The damn bird leads us in circles and loops, twisting and doubling back so many times I come very close to stomping off on a path of my own making, screw magic—but the shadows fall strangely across the moor. I keep thinking I see dark shapes creeping beside us, furred and clawed, gone as soon as I turn to look.

I stay behind Primrose. We keep following the raven.

I don’t know if it’s the mist or something more, but the mountains arrive all at once: black teeth erupting before us, crooked and sharp. A rough road coils up from the moor, biting into the mountainside and ending in a structure so ruinously Gothic, so bleak and desperate, it can only belong to one person in this story.

“Should we approach by the main road?” Primrose whispers. “Or go around, perhaps sneak in and take her by surprise?”

At some point I suppose I should stop being surprised when the princess is more than a doe-eyed maiden, ready to faint prettily at the first sign of danger. I’m always annoyed when people are surprised that I have a personality beyond my disease, as if they expect me to be nothing but brave smiles and blood-spotted handkerchiefs.

I watch the raven spiral up the mountain. It soars through a narrow slit at the top of the tallest tower of the castle. “Oh, I think we can probably just knock on the front door, like civilized folk.” Even before I finish speaking the window pulses with a faint, greenish light. “She already knows we’re coming.”

5

THE PATH UP the mountain doesn’t take as long as it ought to. We’ve barely rounded the first turn in the road when we find ourselves standing at the foot of the castle. Up close it’s even more unsettling: the battlements jagged and uneven, the stones stained, the windows staring like a thousand lidless eyes. All its angles seem subtly wrong, off-putting in no way I can name. I want to laugh at it; I want to run from it. I mentally compose a text to Charm instead: it’s Magic Kingdom for goths. Gormenghast by Escher.

I swallow hard. My fist is raised to knock at the doors—which are exactly as tall and ornate and ghastly as you’re imagining—when they swing silently inward. There’s nothing but formless dark beyond them.

“Well.” I glance sideways at Primrose. She’s pale but unflinching, jaw tight. “Shall we?”

She nods once, her chin high, and offers me her arm. It’s only once I take it that I feel her trembling.

We’re barely a half step inside when a voice cracks from the walls, shrieking like bats from the eaves, everywhere at once. “Who dares enter here?”

I open my mouth to answer but Primrose beats me to it, stepping forward with her chest thrown out and her voice pitched loud, and for the first time it occurs to me that princesses grow up to be queens. “It is I, Princess Primrose of Perceforest, and the Lady Zinnia of Ohio.” She turns back to me and hisses low, “Draw out the blade. Ready yourself. I will distract her.”