A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables #2)(23)

She swallows. “They—yes.” She swallows again, visibly compartmentalizing, wrenching her story back on the rails. “Anyway. The princes began to arrive before she was fifteen. They lounged around my castle, eating from my table while they wooed my stepchild and plotted to take my throne. She was so young … but they came anyway. Every hungry second son who wanted a kingdom of his own.”

Eva’s eyes are narrowed now, her jaw firm. “So I did what I had to. I chased Snow White away, sent her running into the forest pursued by the only man I was certain would never harm her. Berthold came back with that pig’s liver, thinking himself so clever, and I thanked him so prettily.”

I recall Berthold’s handsome, affable, slightly stupid face. I suppose if I genuinely wanted someone assassinated, he would not be my first choice. It occurs to me that the queen must have known he wouldn’t hurt me, either, if I tried to escape.

Eva continues on a long sigh. “I’d hoped never to hear from Snow White again. But she didn’t run far enough, and soon there were whispers about a pretty girl hidden in the woods, and the princes were circling like damned vultures, and I thought—if she were dead, or seemed to be dead, they would desist.” Another sigh, even longer. “It seems I underestimated their appetites.”

Now feels like the moment to apologize or sympathize, or, ideally, to stroke her straggling hair away from her face and press my lips tenderly to her forehead. But we’re six feet apart and she probably hates my guts. “Look, Eva—Your Majesty, I—”

“All I wanted was power.” Her lips make a bitter shape. “I know how I must sound, what you must think of me, but I only mean power over myself. Power to make my own choices, and arrive at my own ends.”

“It’s called agency.” And they said my humanities degree would never come in handy. “It’s like, the power you exert over your own narrative.”

“It’s what protagonists have, then.”

“Sometimes even protagonists don’t get much of it. I mean, did you read Little Brier-Rose in that book? My story sucks ass.”

“Yes, I read it. It does indeed ‘suck ass.’” She pronounces the phrase with aristocratic precision, and I make a mental note to teach her more modern swears, provided the two of us survive our forthcoming execution. “But at least it belongs to you. Your name is right there in the title. The only name I have is”—her voice hitches, like a thread catching a stray nail—“the one you gave me.”

And, God help me, she sounds genuinely grateful. For a mean little nickname I invented just to annoy her. This strikes me as so backwards and awful that I find myself talking, the words falling out in a guilty, desperate tumble. “Charm—she’s my best friend—well, she was, until I screwed it all up—she says the key is narrative resonance.”

A flare of hope in Eva’s eyes, quickly snuffed. “The key to what?”

I take a short breath. “Moving between worlds.”

Eva says nothing, her eyes burning with the same desperate hunger that sent me tumbling into Prim’s world in the first place, that keeps me skipping from world to world like a stone across the cold surface of the universe. I find myself looking away, unable to stand the sight of so much hope, even secondhand. “So, the universe is like a book, right? And each world is like a page. And if you tell the same story enough times, you can bleed through to another page.”

“You mean—I must write down my own story?” Eva looks like she would open a vein and use her own blood as ink if I told her to.

“No, not literally.” Although the thought loosens something in the back of my skull, a question I’d been ignoring. I keep ignoring it. “You have to enact a familiar part of your plot. And then you can sort of slip between worlds and go somewhere else.” Charm is way better at explaining this stuff than me. I miss her, suddenly and fiercely, the way I haven’t let myself in six months and thirteen days. Or, if I’m being honest, five years.

I swallow a knot of snot. “But like, it only works in your own story, usually. I’d only ever zapped into other versions of Sleeping Beauty until you and your magic mirror landed me here.”

“So…” Eva closes her eyes. “We need the mirror.”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Why? It’s just a mirror I enchanted to show me the truth.”

My chains give an uncomfortable rattle. “I think—well, Zellandine thinks that the universes are getting squooshed together?” I applaud my own use of the passive voice. “So your mirror maybe slipped a little into other stories, and showed you other truths.”

I can feel Eva studying me. “It’s your fault, isn’t it? That’s what that fairy meant. The worlds are merging because you won’t finish your story.”

“Excuse me for not wanting to stand around and wait to die.”

“Oh, I quite understand.” Her tone turns acidic, blackly triumphant. “But then, I’m the villain.”

I don’t say anything in my defense, because there’s not much to say. Maybe I’m the villain too.

Eventually, I feel Eva’s bitterness drain away. “The mirror showed me you, out of all the possible people in all the universes.” It sounds almost like an apology. “Why?”