They pushed their small beds together and laid Snow White out across them, the apple still gripped in her cold fingers. They lit candles around her. They sang some more. They discovered that dwarves could cry. Over the next few days they worked long, dangerous shifts for extra gold and then Dreamy spent everything they had saved on a beautiful pink and white dress, bought from a passing merchant on his way to the fine ladies of the city.

In the clearing the deer stank and mouldered in the heat, but Snow White neither breathed nor rotted. Grouchy worked through the night forging a glass coffin, and on the third day they washed and gently redressed her, curling her long hair and rouging her lips and cheeks. When she was ready, they carried the coffin to the mound on the other side of the thicket where it was rare for anyone but a dwarf to pass. Bluebells grew on the banks and the sun caught the space all year round. They would not put her underground. They knew better than any how harsh and brutal the earth’s grip could be. She would lie in the sun, just as she had loved to do.

Some of the dwarves thought that perhaps she should have been dressed in the breeches she’d loved too but Dreamy was so distraught that they let him make a proper princess of her. She was a princess, after all. They would guard her until her father returned, and then perhaps one day a cure for the curse would be found.

They sat with her when their long, bone-tiring shifts were done, but it was always Dreamy who stayed with her the longest. Her sadness was over – his had begun.

Dreamy was sitting alone, tossing small pieces of old cheese to a small brown field mouse, when the prince stumbled through the trees that guided him up onto the mound. Dreamy should have been in the mines. He should have been there all week, but Grouchy had told the supervisor that he had lungflu and no one had questioned it. He wasn’t getting paid, but then they’d all lost their appetites and less food was required. Why bother trying to cook something tasty when it felt as if all the joy had been drained from the world? They were grieving and weighed down with guilt, but it was generally acknowledged that Dreamy, so much more sensitive than the average dwarf, was suffering the most.