“So. What now?”
She lifts her shoulder in a gesture that might be called a shrug in a less graceful person. “Return to my father’s castle and bid my parents farewell. Then I suppose I prick my finger on the spindle’s end, the way I was always going to. Perhaps you might do the same, and return home.” She doesn’t sound sad or angry; she sounds like a woman resigned to her fate. This time I’m sure the tightness in my chest is coming from my heart.
Primrose stands and offers me her hand. She tries to make herself smile and doesn’t quite manage it. “Maybe we’ll both wake up in a better world.”
The fairy packs us seedy bread and salted meat and twelve shining apples before we leave. She takes our hands in hers and rubs her thumb across the crisscrossed lines of our palms. “Come visit me, after,” she tells us, which displays what my grandmother would call a lot of damn gall, given that she knows we’re riding toward certain death/a century-long sleep.
We cross the gentle green meadow that was once the Forbidden Moor, following a blackbird that was once a raven. I look back just before we pass through the standing stones. Instead of that ruinous castle there’s only a stone hut leaning into the mountainside, sunbaked and sweet and just a little lonely. As we step between the stones the hut vanishes, hidden by greasy coils of mist and miles of gloomy moor once more. The blackbird becomes a raven again, all curved talons and ragged feathers. He watches us leave with a bright black eye.
THE FIRST NIGHT we take shelter on the leeward side of a low bluff and I make a very passable fire (shoutout to Mom for making me stay in Girl Scouts through third grade). I feel like I’m getting good at this whole medieval camping thing, but Primrose can’t seem to sleep. She rustles and thrashes beneath her cloak for hours before sighing and sitting up. She warms her hands by the dying coals, the fairy’s bandage glowing orange across her palm. “You ought to sleep, Lady Zinnia. I can’t.”
Her eyes are puffy and red with exhaustion. “I won’t let you wander off,” I tell her. “Just so you know.”
She doesn’t look at me when she answers. “The curse is getting stronger. I think it’s been denied long enough, and now it wants me very badly, and I must fight it all the time. I don’t know if you’d be able to stop me.” I can’t tell if her eyes are green or blue in the dimness. Her voice gets smaller. “I wanted to see my mother once more, before the end.”
We don’t stop much after that. Primrose sleeps only in stolen snatches and wakes with haunted eyes. Her face goes hollow and grayish, her skin stretched like wet paper over the hard bones of her cheeks. By the third day I’m not so much clinging to her as I am holding her desperately upright.