Beyond the Woods. Fairy Tales retold

He shrugged.
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Your husband was embalmed, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. Yes, he was.”
“Then there’s a good chance. It depends on how good a job they did on him, the soil temperature, and how tight the box is. It depends on a lot of things, really, but there’s a good chance. Then there are some tests they can always run—like for arsenic or lead. You can look at a body a hundred years later and still find those things.”

Fourteen years ago, another woman had stood at this window, but she was not like the Witch Queen. The woman had black hair that fell to her ankles; she had a crimson gown, the girdle worn high beneath her breasts, for she was far gone with child. And this woman had thrust open the glass casement on the winter garden, where the old trees crouched in the snow. Then, taking a sharp bone needle, she had thrust it into her finger and shaken three bright drops on the ground. “Let my daughter have,” said the woman, “hair black as mine, black as the wood of these warped and arcane trees. Let her have skin like mine, white as this snow. And let her have my mouth, red as my blood.” And the woman had smiled and licked at her finger. She had a crown on her head; it shone in the dusk like a star. She never came to the window before dusk; she did not like the day. She was the first Queen, and she did not possess a mirror.

“Good man, sweet man, it was only a test of you. Am I not a witch? And do you not love me?”
The huntsman trembled, for he did love her, and she was pressed so close her heart seemed to beat within his own body.
“Put away the knife. Throw away the silly crucifix. We have no need of these things. The King is not one half the man you are.”