Right now you’re thinking: this isn’t how the story goes. You might not have a degree in this shit but you’ve seen enough Disney movies and picture books to know there’s supposed to be a handsome prince and true love and a kiss, which can’t be consensual because unconscious people can’t consent, but at least it breaks the curse and the princess wakes up.
But in the very oldest versions of this story—before the Grimms, before Perrault—the prince does far worse than kiss her, and the princess never wakes up.
I make myself keep listening to Zellandine, unflinching. I always hate it when people flinch from me, as if my wounds are weapons.
“I did not tend the prince’s hearth after that. I hoped—if I were quiet and careful enough—I might be safe. That it might be over.” Zellandine’s fingers spread against the softness of her own stomach. “Soon it became clear that it wasn’t.”
In that oldest story the still-sleeping princess gives birth nine months after the prince visits her in the tower. Her hungry child suckles at her fingertips and removes the splinter of flax, and only then does she wake from her poisoned sleep.
I felt sick the first time I read it, betrayed by a story that I loved, that belonged to me. I slouched into class the next day, arms crossed and hoodie pulled up, scowling while Dr. Bastille lectured about women’s bodies and women’s choices in premodern Europe, about history translated into mythology and passivity into power. “You are accustomed to thinking of fairy tales as make-believe.” Dr. Bastille looked straight at me as she said it, her face somehow both searing and compassionate. “But they have only ever been mirrors.”
I reread the story when I got home, sitting cross-legged on my rose-patterned sheets, and felt a terrible, grown-up sort of melancholy descending over me. I used to see Sleeping Beauty as my wildest, most aspirational fantasy—a dying girl who didn’t die, a tragedy turned into a romance. But suddenly I saw her as my mere reflection: a girl with a shitty story. A girl whose choices were stolen from her.
Zellandine has fallen silent, staring at the table with her face folded tight. I take a sip of my flowery tea. “What happened to the baby?”
She looks up at me and her mouth twists. “There was no baby. I followed whispers and rumors and found a wisewoman in the mountains who knew the spell I needed. I chose a different story for myself, a better one.” The memory of that choice softens her face, settling like sunlight across her features. “I stayed with the wisewoman, after. She taught me everything she knew, and I taught myself more. I gathered power around myself until I could turn blades into feathers and huts into castles, could read the past in tea leaves and the future in the stars.”
It shouldn’t be possible to look intimidating sipping tea in a stained apron, but Zellandine’s eyes are rich and knowing and her smile is full of secrets. The smile dims a little when she continues. “Some of the things I read there … I saw my own story played out over and over. A thousand different girls with a thousand terrible fates. I began to interfere, where and when I could.” I feel a strange flick of shame as she says it; it seems that some dying girls follow different rules and dedicate themselves to saving others, rather than themselves.
“A witch, they called me, or a wicked fairy. I didn’t care.” Zellandine turns the rich blue of her gaze to Primrose for the first time in a long while. “I still don’t, if it saves even a single girl from the future she was given.”
Primrose can’t seem to look away, to move. “What fate did you see for me?” Her voice is the ghost of a whisper.
The blackbird on the fairy’s shoulder tilts its head to consider Primrose with one ink-drop eye. Zellandine strokes a finger down its breast. “Surely you can guess, princess.”
Primrose stares at her with brittle defiance.
“Without my curse, you would be wed by now,” says the fairy, ever so gently. “How well would your marriage bed suit you, do you think?”
The princess is still silent, but I watch the defiance crack and crumble around her shoulders. It leaves her face pale and exposed, and I understand from the anguished twist of her lips that it’s not only Prince Harold that she objects to, but princes in general, along with knights and kings and probably even handsome farm boys.
Zellandine continues in the same gentle, devastating voice. “I saw a marriage you did not want to a husband you could not love, who would not care whether you loved him or not. I saw a slow suffocation in fine sheets, and a woman so desperate to escape her story she might end it herself.”
Primrose lifts her teacup and sets it quickly back down, her hands trembling so hard that tea sloshes over the rim. I want to pat her shoulder or touch her arm, but I don’t. God, I wish Charm were here; she’d have the princess weeping therapeutically into her shoulder within seconds.
“You could have—” Primrose pauses and I watch her throat bob, like she’s swallowing something barbed. “You could have done something else. Warned me or protected me, stolen me away—”
“I’ve tried that. I’ve built towers for girls and kept them locked away. I’ve chased them into the deep woods and left seven good men to guard them. I’ve turned their husbands into beasts and bears, set their suitors impossible tasks. I’ve done it all, and sometimes it has worked. But it’s difficult to disappear a princess. There tend to be wars and hunts and stories that end with witches dancing in hot iron shoes. So I did what I could. I gave you a blessing disguised as a curse, an enchantment that would prevent your engagement and marriage. I gave you one-and-twenty years to walk the earth on your own terms, unpursued by man—”
“Oh, hardly that.” Primrose’s voice is beyond bitter, almost savage. It occurs to me that I got it wrong, and that the knife beneath her pillow might not have been intended for her own flesh at all. I thought she was an Aurora, empty and flat as cardboard, but she was just a girl doing her best to survive in a cruel world, like the rest of us.
“—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.
“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.
Her head lolls forward, her hands slack on the reins.
“Hey, princess. I was wondering—who inherits the throne once you fall asleep?” I absolutely do not care about the inheritance laws of a fairy tale kingdom I’m about to zap myself out of, but I figure it’s the kind of thing a princess might care about.
Her head jerks upright. “What? Oh. I believe the crown will pass to my Uncle Charles, as I have no brothers or sisters.” I wonder exactly when the exclamation points left her sentences, and wish absurdly that I could restore them.
“I don’t have any siblings either,” I offer, sounding like an extremely boring first date. “I always wanted a little sister, but…” Mom and Dad said they only ever wanted one kid, but I’m pretty sure they’re lying. I think they wanted to spare me from a younger sibling who would inevitably outgrow me, a 2.0 version of myself with all the bugs and fatalities worked out, but honestly I wish they’d had a second kid to pour their hearts into. “Anyway. At least I had Charm.”
“Charm?” Primrose says it like a noun rather than a name.
“Haven’t I mentioned her? Here.” I fish my phone from my hoodie and power it on (18%). I curve my arm around the princess so she can see my lock screen: Charm simultaneously blowing me a kiss and flipping me off. It’s summer and she’s wearing a black tank top to show off what she refers to as her “lady-killers” (biceps) and her “job-killers” (tattoos).
Primrose looks at Charm’s face for a length of time that confirms my suspicions about her. She straightens in the saddle, shutting her mouth with an almost audible click of teeth. “A friend of yours?”
“The very best.” The only, really. “We met in second grade when she decked a kid for asking if my parents let me pick out my own casket. She got sent to the principal’s office and I played sick so I could go sit with her in the hall. She’s stuck with me ever since, despite my … curse.” Or, if I’m being honest with myself, because of it.
Charm’s parents already had three kids when they saw a ’90s Frontline special about homeless youth in Russia. They “rescued” Charm from a St. Petersburg orphanage six months later and never let her forget it. Every time she misbehaved they told her to be grateful she wasn’t begging on the streets; every Christmas her dad jokes that they already got her the American Dream, so what else could she want?
It gave Charm a gigantic chip on her shoulder, biweekly counseling sessions at school, and a lifelong desire to be a hero. To be the one doing the saving, rather than being saved. There’s a reason she has a tattoo on her shoulder of an adopted foreign baby who grew up to save the world again and again.
I figure the GRM made me the ultimate challenge, an unrescuable damsel. Charm used to spend hours and hours with her brother’s chemistry set and a stack of Encyclopedia Britannicas—as if a third grader was going to discover the cure to an incurable genetic disorder—until she grew out of it and gave up. At least it wasn’t a complete waste of time: she blew the top off the science section of the ACT and got her pick of internships at fancy biotech companies when she graduated. (I was pushing for this tiny start-up that was trying to clone organs on the cheap, but she went with Pfizer, an objectively terrible pharmaceutical giant, for reasons I genuinely cannot fathom).
She’s texted me twenty or thirty times since I last checked my phone: theories and questions and ultimatums; secondhand worries from my folks who are apparently growing concerned that my “sleepover” is now six days long; a bunch of screenshots from sites about physics and the multiverse and the infinity of alternate realities that lie one atop the other, like pages in a book.
I think about replying but can’t think of anything to say. I power the phone off before I can do anything embarrassing, like cry.
“Perhaps when you return to your world, you and Charm might find your fairy and defeat her together,” Primrose says. “I—I could not have faced Zellandine without you.”
I shrug against her back, feeling a little guilty. I hadn’t gone for her sake, after all. “Didn’t do much good.”
“No. Although…” Primrose’s weary shoulders straighten a little. “Although I feel stronger than I did before, knowing the truth. It’s the difference between being dragged to the gallows blindfolded and walking with your head held high and eyes wide open. It’s the lesser of two evils, I suppose.”
God, that’s bleak. She deserves so much more than the gallows, more than this tight-laced world of towers and thorns and lesser evils. I remind myself how much I dislike being cried over and try very h
ard not to cry over Primrose.
“Perhaps your curse will prove more negotiable than mine. Perhaps—”
“It’s not…” I didn’t really plan on explaining teratogenic damage to a medieval princess whose medical knowledge probably involves bloodletting and wandering uteri, but it’s still half a day’s ride to the castle and I can’t stand the note of stubborn hope in her voice. “It’s not a curse, exactly, and there’s no wicked fairy.”
We ride, and I talk. I talk about natural gas extraction and MAL-09, the chemical compound that contaminated the tap water in Roseville in the late ’90s, which had been tested and approved on adult men—but not pregnant women. I talk about placental barriers and genetic damage and the forty-six infants who were born with fucked-up ribosomes in the greater Roseville area. I talk about the years and years of legal battles, the fines that didn’t matter and the settlement that put me through college. I’m sure at least three-quarters of it is soaring straight over Primrose’s head, but she listens with an intensity that I find weirdly flattering. In my world, everybody already knows about Generalized Roseville Malady. They’ve seen the five-episode documentary on Netflix and argued with conspiracy theorists on Facebook and to them I’m just another headline, not a story in my own right.
“Some of the other GRM kids formed a group—Roseville’s Children—that’s done a lot of activism stuff. They marched on the state capitol, did some sit-ins in Washington. They always get a lot of press, but nothing ever seems to change. Mom and Dad took me to the monthly meetings when I was a kid, but…” I trail away. I stopped going to the Roseville’s Children meetings at sixteen, when I decided I didn’t want to spend my remaining years chanting slogans and wearing cheesy T-shirts. Now I feel another squirm of guilt, thinking of all the sleeping beauties I hadn’t even tried to save. There are fewer of us than there used to be.
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