“What?”
“Just checking.”
It’s the morning of the third day and we’ve abandoned the road, picking our way over scrubby hills and wind-scoured stone. The sun is grayish and reluctant here, as if it’s shining through greasy paper, and the trees are stunted and crabbed.
Primrose has pulled the horse to a stop before a pair of tall, jagged stones. They aren’t carved with strange symbols or glowing or anything, but there’s something deliberate about the angle of them, like they aren’t there by accident.
The princess makes her graceful dismount and touches her palm to the sharp edge of the stone. “It’s forbidden because my father wishes to protect his people, and the moor is dangerous if you don’t know the way.”
“Do we know the way?”
“Harold told me. In some detail.” The flatness of her tone suggests that Harold is one of those men whose conversations are more like long, boastful speeches. “I listened well.”
Without the slightest change of expression, without even drawing a breath, Primrose drags her palm hard across the edge. When she draws back the stone shines slick and dark with blood.
“Jesus, Primrose, what are you doing?”
She doesn’t answer, but merely lifts her hand to the sky, palm up. I watch her blood run down her wrist, red as roses, red as riding hoods. I was so sure I’d landed in one of those soft, G-rated fairy tales, stripped of medieval horrors; I can feel it shifting beneath my feet, twisting toward the kind of tale where prices are paid and blood is spilled.
A shape wings toward us across the moor, ragged and black. It lands on the standing stone in a rush of feathers, and for the first time in my life I fully appreciate the difference between a crow and a raven. This bird is huge and wild-looking, clearly built for midnights dreary rather than McDonald’s parking lots.
It dips forward and laps at Primrose’s palm with a thick tongue and this, I find, is a little much. “Okay, what the fuck?”
“We’ll leave Buttercup behind and continue on foot,” Primrose says evenly. “Walk close behind me, and do not stray to either side.” The raven launches back into the air, cutting a curving path through the smeary sky, and lands on a low branch a quarter mile ahead. Primrose follows it, stepping between the standing stones with her bloodied palm held tight to her chest. I follow them both, muttering about antibiotics and blood poisoning and tetanus, feeling the cold knock of the knife against my ribs, hoping to God all this nonsense is worth it.
* * *
BY NIGHTFALL, A mist has risen. I’m tired and hungry and my muscles are shuddering from three days without supplements or steroids. Primrose isn’t much better; the curse has woken her at midnight for each of the last three nights, the pull growing stronger each time. I’m not sure she slept at all last night, but merely curled beneath her cloak with her eyes screwed shut, fighting the silent call of her spell.
The damn bird leads us in circles and loops, twisting and doubling back so many times I come very close to stomping off on a path of my own making, screw magic—but the shadows fall strangely across the moor. I keep thinking I see dark shapes creeping beside us, furred and clawed, gone as soon as I turn to look.
I stay behind Primrose. We keep following the raven.
I don’t know if it’s the mist or something more, but the mountains arrive all at once: black teeth erupting before us, crooked and sharp. A rough road coils up from the moor, biting into the mountainside and ending in a structure so ruinously Gothic, so bleak and desperate, it can only belong to one person in this story.
“Should we approach by the main road?” Primrose whispers. “Or go around, perhaps sneak in and take her by surprise?”
At some point I suppose I should stop being surprised when the princess is more than a doe-eyed maiden, ready to faint prettily at the first sign of danger. I’m always annoyed when people are surprised that I have a personality beyond my disease, as if they expect me to be nothing but brave smiles and blood-spotted handkerchiefs.
I watch the raven spiral up the mountain. It soars through a narrow slit at the top of the tallest tower of the castle. “Oh, I think we can probably just knock on the front door, like civilized folk.” Even before I finish speaking the window pulses with a faint, greenish light. “She already knows we’re coming.”
5
THE PATH UP the mountain doesn’t take as long as it ought to. We’ve barely rounded the first turn in the road when we find ourselves standing at the foot of the castle. Up close it’s even more unsettling: the battlements jagged and uneven, the stones stained, the windows staring like a thousand lidless eyes. All its angles seem subtly wrong, off-putting in no way I can name. I want to laugh at it; I want to run from it. I mentally compose a text to Charm instead: it’s Magic Kingdom for goths. Gormenghast by Escher.
I swallow hard. My fist is raised to knock at the doors—which are exactly as tall and ornate and ghastly as you’re imagining—when they swing silently inward. There’s nothing but formless dark beyond them.
“Well.” I glance sideways at Primrose. She’s pale but unflinching, jaw tight. “Shall we?”
She nods once, her chin high, and offers me her arm. It’s only once I take it that I feel her trembling.
We’re barely a half step inside when a voice cracks from the walls, shrieking like bats from the eaves, everywhere at once. “Who dares enter here?”
I open my mouth to answer but Primrose beats me to it, stepping forward with her chest thrown out and her voice pitched loud, and for the first time it occurs to me that princesses grow up to be queens. “It is I, Princess Primrose of Perceforest, and the Lady Zinnia of Ohio.” She turns back to me and hisses low, “Draw out the blade. Ready yourself. I will distract her.”
It’s a good plan. It might even work.
Except I didn’t come here to kill a fairy, because I’m not a prince or a knight or a hero. I’m not Charm, who would charge a dozen dragons for me if only she knew where they lived. I’m just a dying girl, and the last rule for dying girls, the one we never say out loud, is try not to die.
I slide the knife from my hoodie and unwind the soft satin. I hold it aloft, showing it clearly to our unseen enemy, then toss it casually to the ground. It throws sparks as it slides across the flagstones.
“Lady Zinnia! What are you—”
I ignore Primrose. “Excuse me?” I call into the shadows. “Miss Maleficent?”
There is a long, frigid silence. Green light flares at the end of the hall, a sickly torch held in a hard-knuckled hand. The light falls across a slender wrist, a black hood, a dramatic sweep of robes. I’m distantly disappointed that she isn’t wearing a horned cowl.
“That is not my name.” This time the voice comes only from the black hood, a low growl instead of a shriek.
“My bad.” I raise both hands, empty of weapons. “I was hoping you had a second to chat.” I wait. “I will take your frozen silence for a yes. We come to beg a favor from you.” There’s an indrawn breath beside me, then Primrose’s voice repeating the word beg as if it’s foreign and rather filthy.
“You want the enchantment lifted, I suppose.” I don’t know if I’m imagining the bitter irony in the fairy’s voice.