A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables #2)(15)

I try to make my face equally bland and pleasant. “She’s good. Fine. She’s married now, actually.” My smile feels weird but I can’t seem to make it un-weird. “Doing the happily-ever-after thing, I guess.”

Zellandine gives me a nod containing more sympathy than is strictly warranted. “So how long has it been since you last saw her?”

“A while. A few months.” Six months and twelve days, but whatever. “Anyway, I don’t know why it matters. What matters is what the hell is going on? What are you doing here?”

Zellandine doesn’t look even slightly thrown by the topic change; it’s annoyingly hard to surprise a prophetic fairy. “I could ask you the same thing,” she replies evenly. When I squint, she lifts one shoulder. “This isn’t your story either.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not my fault. I’m headed back to the Sleeping Beauty–verse as soon as I can.” I don’t mention the secret, wild hope that I don’t have to return to my own story at all. That I’ve found a way to break free of this endless cycle of cursed girls and pricked fingers, to punch through the walls of my own plot and bust into other narrative dimensions like a fairy-tale Kool-Aid Man. And if I can make a new beginning for myself in some other story—what’s to stop me making a new ending too?

There’s a pause before I can speak through the hope now crawling up my throat. “I was kidnapped by an evil queen. How did you get here?”

Zellandine sits back in her chair, watching me as if she knows exactly what I didn’t say. “It’s happened a few times now. I step outside and find myself in deep woods I’ve never seen before, on a mountaintop that isn’t mine. Once, I woke to find my house all covered in sweets, with gingerbread for shingles and boiled sugar for window panes.”

I think: Oh shit. I say: “Oh shit.” I remember the talking wolf in the queen’s world, my juice-stained copy of Grimms’ fairy tales, things shaken loose from their moorings and set adrift. “You’re slipping between stories.”

Zellandine tilts her head. “There do seem to be a lot of tales that require someone old and magical living alone in the woods. I don’t mind it, mostly—cursing the occasional haughty prince, letting a handsome knight or two warm themselves by my fire.” I check her face for innuendo and find it suspiciously absent. “But it’s been happening more and more often. And I’m starting to feel like…” She trails away, her hand stroking the inside of her wrist. The flesh there has milky translucence I don’t remember from five years before.

“Like butter spread over too much bread?”

“Yes, like that,” she breathes. “And I confess, I was fond of my home on the mountainside. We miss it.” Her blackbird trills to her, but I hardly notice because the word home is rattling between my ribs like a stray bullet, carelessly fired. I think of my phone, fully charged but turned off, zipped in one of those inner backpack pockets no one ever opens. I think of three hands buried in the same popcorn bowl. I think of Charm’s face the last time I saw her, asking me for something I couldn’t give.

“Well.” I clear my throat, searching for levity and finding nothing but sickly sarcasm. “You have to admit, your story kind of sucked.”

“But it was mine.” Zellandine’s tone is sharper than I’ve heard before, grief-edged. She bites the inside of her cheek before adding, “I might not have chosen it, but I always chose what to do next.”

“Often on other people’s behalf, if I remember right.”

I meant it as a stinging rebuke, but Zellandine is nodding thoughtfully. “To their detriment, I think now. I was trying to save others from a fate like mine, but perhaps I was taking away their own right to choose, to make of their stories what they would.”

She gives me such a mild look that I bristle defensively. “Hey, I’m not—it’s not like that. I’m helping people fix their stories. And if they can’t be fixed, I help them escape.”

Zellandine is still looking at me with that weaponized mildness. “Oh, I don’t think any of us escape our stories entirely.”

“Prim did.”

“Did she?” I want to sneer that I don’t think Perrault or Disney ever pictured Sleeping Beauty marrying a hot butch with an undercut and a Superman tattoo, except I have this horrible sinking feeling that she might be right. I mean, I said it myself: She’s doing the happily-ever-after thing, I guess.

I raise my hands in mock-surrender, abruptly exhausted. “Well. I’m sorry about the narrative slippage. But I’m glad you were here tonight.” My chair scrapes against wood as I stand and make my way toward the steps.

Zellandine speaks just as my hand lands on the railing. “I don’t understand what’s happening to me, or how.” She turns, her eyes catching the dying red of the hearth, and in that moment I see her as she must be in other stories: the fairy who curses kingdoms, the crone who punishes ungrateful travelers, the witch who waits in the woods.

Her mouth twists, wry and tired, and she is only Zellandine again. “But I think both of us know why.”



* * *



ZELLANDINE’S BEDS ARE squashy and warm, piled deep with flannel and down, but I sleep in fitful bursts. Each time I drift toward unconsciousness I’m woken by some small noise—the scritching of skeletal black branches at the window, the distant shrieks of night birds—and left wide-eyed and panting in a pool of adrenaline. Snow White is apparently accustomed to sleeping through horror movie sound effects, but every time I look toward the queen’s bed, I catch the lambent white of open eyes before both of us turn away.