“Anyway. I’m on a ton of steroids and meds to try to delay the protein buildup, but my last X-rays weren’t great. The phrase ‘weeks, not months’ was used.” I aim for a casual tone, but I hear Primrose’s gasp of horror.
“I’m sorry,” she says eventually, and there isn’t really anything else to say.
We ride on—we dying girls, we sorry girls, gallows-bound—until the fairy tale spires of Perceforest Castle rise through the trees, gilded by the setting sun.
* * *
THE GROOM NEARLY faints when we turn up in the stables, smelly and tired and road-grimed. There follows a long period of shouting and running about, while the groom fetches a better-dressed groom who fetches an even better-dressed fellow, who sweeps the pair of us into the castle and up to the King’s council room.
The atmosphere reminds me of a hospital waiting room, cold and airless, thick with worry. The King and Queen are seated across from Prince Harold, muttering over a map of the kingdom. They fall silent at the sight of the princess.
There follows a medieval version of the classic “young lady, where have you been, we were worried sick” speech. There are a few more “whences” and “wherefores,” but it covers the same territory. I do my best to melt into a tapestry while the King thunders and the Prince tries not to look disappointed that he doesn’t get to ride out in daring rescue of anyone and the Queen stares wearily at the table.
No one seems particularly interested in Primrose’s explanation—although to be fair, “I went for a morning picnic and got lost in the woods” is pretty weak sauce. It seems more important for them to stress how terrified they were and how precious and fragile she is. “For one-and-twenty years I have sought only to protect you,” the King says mournfully. “How could you risk yourself in this manner? Did you think nothing of our love for you?”
In that moment he reminds me of Charm’s parents, or maybe my own: a person whose love is a burdensome thing, a weight dragging always at your ankles.
Primrose listens with a glassy, passive expression that tells me she’s heard it many times before, has grown so used to the shackles around her legs that she barely feels them.
I make a small, involuntary sound somewhere between disgust and empathy. Prince Harold looks up. “And who is this?” His voice cuts through the King’s speech. “She is not one of your ladies, I would swear it, and she is dressed most curiously.”
It takes physical effort not to flip him off.
The princess’s expression remains glassy, opaque. “This is the Lady Zinnia. I met her on my journey, and I am indebted to her for her courage against the perils we faced.”
“There need not have been any perils if you’d stayed where you belong!” The King launches into another long speech about duty, family, fatherhood, honor, womanly virtues, and the obedience owed to one’s elders and monarchs, but Prince Harold’s eyes remain on me. His face is too lumpishly handsome to pull off canny, but there’s a suspicious set to his mouth that I dislike.
Whatever. Soon enough I’ll be home and his fiancée will be asleep, and none of his suspicions will matter.
Eventually the King blusters himself into silence and tells his daughter they’ll discuss her punishment in the morning.
“Of course, Father,” Primrose says placidly. Her eyes cut to her mother and for a moment the glass cracks. Her lips twist, her mouth half opens, but all she says is, “Good night, Mother.” The Queen dips her head in a low, almost apologetic nod that makes me wonder if her love might not be quite so burdensome.
The two of us are escorted up to her rooms by a bustling flock of maids and ladies. The princess is fed and fussed over, pampered and cooed at, bathed and dressed in a nightgown so stiff with embroidery it can’t possibly be comfortable. It’s nearly midnight before they leave us alone.
Primrose climbs into that enormous, ridiculous bed, half swallowed by eiderdown and shadow. “You—you’ll follow me, when I go?”
“Yeah.” I consider the window seat or the carved chairs, then peel out of my hoodie and tennis shoes and crawl in bed after the princess. She doesn’t move or speak, but I catch the wet gleam of her eyes in the dark, the silent slide of tears. I pretend I’m Charm, who knows how to comfort someone who can’t be comforted. “Hey, it’s okay, alright? I’ll walk with you, every step. You won’t be alone.” We might not be able to fix our bullshit stories, but surely we can be less lonely inside them, here at the end. “Just go to sleep. I’m right here.”
Her hand reaches into the space between us and I place my palm over it. We fall asleep curled toward one another like a pair of parentheses, like bookends on either side of the same shitty book.
* * *
THE CURSE COMES for her in the fathomless black after midnight, but long before dawn. I wake to find the princess sitting up, her eyes open and vacant, foxfire green. She climbs out of bed like a sleepwalker, full of terrible, invisible purpose, and I pad behind her on bare feet.
The castle corridors are twistier and colder than I remember, with every torch doused and every door closed. The wind whips through narrow slits in the stone, tangling Primrose’s hair and raising goosebumps on my arms as we wind down one corridor and up another, through a plain door I bet a million bucks didn’t exist until just now. Behind it are stairs that spiral endlessly upward, lit by a sourceless, sickly light.
I don’t need to tell you what happens next. You know how the story goes: the princess climbs the tower. The spinning wheel waits. She reaches one long, tapered finger toward it, her eyes faraway and faintly troubled, as if she’s dreaming an unpleasant dream from which she can’t wake.
The only difference is me. A second princess, crownless and greasy-haired, desperately in need of modern medicine and clean laundry, quietly crying in the shadows behind her. “Goodnight, princess,” I whisper. She hesitates, the frown lines on her face deepening briefly before the fairy’s enchantment smooths them away.
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 backwar
ds-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.
I turn it on and scroll through my missed texts, because why not? There’s no reason to hoard the charge now.
Charm’s sent me a few more wild theories and links to NASA pages that don’t load. I figure I have time to kill so I zoom in on the screenshots enough to read—well, skim—okay, glance at—the articles. All of them seem to subscribe to the (hypothetical, unprovable) concept of the multiverse, in which there are an infinite number of realities separated by nothing but a few quarks and cosmic dust bunnies. One dude describes them as bubbles in paint, endlessly spawning; somebody else asks me to envision a six-sided die that lands six different ways and spawns six alternate realities. My favorite is the one that describes the universe as “a vast book containing an infinity of pages.” I like the idea that I’m just a misplaced punctuation mark or a straying verb who somehow found herself on the wrong page. Beats being a dice roll or a paint bubble.
I wish Charm were here to mock my lack of basic scientific understanding (when you skip half of high school and major in liberal arts, there are certain inevitable holes in your education). I always sort of imagined her beside me at the end, weeping prettily at my bedside, perhaps catching the eye of the extremely hot nurse who works the day shift in the ICU. Maybe they see each other again at my graveside and go out for drinks. Maybe they wind up married with three rescue dogs and a Subaru, who knows?
I type and delete several messages to Charm before going with the painfully effortful: bad news babe. portkey’s busted.
that WOULD be bad news except—as I previously mentioned—portkeys are fiction
It takes less than ten seconds for me to send back a cropped version of one her own screenshots with the final line circled in red: “in a universe of infinite realities, there’s no such thing as fiction.”
She responds with a middle finger emoji, which is fair.
but like, real talk: the magic spinning wheel is broken. I think I might be stuck here forever. or for however long I have left. I’ve been trying not to feel the clogged-drain sensation in my chest or the shuddering weight of my own limbs, trying not to think of the X-rays that sent Mom straight out to her rose beds, her face cold and hard as a spade.
did you read the stuff I sent you?
of course, I lie.
There’s a pause, then: if you had, which you definitely have not, you’d know that alternate dimensional realities are unlikely to be connected by individual physical objects.
charm please. I’ve had a real long day.
there are no ruby slippers or rabbit holes. if there’s a way between universes, which there apparently is, it’s something weirder and more quantum-y than a magic fucking spinning wheel. allow me to present my top ten theories thus far. I can see her so clearly: cross-legged in bed in the crappy two-room apartment she rented for the summer, surrounded by a small ocean of printed-out articles and library books and Smarties wrappers. The whole place would smell like burned coffee and laundry and weed, because Charm is essentially a frat boy with brains and breasts.
Her next text is an image of a PowerPoint slide titled, So You Fucked Up and Got Lost in the Multiverse. The subtitle reads: Theory #1: narrative resonance, followed by a pretty unreasonable number of bullet points. How many jokey, stupid, helpful slideshows has she made me over the years? In junior year it was, So You Want to Disappear: Ninety-Nine Reasons to Stick Around, Asshole. In college she sent me, So You Want to Murder Your Roommate: Practical Suggestions for Making it Look Like an Accident.
I stare at the damp gray ceiling for a while before responding. i thought you grew out of trying to save me
jesus zin you’re so stupid sometimes. hot, but stupid.
She texts again before I can type anything more than hey—
why do you think I majored in biochem? why am I interning at goddamn pfizer??? why was my senior thesis on MAL-09?
I know why. Just like I know why Dad still stays up too late reading message boards and googling unlikely medical experiments, why Mom still attends Roseville’s Children meetings every month. Their love has hung above me like the sun, a burning brightness I could survive only if I never looked straight at it, never flew too close.
My phone buzzes again. i never stopped trying to save you. so don’t you fucking dare stop trying to save yourself.
I stare, unblinking, the words fractured and blurred through the sheen of tears, and she adds: you promised to come back.
I shove the phone back in my jeans pocket and press the heels of my hands into my eyes hard enough that tiny fireworks pop against my eyelids. At sixteen, I tried to run away from my story and couldn’t. So I put away my dreams of adventure and true love and happily ever afters, and settled in to play out the clock. I made my dying girl rules and followed them to the letter. I even wrote Charm a very serious three-page breakup letter and she informed me that (1) I was a dumbass, (2) you can’t break up with your best friend, legally, and (3) she preferred blonds anyway.
And she stuck around. Through every doctor’s appointment and prescription refill, every Gargoyles rewatch and whiny text about my roommate. I pity all those other Auroras and Briar Roses, the sleeping beauties who are alone in their little paint-bubble universes.
I wish I could bleed from my page to theirs, like ink. I wonder if that’s more or less what I did. I wonder what happens when you tell the same story again and again in a thousand overlapping realities, like a pen retracing the same words over and over on the page. I wonder precisely what Charm meant by narrative resonance.
And then I have my second big, stupid, excellent idea. I retrieve my phone (8%) and write back to Charm: ok.
Then: i’m gonna need your help.
* * *
THE FIRST GUARD who visits my cell is too scared of me to be any use at all. I badger him with questions and demands while he quivers and slides a bowl of greenish soup through the bars. He retreats back up the steps and I’m left to pace and scheme and consider all the many and varied ways this plan could fail. The soup congeals at my feet, like a pond scumming over.
The second guard is made of sterner stuff, refilling my water pail with hands that shake only slightly. He barely screams when I grab his wrist.
“Unhand me, foul creature!”
“I need to speak to the King.”
“And why would our noble King consort with an unnatural—”
“Because I have a final request. Even unnatural creatures are owed some dignity in death, aren’t they? Before they die?” I step closer to the bars as I say it, tilting my head upward and putting the slightest tremble in my lower lip. This is the exact fragile-wilting-flower act that got me out of at least 50 percent of my gym classes in high school.
I see the guard’s throat bob. He is no longer trying quite so hard to remove his hand from mine. “I—I will pass your request along.”
I let go of his wrist and sweep my eyelashes down. “Thank you, kind sir. And may I ask one question more?”
“You may.” He’s rubbing the place where my fingers held his wrist.
“The wedding. When will it be held?” Three days hence, the King had said, but that was seven days ago.
A suspicious line forms between the guard’s brows, as if it’s occurred to him that wicked fairies and weddings are an unfortunate combination. He must not be wholly c
onvinced of my wickedness, because he says slowly, “Tomorrow, just after the dawn prayer.”
“Thank you.” I spread my fingers across my chest and sweep him the best curtsy I can achieve in unwashed jeans. He clunks into the wall on his way out of the dungeon.
I return to my unproductive pacing and scheming, stopping only to cough up weird, mucus-y lumps that I try not to look at very closely. If there were X-rays in this world, I bet my chest would look like a galaxy, the healthy black peppered with white stars of protein.
Hours pass. The King never arrives.
But someone else comes in his place. She descends the steps slowly, velvet skirts dragging across stained stone, rings shining hard and bright on her fingers.
The Queen stands on the other side of the bars, entirely alone, watching me down her too-long nose. There’s a steely chill in her eyes that makes it clear that my long-lashed, damsel-in-distress persona will get me exactly nowhere. I should have known Primrose’s spine didn’t come from her father.
I open with a grave “Your Majesty” instead. The Queen doesn’t so much as blink. I wet my cracked lips. “I would like to make a final request.”
“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.”
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