A Spindle Splintered

by Alix E. Harrow

  A shape wings toward us across the moor, ragged and black. It lands on the standing stone in a rush of feathers, and for the first time in my life I fully appreciate the difference between a crow and a raven. This bird is huge and wild-looking, clearly built for midnights dreary rather than McDonald’s parking lots.

  It dips forward and laps at Primrose’s palm with a thick tongue and this, I find, is a little much. “Okay, what the fuck?”

  “We’ll leave Buttercup behind and continue on foot,” Primrose says evenly. “Walk close behind me, and do not stray to either side.” The raven launches back into the air, cutting a curving path through the smeary sky, and lands on a low branch a quarter mile ahead. Primrose follows it, stepping between the standing stones with her bloodied palm held tight to her chest. I follow them both, muttering about antibiotics and blood poisoning and tetanus, feeling the cold knock of the knife against my ribs, hoping to God all this nonsense is worth it.

  * * *

  BY NIGHTFALL, A mist has risen. I’m tired and hungry and my muscles are shuddering from three days without supplements or steroids. Primrose isn’t much better; the curse has woken her at midnight for each of the last three nights, the pull growing stronger each time. I’m not sure she slept at all last night, but merely curled beneath her cloak with her eyes screwed shut, fighting the silent call of her spell.

  The damn bird leads us in circles and loops, twisting and doubling back so many times I come very close to stomping off on a path of my own making, screw magic—but the shadows fall strangely across the moor. I keep thinking I see dark shapes creeping beside us, furred and clawed, gone as soon as I turn to look.

  I stay behind Primrose. We keep following the raven.

  I don’t know if it’s the mist or something more, but the mountains arrive all at once: black teeth erupting before us, crooked and sharp. A rough road coils up from the moor, biting into the mountainside and ending in a structure so ruinously Gothic, so bleak and desperate, it can only belong to one person in this story.

  “Should we approach by the main road?” Primrose whispers. “Or go around, perhaps sneak in and take her by surprise?”

  At some point I suppose I should stop being surprised when the princess is more than a doe-eyed maiden, ready to faint prettily at the first sign of danger. I’m always annoyed when people are surprised that I have a personality beyond my disease, as if they expect me to be nothing but brave smiles and blood-spotted handkerchiefs.

  I watch the raven spiral up the mountain. It soars through a narrow slit at the top of the tallest tower of the castle. “Oh, I think we can probably just knock on the front door, like civilized folk.” Even before I finish speaking the window pulses with a faint, greenish light. “She already knows we’re coming.”

  5

  THE PATH UP the mountain doesn’t take as long as it ought to. We’ve barely rounded the first turn in the road when we find ourselves standing at the foot of the castle. Up close it’s even more unsettling: the battlements jagged and uneven, the stones stained, the windows staring like a thousand lidless eyes. All its angles seem subtly wrong, off-putting in no way I can name. I want to laugh at it; I want to run from it. I mentally compose a text to Charm instead: it’s Magic Kingdom for goths. Gormenghast by Escher.

  I swallow hard. My fist is raised to knock at the doors—which are exactly as tall and ornate and ghastly as you’re imagining—when they swing silently inward. There’s nothing but formless dark beyond them.

  “Well.” I glance sideways at Primrose. She’s pale but unflinching, jaw tight. “Shall we?”

  She nods once, her chin high, and offers me her arm. It’s only once I take it that I feel her trembling.

  We’re barely a half step inside when a voice cracks from the walls, shrieking like bats from the eaves, everywhere at once. “Who dares enter here?”

  I open my mouth to answer but Primrose beats me to it, stepping forward with her chest thrown out and her voice pitched loud, and for the first time it occurs to me that princesses grow up to be queens. “It is I, Princess Primrose of Perceforest, and the Lady Zinnia of Ohio.” She turns back to me and hisses low, “Draw out the blade. Ready yourself. I will distract her.”

  It’s a good plan. It might even work.

  Except I didn’t come here to kill a fairy, because I’m not a prince or a knight or a hero. I’m not Charm, who would charge a dozen dragons for me if only she knew where they lived. I’m just a dying girl, and the last rule for dying girls, the one we never say out loud, is try not to die.

  I slide the knife from my hoodie and unwind the soft satin. I hold it aloft, showing it clearly to our unseen enemy, then toss it casually to the ground. It throws sparks as it slides across the flagstones.

  “Lady Zinnia! What are you—”

  I ignore Primrose. “Excuse me?” I call into the shadows. “Miss Maleficent?”

  There is a long, frigid silence. Green light flares at the end of the hall, a sickly torch held in a hard-knuckled hand. The light falls across a slender wrist, a black hood, a dramatic sweep of robes. I’m distantly disappointed that she isn’t wearing a horned cowl.

  “That is not my name.” This time the voice comes only from the black hood, a low growl instead of a shriek.

  “My bad.” I raise both hands, empty of weapons. “I was hoping you had a second to chat.” I wait. “I will take your frozen silence for a yes. We come to beg a favor from you.” There’s an indrawn breath beside me, then Primrose’s voice repeating the word beg as if it’s foreign and rather filthy.

  “You want the enchantment lifted, I suppose.” I don’t know if I’m imagining the bitter irony in the fairy’s voice.

  I clear my throat. “Two curses, actually. You’re familiar with Primrose’s situation, I think, but not mine. I was … similarly cursed, in a land far from here. I come to you now in the hope that you—in all your infinite wisdom and limitless power, who have unlocked the secrets of life eternal”—I am aware that I’m laying it on thick and don’t care, dignity is for people with more time than me—“might free us both from our misfortunes. I have no jewels or treasures to offer you, save one.” I practiced this speech for the past two nights while I kept watch over the sleeping Primrose. I lift my face to that green torch light and pull my features into an expression of deepest sacrifice. “My firstborn child.”

  Primrose gasps again. “Zinnia, you cannot! I forbid it!”

  “Chill,” I tell her through slightly gritted teeth. I don’t feel like explaining to her that (a) multiple doctors have informed me that my ovaries are toast and (b) I do not want and have never wanted kids, having spent my life trying to save my parents from the trolley problem of my death. Hard pass.

  The hooded figure at the end of the hall takes a step, another, and then somehow she’s standing directly before us, a raven perched on her shoulder and her eyes gleaming like poison through the shadows. Her gaze falls first on Primrose. “Even if I could break the spell I laid on you one-and-twenty years ago, I would not.” The princess stares back, her face gone hard and cold, stark-shadowed in the torchlight.

  I’m not sure I would turn my back to anyone who looked at me like that, but the fairy doesn’t seem to give it much thought. “And you…” She takes a step toward me and snatches my hand, snake-fast. I recoil, but she holds it firm, flipping it palm up to inspect the pattern of lines and veins. She mutters as she looks, tracing a yellowed nail along one or two of the routes as if my palm is a poorly labeled map.

  “Mm.” She releases my hand more slowly, almost gently. Her voice, when she speaks, is even rougher. “Keep your unborn child.”

  “But—”

  “I can’t save you, girl.” Her voice is a slap, harsh and hard, but there’s a note of mourning behind it.

  “Oh.” I rub my palm hard with my thumb, blink against the nothing-at-all stinging my eyes. “Okay.” I was prepared for this, really I was. Sick kids learn to calibrate their expectations early, to negotiate with their
shitty luck again and again. “Okay. How about a trade? I’m basically a princess back in Ohio. Let me take Primrose’s place. I’ll prick my finger and fall into your enchanted sleep, and she goes free.” Maybe I’ll zap back into my own world stuck in some magical cryogenic stasis; maybe a handsome prince will wake me and I’ll be cured. Either way, sleeping has to be better than straight-up dying. Strangers tend to imagine that sick people are looking for ways to die with dignity, but mostly we’re looking for ways to live.

  The fairy’s eyes flash beneath her hood. “You think to save yourself.”

  “And her.” I nod at Primrose. “I’m not a monster.”

  The hood shakes back and forth. “The enchantment cannot be shared or stolen or tricked. You cannot take her place.” She gestures at Primrose with her torch. “She has evaded my terms, but only briefly. There is no escaping fate.”

  There’s a sudden movement behind the fairy. I see rose lips snarling, white knuckles around a black blade. The torch clangs to the castle floor and the fairy’s head is hauled back, a knife hovering a hairsbreadth above her throat. “Oh, no, fairy?” Primrose pants into her ear. The princess’s eyes are green in the torchlight, burning with twenty-one years of bitter rage.

  I can see the fairy’s face clearly for the first time. I don’t know what I was expecting—glamorous eyeliner and devastating cheekbones, perhaps, or a gnarled crone with snaggled teeth—but she’s just a woman. Silvery blond, plainish and oldish and weary.

  “Kill me if you like, child. It won’t save you.” That mournful sound has returned to her voice and her eyes are welling with some deep, grim sympathy. Shouldn’t she be cackling and cursing? Shouldn’t the pair of us be turned into toads or ravens? I feel the story stumbling again, another wrong note in a song I know well.

  “I’m sorry.” The fairy whispers it, and I think dizzily that she means it.

  Primrose makes a strangled, raging, weeping sound in her throat. The knifepoint trembles. “Sorry? You who ruined my life and stole my future? Who cursed me?”

  “I did not curse you, girl.” The fairy sighs the words, long and tired, and Primrose can’t seem to speak through her fury.

  The fairy reaches two fingers up to the blade at her throat and suddenly it’s not a blade at all but merely a feather, glossy and black. It falls from Primrose’s fingers. Her eyes follow it—the feather that was once her only weapon, her way out, secret and cruel—as it slips silently, harmlessly, to the floor.

  The fairy turns to face the princess. She touches the perfect arch of her cheekbone, very gently. “I blessed you.”

  * * *

  PRIMROSE HAS AN expression on her face that I recognize vaguely from middle school plays, when one kid said the wrong line and the other was left in baffled, sweaty limbo.

  “What?” Primrose asks, with admirable calm.

  “It was meant to be a blessing. It still is, by my reckoning.”

  A flicker of that bitter fury returns to the princess’s face. “How is a century of sleep a blessing, exactly?”

  “There are worse things than sleep,” the fairy answers softly, and she may be the villain, but she’s not wrong. “Stay a moment, and I will explain. Would you like some tea?”

  The middle-school-play expression returns to Primrose’s face, and probably mine. Both of us glance helplessly around at the hall, full of twisted black columns and bare stone. No place has ever looked less likely to provide a cup of tea.

  “Oh!” The fairy taps her forehead. “Apologies. Let me just—” She snaps her fingers twice. The walls quiver around us like a reflection in rippling water, and then—

  We aren’t in a castle anymore.

  The three of us are standing in a smallish room with hardwood floors and deep-piled rugs. Everything is pleasantly domestic, bordering on cozy: there’s a scarred kitchen table set with three teacups; neatly banked coals in a stone fireplace; shelves of clay jars and blue glass bottles bearing tidy cursive labels. The ghoulish green torchlight has been replaced by the honeyed glow of beeswax candles.

  The fairy herself is no longer draped in black robes, but wearing a grease-spotted apron over a plain cotton skirt. A small, bright-eyed blackbird perches on her shoulder where the raven once stood.

  For a second I think Primrose might fall into an actual swoon. I position myself to catch her, wondering distantly who’s going to catch me because I’m one surprise away from a swoon myself. The wrong note I heard before has become an entirely wrong tune, dancing us toward God knows where.

  “Forgive my little illusion,” says the fairy. “I find a sufficiently menacing first impression discourages most visitors.”

  Primrose replies with a faint oh. I drift a little dazedly over to the nearest window. We’re still on a mountainside, but it appears to be a much gentler mountain than the craggy peak that confronted us through the mist. I see the pale heads of wildflowers swaying in the moonlight, hear the green shushing of grass stalks in the breeze. The moor below looks more like a meadow now, all gentle curves and grassy knolls.

  “So all that was just … an aesthetic?” Honestly, I admire her commitment. “The castle. The raven. The blood sacrifice—”

  The fairy flinches at the word blood. “Oh!” She bustles to a shelf and returns to the table with an armful of clanking bottles and a length of plain cloth. “Sit, please.”

  Primrose sits, looking like an actor still waiting in vain for someone to give her a line. The fairy points to her hand, curled and crusted with dried blood, and Primrose blinks a little dreamily before laying it on the table between them. The fairy mutters and dabs at the cut—a raw line that strikes like red lightning across her palm—plasters it with honey, and wraps it in clean white cotton. She pats it twice when she’s finished.

  Primrose stares at her own hand on the table as if it’s a sea creature or an alien, wildly out of place. “I don’t understand.” Her musical voice is ragged around the edges.

  “I know. But I don’t know where to begin.” The fairy stares at the princess with eyes that are gentle and wry and very, very blue. I squint at her hair. Was it true gold once, before it was silver?

  I take the third seat at the table and lean across it, hands clasped. “How about you start with your name?” I have a wild suspicion that I already know it.

  The fairy chews at her lower lip—palest pink, like the fragile teacup roses Mom grows along the drive—before whispering, “Zellandine.”

  Oh, hell. I hear a small, pained sound leave my mouth. I glance at Primrose and know from the polite puzzlement of her face that she doesn’t recognize the name. “She’s one of us,” I explain. But I’m lying; her story is far worse than ours.

  “You know my tale, then?”

  I was hoping until that moment that I was wrong, that Zellandine’s story went differently in this world. But I can tell from the look in her eyes—a scarred-over grief, healed but still haunted—that it didn’t.

  I want to tell her I’m sorry, to take her hand and congratulate her for surviving. Instead I give her a stiff nod. For someone who’s spent her entire life being comforted, I’m pretty shit at it.

  “Were you cursed as well, then?” Primrose asks, reaching gamely for her familiar lines.

  Zellandine stands abruptly. She pokes at the coals in the hearth and swings an iron pot low above them, her back turned to us. “Before there were curses—before there were fairies or roses or even spindles—there was just a sleeping girl.”

  Even with my Sleeping Beauty obsession, I didn’t read Zellandine’s version until the fifth week of FOLK 344—Dr. Bastille’s Fairy Tales and Identity course. I guess it’s such an ugly story that we prefer to leave it untold, moldering in the unswept corners of our past like something gone to rot in the back of the pantry.

  “I was born with a disorder of the heart.” Zellandine speaks to the steady heat of the coals. “If I overexerted myself or if I suffered a shock, I might fall into a faint from which no one could rouse me for a spell. It was no
great matter when I was a child. But by the time I was older…”

  She trails away and I look sideways at Primrose to see if she understands what’s coming, hears the dark promise in that ellipsis. Apparently a princess’s life is not so sheltered that she doesn’t know what sorts of things might befall a woman who can’t cry out, can’t run. Her fingers curl around the white line of her bandage. “Surely your father protected you, or your mother.”

  “I was a maid in a king’s castle, far beyond my family’s protection.” In the version we read in Dr. Bastille’s class, a translation from medieval French, Zellandine is a princess who falls into an endless sleep when her finger is pierced by a splinter of flax. I wonder how many tiny variations there are of the same story, how many different beauties are sleeping in how many different worlds.

  Zellandine lifts the pot from the fire with a fold of her apron and fills our teacups. I’ve read enough fantasy books and spy novels to know better than to drink anything offered to me by an enemy, especially if it smells sweet and inviting, like bruised lavender, but I no longer think Zellandine is our enemy. I curl my fingers around the cup and let the heat of it soak through skin and tendon, right down to the bone.

  “Soon enough I caught the eye of the king’s son. I was careful and quiet; I was sure never to tend his rooms when he was present. But one day he returned unexpectedly while I was shoveling the ashes from his hearth. He startled me when he spoke my name, and my heart betrayed me. The last thing I remember is the crack of my skull against the stones.” Zellandine is seated again at the table but she still isn’t looking at us. “When I woke, I was in a bed far grander than any I’d seen before. So wide my hands couldn’t find the edges, so soft I felt I was drowning, suffocated by silk.” Her nostrils flare wide, white-rimmed. “I can still smell it, if I’m not careful. Lye from the castle laundry, rose oil from his skin.”