A Spindle Splintered Read online

  “Good-looking, if you’re into cleft chins.”

  “Quite.”

  “And yet I can’t help but detect a tad of reluctance on your part.”

  There’s a short sigh from behind the canopy. “He’s—it’s—fine. I’m fine.” It’s a lie but I let it stand because she did the same for me, and sometimes lies are lifeboats.

  The sheets rustle as Primrose rolls over. “Anyway, it hardly matters. None of them understand that the curse is still … waiting. Calling to me. Eventually I’ll have to sleep, and I fear I will wake again only as my finger pricks the spindle’s end.”

  I struggle not to roll my eyes at this excessive drama. “Okay, but like, just let me zap myself back to Ohio and then you can set it on fire or whatever. Boom, curse dodged.”

  Primrose sits up slowly, brushing aside the curtains and meeting my eyes. “I searched for it, after supper,” she says softly. “I could not find the spinning wheel, nor the room, nor indeed the tower. It has vanished.”

  I think: oh, shit. I say, “Oh, shit.” The princess doesn’t flinch, so either they don’t have swears in Fake-ass Medieval Fairy Land or Primrose isn’t as proper as she seems. “Well, at least there’s Harold. If you fall into an enchanted sleep, nine out of ten doctors recommend true love’s kiss—”

  “Harold is not my true love. I assure you.” Her lips are thin and pale, twisted with revulsion. “I don’t think—I don’t know that there’s any escaping it.”

  “No. There is, there has to be.” I’m standing for some reason, my fingers curled into useless fists. I remind myself that this isn’t my problem or business or story. That I should be sitting at home with my parents for whatever time I have left, like I promised I would, rather than gallivanting through the multiverse without my meds.

  “Look. Both of us should have died or been cursed or whatever last night, on our twenty-first birthdays. But something messed it up. Our lines got crossed.” I picture that listing ship again, or maybe a train leaping off its tracks and hurtling into the unknown. “It feels like we have a chance to make it come out different. To do something.” I haven’t wanted to “do something” since I was sixteen, packing my backpack and planning my escape.

  The princess sighs a long, defeated sigh, but I can see a foolish flicker of hope in her eyes. “Like what?”

  “Like…” The idea leaps from my skull fully formed, armored and Athenian and deeply stupid. I love it. “Like taking matters into our own hands.” I feel a slightly demented smile stretching my face. “Where’s this wicked fairy, exactly?”

  4

  THE THING ABOUT bad ideas is that they’re contagious. I watch mine infect the princess, her expression sliding from bafflement to horror to frozen fascination.

  “Her lair lies through the Forbidden Moor,” she says slowly. “At the peak of Mount Vordred.”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right. How long would it take to get there? By, uh, horse or whatever?”

  “It took Prince Harold three days of swift riding.”

  Her answer initiates a complex series of calculations involving the number of missed pills over the amount of preexisting protein buildup, magnified by physical exertion and divided by the number of days I have left. If I were a machine, all my warning lights would be blinking. I ignore them.

  “We’ll need supplies and food and stuff. Do you have anything more … rugged to wear?”

  Primrose is watching me as if I’m a grisly car accident or a public marriage proposal: gruesome but mesmerizing. “It won’t work, you know.”

  I’m already rooting through her wardrobe, looking for something free of ruffles, lace, pleats, bows, satin, ribbons, or pearls and not finding it. I wish briefly but passionately that I’d been zapped into a different storyline, maybe one of those ’90s girl power fairy tale retellings with a rebellious princess who wears trousers and hates sewing. (I know they promoted a reductive vision of women’s agency that privileged traditionally male-coded forms of power, but let’s not pretend girls with swords don’t get shit done.)

  Primrose tries again. “She is powerful and cruel, and terribly ancient. Some say she has lived seven mortal lives!” I try not to let my pulse leap or my hands shake, to remind myself that hope is for suckers. “She evaded my father’s men for one-and-twenty years. Even when Prince Harold—”

  “Harold does not strike me as a Perceforest’s best and brightest.”

  “But neither are we, surely!”

  I spin to face her, arms full of satin ruffles. “So what’s your plan? Stay here and wait for the curse to catch you, like you did for the first twenty-one years of your life? Close your eyes and go to sleep and let the world go on without you?” My voice is an angry hiss, but I don’t know which of us I’m angry at.

  Primrose’s face is a waxy green color, her lips pressed white. I step closer. “In my world there’s nothing I can do to save myself. No curse to break, no fairy to defeat. But it’s different here. You can do something other than stand around and wait.” I riffle through my mental box of inspirational quotes and come up with a Dylan Thomas line that I actually know from Interstellar. “Do not go gentle into that good night, princess. I beg of you.”

  She must be susceptible to begging too, because she stares at me for another breathless second before inclining her head infinitesimally. “All right.”

  I clap my palms together. “Swell. Now do you happen to have a magic sword or anything? An enchanted amulet? A shield imbued with special powers?”

  I’m mostly joking, but Primrose wrings her hands, thumbs rubbing hard along slender wrists. “Well.” She kneels and reaches beneath the soft down of her mattress, emerging with something that gleams cruelly in the reddening dusk. “There’s this.”

  It’s a long, narrow knife, sharp as glass and black as sin. It looks out of place among the feather pillows and ball gowns of Primrose’s world, as if it belongs to some other, darker story. “Where the hell did you get that?”

  Primrose holds the knife flat on her palms. “A traveling magician sold it to me when I was sixteen. He swore to me that a single cut was enough to end a life.” She says it flatly, matter-of-factly, but her eyes have gone hollow and her face is waxy again and suddenly I don’t feel jokey at all. Suddenly I wonder why a princess would sleep with a poison blade beneath her bed, why she would purchase it in the first place.

  I picture myself at sixteen, a scarecrow of a girl stuffed with hormones and hunger instead of straw, so sick of dying I would do anything to live. I ran very different calculations in those days, comparing the Greyhound bus schedule to the number of hours before my parents would report me missing, multiplying hoarded pills by the number of days I would have on the run. I figured I could make it to Chicago before the cops were even looking for me, and from there I could go—anywhere. Do anything. Steal a few months or years for myself rather than feeding them all to my parents and their broken hearts.

  Except I told Charm before I ran, and she instantly told Dad. He came up to my room looking like—I try not to remember it, actually. His face was a snapshot of my own death, a time-lapse video of the devastation I would leave behind me. We made a deal that night: if I promised not to run away, he promised to stop trying so hard to keep me.

  A week later I took the SAT and dropped out of high school with my parents’ blessing. Dad paid my application fee and I enrolled at Ohio University that fall. I loved it. The food was bad and my roommate was a nightmare who kept trying to sell me essential oils, but it was the first time I’d felt like a real adult. Like someone who owned their future, who belonged to no one but herself.

  That feeling had been trickling away all summer as I folded myself back into the teenage-shaped hole I left behind at my parents, but what would I have done without that brief escape? What if I’d been trapped with no future and no friends, like Primrose? Perhaps I would have turned toward a darker, uglier kind of escape.

  I take the knife from Primrose very, very carefully. “How … h
elpful. I’ll carry this, okay?” I wrap it in the least expensive-looking skirt I can find. “So. Which way to the stables?”

  “What—you mean now? Tonight?”

  Apparently Primrose never learned dying girl rule #1: move fast. “Yes, dummy. How long do you think you can go without sleep?”

  * * *

  IN THE FOLLOWING hour, several things become clear to me.

  First, that Primrose isn’t quite as helpless and damsel-in-distress-ish as I thought. Rather than sneaking through the castle and making off with a pair of horses by moonlight, she simply informs the stable hands that she and her ladies are going for a dawn ride through the countryside and would like two horses saddled and waiting with a picnic packed for six, please and thank you. “They won’t miss us for hours, this way,” she says calmly.

  Second, that I do not technically “know” how to ride a “horse,” to quote an unnecessarily shocked princess. “But how do you travel in your land? Surely you do not walk?” I consider explaining about internal combustion engines and state highways and asking if she’d like to try driving a stick shift with a sketchy second gear. I shrug instead.

  Third, that one cannot learn to ride a horse in five minutes, at least not well enough to be trusted on a midnight journey to the Forbidden Moor.

  I wind up perched behind the princess on a pile of folded blankets, clinging desperately to her traveling cloak and thinking that Charm would give a year of her life to be cozied up behind Primrose as she galloped into the night on a daring half-cocked rescue mission.

  Even I can admit it’s pretty cool. The air is clean and sharp and the stars reel above us like ciphers or hieroglyphs, stories written in a language I don’t know. The trees are dark Arthur Rackham-ish tangles on either side of the road, reaching for us with wicked fingers while the night birds sing strange songs. My lungs ache and my legs are numb and I know Dad would have a stroke if he could see me, but he can’t, and for tonight at least my life is my own, to waste or squander or give to someone else, no matter how little of it might be left.

  We stop twice that night. The first time in a grove of tall pines, silver-blue in the moonlight, where the horse’s hooves are silenced by soft needles. I don’t so much dismount as fall sideways, barely managing to keep my phone uncrushed in my back pocket. The princess makes a graceful, sweeping gesture that somehow ends with her standing beside her horse, cloak pooled elegantly around her slippered feet. Her shoulders are a bowed line.

  I don’t generally do a lot of worrying about other people, except for Charm and my parents, but even I can see she’s tired. “We could sleep here if you like.” I poke the deep-piled pine needles. “It’s nice and squashy.”

  Primrose shakes her head. “I’d like to be further from the castle before I sleep.” There’s a green gleam in her eyes as she looks back the way we came.

  We ride on.

  The next time we stop is beneath a gnarled hawthorn, where the earth is bare and knotted with roots. Primrose’s dismount looks much more like mine this time, her legs stiff, her hands clumsy. I half catch her in my arms, thinking only briefly how heroic I look before settling her between the least lumpy roots. By the time I tuck our extra clothes and blankets around her, she’s asleep.

  Which is just as well, because that way she can’t comment on my intelligence or life skills as I wrangle the saddle off the horse and loop her reins around a low branch. The princess’s horse must be a patient soul, because she merely gives me a long-suffering ear flick rather than stomping me into jelly.

  I pull my arms inside my hoodie sleeves and hunch against the warm leather of the saddle, looking up at stars through the crosshatched branches and doubting very much that I’ll be able to sleep.

  I must be wrong, because I wake abruptly, my legs stiff and damp, dew-soaked. The sky is the profound, reproachful black of four in the morning and someone is moving nearby.

  It’s Primrose, standing, her head tilted oddly to one side, her eyes wide open. There’s a sickly shine to them, like the reflection of something poisonous.

  “Princess?” She doesn’t seem to hear me. She takes a step deeper into the woods, then another, as if there’s an invisible thread tugging her deeper into a labyrinth. “Primrose!”

  I heave upright and stumble toward her, grabbing her shoulders and shaking hard. “Jesus, wake up!” She does. I feel the weird tension slide out of her body, her arms un-tensing beneath my hands. I release her.

  “Lady Zinnia?” She looks back at me with eyes that are vague and sleep-soft, perfectly blue once more. “What—oh. Dear.”

  I swallow the stale taste of fear. “Yeah.” It’s one thing to read about dark enchantments and fairy curses; it’s quite another to watch them take hold of a woman’s will and march her like a porcelain puppet toward her own doom. The Disneyland sheen of this place is wearing thin, like paint peeling to reveal black mold running beneath it.

  I shrug at her with my hands shoved deep in my jean pockets. “I’ll keep watch, if you want to get a little more sleep.”

  She worries at her lower lip with teeth that are too white in the dark. She nods and curls back among the hawthorn roots, arms wrapped tight around herself, hair spilling over her cloak.

  I watch in silence until her body uncoils and her fingers unclench. Afterward I find myself squinting into the spaces between trees, looking for a hint of green or the shine of a spindle’s end, getting steadily more spooked by the cool touch of wind down my neck and the soft scuttling sounds of night creatures in the woods. I decide it’s a good time to check my phone.

  There are several dozen more texts from Charm, mostly threats upon my person should I fail to return; a handful from Dad, their tone genial listing toward worried; one from the Roseville Public Library informing me that I now owe them $15.75 in fines and/or my firstborn child.

  A few hours ago it had seemed like a perfectly fine idea to go have a little adventure, face down a fairy, rescue a princess (and maybe, somehow, myself), and zap back home like Bilbo strolling back into the Shire. But now—huddled in the cold dark with a cursed princess and a tightness in my chest that’s either terror or impending death—I’m feeling more like Frodo, whose story was full of danger. Who never did get to return home, or at least not for long.

  I text Charm. going to face Maleficent and break curse, should be home in three days.

  She texts back so fast I feel a hot stab of guilt, knowing she’s sleeping with her ringer on. how are you getting home??

  portkey?

  there’s no such thing as portkeys asshole. A brief pause. and i thought we agreed never to mention joanne or her works ever again

  I consider asking her how she would explain interdimensional travel into overlapping fictional narratives, but Charm probably has at least three solid theories she would like to discuss. At length. With slides. So instead I lean over to take another picture of Primrose. Even on my mediocre camera, blurred and dim, she’s luminous. Her face glows white out of the gloom, a sleeping beauty by way of Rembrandt.

  A slight pause before she replies: do not attempt to distract me with your hot imaginary friend. I repeat: there’s no such thing as portkeys

  says who

  says physics

  hon, I respond patiently, I am currently on a quest to find and defeat a wicked fairy. pretty sure the laws of physics no longer apply

  the laws of physics always apply, that’s why we call them laws

  There’s a long gap while her texting bubble appears and disappears.

  give her hell from me, babe

  I can almost hear the rasp of Charm’s voice as she says it, the sudden sincerity that no one expects from a girl with a giant Golden Age Superman tattoo on her shoulder. There’s no reason to choke up over it, so I don’t. I send her another xoxo and power the phone off before the battery can dip below 20 percent.

  After that I sit with my arms around my shins and my cheek on my knees, watching the dawn paint the princess in silver and shadow
and wondering what it would feel like to sleep and keep sleeping. Better than dying, I guess, but Jesus—what a shitty story the two of us were given. I don’t know about the moral arc of the universe, but our arcs sure as hell don’t bend toward justice.

  Unless we change them. Unless we grab our narratives by the ear and drag them kicking and screaming toward better endings. Maybe the universe doesn’t naturally bend toward justice either; maybe it’s only the weight of hands and hearts pulling it true, inch by stubborn inch.

  * * *

  “SO, WHY IS the moor forbidden?” I’m aiming for nonchalant, but my voice sounds tense in my ears. “Are there flying monkeys? Rodents of Unusual Size?”

  “What?”

  “Just checking.”

  It’s the morning of the third day and we’ve abandoned the road, picking our way over scrubby hills and wind-scoured stone. The sun is grayish and reluctant here, as if it’s shining through greasy paper, and the trees are stunted and crabbed.

  Primrose has pulled the horse to a stop before a pair of tall, jagged stones. They aren’t carved with strange symbols or glowing or anything, but there’s something deliberate about the angle of them, like they aren’t there by accident.

  The princess makes her graceful dismount and touches her palm to the sharp edge of the stone. “It’s forbidden because my father wishes to protect his people, and the moor is dangerous if you don’t know the way.”

  “Do we know the way?”

  “Harold told me. In some detail.” The flatness of her tone suggests that Harold is one of those men whose conversations are more like long, boastful speeches. “I listened well.”

  Without the slightest change of expression, without even drawing a breath, Primrose drags her palm hard across the edge. When she draws back the stone shines slick and dark with blood.

  “Jesus, Primrose, what are you doing?”

  She doesn’t answer, but merely lifts her hand to the sky, palm up. I watch her blood run down her wrist, red as roses, red as riding hoods. I was so sure I’d landed in one of those soft, G-rated fairy tales, stripped of medieval horrors; I can feel it shifting beneath my feet, twisting toward the kind of tale where prices are paid and blood is spilled.