“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 The ghoulish green torchlight has been replaced by the honeyed glow of beeswax candles.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.
“So all that was just … an aesthetic?” Honestly, I admire her commitment. “The castle. The raven. The blood sacrifice—”
The fairy flinches at the word blood. “Oh!” She bustles to a shelf and returns to the table with an armful of clanking bottles and a length of plain cloth. “Sit, please.”
Primrose sits, looking like an actor still waiting in vain for someone to give her a line. The fairy points to her hand, curled and crusted with dried blood, and Primrose blinks a little dreamily before laying it on the table between them. The fairy mutters and dabs at the cut—a raw line that strikes like red lightning across her palm—plasters it with honey, and wraps it in clean white cotton. She pats it twice when she’s finished.
Primrose stares at her own hand on the table as if it’s a sea creature or an alien, wildly out of place. “I don’t understand.” Her musical voice is ragged around the edges.
“I know. But I don’t know where to begin.” The fairy stares at the princess with eyes that are gentle and wry and very, very blue. I squint at her hair. Was it true gold once, before it was silver?
I take the third seat at the table and lean across it, hands clasped. “How about you start with your name?” I have a wild suspicion that I already know it.
The fairy chews at her lower lip—palest pink, like the fragile teacup roses Mom grows along the drive—before whispering, “Zellandine.”
Oh, hell. I hear a small, pained sound leave my mouth. I glance at Primrose and know from the polite puzzlement of her face that she doesn’t recognize the name. “She’s one of us,” I explain. But I’m lying; her story is far worse than ours.
“You know my tale, then?”
I was hoping until that moment that I was wrong, that Zellandine’s story went differently in this world. But I can tell from the look in her eyes—a scarred-over grief, healed but still haunted—that it didn’t.
I want to tell her I’m sorry, to take her hand and congratulate her for surviving. Instead I give her a stiff nod. For someone who’s spent her entire life being comforted, I’m pretty shit at it.
“Were you cursed as well, then?” Primrose asks, reaching gamely for her familiar lines.
Zellandine stands abruptly. She pokes at the coals in the hearth and swings an iron pot low above them, her back turned to us. “Be fore there were curses—before there were fairies or roses or even spindles—there was just a sleeping girl.”