There’s a final swell of applause as Primrose and Harold step before the thrones and clasp hands. Primrose’s hand looks limp and boneless in his, like a small, skinned animal.
I lurk at the back of the crowd for a while after that, smiling and nodding and collecting odd looks, before a voice hisses, “What do you think you are doing?”
I spin to face Primrose and sweep her my most absurd curtsy. “Why, Your Majesty, may I not celebrate your engagement?” Oh God, now I’m doing the fake British accent thing.
She barely seems to hear me, her face still gritted in that plastic smile, her pupils wide and hunted. “Your hair, your shoes … you look deranged. If anyone sees you—my father’s court does not take kindly to the uncanny!”
Her hand clamps around my bicep and steers me into a side hall. “Return to my rooms and wait for me.” I cross my arms and give her my best make me glare. “Please,” she adds, looking at me with those enormous eyes of hers, “I beg of you.”
I’m at least three-quarters straight, but her lashes are very long and very golden and I’m not made of stone. I nod. She closes her eyes as if summoning some inner strength before swishing back into the throne room with her smile shining like a shield.
I get lost two or three times on the way back up, startling a pair of amorous knights in a broom closet and briefly alarming a cook. By the time I climb all nine hundred stairs I can hear my pulse a little too loudly in my own ears, feel my lungs pressing too hard against my ribs. I think of my morning handful of pills back in Ohio and the last round of X-rays that showed the chambers of my heart shrinking, my lungs congested. I hadn’t showed them to Charm.
Primrose’s room is warm and sunshiny and quiet. I shrug out of the burgundy velvet gown and curl in her window in my socks and hoodie, staring out at the countryside like a girl in a Mucha ad, thinking about curses and fairies and stories gone sideways. Thinking that I should probably go find that magic spindle and prick my finger and peace out of this entire medieval hallucination.
Instead, I wait. I watch the slow creep of shadows and the lazy dance of dust motes in the air. The sun is squatting fat and red on the horizon by the time Primrose returns.
She’s still stunning, but I must be getting used to it, because I can see past the shine to the weary set of her mouth, the grim line of her spine. She sets a silver platter of heaped food on the seat beside me and collapses back onto her bed, vanishing behind the canopy with a dramatic sigh.
I take three enormous bites of something that I recognize from the Great British Bake-Off as a hand-raised pie. “So.” I swallow. “Harold seems nice.”
“Yes.” Her voice is muffled, as if she’s facedown in a pillow.
“Good-looking, if you’re into cleft chins.”
“Quite.”
“And yet I can’t help but detect a tad of reluctance on your part.”
There’s a short sigh from behind the canopy. “He’s—it’s—fine. I’m fine.” It’s a lie but I let it stand because she did the same for me, and sometimes lies are lifeboats.
The sheets rustle as Primrose rolls over. “Anyway, it hardly matters. None of them understand that the curse is still … waiting. Calling to me. Eventually I’ll have to sleep, and I fear I will wake again only as my finger pricks the spindle’s end.”
I struggle not to roll my eyes at this excessive drama. “Okay, but like, just let me zap myself back to Ohio and then you can set it on fire or whatever. Boom, curse dodged.”
Primrose sits up slowly, brushing aside the curtains and meeting my eyes. “I searched for it, after supper,” she says softly. “I could not find the spinning wheel, nor the room, nor indeed the tower. It has vanished.”
I think: oh, shit. I say, “Oh, shit.” The princess doesn’t flinch, so either they don’t have swears in Fake-ass Medieval Fairy Land or Primrose isn’t as proper as she seems. “Well, at least there’s Harold. If you fall into an enchanted sleep, nine out of ten doctors recommend true love’s kiss—”
“Harold is not my true love. I assure you.” Her lips are thin and pale, twisted with revulsion. “I don’t think—I don’t know that there’s any escaping it.”
“No. There is, there has to be.” I’m standing for some reason, my fingers curled into useless fists. I remind myself that this isn’t my problem or business or story. That I should be sitting at home with my parents for whatever time I have left, like I promised I would, rather than gallivanting through the multiverse without my meds.