Her finger is an inch from the spindle’s end when I hear a sound I’ve never heard in real life, but which I recognize from an adolescence spent rewatching Lord of the Rings: a sword being drawn from a scabbard. Then comes the ringing of boots on stairs, the drag of cloaks on stone, and armored men pour into the tower room.
A broad hand closes around Primrose’s arm and hauls her backward. A silver blade crashes down on the spinning wheel and I flinch from flying splinters. I lower my arms to see a square-jawed man standing triumphantly above the shattered wreckage of the thing that was my only way home.
Prince Harold is panting lightly, his fingers still tight around Primrose’s arm. He casts a heroic glance in her direction, a curl of hair falling artfully across his forehead. “You are safe, princess, do not fear.”
Primrose doesn’t look frightened. She looks baffled and bleary, distantly annoyed. Harold doesn’t seem to notice. He raises his sword once more and points it directly at my chest. “Guards! Seize her!”
I have time for a single airless “what the shit” before my arms are wrenched behind me and my wrists are wrapped in cold iron. I writhe against the chains, but I can feel the weakness of my limbs, the stony strength of the men holding me.
Harold shakes his head at me, flicking that perfect curl from his forehead. “Did you think you could evade me twice, fairy?” He gestures imperiously to the tower steps. “To the dungeons.”
7
THE DUNGEON ISN’T so much a place as a collection of generic dungeon-ish elements: damp stone walls and iron bars; dangling chains stained with God knows what; brittle bones piled in the corners, cracked and yellow; a decayed sweetness in the air, like a root cellar with something rotting in it.
In all my twenty-one years of bad luck, I don’t think I’ve ever been this thoroughly, irredeemably fucked. I’m locked in a windowless cell in the wrong reality, wondering how long I can stay on my feet before I’m forced to sit on the stained stone floor. I’m hungry and thirsty and fatally ill. I have no way home. My only friend in this entire backwards-ass pre-Enlightenment world is about to be married off to a sentient cleft chin. Right now, the King is probably debating whether to drown me or burn me or make me dance in hot iron shoes.
I wanted to wrench my story off its tracks, to strike out toward some better ending, but all I’ve done is change my lines. I made myself the witch, and witches have even worse endings than princesses.
My therapist—who is corny and sincere, but usually right—says when things get overwhelming it can help to make a list of your assets. It’s a short list: a small pile of vertebrae in the corner; a tin pail of unsanitary drinking water; several protein-clogged organs; a phone with approximately 12% of its battery life remaining.