I make myself keep listening to Zellandine, unflinching. I always hate it when people flinch from me, as if my wounds are weapons.

“I did not tend the prince’s hearth after that. I hoped—if I were quiet and careful enough—I might be safe. That it might be over.” Zellandine’s fingers spread against the softness of her own stomach. “Soon it became clear that it wasn’t.”

In that oldest story the still-sleeping princess gives birth nine months after the prince visits her in the tower. Her hungry child suckles at her fingertips and removes the splinter of flax, and only then does she wake from her poisoned sleep.

I felt sick the first time I read it, betrayed by a story that I loved, that belonged to me. I slouched into class the next day, arms crossed and hoodie pulled up, scowling while Dr. Bastille lectured about women’s bodies and women’s choices in premodern Europe, about history translated into mythology and passivity into power. “You are accustomed to thinking of fairy tales as make-believe.” Dr. Bastille looked straight at me as she said it, her face somehow both searing and compassionate. “But they have only ever been mirrors.”

I reread the story when I got home, sitting cross-legged on my rose-patterned sheets, and felt a terrible, grown-up sort of melancholy descending over me. I used to see Sleeping Beauty as my wildest, most aspirational fantasy—a dying girl who didn’t die, a tragedy turned into a romance. But suddenly I saw her as my mere reflection: a girl with a shitty story. A girl whose choices were stolen from her.

Zellandine has fallen silent, staring at the table with her face folded tight. I take a sip of my flowery tea. “What happened to the baby?”

She looks up at me and her mouth twists. “There was no baby. I followed whispers and rumors and found a wisewoman in the mountains who knew the spell I needed. I chose a different story for myself, a better one.” The memory of that choice softens her face, settling like sunlight across her features. “I stayed with the wisewoman, after. She taught me everything she knew, and I taught myself more. I gathered power around myself until I could turn blades into feathers and huts into castles, could read the past in tea leaves and the future in the stars.”

It shouldn’t be possible to look intimidating sipping tea in a stained apron, but Zellandine’s eyes are rich and knowing and her smile is full of secrets. The smile dims a little when she continues. “Some of the things I read there … I saw my own story played out over and over. A thousand different girls with a thousand terrible fates. I began to interfere, where and when I could.” I feel a strange flick of shame as she says it; it seems that some dying girls follow different rules and dedicate themselves to saving others, rather than themselves.