Author's Note: I've been sitting on this fic since last fall, when I posted this first "chapter" to my Tumblr. I had every intention of returning to it, and a whole new batch of Everlark fairy tales, this spring/summer, but a glut of real-life factors, including a car accident, financial struggles, and most recently major surgery got in the way. :(

Said surgery ended up being a hysterectomy, from which I'm currently recovering both physically and emotionally and which should make this the very last fic I'd want to come anywhere near. But several Tumblr friends have remarked lately on how comforting my fics have been to readers in all sorts of situations all over the world, and I woke up this morning wondering if maybe, just maybe, this particular story might bring some solace to readers who are going through (or have gone through) the same sort of grief as me.

Fair warning: Raisa is the stepmother in this Snow White reboot and things will not, of course, remain entirely rosy for her throughout the fic (whenever I manage to continue it), but I love this incarnation of her far too much to send her off into the sunset in a pair of red-hot shoes/similar. And to be entirely honest, I ship her and Jack (Mr. Everdeen) so hard it just might be illegal, so there's that as well. ;D

Chapter One: The Baker's Widow

He had stayed too long at the abbey.

Since the queen's death he had done little else but ride betwixt the palace and that place and linger in the woods as he passed through, half-heartedly bringing down rabbits and game-birds with bowshots made clumsy by grief. The meat he gave to the abbot or, indeed, any person who would accept a free meal from royal hands.

Seven days had come and gone since the queen breathed her last, and in that time, nothing but bread and water had passed the king's lips.

He was some ways from the palace still – indeed, on the very fringe of the village below – when the fur-bundled infant gave a squall from her nest inside the breast of his jerkin. He had stayed too long at the abbey, and here was clear proof of it.

The queen had drawn her last breath in the same moment that the princess had taken her first, and thus there had been no tender embrace of mother and newborn child; no careful guiding of a tiny head to a full breast, no fierce latching-on, nor eager suckling. The king, practical even in that first, bitterest hour of grief, sent at once for a plump skin of goat's milk, still warm from the udder, and wet his fingertips with it, then brought them to his daughter's wildly rooting mouth. The princess suckled at his fingers with a desperate vigor as he coated them again and again with fresh milk, and now and again she would even drink directly from the neck of the skin.

This arrangement had served them remarkably well for the past sevennight. The king was never far from goat's milk, for there were many ivory-coated nannies in the palace dairy, and the abbot kept milk-goats himself, and geese besides. But this day the king had stayed too long at the abbey, and the princess had drunk up all the milk the abbot had given them. The palace lay a quarter-hour's ride ahead still, and the milk-goats a little ways further, and the king knew his daughter too well to think he could quiet her raging belly so long at that. He tried easing the tip of his thumb between her lips to placate her, but she spat it out with a grunt of displeasure and an angry lash of her wet little tongue.

To add insult to injury, it had been raining since they left the abbey, and though the princess was secure and quite dry in her hideaway of sorts, the king's dark hair was plastered to his skull, and his riding leathers were damp and cold. The streets were rapidly emptying of makeshift stalls and carts and persons, and the grief-hollowed king was less than eager to begin knocking on doors and inquiring if there was a milk-goat about.

The hungry princess gave a second cry then – a piercing, emphatic one, as though she suspected her father had not heard her first demand for food or perhaps meant to ignore it – but this time, strangely, another cry answered it. Another infant, very near.

The king looked about them at the muddy streets, the travelers hurrying toward shelter with their cloaks pulled tight, the merchants bustling away the last of their wares before the rain destroyed them, and the cry came again. This time the direction was clear, and the king's keen eyes were drawn to an aproned woman in a dress of blue homespun. Her sleeves were cuffed above her elbows, baring strong arms as pale as milk, and a thick hank of red-gold hair had slipped from her white cap to lie, damp and curling, along her slim neck.

A baker's wife, and no mistake.

She stood in the doorway to her shop, clutching two sodden loaves with one arm and scowling at the empty rain-logged street. Across her chest was strapped a sling of coarse cloth, and in that sling lay an infant. He was clearly there to feed while his mother worked, for her dress was unlaced a little and tugged to one side, and the king glimpsed a peak of dusty pink against the baby's cheek.

Surely, thought the king with a silent prayer of both thanks and supplication at such a sight, here is milk for my daughter.

"Goodwife," he called to the woman, drawing her eyes at once – common blue, they were, but flecked uncommonly with hazel. "The princess is hungry," he said – a needless explanation, in light of the mewling cries now being exchanged betwixt his jerkin and her sling. "If you have milk sufficient for two, I will pay you well to feed her."

The woman sketched a careful curtsey, elegant for a merchant's wife. "Of course, your majesty," she replied. "Come inside and warm yourself by the ovens, and I shall gladly see to your babe."

A king stood in the bakery doorway, dark and lean and magnificently handsome, even wet-through with rain as he was, and tucked inside the damp jerkin of his riding leathers was the princess herself, wrapped in fur and shrieking for a meal.

Raisa had never longed for anything so badly as to suckle a baby girl, and to nurse a princess would be very heaven.

She nodded to her brother-in-law, a red-faced man with a sweaty mop of straw-colored hair who worked a great mass of dough with her two elder sons – one five years old and nearly capable, the other just past his first year and toddling squarely – each clinging to one strong leg, then she led the king back to the kitchen, where the ovens still blazed with welcome heat on such an unseasonably cold spring day.

"Take your ease, majesty," she urged, retrieving a stool for him, then she assembled a plate of bread, butter, and cheese and a cup of cold cider for his repast, which he took with quiet thanks but made no move to consume. She unbound the sling from her chest and laid her fussing boy upon a sack of flour while she made short work of the remainder of her laces, then she turned down her bodice about her waist, leaving her bare-breasted in the presence of a king.

She did this not out of lack of modesty nor intention to seduce, but raising three babes – and all of them boys with lusty appetites – whittles away at a goodwife's sensibilities. One learns to nurse one's children when and where she can, never mind the presence of others, be they burgher, bishop, or king. What was more, Raisa knew she would have two to feed this time – for her son would not wait for his meal, nor did the king seem to expect it – and it would be nigh unto impossible to retain any shred of modesty, or clothing above the waist, if she wished to suckle two babes at once.

She went to the king then, who had watched her all this while, as though enraptured, and eased the princess from inside his jerkin. She was a tiny thing, no bigger than a kitten in her sleek bunting of rabbit fur, with wisps of dusty black hair and a scrunched-up red face. She smelled of apple blossoms and wet woods and holy places, of goat's milk and violets and the musk of her father's body.

Raisa fell in love with her at once.

It took a little to get the squalling princess to accept a breast, to latch her yowling little mouth around the nipple and suckle properly, and Raisa wondered if this could be the first time the baby had been fed in such a fashion. To be sure, there had been no rumor of a wet-nurse in the scant week since the queen had died. But once the princess drew her first mouthful of mother's milk, her tiny jaw snugged tight as a snapping turtle's and she sucked and sucked with all her might. This, her happy swallows and rhythmic little grunts seemed to say. Not goat's milk, not even from my papa's fingers.

Raisa moaned a little and bent to kiss the princess's dark head as she cradled her even closer. The babe's angry brow was smooth now; blissful, even, and already Raisa ached that this moment would not last much longer. The princess was suckling steadily, and as a mother of three babes, Raisa knew that a breast could be drained entirely in a quarter-hour, perhaps less. In a matter of minutes, the king would leave behind his bread and cheese and take this tiny precious thing away forever.

With a sigh that was dangerously near a sob, Raisa picked up her son – himself little bigger than the princess, for he was a matter of weeks older – and shifted him with ease to latch onto her other breast. She had fed two at once now and again – this one and the next, a year older – and was not unaccustomed to the pleasure wrought by suckling mouths at both breasts, but how much more exquisite that one should be a girl, and the very princess at that.

The princess who, it seemed, had known no breast but Raisa's.

She seated herself on the flour sack that had briefly cushioned her little son and studied the princess's face. The baby's eyes were open now, a wet, deep blue that, no doubt, would soon fade to the silvered smoke of the king's eyes. Raisa had never seen a wolf before, but she fancied that this hunter-king had a wolf's eyes – leastways, when they were unshadowed by grief. There was something breathtaking – almost otherworldly – in his lean catlike figure and wide cheekbones; his smooth dusky skin and sleek pitch-black hair.

The princess, Raisa imagined, would favor her father in coloring, but her features were more like the queen's. A mouth like a wild rose-bud. A nubbin-nose that cried out to be kissed. A brow high and fine, when not clouded with anger, that would bear a crown proudly.

The queen had been lovely in a celestial sort of fashion that most common people – and more than a few nobly-born – equated with the Blessed Virgin: hair as fine and pale as spidersilk shot through with gold, clear porcelain skin, slender hands and wide violet eyes. But Raisa knew better than most that the late queen had not been the saintliest of maids.

She remembered well when the king's wife had been simply Alyssum, an apothecary's daughter with wildflowers woven into her thick wheat-blonde plaits and love-bites marring the white skin of her long neck. She had been all but promised to the baker's eldest son then – a brawny, handsome boy, all broad shoulders and golden curls – and she took him often into the woods when her parents sent her foraging for rare herbs. Afterward there would be bits of moss in her hair and bark stains down the back of her skirts, no matter how vigilantly the lovers strove to conceal their trysting, and it was no great secret that the apothecary's daughter splayed her white legs for her sweetheart anytime they reached the safety of woodland shadows.

But of course, one day she had reached the woods ahead of her boy and had instead found the king himself, hunting in his leathers and singing like a six-winged seraph. How they won each other in a single morn, none ever quite knew, though when the heartbroken baker's boy pressed his love for an answer, she spoke most ardently of the king's voice, so beautiful that the very birds in the woods fell silent to hear his songs.

Raisa knew this much better than most, for the night that Alyssum became queen, Raisa lay beneath the baker's boy and bit back cries of pain as he rent her maidenhead with deep, angry thrusts. Afterward he sobbed for shame and turned away from her, but she tucked herself against his broad back and pressed teary kisses to his damp skin. Stay with me, she soothed, caressing his chest with one shaky hand. I would marry you tomorrow if you asked. I would make you a fine wife. I love you.

None of this was untrue, and broken as he was by sorrow and shame, the baker's son agreed. They joined hands before the village priest the next day, and Raisa left her mother's house for her husband's. Janek was a good man and a good spouse; he kept Raisa warm and clothed and well-fed and gave her three fine sons besides – but he never stopped loving the queen. Not when his sons grew in his wife's belly. Not even when the king at last put a child in the queen's.

The king spoke then, his voice – every bit as musical as Raisa had been led to believe – luring her out of her reverie. "Your husband mislikes that you show yourself thus to a king, goodwife?" he said, his brows half-raised in question.

It took a good long moment to make sense of these words. "My husband is in Heaven, majesty," she said. "The man you saw at the kneading is his brother, who knows well that we cannot refuse any opportunity to earn gold, even if I must suckle another's child for it."

Her spouse, like the king's, had died a sevennight ago. At the very moment of the queen's death, Janek's heart had burst, and Raisa found him lying like a stone beside an oven full of burnt bread. She had just sent her eldest son to fetch the priest when the cathedral bells sounded the queen's passing.

Of course, she told the king none of this, thinking to spare him further grief, though she wondered a little whether he had ever given a moment's thought to what became of his wife's former lover. Whether he would be surprised to learn that he sat beneath that man's roof and warmed himself at his ovens while that man's widow suckled his child.

"Good widow, how are you called?" the king asked. There was a faint light in his shadowed eyes now, as though he had found something interesting in her words.

"Raisa, your majesty," she replied, and stood a little to sketch another curtsey.

"Raisa," he echoed – or mused, perhaps – and raised the cup of cider to his lips. His damp leathers steamed at the heat of the ovens, giving off odors of horseflesh and incense and a musk so rampantly male that Raisa pressed her thighs together beneath her skirts and blushed hotly. It was too much: twin infant mouths suckling her breasts in tandem as she sat opposite this breathtakingly wild king and spoke in intimate whispers.

His jaw was dark with a week's growth of black whiskers, and Raisa recalled hearing once that the queen herself shaved him each morning with her fine white hands. She wondered, with the queen gone, whether the king would ever shave again, and considered that a beard became his face magnificently.

He ate a bite of cheese carefully, as though his mouth had forgotten what food was, and Raisa blushed hotter still. She turned her attention back to the princess tucked against her; a safer subject for her consideration, and one more beloved. She kissed the little brow again and again and nuzzled it a little with her cheek. An unforgivable impropriety, surely, to press common lips to a royal face, but there was only the king to bear witness, and he had given no sign of offense. Not to mention, when royal lips suckled at a common breast and a goodwife's milk filled a royal belly, any lesser intimacy could hardly be remarked upon.

Raisa bent again, this time to brush the tiny nubbin-nose with her own, and felt a tear slip from her cheek to wet the princess's brow. There would be no daughter for her to bear and love and suckle, even if she took another husband. Something had gone wrong with her last birthing; bleeding, tearing, pain beyond comprehension. Her third son – the plump, florid-cheeked boy who suckled at her other breast and brushed his feet against the princess's silky rabbit-bunting – had been delivered safely, but the midwife told Raisa that she had been lucky to survive the birthing and would never conceive again.

It would have been bearable if Peeta had been a girl, but to birth a third stocky baker-boy and in the process, lose any chance of ever conceiving a girl... Raisa had wept for days, and only her husband's constant pleas had persuaded her to take their newborn son to her breast. She loved him, of course, as any mother would, but she could not forget what he might have been and what now would never be, and never more so than at this moment, when a princess suckled and dozed and cooed at her other breast.

Two babes could not have been more different. On Raisa's right lay her round, rosy son, heavy as a sack of bricks and grunting his displeasure as he suckled without success (for he had drained his breast quickly and wanted even more, though Raisa would sooner die than stint the princess on her first proper meal), and on her left was this feather of a princess with a face like a dusky angel, her tiny pursed mouth as lovely as a wild rose-bud.

That sweet mouth was easing its latch upon Raisa's breast and would soon break it altogether, and Raisa shed another tear in anticipation of that loss. Had she a hand free, she would have caressed the princess's downy head till her gently questing fingertips found the soft spot at the back of the skull, then circled it again and again with tender affection. But her arms were both weighted down and full with babes, so instead she moaned with maternal longing and sorrow at the thought of giving this precious thing back to her father, so very soon now. She wondered through her tears who would feed the princess tomorrow, or even tonight, for now that she'd had a taste of breast milk – indeed, a bellyful of it – she would not happily take goat's milk from her father's fingers.

The princess's mouth loosed its latch with a contented gurgle and Raisa bit back a piercing cry, as though a blade had been driven deep into her heart. Was God in His heaven so cruel? that a king should do what her husband could not: put a perfect girl-child in her arms for her to suckle and coddle and love, only to take it away again a matter of moments later and leave Raisa to her cross, workworn brother-in-law and her husband's three stout sons, all of them sturdy as chimneys and greedy as piglets? She knew now why Janek's heart had burst at the queen's death, for her own would do likewise when the king and his daughter rode away. There would be another body beside the ovens and another grave for her boys to puzzle and wail over as they scattered clumsy fistfuls of violets upon the freshly turned earth.

She rose from her flour-cushion as one going to her death and laid her son down upon it once more, bundling him in the sling-cloth so he would not roll off his makeshift bed as he fussed for more milk. Then she cupped the princess in both hands – she was so tiny, it required little else to contain her – and lifted her so their foreheads might touch. "Be strong and brave, my owlet," Raisa whispered through a fresh wave of hot tears. "One day you will rule us all, and be praised as the fairest in all the land."

With these words she pressed a dozen kisses to every inch of the princess that she could reach: her wet blue eyes and high dusky brow; her tufts of fine black hair, so like a nestling's first feathers, and the tender fontanelles just beneath; her perfect ears and her nubbin-nose – oh, that nose! – and her rose-bud mouth, now slippery and sweet with breast milk. The rest of her was snugly encased in rabbit skin, but Raisa kissed those bits anyway and imagined how they might be, were this baby truly hers, to be fed and bathed and cuddled. The elusive indent of her neck. The flat of her narrow chest, beneath which beat the heart of a future queen. Her hands, which of a certainty would be long-fingered and deft as her father's in good time. Her little belly, pleasantly swollen with milk. Even her feet were showered with kisses where they batted weakly against the fur, and Raisa wept for just one glimpse of perfect dusky toes.

She cradled the princess against her chest for a few final moments and made to wipe her tears on her sleeve, but she had forgotten that she was naked from the waist upwards, and her wet face met bare skin instead of homespun. She stood needlessly bare-breasted in the presence of her king. It was time and past to return his child and cover herself properly.

She crossed, wet-eyed and hot-cheeked, to give the princess back to her father, and the king's hands were free to take his child, for he had cleaned his plate and drained his cup of cider, and the dishes stood empty beside his stool. I have fed both the widower-king and his daughter, Raisa thought with a broken attempt at a smile as she laid her precious charge in the king's hands.

The king took the princess wordlessly and tucked her inside his jerkin once more with a soft kiss to her brow, but he made no move to rise, and his eyes lingered strangely on Raisa's face. There was grief in those quicksilver eyes; such grief, and perhaps longing for what this moment should have been: his fairylike queen on a bed of silks, her pale hair like a halo about her radiant face as she drew aside her fine robe to suckle their child.

And because of this – for his grief and longing, and her own love for his daughter – Raisa took the king's face in her hands with a little sigh and bent to press a kiss to his brow.

This, she knew better than her own name, was unforgivable –that a baker's widow should kiss a king – and yet she could not help herself, for her heart overflowed with his grief and her own. And then his brow was not enough and her lips crept downward to press kisses to his shadowed eyes, his straight nose, the proud contours of his cheekbones, and at last his mouth in its ragged nest of black beard. His lips were unresponsive beneath hers – indeed, he seemed scarcely to have breathed since first she kissed his brow – but she tasted cider and cheese through the salt of her tears and kissed his bearded mouth again and again and again.

She did this not out of passion but compassion, for his yawning lifetime of nights in a cold bed where before there had been the heady warmth and lush roundness of the queen's pregnant form. For his stride through the palace's stone halls, which no longer had an echo of small, slippered feet. For a pillow without its cover of unbound flaxen hair or the indent of the queen's head.

All at once the reality of what she did descended like an icy downpour, and Raisa drew back with a cry of horror. Had she no decency? Here she stood, bare-breasted as trollop, kissing a newly widowed king on her kitchen stool!

She made to step back then, and would have done, but the king raised a long-fingered hand to gently stay her arm. "Raisa," he said again, like a prayer this time. He drew her back to him, a curious half-frown on his lips, and brought his free hand to her temple to tug back her white cap.

A beleaguered mother of three vigorous boys, Raisa had forsaken hairpins and pretty combs long ago. The king's hand freed the heavy mass of her ruddy blonde hair to tumble down about her shoulders, and she sucked in a shallow breath at the brush of hair on bare skin, as though she were more exposed now, not less so.

"Beautiful," murmured the king, almost in awe, as he took a long lock between his fingers.

Much later she would see how like a spell that moment had been: a grief-stricken king and a ripe-breasted baker's widow, the glory of her bright hair spilling about her bare torso. Later still there would be blame laid, and enchantments identified and condemned. But in that humble kitchen, during the coldest May anyone could remember, the only enchantments present were of the natural sort which spring up, unbidden, in the human mind and heart.

"Raisa," the king said softly, "how would you like to be a queen?"

Author's Note: If you enjoyed this chapter, please pop over to my Tumblr (porchwood) for a little continuation. :D