“And why should I grant you any requests?” Her tone is so perfectly calm that I see giant flashing warning lights ahead. It’s the voice Mom uses on doctors who talk down to me or school administrators who give her shit about all my absences.
“Because,” I begin carefully, but the Queen cuts me off in the same flat voice.
“Why should I grant anything at all to the creature who cursed my daughter?”
“Because I’m someone’s daughter too, whatever else you think I am.” God, what if this doesn’t work? What if I vanish from my parents’ world and leave them with a terrible absence in place of an ending? Running away had seemed so romantic when I was a kid, but I’d planned to leave a note, at least. “And my mother wouldn’t want me to spend my last night surrounded by filth and darkness.”
Something flashes behind the Queen’s eyes, red and wounded, before she banishes it. “It is our choices which determine our fates. Each of us gets what we deserve.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“How dare you—”
“I’m sorry. I meant: bullshit, Your Majesty. Did your daughter choose to be cursed? Did she choose to marry that dumbass prince?”
The Queen seethes at me, that red wound glistening behind her eyes. “There are certain duties—certain responsibilities that come with her rank and birth—”
Watching her choke with rage, a sudden suspicion occurs to me. I lean closer to the bars. “Did you choose to marry the King? Or would you have chosen differently for yourself, if you could? If this world permitted you to?”
The Queen is silent, her face wracked with rage or despair or maybe both. I can’t tell whether she’s considering helping me or setting me on fire herself. But why did she come down here without handmaidens or ladies or even guards? Why did she answer my call at all? Perhaps she, too, is hoping for a last-second miracle.
“Listen.” I whisper it, one conspirator to another. “Give me what I need, and I might be able to help her. I might be able to give your daughter the first real choice she’s had in her life.”
The Queen stares at me for a very long time. In her face I see the cold weight of the choices she didn’t have and the chances she didn’t take, the weary years waiting for fate to swallow her daughter the same way it swallowed her. I see her choosing now whether to make her love into a cage or a key.
She smooths her palms down the rich velvet of her gown and asks, quite matter-of-factly, “What do you require?”
THE ROSES ARRIVE by the bucket and barrelful, carried by bewildered guards and skeptical gardeners. They must have stripped every climbing vine and rosebush for miles, tying the flowers into hasty bundles and hauling them down to the dungeons to fulfill the fairy’s final request. They must think I’ve gone mad; they might be right.