A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)(15)

“You could have—” Primrose pauses and I watch her throat bob, like she’s swallowing something barbed. “You could have done something else. Warned me or protected me, stolen me away—”

“I’ve tried that. I’ve built towers for girls and kept them locked away. I’ve chased them into the deep woods and left seven good men to guard them. I’ve turned their husbands into beasts and bears, set their suitors impossible tasks. I’ve done it all, and sometimes it has worked. But it’s difficult to disappear a princess. There tend to be wars and hunts and stories that end with witches dancing in hot iron shoes. So I did what I could. I gave you a blessing disguised as a curse, an enchantment that would prevent your engagement and marriage. I gave you one-and-twenty years to walk the earth on your own terms, unpursued by man—”

“Oh, hardly that.” Primrose’s voice is beyond bitter, almost savage. It occurs to me that I got it wrong, and that the knife beneath her pillow might not have been intended for her own flesh at all. I thought she was an Aurora, empty and flat as cardboard, but she was just a girl doing her best to survive in a cruel world, like the rest of us.

“—followed by a century to sleep protected by a hedge of thorns so high no man could reach you. I gave you the hope that when you wake you will be forgotten, no longer a princess but merely a woman, and freer for it. The hope that the world might grow kinder while you sleep.”

Zellandine, who is neither selfish nor a coward, reaches her hand toward Primrose’s. “I’m sorry if it isn’t enough. It’s all I could give, and there’s no changing it now.”

Primrose stands before the fairy’s fingers can find hers, chair scraping across the floorboards, hands curled into fists. “I can’t—I need—” She reels for the door and staggers out into the velveteen night before I can do more than say her name.

The door swings stupidly behind her, swaying in the breeze. I sit watching it for a while, my tea freezing and my heart aching, before Zellandine observes, “The heaviest burdens are those you bear alone.”

I transfer my blank stare to her and she adds, a little less mystically and more acerbically, “Go talk to her, girl.” I do as I’m told.





6


SHE’S SITTING AMONG the pale-petaled wildflowers, her arms wrapped around her knees and her eyes fixed on the eastern horizon. Her face makes me think of those eerie Renaissance paintings of Death and the Maiden, youthful beauties dancing with alabaster skeletons.

“Hey,” I offer, feebly. She doesn’t answer.

I sit carefully beside her and run my fingertips over the white satin flowers. When I was a girl, I used to pull daisy petals one by one and play my own macabre version of he loves me/he loves me not. It went I live/I die, and I would keep playing until I ended on an I live.

“I heard you speak to me, that night. When I almost touched the spindle.” She sounds distant and dreamy, as if she’s talking in her sleep.

I twist at a flower stem. “I called you a bonehead.”

“You told me not to do it. And it was like a spark falling into my mind, catching me on fire. I asked for your help because it was the first time I thought anyone could help me, that I might truly have a choice. That my own will might matter.” She’s staring at the horizon, where the gray promise of dawn is gathering. “I’d almost begun to believe it.”

My lungs feel tight and I don’t know if it’s the amyloidosis or the heartbreak. “Yeah. Yeah, me too.” I’d half convinced myself that I’d found a loophole, a workaround, a way out of my bullshit story. I thought the two of us together might change the rules. But even in a world of magic and miracles, both of us remain damned. I clear my throat. “I’m sorry.”

Primrose shakes her head, hair rippling silver in the starlight. “Don’t be. These three days have been the best of my life.” I think of the long days of riding and the haunted nights among the hawthorn roots, of a raven’s tongue lapping at her blood, and try not to reflect too deeply on what this says about the princess’s quality of life.

“So. What now?”



She lifts her shoulder in a gesture that might be called a shrug in a less graceful person. “Return to my father’s castle and bid my parents farewell. Then I suppose I prick my finger on the spindle’s end, the way I was always going to. Perhaps you might do the same, and return home.” She doesn’t sound sad or angry; she sounds like a woman resigned to her fate. This time I’m sure the tightness in my chest is coming from my heart.

Primrose stands and offers me her hand. She tries to make herself smile and doesn’t quite manage it. “Maybe we’ll both wake up in a better world.”

The fairy packs us seedy bread and salted meat and twelve shining apples before we leave. She takes our hands in hers and rubs her thumb across the crisscrossed lines of our palms. “Come visit me, after,” she tells us, which displays what my grandmother would call a lot of damn gall, given that she knows we’re riding toward certain death/a century-long sleep.

We cross the gentle green meadow that was once the Forbidden Moor, following a blackbird that was once a raven. I look back just before we pass through the standing stones. Instead of that ruinous castle there’s only a stone hut leaning into the mountainside, sunbaked and sweet and just a little lonely. As we step between the stones the hut vanishes, hidden by greasy coils of mist and miles of gloomy moor once more. The blackbird becomes a raven again, all curved talons and ragged feathers. He watches us leave with a bright black eye.