“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.