Literature
Snow White and the Impractical Law of Succession
Once upon a time there lived an evil queen, known by all as the most beautiful woman in the land. Marked for greatness by her flawless skin and flaxen hair, her ascent to the throne was uncontested and her rule unquestioned. But this queen had yet one more power not granted by her title: she practised witchcraft, and could converse with servile spirits that flitted behind the glass of the grand mirror in her chamber. “Mirror mirror on the wall,” she entreated the spirits, “who is the fairest of them all?” “With hair of red and tats of blue,” said the spirits in the mirror, “the fairest is Snow White, not you.” The queen had feared just such an answer: though she was widely recognised as the most beautiful in the land, the council that had given her the crown lacked her spirit-sight. She had always known that they might have overlooked some rustic of uncommon grace, and so she posed a second question to her spirits in the glass: “Captive shades whose fate I pity, whose is the bod