I clear my throat. “Two curses, actually. You’re familiar with Primrose’s situation, I think, but not mine. I was … similarly cursed, in a land far from here. I come to you now in the hope that you—in all your infinite wisdom and limitless power, who have unlocked the secrets of life eternal”—I am aware that I’m laying it on thick and don’t care, dignity is for people with more time than me—“might free us both from our misfortunes. I have no jewels or treasures to offer you, save one.” I practiced this speech for the past two nights while I kept watch over the sleeping Primrose. I lift my face to that green torch light and pull my features into an expression of deepest sacrifice. “My firstborn child.”
Primrose gasps again. “Zinnia, you cannot! I forbid it!”
“Chill,” I tell her through slightly gritted teeth. I don’t feel like explaining to her that (a) multiple doctors have informed me that my ovaries are toast and (b) I do not want and have never wanted kids, having spent my life trying to save my parents from the trolley problem of my death. Hard pass.
The hooded figure at the end of the hall takes a step, another, and then somehow she’s standing directly before us, a raven perched on her shoulder and her eyes gleaming like poison through the shadows. Her gaze falls first on Primrose. “Even if I could break the spell I laid on you one-and-twenty years ago, I would not.” The princess stares back, her face gone hard and cold, stark-shadowed in the torchlight.
I’m not sure I would turn my back to anyone who looked at me like that, but the fairy doesn’t seem to give it much thought. “And you…” She takes a step toward me and snatches my hand, snake-fast. I recoil, but she holds it firm, flipping it palm up to inspect the pattern of lines and veins. She mutters as she looks, tracing a yellowed nail along one or two of the routes as if my palm is a poorly labeled map.
“Mm.” She releases my hand more slowly, almost gently. Her voice, when she speaks, is even rougher. “Keep your unborn child.”
“But—”
“I can’t save you, girl.” Her voice is a slap, harsh and hard, but there’s a note of mourning behind it.
“Oh.” I rub my palm hard with my thumb, blink against the nothing-at-all stinging my eyes. “Okay.” I was prepared for this, really I was. Sick kids learn to calibrate their expectations early, to negotiate with their shitty luck again and again. “Okay. How about a trade? I’m basically a princess back in Ohio. Let me take Primrose’s place. I’ll prick my finger and fall into your enchanted sleep, and she goes free.” Maybe I’ll zap back into my own world stuck in some magical cryogenic stasis; maybe a handsome prince will wake me and I’ll be cured. Either way, sleeping has to be better than straight-up dying. Strangers tend to imagine that sick people are looking for ways to die with dignity, but mostly we’re looking for ways to live.
The fairy’s eyes flash beneath her hood. “You think to save yourself.”
“And her.” I nod at Primrose. “I’m not a monster.”
The hood shakes back and forth. “The enchantment cannot be shared or stolen or tricked. You cannot take her place.” She gestures at Primrose with her torch. “She has evaded my terms, but only briefly. There is no escaping fate.”
There’s a sudden movement behind the fairy. I see rose lips snarling, white knuckles around a black blade. The torch clangs to the castle floor and the fairy’s head is hauled back, a knife hovering a hairsbreadth above her throat. “Oh, no, fairy?” Primrose pants into her ear. The princess’s eyes are green in the torchlight, burning with twenty-one years of bitter rage.
I can see the fairy’s face clearly for the first time. I don’t know what I was expecting—glamorous eyeliner and devastating cheekbones, perhaps, or a gnarled crone with snaggled teeth—but she’s just a woman. Silvery blond, plainish and oldish and weary.
“Kill me if you like, child. It won’t save you.” That mournful sound has returned to her voice and her eyes are welling with some deep, grim sympathy. Shouldn’t she be cackling and cursing? Shouldn’t the pair of us be turned into toads or ravens? I feel the story stumbling again, another wrong note in a song I know well.
“I’m sorry.” The fairy whispers it, and I think dizzily that she means it.
Primrose makes a strangled, raging, weeping sound in her throat. The knifepoint trembles. “Sorry? You who ruined my life and stole my future? Who cursed me?”
“I did not curse you, girl.” The fairy sighs the words, long and tired, and Primrose can’t seem to speak through her fury.
The fairy reaches two fingers up to the blade at her throat and suddenly it’s not a blade at all but merely a feather, glossy and black. It falls from Primrose’s fingers. Her eyes follow it—the feather that was once her only weapon, her way out, secret and cruel—as it slips silently, harmlessly, to the floor.
The fairy turns to face the princess. She touches the perfect arch of her cheekbone, very gently. “I blessed you.”
* * *
PRIMROSE HAS AN expression on her face that I recognize vaguely from middle school plays, when one kid said the wrong line and the other was left in baffled, sweaty limbo.
“What?” Primrose asks, with admirable calm.
“It was meant to be a blessing. It still is, by my reckoning.”
A flicker of that bitter fury returns to the princess’s face. “How is a century of sleep a blessing, exactly?”
“There are worse things than sleep,” the fairy answers softly, and she may be the villain, but she’s not wrong. “Stay a moment, and I will explain. Would you like some tea?”
The middle-school-play expression returns to Primrose’s face, and probably mine. Both of us glance helplessly around at the hall, full of twisted black columns and bare stone. No place has ever looked less likely to provide a cup of tea.
“Oh!” The fairy taps her forehead. “Apologies. Let me just—” She snaps her fingers twice. The walls quiver around us like a reflection in rippling water, and then—
We aren’t in a castle anymore.
The three of us are standing in a smallish room with hardwood floors and deep-piled rugs. Everything is pleasantly domestic, bordering on cozy: there’s a scarred kitchen table set with three teacups; neatly banked coals in a stone fireplace; shelves of clay jars and blue glass bottles bearing tidy cursive labels. The ghoulish green torchlight has been replaced by the honeyed glow of beeswax candles.
The fairy herself is no longer draped in black robes, but wearing a grease-spotted apron over a plain cotton skirt. A small, bright-eyed blackbird perches on her shoulder where the raven once stood.
For a second I think Primrose might fall into an actual swoon. I position myself to catch her, wondering distantly who’s going to catch me because I’m one surprise away from a swoon myself. The wrong note I heard before has become an entirely wrong tune, dancing us toward God knows where.
“Forgive my little illusion,” says the fairy. “I find a sufficiently menacing first impression discourages most visitors.”
Primrose replies with a faint oh. I drift a little dazedly over to the nearest window. We’re still on a mountainside, but it appears to be a much gentler mountain than the craggy peak that confronted us through the mist. I see the pale heads of wildflowers swaying in the moonlight, hear the green shushing of grass stalks in the breeze. The moor below looks more like a meadow now, all gentle curves and grassy knolls.