Penultimate chapter of The Red Winter Queen is up, and if you have been missing it, it is drawing to what I hope is a satisfying close.  One of the central images of any Snow White story is where she lies in apparent death, usually entombed in some glass or crystalline sarcophagus, and the Prince comes to rescue her.  The problem with the Prince as a character is he usually appears very much as a deus ex machina - he has nothing to do with the story we've been reading, he just shows up to save Snow White and make her his own, passing her from ownership of her father to her dwarvish surrogate brothers, and then to a husband.  It's really all sickeningly patriarchal when you start to think about it.

I wanted to find a way to make the Huntsman a central figure, and as he's really the only major 'male' character in the story, I wanted to flesh him out and see how many hats he could wear.  So here we have the Huntsman serving as Father, Lover, and now, at last, taking his final place.  Any time you get into incest in myth, you are treading into Sacred King territory: the king who dies and dies again, only to arise and become his own father.  Man is transitory, and Woman is eternal.