A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)(22)

I open my eyes to the same face I’ve woken up to on hundreds of Saturday mornings since second grade: Charmaine Baldwin. She’s looming over me with a worried frown and wild hair. I give her a lopsided smile. “Morning, sunshine.”

She rests her forehead very briefly against mine. “Oh, thank Jesus.”

I sit up slowly, achy and stiff, feeling simultaneously hungover and still drunk, to find that my list of assets has expanded considerably while I slept: there are now four women crammed into my narrow, rose-filled cell.

Charm, sitting cross-legged with her tutu crumpled in her lap and her head tilted back against the bars, eyes closed in relief. The short-haired girl with the sword and the stubborn jaw who reminds me of every young adult protagonist from the ’90s; the Black space princess wearing a silvery suit and a skeptical expression, stepped straight out of science fiction; the armored Viking woman whose name is probably something like Brunhilda and whose shoulders are wider than any three of us shoved together.

All of them came when I called. All of them stepped out of their own narratives to save someone else. All of them are staring at me.

“Uh,” I begin auspiciously. “Thank you all for coming.” I’m banking on the fairy tale logic of this world to let them understand me. “I think you’re all—well, I think we’re all versions of the same story, retold in different realities. The universe is like a book, see, and telling a story is like writing on a page. And if a story is told enough times, the ink bleeds through.” Charm makes a small, pained sound at the scientific absurdity of my explanation. The other beauties stare at me in unblinking unison.

“So we’re … the ink? In this metaphor?” It’s the space princess, whose expression of skepticism has deepened by several degrees.

“Yes?”

Charm rescues me, as usual. “Don’t we have a wedding to stop? A princess to save?”

“Oh, right. So there’s another one of us here. She was cursed to prick her finger on a spindle’s end and fall into a hundred-year sleep”—a series of grim nods from the other beauties—“except it turns out the curse was supposed to save her from a shitty marriage”—at least two grim nods—“and she’s probably standing at the altar right now. I was hoping you could help me bust out of here and save her.”

A painful silence follows while they exchange a series of glances. The ’90s heroine-type cocks her head at me. “And afterward you’ll send us home?”

“Or wherever else you want to go.” Assuming I can arrange another moment of sufficient narrative resonance, but I elect not to alarm them with the sketchy details of my sketchy-ass plan.

The Viking woman gives a wordless shrug, tosses her pale braids over one shoulder, and turns to face the barred door. She wraps her scarred fists around the bars and muscle ripples across her back. Ropes of tendon twist down her arms.

I have time to think no fucking way before the iron gives a long groan of submission. The bars are warping beneath her fists, bending slowly inward, when a blue bolt of light streaks past my ear. It sizzles through the iron like spit through tissue paper, leaving nothing but a ragged, faintly smoking hole where the latch used to be. The Viking lets go of the bars. The door swings meekly open.

We turn collectively toward the space princess, who is holstering something shiny and chrome that’s probably called a blaster or a plasma arc. I hear Charm whisper a reverent hot damn.



We ascend the stairs in single file, boots and tennis shoes and bare feet tapping against the stone. A pair of guards wait at the top, hands slack around their spears, entirely unprepared for a legion of renegade princesses to descend upon them like a set of mismatched Valkyries.

In less than ten seconds Brunhilda and the girl with the sword have them kneeling, disarmed, and gibbering, their own weapons leveled at their throats. I lean down and give a small wave. “Hi, sorry. Where’s the chapel? We’ve got a happily ever after to stop.”



There’s a queasy second where I think they might pass out before answering, but one of them swallows against his own spearpoint and raises a shaking finger. I thank them both sincerely before Brunhilda clangs their helmets together like brass bells. They slump against the wall and I think a little giddily of the versions of this story where the castle falls asleep with its princess, from kings to cooks to the mice in the walls.

Charm takes off down the corridor and I follow, and then the five of us are flying, running down toward the wedding like last chances or last-second miracles, like twist endings in a story you’ve heard too many times.



* * *



LOGICALLY WE COULD show up at the ceremony at the wrong time: ten minutes too early, when guests are still filing into the pews, or half an hour too late, when the chapel is emptying and the princess has already been swept away by her uncharming prince.

But we’re in a fairy tale, and fairy tales have a logic all their own.

We skid around a final corner and see a pair of arched doors standing open. Ceremonial-sounding Latin drifts through them, echoing off stone walls. I tiptoe to the doorway and peer around the corner. The room is smaller than I expected, with a dozen rows of pews lined up beneath a vaulted ceiling. Morning light falls through a single circular window, gilding the bride and groom on the dais below.

Princess Primrose looks literally divine, Boticelli’s Venus with clothes. Her hair is burnished gold beneath the thinnest whisper of a veil; her gown is a rich rose the precise shade of her lips. Her face is coldest ivory.