A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)(14)

“Soon enough I caught the eye of the king’s son. I was careful and quiet; I was sure never to tend his rooms when he was present. But one day he returned unexpectedly while I was shoveling the ashes from his hearth. He startled me when he spoke my name, and my heart betrayed me. The last thing I remember is the crack of my skull against the stones.” Zellandine is seated again at the table but she still isn’t looking at us. “When I woke, I was in a bed far grander than any I’d seen before. So wide my hands couldn’t find the edges, so soft I felt I was drowning, suffocated by silk.” Her nostrils flare wide, white-rimmed. “I can still smell it, if I’m not careful. Lye from the castle laundry, rose oil from his skin.”

Right now you’re thinking: this isn’t how the story goes. You might not have a degree in this shit but you’ve seen enough Disney movies and picture books to know there’s supposed to be a handsome prince and true love and a kiss, which can’t be consensual because unconscious people can’t consent, but at least it breaks the curse and the princess wakes up.

But in the very oldest versions of this story—before the Grimms, before Perrault—the prince does far worse than kiss her, and the princess never wakes up.

I make myself keep listening to Zellandine, unflinching. I always hate it when people flinch from me, as if my wounds are weapons.

“I did not tend the prince’s hearth after that. I hoped—if I were quiet and careful enough—I might be safe. That it might be over.” Zellandine’s fingers spread against the softness of her own stomach. “Soon it became clear that it wasn’t.”

In that oldest story the still-sleeping princess gives birth nine months after the prince visits her in the tower. Her hungry child suckles at her fingertips and removes the splinter of flax, and only then does she wake from her poisoned sleep.

I felt sick the first time I read it, betrayed by a story that I loved, that belonged to me. I slouched into class the next day, arms crossed and hoodie pulled up, scowling while Dr. Bastille lectured about women’s bodies and women’s choices in premodern Europe, about history translated into mythology and passivity into power. “You are accustomed to thinking of fairy tales as make-believe.” Dr. Bastille looked straight at me as she said it, her face somehow both searing and compassionate. “But they have only ever been mirrors.”

I reread the story when I got home, sitting cross-legged on my rose-patterned sheets, and felt a terrible, grown-up sort of melancholy descending over me. I used to see Sleeping Beauty as my wildest, most aspirational fantasy—a dying girl who didn’t die, a tragedy turned into a romance. But suddenly I saw her as my mere reflection: a girl with a shitty story. A girl whose choices were stolen from her.

Zellandine has fallen silent, staring at the table with her face folded tight. I take a sip of my flowery tea. “What happened to the baby?”

She looks up at me and her mouth twists. “There was no baby. I followed whispers and rumors and found a wisewoman in the mountains who knew the spell I needed. I chose a different story for myself, a better one.” The memory of that choice softens her face, settling like sunlight across her features. “I stayed with the wisewoman, after. She taught me everything she knew, and I taught myself more. I gathered power around myself until I could turn blades into feathers and huts into castles, could read the past in tea leaves and the future in the stars.”



It shouldn’t be possible to look intimidating sipping tea in a stained apron, but Zellandine’s eyes are rich and knowing and her smile is full of secrets. The smile dims a little when she continues. “Some of the things I read there … I saw my own story played out over and over. A thousand different girls with a thousand terrible fates. I began to interfere, where and when I could.” I feel a strange flick of shame as she says it; it seems that some dying girls follow different rules and dedicate themselves to saving others, rather than themselves.

“A witch, they called me, or a wicked fairy. I didn’t care.” Zellandine turns the rich blue of her gaze to Primrose for the first time in a long while. “I still don’t, if it saves even a single girl from the future she was given.”

Primrose can’t seem to look away, to move. “What fate did you see for me?” Her voice is the ghost of a whisper.

The blackbird on the fairy’s shoulder tilts its head to consider Primrose with one ink-drop eye. Zellandine strokes a finger down its breast. “Surely you can guess, princess.”

Primrose stares at her with brittle defiance.

“Without my curse, you would be wed by now,” says the fairy, ever so gently. “How well would your marriage bed suit you, do you think?”

The princess is still silent, but I watch the defiance crack and crumble around her shoulders. It leaves her face pale and exposed, and I understand from the anguished twist of her lips that it’s not only Prince Harold that she objects to, but princes in general, along with knights and kings and probably even handsome farm boys.

Zellandine continues in the same gentle, devastating voice. “I saw a marriage you did not want to a husband you could not love, who would not care whether you loved him or not. I saw a slow suffocation in fine sheets, and a woman so desperate to escape her story she might end it herself.”

Primrose lifts her teacup and sets it quickly back down, her hands trembling so hard that tea sloshes over the rim. I want to pat her shoulder or touch her arm, but I don’t. God, I wish Charm were here; she’d have the princess weeping therapeutically into her shoulder within seconds.