Primrose looks nothing like her parents. I guess when twelve fairies bless you with hotness, you lose some of the family quirks. The Queen has ordinary brown hair, a too-long nose, and an expression of permanent weariness; the King is roundish and baldish and alcoholic-looking. Standing beside them, Primrose looks like one of those Renaissance angels descended among mortals, softly glowing. I touch my own chin—the tiny, too-sharp chin I got straight from Mom—and almost like it for the first time in my life.
Primrose’s eyes flick up at my movement. They widen very slightly. I give her a cheery shrug.
Before she can either banish me or die of embarrassment, the King taps his ringed knuckle against the arm of his throne. The court falls quiet. “It is my very great pleasure to announce that the curse laid upon our fair princess has failed! She is one-and-twenty years old, and yet untouched by that wicked promise!” His accent is vaguely English, the way medieval accents are in movies, and his voice booms exactly like a king’s should. When the clapping and hurrah-ing dies down, he continues, “And it is my even greater pleasure to announce my daughter’s betrothal!” I guess exclamation points are inheritable. “To none other than the good Prince Harold of Glennwald!”
It’s only then that I notice the person standing on the other side of the thrones: a twenty-something man wearing a tunic and an expression of criminal smugness. He’s handsome, in that generic, Captain America–ish way that does absolutely nothing for me, and I can tell from the briefest glance at Primrose that I’m not alone. She’s smiling, but there’s a falseness to it that reminds me of those Disneyland actresses when I was eleven.
That smile jars me, like a little shock of static or a missed step on the stairs. I know this story really, really well: after the curse is broken, Prince Charming marries the princess and they live happily ever after, the end. But this version has slid sideways somehow, like a listing ship. The curse isn’t quite broken, the prince isn’t quite charming, and that’s not a happily ever after I see swimming in the princess’s eyes.
The King has been speechifying for some time about his hopes for their blessed union and Prince Harold’s many virtues. “—a true son to us, who has tirelessly striven to end the curse for years now, even tracking the fairy to her lair, though she fled before his might.” I squint at Harold, all jawline and puffed pride; surely even an off-brand discount-store Maleficent could take him if she wanted to. “That their marriage may be delayed no longer, Princess Primrose and her betrothed will speak their vows in three days hence!”
There’s a final swell of applause as Primrose and Harold step before the thrones and clasp hands. Primrose’s hand looks limp and boneless in his, like a small, skinned animal.
I lurk at the back of the crowd for a while after that, smiling and nodding and collecting odd looks, before a voice hisses, “What do you think you are doing?”
I spin to face Primrose and sweep her my most absurd curtsy. “Why, Your Majesty, may I not celebrate your engagement?” Oh God, now I’m doing the fake British accent thing.
She barely seems to hear me, her face still gritted in that plastic smile, her pupils wide and hunted. “Your hair, your shoes … you look deranged. If anyone sees you—my father’s court does not take kindly to the uncanny!”
Her hand clamps around my bicep and steers me into a side hall. “Return to my rooms and wait for me.” I cross my arms and give her my best make me glare. “Please,” she adds, looking at me with those enormous eyes of hers, “I beg of you.”
I’m at least three-quarters straight, but her lashes are very long and very golden and I’m not made of stone. I nod. She closes her eyes as if summoning some inner strength before swishing back into the throne room with her smile shining like a shield.
I get lost two or three times on the way back up, startling a pair of amorous knights in a broom closet and briefly alarming a cook. By the time I climb all nine hundred stairs I can hear my pulse a little too loudly in my own ears, feel my lungs pressing too hard against my ribs. I think of my morning handful of pills back in Ohio and the last round of X-rays that showed the chambers of my heart shrinking, my lungs congested. I hadn’t showed them to Charm.
Primrose’s room is warm and sunshiny and quiet. I shrug out of the burgundy velvet gown and curl in her window in my socks and hoodie, staring out at the countryside like a girl in a Mucha ad, thinking about curses and fairies and stories gone sideways. Thinking that I should probably go find that magic spindle and prick my finger and peace out of this entire medieval hallucination.
Instead, I wait. I watch the slow creep of shadows and the lazy dance of dust motes in the air. The sun is squatting fat and red on the horizon by the time Primrose returns.
She’s still stunning, but I must be getting used to it, because I can see past the shine to the weary set of her mouth, the grim line of her spine. She sets a silver platter of heaped food on the seat beside me and collapses back onto her bed, vanishing behind the canopy with a dramatic sigh.
I take three enormous bites of something that I recognize from the Great British Bake-Off as a hand-raised pie. “So.” I swallow. “Harold seems nice.”
“Yes.” Her voice is muffled, as if she’s facedown in a pillow.
“Good-looking, if you’re into cleft chins.”
“Quite.”
“And yet I can’t help but detect a tad of reluctance on your part.”
There’s a short sigh from behind the canopy. “He’s—it’s—fine. I’m fine.” It’s a lie but I let it stand because she did the same for me, and sometimes lies are lifeboats.
The sheets rustle as Primrose rolls over. “Anyway, it hardly matters. None of them understand that the curse is still … waiting. Calling to me. Eventually I’ll have to sleep, and I fear I will wake again only as my finger pricks the spindle’s end.”
I struggle not to roll my eyes at this excessive drama. “Okay, but like, just let me zap myself back to Ohio and then you can set it on fire or whatever. Boom, curse dodged.”
Primrose sits up slowly, brushing aside the curtains and meeting my eyes. “I searched for it, after supper,” she says softly. “I could not find the spinning wheel, nor the room, nor indeed the tower. It has vanished.”
I think: oh, shit. I say, “Oh, shit.” The princess doesn’t flinch, so either they don’t have swears in Fake-ass Medieval Fairy Land or Primrose isn’t as proper as she seems. “Well, at least there’s Harold. If you fall into an enchanted sleep, nine out of ten doctors recommend true love’s kiss—”
“Harold is not my true love. I assure you.” Her lips are thin and pale, twisted with revulsion. “I don’t think—I don’t know that there’s any escaping it.”
“No. There is, there has to be.” I’m standing for some reason, my fingers curled into useless fists. I remind myself that this isn’t my problem or business or story. That I should be sitting at home with my parents for whatever time I have left, like I promised I would, rather than gallivanting through the multiverse without my meds.
“Look. Both of us should have died or been cursed or whatever last night, on our twenty-first birthdays. But something messed it up. Our lines got crossed.” I picture that listing ship again, or maybe a train leaping off its tracks and hurtling into the unknown. “It feels like we have a chance to make it come out different. To do something.” I haven’t wanted to “do something” since I was sixteen, packing my backpack and planning my escape.