A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)(18)

Whatever. Soon enough I’ll be home and his fiancée will be asleep, and none of his suspicions will matter.

Eventually the King blusters himself into silence and tells his daughter they’ll discuss her punishment in the morning.

“Of course, Father,” Primrose says placidly. Her eyes cut to her mother and for a moment the glass cracks. Her lips twist, her mouth half opens, but all she says is, “Good night, Mother.” The Queen dips her head in a low, almost apologetic nod that makes me wonder if her love might not be quite so burdensome.

The two of us are escorted up to her rooms by a bustling flock of maids and ladies. The princess is fed and fussed over, pampered and cooed at, bathed and dressed in a nightgown so stiff with embroidery it can’t possibly be comfortable. It’s nearly midnight before they leave us alone.

Primrose climbs into that enormous, ridiculous bed, half swallowed by eiderdown and shadow. “You—you’ll follow me, when I go?”

“Yeah.” I consider the window seat or the carved chairs, then peel out of my hoodie and tennis shoes and crawl in bed after the princess. She doesn’t move or speak, but I catch the wet gleam of her eyes in the dark, the silent slide of tears. I pretend I’m Charm, who knows how to comfort someone who can’t be comforted. “Hey, it’s okay, alright? I’ll walk with you, every step. You won’t be alone.” We might not be able to fix our bullshit stories, but surely we can be less lonely inside them, here at the end. “Just go to sleep. I’m right here.”

Her hand reaches into the space between us and I place my palm over it. We fall asleep curled toward one another like a pair of parentheses, like bookends on either side of the same shitty book.



* * *



THE CURSE COMES for her in the fathomless black after midnight, but long before dawn. I wake to find the princess sitting up, her eyes open and vacant, foxfire green. She climbs out of bed like a sleepwalker, full of terrible, invisible purpose, and I pad behind her on bare feet.

The castle corridors are twistier and colder than I remember, with every torch doused and every door closed. The wind whips through narrow slits in the stone, tangling Primrose’s hair and raising goosebumps on my arms as we wind down one corridor and up another, through a plain door I bet a million bucks didn’t exist until just now. Behind it are stairs that spiral endlessly upward, lit by a sourceless, sickly light.

I don’t need to tell you what happens next. You know how the story goes: the princess climbs the tower. The spinning wheel waits. She reaches one long, tapered finger toward it, her eyes faraway and faintly troubled, as if she’s dreaming an unpleasant dream from which she can’t wake.

The only difference is me. A second princess, crownless and greasy-haired, desperately in need of modern medicine and clean laundry, quietly crying in the shadows behind her. “Goodnight, princess,” I whisper. She hesitates, the frown lines on her face deepening briefly before the fairy’s enchantment smooths them away.

Her finger is an inch from the spindle’s end when I hear a sound I’ve never heard in real life, but which I recognize from an adolescence spent rewatching Lord of the Rings: a sword being drawn from a scabbard. Then comes the ringing of boots on stairs, the drag of cloaks on stone, and armored men pour into the tower room.

A broad hand closes around Primrose’s arm and hauls her backward. A silver blade crashes down on the spinning wheel and I flinch from flying splinters. I lower my arms to see a square-jawed man standing triumphantly above the shattered wreckage of the thing that was my only way home.

Prince Harold is panting lightly, his fingers still tight around Primrose’s arm. He casts a heroic glance in her direction, a curl of hair falling artfully across his forehead. “You are safe, princess, do not fear.”

Primrose doesn’t look frightened. She looks baffled and bleary, distantly annoyed. Harold doesn’t seem to notice. He raises his sword once more and points it directly at my chest. “Guards! Seize her!”



I have time for a single airless “what the shit” before my arms are wrenched behind me and my wrists are wrapped in cold iron. I writhe against the chains, but I can feel the weakness of my limbs, the stony strength of the men holding me.

Harold shakes his head at me, flicking that perfect curl from his forehead. “Did you think you could evade me twice, fairy?” He gestures imperiously to the tower steps. “To the dungeons.”





7


THE DUNGEON ISN’T so much a place as a collection of generic dungeon-ish elements: damp stone walls and iron bars; dangling chains stained with God knows what; brittle bones piled in the corners, cracked and yellow; a decayed sweetness in the air, like a root cellar with something rotting in it.

In all my twenty-one years of bad luck, I don’t think I’ve ever been this thoroughly, irredeemably fucked. I’m locked in a windowless cell in the wrong reality, wondering how long I can stay on my feet before I’m forced to sit on the stained stone floor. I’m hungry and thirsty and fatally ill. I have no way home. My only friend in this entire backwards-ass pre-Enlightenment world is about to be married off to a sentient cleft chin. Right now, the King is probably debating whether to drown me or burn me or make me dance in hot iron shoes.

I wanted to wrench my story off its tracks, to strike out toward some better ending, but all I’ve done is change my lines. I made myself the witch, and witches have even worse endings than princesses.