The Hunt for Snow White

"Ruadh, you have had that crossbow aimed at my back for a while now. What exactly are you waiting for?" the huntsman said.

Just then, a woman wearing a hooded crimson cloak, as dark as the shadows the huntsman was watching, crept through the kitchen, slowly closing the door behind her. She walked past the huntsman and sat beside the table, opposite him, crossbow aimed at his chest.

"Keep your hands on the table," she commanded and then asked, "Where is the girl, my lord?"

The huntsman took another drink of the canteen before answering.

"I saw some tracks at the back of the Keep. The girl, I think, went out to gather some firewood about two days ago, then spied some troll somewhere in the horizon. She dropped everything she was carrying and ran north. The troll in pursuit," the huntsman explained. "The girl is dead, Ruadh," he concluded after a moment.

"Not likely," said Ruadh. "The princess was given a coin forged by the dwarves of Avenlon. No creature that dwells in this forest will harm her while she carries that coin."

"So we wait," suggested the huntsman.

"No, my lord, I'll wait," she responded. "You, on the other hand, will die," continued Ruadh, as she started to depress the crossbow's trigger.

Soon as she made her intention known however, the huntsman pulled back his foot with the string tied to the burnt piece of wood. The cast iron stove door flew open and hit the sides with a loud clang. Startled, Ruadh pressed the trigger harder than necessary, raising the crossbow's aim, causing the dart to fly over the huntsman's left shoulder. Even before the dart hit the back of the kitchen door, the huntsman had grabbed the canteen and was throwing it straight at Ruadh's head. He missed. His killer, dropping the crossbow, had already slid off of her chair, a hand gripping the hilt of her sword. Left with no choice, the huntsman rushed towards Ruadh, aiming low, before she could fully withdrew her sword. As the huntsman's shoulders collided with her ribs, Ruadh uttered a short grunt before being lifted off her feet and slammed hard on her back to the floor. By then the huntsman's knife was already out of its own sheath. But unlike his encounter with the man whose shins he split in two so long ago, this time the huntsman did not hesitate. Screaming, he stuck the knife deep into the sides of the struggling woman under him.

The fight may have begun and ended in a few blinks of an eye, but the huntsman felt his limbs shook with exhaustion as though he had wrestled a bull for days. His heart still beating fast, he slid and crawled towards the table, blood from his hand and on the knife trailing on wooden floor. He leaned his back on one of the table legs and looked for the canteen. He found it far across the room, most of its contents spilled all over the floor. He decided to stay where he was.

The huntsman was about to slip the bloody knife back to its sheath when he heard somebody spoke. He looked up to where Ruadh has lain, but the woman's tear filled eyes had already turned glassy.

"I said, what now?" Someone spoke again. The huntsman turned to the open kitchen door and held before his eyes a girl--bare foot, covered in mud and bleeding, the hems of her dress torn to shreds, hair disheveled as a bird's nest. The fairest of the land, the huntsman thought.

EPILOGUE

Winter had come to the forest when the huntsman finally came home to his small wooden cottage. Though he had enough firewood to last cold season, he picked up his axe just the same and went to the shed to split the stock of dried wood. He needed to sort out his feelings over recent events. Axe raised and aimed at the firewood on top of the chopping block, the huntsman reflected back to the day he handed to her majesty the wooden chest containing a rotting human heart. The queen barely said a word then. Instead, she just looked at the heart and nodded her praise to the huntsman. But the queen's stoicism was not what particularly disturbed the huntsman. What gave him so much unease as he now whipped the axe down hard, was that, as her majesty turned and walked away to attend to some other business, the huntsman could swear that the Queen bore a striking resemblance to the witch his sister had supposedly slain a long time ago.