“So all that was just … an aesthetic?” Honestly, I admire her commitment. “The castle. The raven. The blood sacrifice—”

The fairy flinches at the word blood. “Oh!” She bustles to a shelf and returns to the table with an armful of clanking bottles and a length of plain cloth. “Sit, please.”

Primrose sits, looking like an actor still waiting in vain for someone to give her a line. The fairy points to her hand, curled and crusted with dried blood, and Primrose blinks a little dreamily before laying it on the table between them. The fairy mutters and dabs at the cut—a raw line that strikes like red lightning across her palm—plasters it with honey, and wraps it in clean white cotton. She pats it twice when she’s finished.

Primrose stares at her own hand on the table as if it’s a sea creature or an alien, wildly out of place. “I don’t understand.” Her musical voice is ragged around the edges.

“I know. But I don’t know where to begin.” The fairy stares at the princess with eyes that are gentle and wry and very, very blue. I squint at her hair. Was it true gold once, before it was silver?

I take the third seat at the table and lean across it, hands clasped. “How about you start with your name?” I have a wild suspicion that I already know it.

The fairy chews at her lower lip—palest pink, like the fragile teacup roses Mom grows along the drive—before whispering, “Zellandine.”

Oh, hell. I hear a small, pained sound leave my mouth. I glance at Primrose and know from the polite puzzlement of her face that she doesn’t recognize the name. “She’s one of us,” I explain. But I’m lying; her story is far worse than ours.

“You know my tale, then?”

I was hoping until that moment that I was wrong, that Zellandine’s story went differently in this world. But I can tell from the look in her eyes—a scarred-over grief, healed but still haunted—that it didn’t.

I want to tell her I’m sorry, to take her hand and congratulate her for surviving. Instead I give her a stiff nod. For someone who’s spent her entire life being comforted, I’m pretty shit at it.

“Were you cursed as well, then?” Primrose asks, reaching gamely for her familiar lines.

Zellandine stands abruptly. She pokes at the coals in the hearth and swings an iron pot low above them, her back turned to us. “Before there were curses—before there were fairies or roses or even spindles—there was just a sleeping girl.”

Even with my Sleeping Beauty obsession, I didn’t read Zellandine’s version until the fifth week of FOLK 344—Dr. Bastille’s Fairy Tales and Identity course. I guess it’s such an ugly story that we prefer to leave it untold, moldering in the unswept corners of our past like something gone to rot in the back of the pantry.