“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 can not 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.