The door swings stupidly behind her, swaying in the breeze. I sit watching it for a while, my tea freezing and my heart aching, before Zellandine observes, “The heaviest burdens are those you bear alone.”
I transfer my blank stare to her and she adds, a little less mystically and more acerbically, “Go talk to her, girl.” I do as I’m told.
6
SHE’S SITTING AMONG the pale-petaled wildflowers, her arms wrapped around her knees and her eyes fixed on the eastern horizon. Her face makes me think of those eerie Renaissance paintings of Death and the Maiden, youthful beauties dancing with alabaster skeletons.
“Hey,” I offer, feebly. She doesn’t answer.
I sit carefully beside her and run my fingertips over the white satin flowers. When I was a girl, I used to pull daisy petals one by one and play my own macabre version of he loves me/he loves me not. It went I live/I die, and I would keep playing until I ended on an I live.
“I heard you speak to me, that night. When I almost touched the spindle.” She sounds distant and dreamy, as if she’s talking in her sleep.
I twist at a flower stem. “I called you a bonehead.”
“You told me not to do it. And it was like a spark falling into my mind, catching me on fire. I asked for your help because it was the first time I thought anyone could help me, that I might truly have a choice. That my own will might matter.” She’s staring at the horizon, where the gray promise of dawn is gathering. “I’d almost begun to believe it.”
My lungs feel tight and I don’t know if it’s the amyloidosis or the heartbreak. “Yeah. Yeah, me too.” I’d half convinced myself that I’d found a loophole, a workaround, a way out of my bullshit story. I thought the two of us together might change the rules. But even in a world of magic and miracles, both of us remain damned. I clear my throat. “I’m sorry.”
Primrose shakes her head, hair rippling silver in the starlight. “Don’t be. These three days have been the best of my life.” I think of the long days of riding and the haunted nights among the hawthorn roots, of a raven’s tongue lapping at her blood, and try not to reflect too deeply on what this says about the princess’s quality of life.
“So. What now?”
She lifts her shoulder in a gesture that might be called a shrug in a less graceful person. “Return to my father’s castle and bid my parents farewell. Then I suppose I prick my finger on the spindle’s end, the way I was always going to. Perhaps you might do the same, and return home.” She doesn’t sound sad or angry; she sounds like a woman resigned to her fate. This time I’m sure the tightness in my chest is coming from my heart.
Primrose stands and offers me her hand. She tries to make herself smile and doesn’t quite manage it. “Maybe we’ll both wake up in a better world.”
The fairy packs us seedy bread and salted meat and twelve shining apples before we leave. She takes our hands in hers and rubs her thumb across the crisscrossed lines of our palms. “Come visit me, after,” she tells us, which displays what my grandmother would call a lot of damn gall, given that she knows we’re riding toward certain death/a century-long sleep.
We cross the gentle green meadow that was once the Forbidden Moor, following a blackbird that was once a raven. I look back just before we pass through the standing stones. Instead of that ruinous castle there’s only a stone hut leaning into the mountainside, sunbaked and sweet and just a little lonely. As we step between the stones the hut vanishes, hidden by greasy coils of mist and miles of gloomy moor once more. The blackbird becomes a raven again, all curved talons and ragged feathers. He watches us leave with a bright black eye.
* * *
THE FIRST NIGHT we take shelter on the leeward side of a low bluff and I make a very passable fire （shoutout to Mom for making me stay in Girl Scouts through third grade）。 I feel like I’m getting good at this whole medieval camping thing, but Primrose can’t seem to sleep. She rustles and thrashes beneath her cloak for hours before sighing and sitting up. She warms her hands by the dying coals, the fairy’s bandage glowing orange across her palm. “You ought to sleep, Lady Zinnia. I can’t.”
Her eyes are puffy and red with exhaustion. “I won’t let you wander off,” I tell her. “Just so you know.”
She doesn’t look at me when she answers. “The curse is getting stronger. I think it’s been denied long enough, and now it wants me very badly, and I must fight it all the time. I don’t know if you’d be able to stop me.” I can’t tell if her eyes are green or blue in the dimness. Her voice gets smaller. “I wanted to see my mother once more, before the end.”