“Look. Both of us should have died or been cursed or whatever last night, on our twenty-first birthdays. But something messed it up. Our lines got crossed.” I picture that listing ship again, or maybe a train leaping off its tracks and hurtling into the unknown. “It feels like we have a chance to make it come out different. To do something.” I haven’t wanted to “do something” since I was sixteen, packing my backpack and planning my escape.
The princess sighs a long, defeated sigh, but I can see a foolish flicker of hope in her eyes. “Like what?”
“Like…” The idea leaps from my skull fully formed, armored and Athenian and deeply stupid. I love it. “Like taking matters into our own hands.” I feel a slightly demented smile stretching my face. “Where’s this wicked fairy, exactly?”
4
THE THING ABOUT bad ideas is that they’re contagious. I watch mine infect the princess, her expression sliding from bafflement to horror to frozen fascination.
“Her lair lies through the Forbidden Moor,” she says slowly. “At the peak of Mount Vordred.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right. How long would it take to get there? By, uh, horse or whatever?”
“It took Prince Harold three days of swift riding.”
Her answer initiates a complex series of calculations involving the number of missed pills over the amount of preexisting protein buildup, magnified by physical exertion and divided by the number of days I have left. If I were a machine, all my warning lights would be blinking. I ignore them.
“We’ll need supplies and food and stuff. Do you have anything more … rugged to wear?”
Primrose is watching me as if I’m a grisly car accident or a public marriage proposal: gruesome but mesmerizing. “It won’t work, you know.”
I’m already rooting through her wardrobe, looking for something free of ruffles, lace, pleats, bows, satin, ribbons, or pearls and not finding it. I wish briefly but passionately that I’d been zapped into a different storyline, maybe one of those ’90s girl power fairy tale retellings with a rebellious princess who wears trousers and hates sewing. （I know they promoted a reductive vision of women’s agency that privileged traditionally male-coded forms of power, but let’s not pretend girls with swords don’t get shit done.）
Primrose tries again. “She is powerful and cruel, and terribly ancient. Some say she has lived seven mortal lives!” I try not to let my pulse leap or my hands shake, to remind myself that hope is for suckers. “She evaded my father’s men for one-and-twenty years. Even when Prince Harold—”
“Harold does not strike me as a Perceforest’s best and brightest.”
“But neither are we, surely!”
I spin to face her, arms full of satin ruffles. “So what’s your plan? Stay here and wait for the curse to catch you, like you did for the first twenty-one years of your life? Close your eyes and go to sleep and let the world go on without you?” My voice is an angry hiss, but I don’t know which of us I’m angry at.
Primrose’s face is a waxy green color, her lips pressed white. I step closer. “In my world there’s nothing I can do to save myself. No curse to break, no fairy to defeat. But it’s different here. You can do something other than stand around and wait.” I riffle through my mental box of inspirational quotes and come up with a Dylan Thomas line that I actually know from Interstellar. “Do not go gentle into that good night, princess. I beg of you.”
She must be susceptible to begging too, because she stares at me for another breathless second before inclining her head infinitesimally. “All right.”
I clap my palms together. “Swell. Now do you happen to have a magic sword or anything? An enchanted amulet? A shield imbued with special powers?”
I’m mostly joking, but Primrose wrings her hands, thumbs rubbing hard along slender wrists. “Well.” She kneels and reaches beneath the soft down of her mattress, emerging with something that gleams cruelly in the reddening dusk. “There’s this.”
It’s a long, narrow knife, sharp as glass and black as sin. It looks out of place among the feather pillows and ball gowns of Primrose’s world, as if it belongs to some other, darker story. “Where the hell did you get that?”
Primrose holds the knife flat on her palms. “A traveling magician sold it to me when I was sixteen. He swore to me that a single cut was enough to end a life.” She says it flatly, matter-of-factly, but her eyes have gone hollow and her face is waxy again and suddenly I don’t feel jokey at all. Suddenly I wonder why a princess would sleep with a poison blade beneath her bed, why she would purchase it in the first place.