Unspun

by Ruth Nickle

  “What do you remember of the last ten days?”

  “Midterms, a paper, lots of homework . . . ” She shook her head. “Five days ago, I went home. I took yesterday as a sick day.”

  “Any lucid dreams?”

  At Anna’s query, she vaguely remembered a recurring one in which she attempted to reach out to the prince but couldn’t get a response. The dream had been terrifying, but it was probably nothing more than a byproduct of the fear she’d felt in her own home.

  “Well, maybe a few,” she said, “but nothing important stands out.”

  Anna turned to stare at Prince, as though daring him to act. His head had bowed when she mentioned going home, and for the first time since she’d met him, he seemed to slump.

  “With your permission, I’d like to see one of these dreams.”

  The request seemed odd, but nothing raised an alarm in her mind. Her lie that she remembered nothing important had been a white one and he wouldn’t find anything incriminating.

  “How?”

  While the Mouse King had seized her upper arm, Prince took hold of her wrist where he could feel her pulse. Darkness nibbled at the edges of her vision, but a memory of the dream returned. She watched with detached interest as she futilely demanded that he come to her aid.

  “What? Am I that easy to abandon?”

  She felt a momentary flash of hot shame at seeming so needy, but in the same way she couldn’t blame the prince for not responding to her dreams, she could not think of this as a real interaction. Where the dream normally ended, however, some other memory unfurled. She recognized classrooms and the quad by the sciences building, but the scenes that played out were as unfamiliar as images on a surveillance camera.

  “Stop.”

  He obeyed at once and she was left feeling as shaken as if she had just been violently ill.

  “That wasn’t me,” Lena blurted out. “I’ve never seen anything but that first part before.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Anna said, looking just as unnerved as Lena by what she had not witnessed. “Your calendar isn’t wrong.”

  This time, it took bracing her elbows on her knees and hanging her head to make the dizziness and nausea subside.

  “How?”

  “His magic left traces that I thought were an attempt to establish control over this household as well. I did not realize that the power was just enough to have a foothold in your mind.”

  “So, I’m possessed?” She choked back bile and clamped her jaw shut, but a moan escaped. No one responded, but Anna took hold of her hand. The dizziness subsided, but the unease didn’t. The only thing that could be done was to start looking for solutions and hope that had been the worst of the news. That wasn’t much, but action made her feel like less of a prisoner and she attempted to look resolute when she finally straightened her spine and shoulders and looked to Prince. “You said he had a foothold.”

  “A foothold, not control,” the prince clarified, still keeping a solicitous eye on her.

  “Which is why Laurie didn’t bring it up?”

  “Laurie said on Facebook that she was feeling lonely while her roommate was sleeping off the flu, but I don’t know if the illness is what the Mouse King told her or if she just made an educated guess,” Anna answered. “I also found a passive-aggressive note about cleaning out the fridge, but she’s not the one in danger and he’s only been messing with you.”

  Prince nodded in agreement. “It took him a few days to gain this much control, which is likely the source of those pains that you have been experiencing, but he has been holding you hostage for the last ten days.”

  She nearly swore, but the urgency of Anna’s texts was finally clear. “Ten days. And this is the first time I’ve come back to myself?”

  “You were always there,” Prince said gravely, “but you have not been yourself.”

  “He invaded me,” Lena said after another long moment of horrified contemplation. “I let him stay in that house and I let him invade.”

  “He would say he’s a marauder,” Prince said, “but we call him a plunderer. An enemy wants to conquer, but a plunderer wants to leave nothing but destruction in his wake. Nothing less would satisfy him.”

  This time, she bolted to the bathroom, but she hadn’t eaten recently enough to bring anything up. The dry heaves turned into gasping for air. Once those had passed, she reached a claw-like hand out to turn the water on and noticed that her arm seemed suddenly shrunken and frail. Of course, if she hadn’t eaten properly in ten days, she probably had started to waste away.

  Anna’s knock was timid this time and it took Lena several moments to compose herself enough to open the door. Her aunt guided her back to the living room, but no one spoke until Lena was seated and provided with a glass of water.

  “He has a foothold because he was able to enter your mind once he had touched it with his powers,” Prince said at last. “What he wants is to drive you out entirely, but you have resisted him too well. You have been resisting and it is because of this that he has had to settle for invasion tactics.”

  “Stop talking about me as if I’m Belgium!” The water slopped over the edge of the glass as her hand shook. “I’m not something to be overrun.”

  “You’re not,” Anna said, “but if he’s an invader, there’s a good thing about that.”

  “Which is?”

  Anna and Prince wore identical looks of resolve, but it was her ally, not her aunt, who answered. “Invaders can be driven out.”

  * * *

  The rules and regulations for her safety didn’t change, but by the following morning, Prince had placed additional wards around her. She didn’t ask what they were, but something about his efforts cleared some of the fog from her brain, and time proceeded at a normal pace.

  She panicked a few days later when she lost track of five hours, but Prince responded to her summons and assured her that it had been the enemy at the sentry line, not marching through the avenues of her mind. She only sounded the alarm when the lucid dreams returned for two nights in a row and he returned to reinforce whatever spells he had placed on her apartment. There was, he said, not much else he could do without spiriting her away for a few days.

  “You’re really a masochist,” Laurie commented one Thursday in late November. “No one in their right mind would spend Thanksgiving break on campus when they were in driving distance of home.”

  It wasn’t the first time Lena’s roommate had made this argument, but this was her last-ditch effort to save Lena’s long weekend.

  “My aunt will be here.” Lena reiterated her usual explanation. “And I’m in driving distance of an empty house. It’s not the home I’m looking for right now.”

  “You’re still welcome to brave my family.”

  “Not while Anna’s here.” She flashed a grateful smile across the living room so Laurie would know the offer was still appreciated. “It’s my first major holiday without Mom, and I think it’ll be good to keep things low key.”

  In previous versions of this conversation, she had spoken about getting a head start on end-of-term papers and studying for finals. Anna had been the one to insist on bringing dinner for two Hoffmans and a prince, should he decide to join them. Laurie had even offered to stay behind at one point, but Lena had encouraged her to enjoy home comforts and let someone else do her laundry.

  These were all cheerful fronts for the fact that she was currently in danger even far from her childhood home, but Laurie didn’t need to know that. It didn’t keep her from committing Lena to calling her if she felt at all in need of rescuing.

  “If we burn the turkey and get sick of each other, you’ll be the first one to know,” Lena promised.

  Anna arrived four hours later, just after Lena had conquered one of her assignments for the break. Lena hadn’t exactly lied about needing to get work done, but t
his was going to be an unpredictable weekend and she wanted as much out of the way as possible. Anna set down two duffels before giving Lena a hug, but there were several things conspicuously absent from what she unpacked from the car.

  “No food?”

  “Prince promised to take care of such things,” Anna explained. “I thought you’d have summoned him by now.”

  “Not until you got here,” Lena said. “This is supposed to be family time, and you’re not missing out on a single moment of it.”

  Anna’s smile was slightly nervous, as if she were remembering their last “family time” at home. Before she could pose a tactful question, Lena added, “I’m on better terms with the true prince.”

  “Then we should go ahead and invite him over,” her aunt suggested, heading for the side table where the nutcracker was standing guard. “If you will do the honors . . . ”

  On their first meeting, Anna had tried playing the role of peacekeeper, but that had been before the revelation that they had been ensorcelled in the process of welcoming an old friend back into the fold. She had not, as far as Lena knew, taken Prince to task for the oversight, but it had not escaped Lena’s notice that Anna refused to greet the family friend with anything more than a tight-lipped smile at the door. So, the fact that she was now suggesting his presence meant that she too was on better terms with him again.

  Prince rang the doorbell less than a minute later and presented Anna with a particularly large box of sugar plums before accepting Lena’s invitation to enter.

  “I apologize for coming with so little,” he said by way of greeting, “but we will not be staying here long.”

  “You would have told us if it was safe to go home again,” Anna commented. “Since Lena’s planning to host here, just where are we going?”

  “My home.” His clear, blue-eyed gaze slid from Anna to Lena. “If that’s all right.”

  “Will we be staying there long?”

  “Only as long as you like,” he assured her. “If you would like to bring your textbooks, you may, but we are not technologically equipped for anything more advanced than that.”

  “I’m not asking if you have wi-fi,” Lena said as calmly as possible. “I’m asking if you mean to have us over for dinner or if you are taking us into protective custody.”

  “We wish to look after your happiness on this holiday,” Prince said, “but the other matter will come up.”

  “Good,” Anna said. “I’m pretty sure we’ll both forgive you in time for that, but we’re a long way from forgetting.”

  The comment brought the conversation to a standstill. It wasn’t exactly an ultimatum, but it was something for which neither party was likely to apologize.

  “What do I need?” Lena changed the subject.

  “Whatever you like,” he said. “We are at your service. If you do not wish to pack a change of clothing, we can accommodate your needs.”

  “Then I’ll be just a few minutes.”

  He nodded. “I’ll return when summoned.”

  They were ready to leave ten minutes later, once Lena had packed pajamas, underwear, a dress, two pairs of jeans, and three t-shirts into her backpack next to the Norton anthology that she would need for her British Literature paper and her notes for Biology.

  On this momentous occasion of visiting the kingdom for the first time, she had wanted to upbraid a few “allies” for letting the Mouse King’s plots go on under Prince’s nose, but the state of siege was the more pressing concern and all she wanted to demand was help in breaking free.

  “Are you ready for a plan of attack?” Anna asked while they were still able to speak privately.

  “No.” Magical blood or not, this wasn’t something she could tackle on her own. That didn’t mean she hadn’t contemplated everything from throwing a ballet shoe if she ran into the false prince to looking up black magic on the internet, but she was no warrior and she was most likely in over her head. “But I’m ready to ask for help, forcefully if necessary.”

  Prince always responded to an apartment-based summons by ringing the doorbell and less than a minute after Lena had invoked that right, it chimed. An aristocratic-looking woman in a lavender dress stood at the threshold, and she bore enough of a resemblance to Mom for her identity to be obvious. The part of Lena that still waited for an intuitive connection scoured her memory for times this woman had made an appearance, but not even one came to mind. There was no need for clarification, though. Not given the means of arrival.

  “You are my escort,” Lena guessed. “Thank you for sending the sugar plums.”

  Her great-great-grandmother smiled and handed over another box, which resembled the one that Prince had brought earlier, but it seemed to glow softly in the afternoon light. The prince ruled the kingdom, but he had only been a courier to Lena, and the gift directly from its source reflected something of her magic.

  Lena had never gone on a magical, mystical adventure before, but she stashed her keys in a purse and donned a coat in case the ambient temperature of a fairy tale kingdom involved inclement weather.

  She returned to find Anna asking about how often their families had actually crossed paths. It was an odd kind of small talk, but genealogically, it was probably no stranger than “So, you from around here?” Lena decided to ask a more pressing question before they set out.

  “I know who you are,” she said once the conversation had come to a polite pause, “but I don’t know what you’d like to be called. Prince calls you his right-hand fairy, the stories say you’re the Sugar Plum Fairy. I’ve never had a conversation with a great-great-grandmother before.”

  The woman had looked somewhat wistful during her discussion of what nineteenth-century Germany had been like, but she smiled affectionately at this question. “I thank you for thinking of such things. Most call me Lady Sakharnaya of the Sliva Groves, but I see nothing wrong with you calling me Great-Great-Grandmother. And you?”

  “Lena will be fine,” she responded.

  “Anna is the only name I’ll answer to,” her aunt answered. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last, Great-Grandmother.”

  Lena hadn’t meant to sound so formal, but it had allowed them to speak as equals while they were still learning to see each other as family.

  “What should I expect?” she asked once they had left the building.

  “Dear child,” the fairy said with a sigh, “that is the question of many of our kind as well. We know your family of old, but we expect you to be your own person and I, for one, am quite excited to discover what that entails.”

  Lena couldn’t be sure that the fairy would still say so once she had heard her demands, but for now, she could agree that this journey was a risk worth taking.

  This opinion was only strengthened when they reached the forest between worlds. Something indefinable had suddenly changed.

  “I’ve been wondering if I’d be able to tell a difference when we crossed over,” Lena admitted, “but this looks like Washington state, not a wonderland.”

  Great-great-grandmother had likely never been to the Pacific Northwest, but she smiled at the observation. “Our world is not as strange as you might imagine, and over long years of association, the flora and fauna of your world have occasionally come to ours. Some are merely the last of species you no longer know. Others have evolved after many years in such a magically powerful place.”

  “So the trees might talk or we’ll play with dodos after dinner?” Anna asked.

  Their escort did not answer immediately, but peered beneath one of the trees that stood sentinel along the path to a new world. After a minute, she plucked a black feather that had caught on a branch. “I often see birds in this part of the forest, and this was left by a visitor from your world. I have been told by my emissaries that they are called Labrador ducks.”

  “Which went extinct over a century ago, if I re
member right.” Anna was no ornithologist, but she loved a good museum. “Could they be brought back?”

  “Only if that is their wish. It is a rare thing for us to turn anyone away, and they have been happy here. But that,” she said to Lena, “is not what you meant by ‘a difference,’ is it?”

  “No.” She wasn’t entirely sure how to articulate the sensation at first, so she put it in plain terms. “I feel a different kind of power, even in the forest. I can’t imagine what the kingdom will be like.”

  The magic that Prince had brought to bear on her under-furnished and overpriced student apartment had given her reprieve from the headaches and allowed her to have some distance from the malevolent powers of the Mouse King. Escaping her world, however, felt like being allowed into a ballroom after weeks of being trapped in a closet.

  “You cannot be touched by that sorcery here,” Great-great-grandmother said as if she had spoken the thought out loud. “This is part of your ancestral homeland and it protects you. While you are here, we will decide once and for all how you may claim that power in your own world.”

  * * *

  The Hoffman family had never been very gregarious. They visited each other but never felt the need to have elaborate family reunions or fifty-cousin Seders. It was, therefore, a bit overwhelming to be immediately treated as a long-lost sister by everyone she met in the fairy kingdom. A few of the flower fairies insisted that she wear a wreath like theirs and every actual blood relation claimed that she bore a strong resemblance to her great-great-great-aunt because of the family nose. Those who were around her age weren’t the sort of cousins who would hug without permission, but they appointed themselves as her entourage, and Lena didn’t protest.

  Thanksgiving at the palace was beyond description. Lena’s favorite dishes were served on plates of gold and eaten with silver utensils. Musicians played melodies that swirled like snowflakes in the background, while emissaries from every province of the kingdom paid their respects with stories of her family. It was a bit like sitting Shiva within a carnival, but every passing moment made it more difficult to remember the mortal peril that came along with her tie to this mesmerizing place.