“So all that was just … an aesthetic?” Honestly, I admire her commitment. “The castle. The raven. The blood sacrifice—”
The fairy flinches at the word blood. “Oh!” She bustles to a shelf and returns to the table with an armful of clanking bottles and a length of plain cloth. “Sit, please.”
Primrose sits, looking like an actor still waiting in vain for someone to give her a line. The fairy points to her hand, curled and crusted with dried blood, and Primrose blinks a little dreamily before laying it on the table between them. The fairy mutters and dabs at the cut—a raw line that strikes like red lightning across her palm—plasters it with honey, and wraps it in clean white cotton. She pats it twice when she’s finished.
Primrose stares at her own hand on the table as if it’s a sea creature or an alien, wildly out of place. “I don’t understand.” Her musical voice is ragged around the edges.
“I know. But I don’t know where to begin.” The fairy stares at the princess with eyes that are gentle and wry and very, very blue. I squint at her hair. Was it true gold once, before it was silver?
I take the third seat at the table and lean across it, hands clasped. “How about you start with your name?” I have a wild suspicion that I already know it.
The fairy chews at her lower lip—palest pink, like the fragile teacup roses Mom grows along the drive—before whispering, “Zellandine.”
Oh, hell. I hear a small, pained sound leave my mouth. I glance at Primrose and know from the polite puzzlement of her face that she doesn’t recognize the name. “She’s one of us,” I explain. But I’m lying; her story is far worse than ours.
“You know my tale, then?”
I was hoping until that moment that I was wrong, that Zellandine’s story went differently in this world. But I can tell from the look in her eyes—a scarred-over grief, healed but still haunted—that it didn’t.
I want to tell her I’m sorry, to take her hand and congratulate her for surviving. Instead I give her a stiff nod. For someone who’s spent her entire life being comforted, I’m pretty shit at it.
“Were you cursed as well, then?” Primrose asks, reaching gamely for her familiar lines.
Zellandine stands abruptly. She pokes at the coals in the hearth and swings an iron pot low above them, her back turned to us. “Before there were curses—before there were fairies or roses or even spindles—there was just a sleeping girl.”
Even with my Sleeping Beauty obsession, I didn’t read Zellandine’s version until the fifth week of FOLK 344—Dr. Bastille’s Fairy Tales and Identity course. I guess it’s such an ugly story that we prefer to leave it untold, moldering in the unswept corners of our past like something gone to rot in the back of the pantry.
“I was born with a disorder of the heart.” Zellandine speaks to the steady heat of the coals. “If I overexerted myself or if I suffered a shock, I might fall into a faint from which no one could rouse me for a spell. It was no great matter when I was a child. But by the time I was older…”
She trails away and I look sideways at Primrose to see if she understands what’s coming, hears the dark promise in that ellipsis. Apparently a princess’s life is not so sheltered that she doesn’t know what sorts of things might befall a woman who can’t cry out, can’t run. Her fingers curl around the white line of her bandage. “Surely your father protected you, or your mother.”
“I was a maid in a king’s castle, far beyond my family’s protection.” In the version we read in Dr. Bastille’s class, a translation from medieval French, Zellandine is a princess who falls into an endless sleep when her finger is pierced by a splinter of flax. I wonder how many tiny variations there are of the same story, how many different beauties are sleeping in how many different worlds.
Zellandine lifts the pot from the fire with a fold of her apron and fills our teacups. I’ve read enough fantasy books and spy novels to know better than to drink anything offered to me by an enemy, especially if it smells sweet and inviting, like bruised lavender, but I no longer think Zellandine is our enemy. I curl my fingers around the cup and let the heat of it soak through skin and tendon, right down to the bone.
“Soon enough I caught the eye of the king’s son. I was careful and quiet; I was sure never to tend his rooms when he was present. But one day he returned unexpectedly while I was shoveling the ashes from his hearth. He startled me when he spoke my name, and my heart betrayed me. The last thing I remember is the crack of my skull against the stones.” Zellandine is seated again at the table but she still isn’t looking at us. “When I woke, I was in a bed far grander than any I’d seen before. So wide my hands couldn’t find the edges, so soft I felt I was drowning, suffocated by silk.” Her nostrils flare wide, white-rimmed. “I can still smell it, if I’m not careful. Lye from the castle laundry, rose oil from his skin.”
Right now you’re thinking: this isn’t how the story goes. You might not have a degree in this shit but you’ve seen enough Disney movies and picture books to know there’s supposed to be a handsome prince and true love and a kiss, which can’t be consensual because unconscious people can’t consent, but at least it breaks the curse and the princess wakes up.
But in the very oldest versions of this story—before the Grimms, before Perrault—the prince does far worse than kiss her, and the princess never wakes up.
I make myself keep listening to Zellandine, unflinching. I always hate it when people flinch from me, as if my wounds are weapons.
“I did not tend the prince’s hearth after that. I hoped—if I were quiet and careful enough—I might be safe. That it might be over.” Zellandine’s fingers spread against the softness of her own stomach. “Soon it became clear that it wasn’t.”
In that oldest story the still-sleeping princess gives birth nine months after the prince visits her in the tower. Her hungry child suckles at her fingertips and removes the splinter of flax, and only then does she wake from her poisoned sleep.
I felt sick the first time I read it, betrayed by a story that I loved, that belonged to me. I slouched into class the next day, arms crossed and hoodie pulled up, scowling while Dr. Bastille lectured about women’s bodies and women’s choices in premodern Europe, about history translated into mythology and passivity into power. “You are accustomed to thinking of fairy tales as make-believe.” Dr. Bastille looked straight at me as she said it, her face somehow both searing and compassionate. “But they have only ever been mirrors.”
I reread the story when I got home, sitting cross-legged on my rose-patterned sheets, and felt a terrible, grown-up sort of melancholy descending over me. I used to see Sleeping Beauty as my wildest, most aspirational fantasy—a dying girl who didn’t die, a tragedy turned into a romance. But suddenly I saw her as my mere reflection: a girl with a shitty story. A girl whose choices were stolen from her.
Zellandine has fallen silent, staring at the table with her face folded tight. I take a sip of my flowery tea. “What happened to the baby?”
She looks up at me and her mouth twists. “There was no baby. I followed whispers and rumors and found a wisewoman in the mountains who knew the spell I needed. I chose a different story for myself, a better one.” The memory of that choice softens her face, settling like sunlight across her features. “I stayed with the wisewoman, after. She taught me everything she knew, and I taught myself more. I gathered power around myself until I could turn blades into feathers and huts into castles, could read the past in tea leaves and the future in the stars.”