“—followed by a century to sleep protected by a hedge of thorns so high no man could reach you. I gave you the hope that when you wake you will be forgotten, no longer a princess but merely a woman, and freer for it. The hope that the world might grow kinder while you sleep.”
Zellandine, who is neither selfish nor a coward, reaches her hand toward Primrose’s. “I’m sorry if it isn’t enough. It’s all I could give, and there’s no changing it now.”
Primrose stands before the fairy’s fingers can find hers, chair scraping across the floorboards, hands curled into fists. “I can’t—I need—” She reels for the door and staggers out into the velveteen night before I can do more than say her name.
The door swings stupidly behind her, swaying in the breeze. I sit watching it for a while, my tea freezing and my heart aching, before Zellandine observes, “The heaviest burdens are those you bear alone.”
I transfer my blank stare to her and she adds, a little less mystically and more acerbically, “Go talk to her, girl.” I do as I’m told.
6
SHE’S SITTING AMONG the pale-petaled wildflowers, her arms wrapped around her knees and her eyes fixed on the eastern horizon. Her face makes me think of those eerie Renaissance paintings of Death and the Maiden, youthful beauties dancing with alabaster skeletons.
“Hey,” I offer, feebly. She doesn’t answer.
I sit carefully beside her and run my fingertips over the white satin flowers. When I was a girl, I used to pull daisy petals one by one and play my own macabre version of he loves me/he loves me not. It went I live/I die, and I would keep playing until I ended on an I live.
“I heard you speak to me, that night. When I almost touched the spindle.” She sounds distant and dreamy, as if she’s talking in her sleep.
I twist at a flower stem. “I called you a bonehead.”
“You told me not to do it. And it was like a spark falling into my mind, catching me on fire. I asked for your help because it was the first time I thought anyone could help me, that I might truly have a choice. That my own will might matter.” She’s staring at the horizon, where the gray promise of dawn is gathering. “I’d almost begun to believe it.”
My lungs feel tight and I don’t know if it’s the amyloidosis or the heartbreak. “Yeah. Yeah, me too.” I’d half convinced myself that I’d found a loophole, a workaround, a way out of my bullshit story. I thought the two of us together might change the rules. But even in a world of magic and miracles, both of us remain damned. I clear my throat. “I’m sorry.”
Primrose shakes her head, hair rippling silver in the starlight. “Don’t be. These three days have been the best of my life.” I think of the long days of riding and the haunted nights among the hawthorn roots, of a raven’s tongue lapping at her blood, and try not to reflect too deeply on what this says about the princess’s quality of life.