infant, who now and then acknowledged her, gave her some strange inimical present, like the emerald ring too big for her, or the Eastern mirror.
    He sat in his library, and below, down the stair in the hall, there was a lot of noise, the clashing of the men in their mail, and sometimes women crying. (“What is it?” she had asked her maids, hearing these sounds at first distantly. “Has someone died?” The maids looked frightened. It was the old nurse who said, rocking herself slowly, half smiling—but without joy—“Most will.”) They were at war, it seemed. A horde marched toward them. Arpazia, too, became afraid, but only a little, for it was beyond her understanding.
    The library was a small room, its stone walls hung with carpets, or else shelves and great books heaped on, some large as a three-year-old child, or long tubes of wood or metal in which lay scrolls of yellowed paper.
    Arpazia’s father glanced up from a map he had been studying with some difficulty—his pale eyes, too, the girl had learned, were no longer much use to him.
    “Is it you, Arpazia?”
    “Yes, Father.”
    This question was not due to his eyesight, only his indifference, she suspected. He had other daughters in the castle, though none legitimate. Her own waiting-women were two of these.
    “Have they informed you?”
    “Yes, Father.”
    “I expect you’re fearful. It is a terrible thing.” The elderly man raised his gray face and looked at everything, the room, his books, her, with a ghastly resignation. “This one who springs down on us is barbaric. And cunning. His symbol is a hlack hull sporting fire, but his name’s Draco—the dragon.”
    Arpazia felt a new, more positive fear. And yet, the gale of change blew in her face and never had she sensed her life or her youth so strongly.
    “What shall we do?” she cried.
    “Resist,” said the remote father. “Rut fail. I judge there’s little hope. Presently you should go to pray. Confide in the Blessed Marusa. The priest will shrive you. Wait meekly. When the hour comes, I’ll find you. I will see to it you suffer nothing at their hands.”
    Arpazia blinked. Was this magic he spoke of? He was very clever, she had always heard, intellectual and mentally powerful, if physically a poor specimen.
    “The nurse says,” she blurted, “you’ll give me wings to fly away—”
    He laughed. It was a horrible laugh. Not cruel, but nevertheless quite pitiless. “So I shall. She spoke well, the old woman. Tell her,
I’ll give her wings, too. She has been faithful, and why should they have her, these brutes, to make a slave of? Tell her, Arpazia, she too shall have wings.”
    But as he said this, he did something at odds with the words, a piece of body theater that, without instructing the girl, yet forewarned her. He drew a long thin dagger and placed it, shining, on the table.
    I must be shriven and then will be pure for Heaven. Angels and the souls of the dead have wings.
    Arpazia backed a step away, but her father had already lost interest in her, taken up as he was with preparing his own self for death, and his castle—that no one should have the benefit of it after him.
    When the girl had returned to her own apartment, she found her nurse still sitting at the fireside.
    “He means to kill me!”
    “Your father? Oh yes.” The nurse was vague and dispassionate. Her abject fatalism might have bloomed for this moment. “He won’t want the barbarians to get you. They’d rip you in bits with their dirty ways. It is a favor to you. None of the other girls will get any assistance, they’ll have to see to it for themselves.”
    Shocked, Arpazia hissed, “He said he would kill you too.”
    “Good, good. That’s kind of him.”
    The girl