Hours pass. The King never arrives.
But someone else comes in his place. She descends the steps slowly, velvet skirts dragging across stained stone, rings shining hard and bright on her fingers.
The Queen stands on the other side of the bars, entirely alone, watching me down her too-long nose. There’s a steely chill in her eyes that makes it clear that my long-lashed, damsel-in-distress persona will get me exactly nowhere. I should have known Primrose’s spine didn’t come from her father.
I open with a grave “Your Majesty” instead. The Queen doesn’t so much as blink. I wet my cracked lips. “I would like to make a final request.”
“And why should I grant you any requests?” Her tone is so perfectly calm that I see giant flashing warning lights ahead. It’s the voice Mom uses on doctors who talk down to me or school administrators who give her shit about all my absences.
“Because,” I begin carefully, but the Queen cuts me off in the same flat voice.
“Why should I grant anything at all to the creature who cursed my daughter?”
“Because I’m someone’s daughter too, whatever else you think I am.” God, what if this doesn’t work? What if I vanish from my parents’ world and leave them with a terrible absence in place of an ending? Running away had seemed so romantic when I was a kid, but I’d planned to leave a note, at least. “And my mother wouldn’t want me to spend my last night surrounded by filth and darkness.”
Something flashes behind the Queen’s eyes, red and wounded, before she banishes it. “It is our choices which determine our fates. Each of us gets what we deserve.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“How dare you—”
“I’m sorry. I meant: bullshit, Your Majesty. Did your daughter choose to be cursed? Did she choose to marry that dumbass prince?”
The Queen seethes at me, that red wound glistening behind her eyes. “There are certain duties—certain responsibilities that come with her rank and birth—”
Watching her choke with rage, a sudden suspicion occurs to me. I lean closer to the bars. “Did you choose to marry the King? Or would you have chosen differently for yourself, if you could? If this world permitted you to?”
The Queen is silent, her face wracked with rage or despair or maybe both. I can’t tell whether she’s considering helping me or setting me on fire herself. But why did she come down here without handmaidens or ladies or even guards? Why did she answer my call at all? Perhaps she, too, is hoping for a last-second miracle.
“Listen.” I whisper it, one conspirator to another. “Give me what I need, and I might be able to help her. I might be able to give your daughter the first real choice she’s had in her life.”
The Queen stares at me for a very long time. In her face I see the cold weight of the choices she didn’t have and the chances she didn’t take, the weary years waiting for fate to swallow her daughter the same way it swallowed her. I see her choosing now whether to make her love into a cage or a key.
She smooths her palms down the rich velvet of her gown and asks, quite matter-of-factly, “What do you require?”
* * *
THE ROSES ARRIVE by the bucket and barrelful, carried by bewildered guards and skeptical gardeners. They must have stripped every climbing vine and rosebush for miles, tying the flowers into hasty bundles and hauling them down to the dungeons to fulfill the fairy’s final request. They must think I’ve gone mad; they might be right.
By the time the last footsteps echo back up the stairs, my cell looks like a poorly tended greenhouse: roses burst from every corner, lining the walls and pressing through the bars. Fallen petals carpet the floor. The air smells green and sweet and bright, like summer. Like home.
I lie on the hard stone, the dampness leaching through my jeans, the petals clinging to the bare backs of my arms. I check my phone to see if Charm wrote back, if she made it to the tower, if the roses are still there—but it makes a final, weary bleat and the screen goes dark.
After that there’s nothing to do but fall asleep. I tell myself a fairy tale, the way I did when I was little, imagining a great unseen pen retracing the same letters over and over, the ink bleeding through to the next page.
I begin at the end: Once upon a time there was a princess who slept surrounded by roses.
8
I DON’T KNOW when I start dreaming, or whether it’s a dream at all. What do you call the vast nothing between the pages of the universe? The whisper-thin nowhere-at-all that waits in the place where one story ends and another begins?