‘The apple,’ Dreamy nodded at the perfect fruit still gripped tightly in her small palm. ‘She ate the apple.’ They both stared at the frozen girl a little longer, lost in their individual thoughts.

‘What was she like before?’ the prince asked. ‘Did you know her?’

‘She was beautiful,’ Dreamy said. He could barely get the words out. ‘And always kind.’ He wasn’t ready to talk about her yet; her wild charm, her skill on horseback, the way she swam free and naked in the lake. Those were his memories. They’d be razor blades on his tongue if he spoke of them so soon.

‘She was a princess,’ he said. That much he could be truthful about. There were many princesses in the stories he’d read. Maybe none quite like Snow White, but many he could draw on. ‘A pure girl with a kind and delicate disposition. She excelled at dancing and music. She sewed the most ornate tapestries with silk threads. Her laugh was like sunlight on dappled water.’ He choked a little at that. It was almost true. Her laugh was richer though; molten ore in the heart of the rocks they battled daily. But her smile, her smile was all nature and sunlight, and when he remembered it she was always splashing in the pond, gently mocking them for not coming in.

‘She sounds perfect.’ The prince had laid down alongside the coffin, staring in. ‘A true beauty.’

‘She was.’ Dreamy wiped away his tears and then dipped into his fictions to tell more stories of the beautiful princess who’d been cursed for her kindness. The sun slowly set, but he didn’t stop. The prince didn’t interrupt him, but it was only when he began to twitch and mutter that Dreamy snapped back to reality and realised how much time had passed. The stranger had fallen into a fever, no doubt caused by his wound and, collapsed on the grass, he tossed and turned in the grip of a nightmare, his eyes moving rapidly behind their lids. Dreamy tried to wake him and pull him to his feet, but he was too far gone and too heavy.

‘Beauty,’ the prince mumbled urgently, the rest of his sentence lost in hot breath and half-words. ‘Beauty.’

7

‘A princess is missing’

The dwarves made him a makeshift bed beside the coffin. The cottage was too cramped and they decided the fresh, warm air would be good for him. Stumpy built him a fire and they dressed his wounds and fed him broth as the fever slowly broke. It wasn’t just him who slowly recovered; the dwarves did too. They had someone to care for, someone to mend, and in doing so their hearts too mended a little as the days passed into weeks.