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Just in time, she remembered that she’d forgotten to do her face. With a sigh and a curse, she pulled the chair away from her dressing table, sat down in front of the mirror and dabbed at her nose with a powder puff. When she’d restored enough girlish pinkness (memo to self: lay off the radishes and the garlic bread) she paused for a moment to look at her reflection.
Beautiful.
Stu
But she knew that already. There was something else about the image that faced her in the glass this morning that she couldn’t quite place. She looked again and began eliminating the impossible.
It wasn’t her, it was the mirror itself. It was looking at her.
‘Mirror?’ she whispered.
Her reflection regarded her coolly. Its perfect lips parted.
‘Ru
Snow White’s eyebrows shot up; their counterparts in the mirror stayed put. What was going on? And what in blazes was DOS? And why did she feel this urge to ask…?
‘Ready,’ said the face in the mirror.
‘All right.’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘Um. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?’
The reflection’s lips flickered for a tiny moment in a mocking smile. Then it went back to the perfect stone face, and made its answer:
‘Thou, O Snow White, are the fairest of them all.’
Chapter 4
‘Hell fire and buggery,’ said the elf, with a barely suppressed snigger. ‘Exactly what happened to you?’
The handsome prince snarled. ‘You think it’s fu
The elf shrugged. ‘Poetic justice, maybe. Actually, you should see yourself, it suits you. Better than the frog outfit, anyway.’
‘Get stuffed.’
The handsome prince took a step forward, staggered and grabbed hold of a tree to steady himself. It had been bad enough being turned from a wolf into a frog, but at least the leg count had remained fairly stable. The sudden jump from quadruped to biped was something quite other.
‘I guess that’s what’s meant by an identity crisis,’ the elf went on unkindly. ‘If you ask me, you’re headed for really major personality problems if you keep this up. Not that you haven’t got plenty of those already,’ she added fairly. ‘It’s just that they’re pimples on the bum compared to what’s in store for you.’
The handsome prince levered himself upright and extended a leg. His instincts were screaming at him that this was all wrong; walking on two legs was just a party trick, not the sort of thing any self-respecting wolf would even attempt to do while sober. He ignored the siren voices in his head; there was work to be done, he was way behind schedule, his recent performance record was looking pretty abysmal and he had his quarterly management assessment looming on the middle-to-short term horizon. Wolfpack didn’t listen to excuses or tolerate failure; they didn’t make allowances if you got turned into something nasty, because getting turned into something nasty in itself implied a whole subcategory of failures. He knew exactly what his superiors would say: if you’re dumb enough to allow yourself to get turned into a handsome prince, you’re just going to have to compensate as best you can. We are not an equal opportunities employer.
‘Come on, you,’ he grunted at the elf.
She ducked behind a nettle. ‘You leave me out of it,’ she said. ‘Both times I’ve done my bit; you’re the one who keeps screwing things up. Anyway, this is nothing to do with…’
Before she could complete the sentence, the handsome prince grabbed, closed his hand, snarled in triumph and then resorted to intemperate language as he discovered the hard way that human beings don’t like the touch of nettles on their bare skin. The elf wriggled and squirmed like a cabinet minister on a chat show, but it didn’t do her any good.
‘This is kidnapping,’ she squeaked. ‘Also assault, intimidation and discriminatory treatment of an ethnic group.’
‘Yes,’ replied the handsome prince. ‘Now shut your face and keep still.’
After half an hour or so of rubber-legged staggering, he’d reached the stage where he could reliably go more than three yards without falling over. Since he was in a forest, with lots of trees to hang on to, it wasn’t so bad. He ought to be able to deal with the next item on his agenda.
Eventually, after a lot of effort and a great amount of unintentional comedy (imagine John Cleese doing fu
He was looking at something which at first sight could have been taken for a giant windmill. It had huge, carefully shaped sails forming an X on one side, and stood on a circular plinth, which in turn was cemented into the ground. The upper section, which looked like a salt cellar designed by an illiterate giant, was clearly intended to revolve, turning with the wind. Where it differed from the average windmill was in having searchlights, 50-calibre machine guns and a barbed-wire entanglement.
You had to give the little buggers credit for trying.
He lurched, limped, wobbled and staggered out of the wood, across the plain and up to the gate in the white picket fence that surrounded the whole installation. A porcine head poked up out of a kevlar-reinforced skylight, took one look at him and vanished. Klaxons began to blare and red lights flashed. Under the ground there was a rumble of hydraulics as the ground fell away at the handsome prince’s feet, revealing a deep trench lined at the bottom with savagely pointed stakes.
The handsome prince stooped, picked up a pebble and tossed it lightly against one of the steel-shuttered windows.
‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Anybody home?’
He stood still and listened carefully. The afternoon air was still, and he could make out the sound of raised voices inside the tower, made audible on the outside as they vibrated off the stiff steel plate of the shatterboards.
‘It’s him,’ hissed a voice. ‘I know it is.’
‘Rubbish. It’s a human.’
‘Yeah,’ replied the first voice irritably. ‘And last time he was a frog. Can’t you see it’s another damn trick?’
‘You can’t be sure of that.’
‘Can’t I? Watch. And load the fifty-cals. I’m going to blow him apart where he stands.’
The handsome prince took off his hat, with its cheerful feather sticking out of the side, and waved it. ‘Can you hear me in there?’ he called out. ‘Hello?’
‘Yes, but if he is a prince and we gun him down in cold blood—’
‘Oh get real, Eugene. If he’s a prince I’m Noel Edmonds. Now get out of the way of my rangefinder. All I can see is your fat backside, and I know how far away that is.’
The handsome prince stood on tiptoe. ‘I’m looking for a pig called Julian,’ he called out. ‘Anybody of that name live here?’
The nose of a surface-to-surface missile poked out of a loophole at the top of the tower, followed by the tip of a pig’s snout. There was a flash as the sunlight caught the nose-ring.
‘Who wants to know?’ called out a voice from the loophole.
‘You don’t know me,’ the prince shouted, ‘I live the other side of the forest. But I met this talking wolf back along, and he asked me to give you a message.’
The snout vanished and reappeared a few moments later. ‘So why couldn’t this wolf carry his own messages?’ it demanded.
‘He was caught in a bear trap at the time,’ the prince replied. ‘Wasn’t looking all that chipper, to be honest with you. Lost a lot of blood. In fact, I’d say if he isn’t got to a vet in the next ten minutes, he’s had it. That’s why I want to use your mirror.’
The pig’s head went away again, and the handsome prince started to count to ten. Just when he’d reached eight, the head popped out again.