Review of Tanith Lee's short story "The White Queen"

"The White Queen" is a mystery short story by Tanith Lee, with touches of magic and a carefully drawn period setting, in which a young widow is locked in a tower on the very day of her wedding. There she receives a visit that guides her through her own life and seals the fate of two characters.

## A wedding that ends in the tower

The story opens with a scene that says almost everything: a white queen, young and widowed on her wedding day. The monarch, old and frail, has died, and she is accused of having killed him with her sharp tongue. At the feet of her bare body on the nuptial catafalque they hurl all kinds of humiliations and insults.

What she does not know is that a servant has been left listening, precisely so that what happens does not happen. The queen, white and murderous, is going to pay the price for the monarch's death. Her confinement in the tower is not an improvised punishment: it is the fate that has been prepared for her.

## The white queens who came before

The tower is not empty. So many white queens like her have ended up there, locked away with no contact with anyone. That solitude is the setting of the mystery, and also its engine: in that silence a peculiar visitor appears.

That visitor will guide her through what was the course of her own life without her realizing it. The story plays with the protagonist's ignorance, as she moves through her own past without recognizing it. And along the way it seals the fate of those two whose portrait the writer paints in her tale.

## A raven at the window

During one winter a raven, black as night, appears at the window of her tower, asking for shelter, food and warmth. The image condenses the tone of the story: mystery, magic and a period description that sustains the atmosphere.

Tanith Lee thus builds a tale of confinement and revelation, in which the protagonist is at once queen, widow and murderer. The rest is left to the reader.