That feeling had been trickling away all summer as I folded myself back into the teenage-shaped hole I left behind at my parents, but what would I have done without that brief escape? What if I’d been trapped with no future and no friends, like Primrose? Perhaps I would have turned toward a darker, uglier kind of escape.

I take the knife from Primrose very, very carefully. “How … helpful. I’ll carry this, okay?” I wrap it in the least expensive-looking skirt I can find. “So. Which way to the stables?”

“What—you mean now? Tonight?”

Apparently Primrose never learned dying girl rule #1: move fast. “Yes, dummy. How long do you think you can go without sleep?”

IN THE FOLLOWING hour, several things become clear to me.

First, that Primrose isn’t quite as helpless and damsel-in-distress-ish as I thought. Rather than sneaking through the castle and making off with a pair of horses by moonlight, she simply informs the stable hands that she and her ladies are going for a dawn ride through the countryside and would like two horses saddled and waiting with a picnic packed for six, please and thank you. “They won’t miss us for hours, this way,” she says calmly.

Second, that I do not technically “know” how to ride a “horse,” to quote an unnecessarily shocked princess. “But how do you travel in your land? Surely you do not walk?” I consider explaining about internal combustion engines and state highways and asking if she’d like to try driving a stick shift with a sketchy second gear. I shrug instead.

Third, that one cannot learn to ride a horse in five minutes, at least not well enough to be trusted on a midnight journey to the Forbidden Moor.

I wind up perched behind the princess on a pile of folded blankets, clinging desperately to her traveling cloak and thinking that Charm would give a year of her life to be cozied up behind Primrose as she galloped into the night on a daring half-cocked rescue mission.

Even I can admit it’s pretty cool. The air is clean and sharp and the stars reel above us like ciphers or hieroglyphs, stories written in a language I don’t know. The trees are dark Arthur Rackham-ish tangles on either side of the road, reaching for us with wicked fingers while the night birds sing strange songs. My lungs ache and my legs are numb and I know Dad would have a stroke if he could see me, but he can’t, and for tonight at least my life is my own, to waste or squander or give to someone else, no matter how little of it might be left.

We stop twice that night. The first time in a grove of tall pines, silver-blue in the moonlight, where the horse’s hooves are silenced by soft needles. I don’t so much dismount as fall sideways, barely managing to keep my phone uncrushed in my back pocket. The princess makes a graceful, sweeping gesture that somehow ends with her standing beside her horse, cloak pooled elegantly around her slippered feet. Her shoulders are a bowed line.