A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)(9)

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IN THE FOLLOWING hour, several things become clear to me.

First, that Primrose isn’t quite as helpless and damsel-in-distress-ish as I thought. Rather than sneaking through the castle and making off with a pair of horses by moonlight, she simply informs the stable hands that she and her ladies are going for a dawn ride through the countryside and would like two horses saddled and waiting with a picnic packed for six, please and thank you. “They won’t miss us for hours, this way,” she says calmly.

Second, that I do not technically “know” how to ride a “horse,” to quote an unnecessarily shocked princess. “But how do you travel in your land? Surely you do not walk?” I consider explaining about internal combustion engines and state highways and asking if she’d like to try driving a stick shift with a sketchy second gear. I shrug instead.

Third, that one cannot learn to ride a horse in five minutes, at least not well enough to be trusted on a midnight journey to the Forbidden Moor.

I wind up perched behind the princess on a pile of folded blankets, clinging desperately to her traveling cloak and thinking that Charm would give a year of her life to be cozied up behind Primrose as she galloped into the night on a daring half-cocked rescue mission.

Even I can admit it’s pretty cool. The air is clean and sharp and the stars reel above us like ciphers or hieroglyphs, stories written in a language I don’t know. The trees are dark Arthur Rackham-ish tangles on either side of the road, reaching for us with wicked fingers while the night birds sing strange songs. My lungs ache and my legs are numb and I know Dad would have a stroke if he could see me, but he can’t, and for tonight at least my life is my own, to waste or squander or give to someone else, no matter how little of it might be left.

We stop twice that night. The first time in a grove of tall pines, silver-blue in the moonlight, where the horse’s hooves are silenced by soft needles. I don’t so much dismount as fall sideways, barely managing to keep my phone uncrushed in my back pocket. The princess makes a graceful, sweeping gesture that somehow ends with her standing beside her horse, cloak pooled elegantly around her slippered feet. Her shoulders are a bowed line.

I don’t generally do a lot of worrying about other people, except for Charm and my parents, but even I can see she’s tired. “We could sleep here if you like.” I poke the deep-piled pine needles. “It’s nice and squashy.”

Primrose shakes her head. “I’d like to be further from the castle before I sleep.” There’s a green gleam in her eyes as she looks back the way we came.

We ride on.

The next time we stop is beneath a gnarled hawthorn, where the earth is bare and knotted with roots. Primrose’s dismount looks much more like mine this time, her legs stiff, her hands clumsy. I half catch her in my arms, thinking only briefly how heroic I look before settling her between the least lumpy roots. By the time I tuck our extra clothes and blankets around her, she’s asleep.

Which is just as well, because that way she can’t comment on my intelligence or life skills as I wrangle the saddle off the horse and loop her reins around a low branch. The princess’s horse must be a patient soul, because she merely gives me a long-suffering ear flick rather than stomping me into jelly.

I pull my arms inside my hoodie sleeves and hunch against the warm leather of the saddle, looking up at stars through the crosshatched branches and doubting very much that I’ll be able to sleep.

I must be wrong, because I wake abruptly, my legs stiff and damp, dew-soaked. The sky is the profound, reproachful black of four in the morning and someone is moving nearby.

It’s Primrose, standing, her head tilted oddly to one side, her eyes wide open. There’s a sickly shine to them, like the reflection of something poisonous.

“Princess?” She doesn’t seem to hear me. She takes a step deeper into the woods, then another, as if there’s an invisible thread tugging her deeper into a labyrinth. “Primrose!”

I heave upright and stumble toward her, grabbing her shoulders and shaking hard. “Jesus, wake up!” She does. I feel the weird tension slide out of her body, her arms un-tensing beneath my hands. I release her.

“Lady Zinnia?” She looks back at me with eyes that are vague and sleep-soft, perfectly blue once more. “What—oh. Dear.”

I swallow the stale taste of fear. “Yeah.” It’s one thing to read about dark enchantments and fairy curses; it’s quite another to watch them take hold of a woman’s will and march her like a porcelain puppet toward her own doom. The Disneyland sheen of this place is wearing thin, like paint peeling to reveal black mold running beneath it.

I shrug at her with my hands shoved deep in my jean pockets. “I’ll keep watch, if you want to get a little more sleep.”

She worries at her lower lip with teeth that are too white in the dark. She nods and curls back among the hawthorn roots, arms wrapped tight around herself, hair spilling over her cloak.

I watch in silence until her body uncoils and her fingers unclench. Afterward I find myself squinting into the spaces between trees, looking for a hint of green or the shine of a spindle’s end, getting steadily more spooked by the cool touch of wind down my neck and the soft scuttling sounds of night creatures in the woods. I decide it’s a good time to check my phone.

There are several dozen more texts from Charm, mostly threats upon my person should I fail to return; a handful from Dad, their tone genial listing toward worried; one from the Roseville Public Library informing me that I now owe them $15.75 in fines and/or my firstborn child.