“A witch, they called me, or a wicked fairy. I didn’t care.” Zellandine turns the rich blue of her gaze to Primrose for the first time in a long while. “I still don’t, if it saves even a single girl from the future she was given.”
Primrose can’t seem to look away, to move. “What fate did you see for me?” Her voice is the ghost of a whisper.
The blackbird on the fairy’s shoulder tilts its head to consider Primrose with one ink-drop eye. Zellandine strokes a finger down its breast. “Surely you can guess, princess.”
Primrose stares at her with brittle defiance.
“Without my curse, you would be wed by now,” says the fairy, ever so gently. “How well would your marriage bed suit you, do you think?”
The princess is still silent, but I watch the defiance crack and crumble around her shoulders. It leaves her face pale and exposed, and I understand from the anguished twist of her lips that it’s not only Prince Harold that she objects to, but princes in general, along with knights and kings and probably even handsome farm boys.
Zellandine continues in the same gentle, devastating voice. “I saw a marriage you did not want to a husband you could not love, who would not care whether you loved him or not. I saw a slow suffocation in fine sheets, and a woman so desperate to escape her story she might end it herself.”
Primrose lifts her teacup and sets it quickly back down, her hands trembling so hard that tea sloshes over the rim. I want to pat her shoulder or touch her arm, but I don’t. God, I wish Charm were here; she’d have the princess weeping therapeutically into her shoulder within seconds.
“You could have—” Primrose pauses and I watch her throat bob, like she’s swallowing something barbed. “You could have done something else. Warned me or protected me, stolen me away—”
“I’ve tried that. I’ve built towers for girls and kept them locked away. I’ve chased them into the deep woods and left seven good men to guard them. I’ve turned their husbands into beasts and bears, set their suitors impossible tasks. I’ve done it all, and sometimes it has worked. But it’s difficult to disappear a princess. There tend to be wars and hunts and stories that end with witches dancing in hot iron shoes. So I did what I could. I gave you a blessing disguised as a curse, an enchantment that would prevent your engagement and marriage. I gave you one-and-twenty years to walk the earth on your own terms, unpursued by man—”
“Oh, hardly that.” Primrose’s voice is beyond bitter, almost savage. It occurs to me that I got it wrong, and that the knife beneath her pillow might not have been intended for her own flesh at all. I thought she was an Aurora, empty and flat as cardboard, but she was just a girl doing her best to survive in a cruel world, like the rest of us.