We cross the gentle green meadow that was once the Forbidden Moor, following a blackbird that was once a raven. I look back just before we pass through the standing stones. Instead of that ruinous castle there’s only a stone hut leaning into the mountainside, sunbaked and sweet and just a little lonely. As we step between the stones the hut vanishes, hidden by greasy coils of mist and miles of gloomy moor once more. The blackbird becomes a raven again, all curved talons and ragged feathers. He watches us leave with a bright black eye.
* * *
THE FIRST NIGHT we take shelter on the leeward side of a low bluff and I make a very passable fire (shoutout to Mom for making me stay in Girl Scouts through third grade). I feel like I’m getting good at this whole medieval camping thing, but Primrose can’t seem to sleep. She rustles and thrashes beneath her cloak for hours before sighing and sitting up. She warms her hands by the dying coals, the fairy’s bandage glowing orange across her palm. “You ought to sleep, Lady Zinnia. I can’t.”
Her eyes are puffy and red with exhaustion. “I won’t let you wander off,” I tell her. “Just so you know.”
She doesn’t look at me when she answers. “The curse is getting stronger. I think it’s been denied long enough, and now it wants me very badly, and I must fight it all the time. I don’t know if you’d be able to stop me.” I can’t tell if her eyes are green or blue in the dimness. Her voice gets smaller. “I wanted to see my mother once more, before the end.”
We don’t stop much after that. Primrose sleeps only in stolen snatches and wakes with haunted eyes. Her face goes hollow and grayish, her skin stretched like wet paper over the hard bones of her cheeks. By the third day I’m not so much clinging to her as I am holding her desperately upright.
Her head lolls forward, her hands slack on the reins.
“Hey, princess. I was wondering—who inherits the throne once you fall asleep?” I absolutely do not care about the inheritance laws of a fairy tale kingdom I’m about to zap myself out of, but I figure it’s the kind of thing a princess might care about.
Her head jerks upright. “What? Oh. I believe the crown will pass to my Uncle Charles, as I have no brothers or sisters.” I wonder exactly when the exclamation points left her sentences, and wish absurdly that I could restore them.
“I don’t have any siblings either,” I offer, sounding like an extremely boring first date. “I always wanted a little sister, but…” Mom and Dad said they only ever wanted one kid, but I’m pretty sure they’re lying. I think they wanted to spare me from a younger sibling who would inevitably outgrow me, a 2.0 version of myself with all the bugs and fatalities worked out, but honestly I wish they’d had a second kid to pour their hearts into. “Anyway. At least I had Charm.”
“Charm?” Primrose says it like a noun rather than a name.
“Haven’t I mentioned her? Here.” I fish my phone from my hoodie and power it on (18%). I curve my arm around the princess so she can see my lock screen: Charm simultaneously blowing me a kiss and flipping me off. It’s summer and she’s wearing a black tank top to show off what she refers to as her “lady-killers” (biceps) and her “job-killers” (tattoos).
Primrose looks at Charm’s face for a length of time that confirms my suspicions about her. She straightens in the saddle, shutting her mouth with an almost audible click of teeth. “A friend of yours?”
“The very best.” The only, really. “We met in second grade when she decked a kid for asking if my parents let me pick out my own casket. She got sent to the principal’s office and I played sick so I could go sit with her in the hall. She’s stuck with me ever since, despite my … curse.” Or, if I’m being honest with myself, because of it.
Charm’s parents already had three kids when they saw a ’90s Frontline special about homeless youth in Russia. They “rescued” Charm from a St. Petersburg orphanage six months later and never let her forget it. Every time she misbehaved they told her to be grateful she wasn’t begging on the streets; every Christmas her dad jokes that they already got her the American Dream, so what else could she want?
It gave Charm a gigantic chip on her shoulder, biweekly counseling sessions at school, and a lifelong desire to be a hero. To be the one doing the saving, rather than being saved. There’s a reason she has a tattoo on her shoulder of an adopted foreign baby who grew up to save the world again and again.
I figure the GRM made me the ultimate challenge, an unrescuable damsel. Charm used to spend hours and hours with her brother’s chemistry set and a stack of Encyclopedia Britannicas—as if a third grader was going to discover the cure to an incurable genetic disorder—until she grew out of it and gave up. At least it wasn’t a complete waste of time: she blew the top off the science section of the ACT and got her pick of internships at fancy biotech companies when she graduated. (I was pushing for this tiny start-up that was trying to clone organs on the cheap, but she went with Pfizer, an objectively terrible pharmaceutical giant, for reasons I genuinely cannot fathom).
She’s texted me twenty or thirty times since I last checked my phone: theories and questions and ultimatums; secondhand worries from my folks who are apparently growing concerned that my “sleepover” is now six days long; a bunch of screenshots from sites about physics and the multiverse and the infinity of alternate realities that lie one atop the other, like pages in a book.
I think about replying but can’t think of anything to say. I power the phone off before I can do anything embarrassing, like cry.
“Perhaps when you return to your world, you and Charm might find your fairy and defeat her together,” Primrose says. “I—I could not have faced Zellandine without you.”
I shrug against her back, feeling a little guilty. I hadn’t gone for her sake, after all. “Didn’t do much good.”
“No. Although…” Primrose’s weary shoulders straighten a little. “Although I feel stronger than I did before, knowing the truth. It’s the difference between being dragged to the gallows blindfolded and walking with your head held high and eyes wide open. It’s the lesser of two evils, I suppose.”
God, that’s bleak. She deserves so much more than the gallows, more than this tight-laced world of towers and thorns and lesser evils. I remind myself how much I dislike being cried over and try very hard not to cry over Primrose.
“Perhaps your curse will prove more negotiable than mine. Perhaps—”
“It’s not…” I didn’t really plan on explaining teratogenic damage to a medieval princess whose medical knowledge probably involves bloodletting and wandering uteri, but it’s still half a day’s ride to the castle and I can’t stand the note of stubborn hope in her voice. “It’s not a curse, exactly, and there’s no wicked fairy.”
We ride, and I talk. I talk about natural gas extraction and MAL-09, the chemical compound that contaminated the tap water in Roseville in the late ’90s, which had been tested and approved on adult men—but not pregnant women. I talk about placental barriers and genetic damage and the forty-six infants who were born with fucked-up ribosomes in the greater Roseville area. I talk about the years and years of legal battles, the fines that didn’t matter and the settlement that put me through college. I’m sure at least three-quarters of it is soaring straight over Primrose’s head, but she listens with an intensity that I find weirdly flattering. In my world, everybody already knows about Generalized Roseville Malady. They’ve seen the five-episode documentary on Netflix and argued with conspiracy theorists on Facebook and to them I’m just another headline, not a story in my own right.