The princess sighs a long, defeated sigh, but I can see a foolish flicker of hope in her eyes. “Like what?”
“Like…” The idea leaps from my skull fully formed, armored and Athenian and deeply stupid. I love it. “Like taking matters into our own hands.” I feel a slightly demented smile stretching my face. “Where’s this wicked fairy, exactly?”
4
THE THING ABOUT bad ideas is that they’re contagious. I watch mine infect the princess, her expression sliding from bafflement to horror to frozen fascination.
“Her lair lies through the Forbidden Moor,” she says slowly. “At the peak of Mount Vordred.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right. How long would it take to get there? By, uh, horse or whatever?”
“It took Prince Harold three days of swift riding.”
Her answer initiates a complex series of calculations involving the number of missed pills over the amount of preexisting protein buildup, magnified by physical exertion and divided by the number of days I have left. If I were a machine, all my warning lights would be blinking. I ignore them.
“We’ll need supplies and food and stuff. Do you have anything more … rugged to wear?”
Primrose is watching me as if I’m a grisly car accident or a public marriage proposal: gruesome but mesmerizing. “It won’t work, you know.”
I’m already rooting through her wardrobe, looking for something free of ruffles, lace, pleats, bows, satin, ribbons, or pearls and not finding it. I wish briefly but passionately that I’d been zapped into a different storyline, maybe one of those ’90s girl power fairy tale retellings with a rebellious princess who wears trousers and hates sewing. (I know they promoted a reductive vision of women’s agency that privileged traditionally male-coded forms of power, but let’s not pretend girls with swords don’t get shit done.)
Primrose tries again. “She is powerful and cruel, and terribly ancient. Some say she has lived seven mortal lives!” I try not to let my pulse leap or my hands shake, to remind myself that hope is for suckers. “She evaded my father’s men for one-and-twenty years. Even when Prince Harold—”
“Harold does not strike me as a Perceforest’s best and brightest.”
“But neither are we, surely!”
I spin to face her, arms full of satin ruffles. “So what’s your plan? Stay here and wait for the curse to catch you, like you did for the first twenty-one years of your life? Close your eyes and go to sleep and let the world go on without you?” My voice is an angry hiss, but I don’t know which of us I’m angry at.
Primrose’s face is a waxy green color, her lips pressed white. I step closer. “In my world there’s nothing I can do to save myself. No curse to break, no fairy to defeat. But it’s different here. You can do something other than stand around and wait.” I riffle through my mental box of inspirational quotes and come up with a Dylan Thomas line that I actually know from Interstellar. “Do not go gentle into that good night, princess. I beg of you.”
She must be susceptible to begging too, because she stares at me for another breathless second before inclining her head infinitesimally. “All right.”
I clap my palms together. “Swell. Now do you happen to have a magic sword or anything? An enchanted amulet? A shield imbued with special powers?”
I’m mostly joking, but Primrose wrings her hands, thumbs rubbing hard along slender wrists. “Well.” She kneels and reaches beneath the soft down of her mattress, emerging with something that gleams cruelly in the reddening dusk. “There’s this.”
It’s a long, narrow knife, sharp as glass and black as sin. It looks out of place among the feather pillows and ball gowns of Primrose’s world, as if it belongs to some other, darker story. “Where the hell did you get that?”
Primrose holds the knife flat on her palms. “A traveling magician sold it to me when I was sixteen. He swore to me that a single cut was enough to end a life.” She says it flatly, matter-of-factly, but her eyes have gone hollow and her face is waxy again and suddenly I don’t feel jokey at all. Suddenly I wonder why a princess would sleep with a poison blade beneath her bed, why she would purchase it in the first place.
I picture myself at sixteen, a scarecrow of a girl stuffed with hormones and hunger instead of straw, so sick of dying I would do anything to live. I ran very different calculations in those days, comparing the Greyhound bus schedule to the number of hours before my parents would report me missing, multiplying hoarded pills by the number of days I would have on the run. I figured I could make it to Chicago before the cops were even looking for me, and from there I could go—anywhere. Do anything. Steal a few months or years for myself rather than feeding them all to my parents and their broken hearts.
Except I told Charm before I ran, and she instantly told Dad. He came up to my room looking like—I try not to remember it, actually. His face was a snapshot of my own death, a time-lapse video of the devastation I would leave behind me. We made a deal that night: if I promised not to run away, he promised to stop trying so hard to keep me.
A week later I took the SAT and dropped out of high school with my parents’ blessing. Dad paid my application fee and I enrolled at Ohio University that fall. I loved it. The food was bad and my roommate was a nightmare who kept trying to sell me essential oils, but it was the first time I’d felt like a real adult. Like someone who owned their future, who belonged to no one but herself.
That feeling had been trickling away all summer as I folded myself back into the teenage-shaped hole I left behind at my parents, but what would I have done without that brief escape? What if I’d been trapped with no future and no friends, like Primrose? Perhaps I would have turned toward a darker, uglier kind of escape.
I take the knife from Primrose very, very carefully. “How … helpful. I’ll carry this, okay?” I wrap it in the least expensive-looking skirt I can find. “So. Which way to the stables?”
“What—you mean now? Tonight?”
Apparently Primrose never learned dying girl rule #1: move fast. “Yes, dummy. How long do you think you can go without sleep?”
* * *
IN THE FOLLOWING hour, several things become clear to me.
First, that Primrose isn’t quite as helpless and damsel-in-distress-ish as I thought. Rather than sneaking through the castle and making off with a pair of horses by moonlight, she simply informs the stable hands that she and her ladies are going for a dawn ride through the countryside and would like two horses saddled and waiting with a picnic packed for six, please and thank you. “They won’t miss us for hours, this way,” she says calmly.
Second, that I do not technically “know” how to ride a “horse,” to quote an unnecessarily shocked princess. “But how do you travel in your land? Surely you do not walk?” I consider explaining about internal combustion engines and state highways and asking if she’d like to try driving a stick shift with a sketchy second gear. I shrug instead.
Third, that one cannot learn to ride a horse in five minutes, at least not well enough to be trusted on a midnight journey to the Forbidden Moor.