Something flashes behind the Queen’s eyes, red and wounded, before she banishes it. “It is our choices which determine our fates. Each of us gets what we deserve.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“How dare you—”
“I’m sorry. I meant: bullshit, Your Majesty. Did your daughter choose to be cursed? Did she choose to marry that dumbass prince?”
The Queen seethes at me, that red wound glistening behind her eyes. “There are certain duties—certain responsibilities that come with her rank and birth—”
Watching her choke with rage, a sudden suspicion occurs to me. I lean closer to the bars. “Did you choose to marry the King? Or would you have chosen differently for yourself, if you could? If this world permitted you to?”
The Queen is silent, her face wracked with rage or despair or maybe both. I can’t tell whether she’s considering helping me or setting me on fire herself. But why did she come down here without handmaidens or ladies or even guards? Why did she answer my call at all? Perhaps she, too, is hoping for a last-second miracle.
“Listen.” I whisper it, one conspirator to another. “Give me what I need, and I might be able to help her. I might be able to give your daughter the first real choice she’s had in her life.”
The Queen stares at me for a very long time. In her face I see the cold weight of the choices she didn’t have and the chances she didn’t take, the weary years waiting for fate to swallow her daughter the same way it swallowed her. I see her choosing now whether to make her love into a cage or a key.
She smooths her palms down the rich velvet of her gown and asks, quite matter-of-factly, “What do you require?”
* * *
THE ROSES ARRIVE by the bucket and barrelful, carried by bewildered guards and skeptical gardeners. They must have stripped every climbing vine and rosebush for miles, tying the flowers into hasty bundles and hauling them down to the dungeons to fulfill the fairy’s final request. They must think I’ve gone mad; they might be right.
By the time the last footsteps echo back up the stairs, my cell looks like a poorly tended greenhouse: roses burst from every corner, lining the walls and pressing through the bars. Fallen petals carpet the floor. The air smells green and sweet and bright, like summer. Like home.
I lie on the hard stone, the dampness leaching through my jeans, the petals clinging to the bare backs of my arms. I check my phone to see if Charm wrote back, if she made it to the tower, if the roses are still there—but it makes a final, weary bleat and the screen goes dark.
After that there’s nothing to do but fall asleep. I tell myself a fairy tale, the way I did when I was little, imagining a great unseen pen retracing the same letters over and over, the ink bleeding through to the next page.
I begin at the end: Once upon a time there was a princess who slept surrounded by roses.
8
I DON’T KNOW when I start dreaming, or whether it’s a dream at all. What do you call the vast nothing between the pages of the universe? The whisper-thin nowhere-at-all that waits in the place where one story ends and another begins?
The world smears sideways around me. A silent wind rushes past.
I see a woman sleeping in a castle bedroom, its windows dark with thorns.
I see a woman sleeping on a mountaintop, broad-shouldered and armored, surrounded by shields and flames. Her nose is crooked and scarred; she scowls even in her sleep.
I see a woman sleeping in a chrome coffin, white frost prickling across the deep brown of her skin. There is nothing but a thin metal hull between her and the star-strewn black of space.
I see a woman sleeping among the wild roses of the deep woods, her hair cropped short and her hand curled around the hilt of a sword.
I see women sleeping in towers and townhouses, attics and lakes, hospital beds and spaceships. Some of them sleep serenely, as if they’ve accepted their fate; some of them look like they fought fate tooth and nail and are still ready to go another round. All of them are alone.
Except me, because I have Charm. I see her sleeping on top of a grubby comforter in the abandoned guard tower on Route 32. The buckets and vases of roses still surround her, their edges curled black with age, their leaves shriveled. The bleached wing of her hair is fanned like a halo behind her head and there’s a misshapen tutu tugged over her jeans. The plastic crown she gave me on my birthday glimmers false gold on her brow. I told her to dress like a princess, and I guess this is as close as she gets.
I’m so relieved to see her I almost wake from this not-quite dream. I wasn’t sure it would work—Charm isn’t really a sleeping beauty. But she had a mother and father who longed for a daughter, and she shared my curse with me for almost twenty-one years. And she climbed to the top of the tallest tower in the land and slept surrounded by roses. It must have been enough.
Or maybe—I look at her hand, still curled tight around her phone, still waiting for my next text—we’re so much a part of one another’s stories that the laws of physics bend for us, just a little.
Charm opens her eyes. I see my name on her lips. Her hand reaches up toward me and I reach down to her, and I know, I know, that I could step out of this knockoff fairy tale world and go back into my own. I could go home, and to hell with Primrose and Prince Harold and shitty medieval gender roles.
But I promised the Queen I would try to change her daughter’s fate, and I promised Primrose she wouldn’t be alone. And maybe the dying girl rules are garbage, and instead of just trying not to die we should be trying to live.
My hand finds Charm’s and I haul her toward me. I feel her body land beside mine on the dungeon floor, smell the slightly chemical citrus of her hair, but I remain in the whirling in-between. I look out at all those hundreds of sleeping beauties, trapped and cursed, bound and buried, all alone. I wonder if they’ll even be able to hear me, and if any of them will answer; I wonder how badly they want out of their stories.
The void between worlds is nibbling at my edges, tearing at my borders. I don’t know what’ll happen if I linger too long, but I imagine it’s the same thing that would happen to a chickadee who lingered in a jet engine. I reach my hand out to all the sleeping princesses and whisper the word that brought me into Primrose’s world, that sent both our stories careening off their tracks: “Help.”
I land back on the cold cell of my floor, surrounded by roses and rot. My last bleary thought before I slip into true sleep, or possibly a coma, is that some of the beauties must have heard me.
Because some of them have answered.
* * *
HANDS ARE SHAKING my shoulders. A voice—a voice I know better than any other voice in the world—is saying my name. “Zinnia Gray. I did not zap myself into another dimension to watch you die. Wake up.”
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.
Prince Harold looks ridiculous. He’s wearing those embarrassing medieval pants that poof out above the knee and he’s looking at Primrose the way a man might look at his favorite golf club, fondly possessive.
Charm pokes her head around me and gives a silent whistle. “That’s her, huh?”
“Yeah.” I pull back from the doorway and chew my lip. “I can’t remember if they did the ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’ thing in medieval times, or if it’s one of those Victorian inventions, like brides wearing white, or homophobia. Should we wait and see or—”
But Charm isn’t listening, because Charm is already moving. She strolls through the chapel doors and down the aisle like a fashion model with a bad attitude, a deus ex machina in black jeans. “Hey!” Her voice shouts back at the congregation from the arched ceiling, redoubled. The Latin chanting stops abruptly. Charm slides her hands into her pockets and shrugs one shoulder, her chin high. “I object. Or whatever.”
The silence is broken only by the slide of satin as the gathered lords and ladies swivel in their seats to look at Charm. The Superman tattoo grins back at them.
Primrose turns slowly on the dais, her face filling with a desperate, painful hope, the kind of hope that has died at least once and is rising now from its own ashes. Her eyes fall on Charm and the hope ignites, blazing hot.
I look past the princess to the throne where her mother sits. The Queen looks suitably shocked, her hand held primly before her open mouth, but behind the shock I see an echo of the same hope that burns in her daughter’s face, like reflected flames.
The guards stir against the walls, their polished armor clanking awkwardly. I guess guard training doesn’t cover bleached blonds interrupting royal weddings, because they all look helplessly up at the dais for direction.
The King recovers his voice. “What are you waiting for? Seize this trespasser!”
I nod to the other beauties still hesitating with me, just outside the door. “That’s our cue, ladies.” The ’90s heroine tosses me a spear she stole from the dungeon guards and braces her sword crosswise. The space princess draws her blaster and does something complicated with the dials and buttons on the side. Brunhilda cracks her neck to one side and gives me a small, ominous smile.
We pour into the chapel after Charm, a horde of misfits bristling with weapons. I swing my spear with all the enthusiasm my scrawny, oxygen-starved muscles can muster, which isn’t much, but it doesn’t seem to matter—the guards are so thoroughly taken aback by our arrival they appear frozen in place, their jaws hanging loose.
“Primrose, come on!” The princess gathers her vast skirts in two hands and makes it one step down the dais before Prince Harold catches her wrist. The fabric of her sleeve puckers beneath his grip, crushed tight.
Primrose spins back to face him, golden hair arcing behind her, crown askew. The perfect porcelain princess has vanished, replaced by someone angrier and wearier and far less inclined to tolerate bullshit. “Let go of me,” she spits.
If Harold had the sense God gave a dachshund, he would listen to her. He doesn’t.
Primrose closes her eyes very briefly, either gathering herself or abandoning herself, before she punches him in the face. I don’t know much about hand-to-hand combat, but it’s pretty clear that she’s never punched anyone in the face before. It’s equally clear that Prince Harold has never been punched. He reels back with a profoundly unmanly squeal, releasing her wrist to press both hands to his face and bleat.
Primrose looks sick and giddy as she turns away, even paler than usual. Her feet tangle in the vast drape of her own dress and she topples forward, but Charm is somehow already at her side, arms outstretched. She catches the princess as she falls, a knight catching a swoonin
g damsel in a cheesy Hollywood movie.
Charm looks down at Primrose, her arm wrapped tight around her waist, and Primrose looks up at her, one hand resting delicately on her breastbone. The two of them remain that way so long I suspect they’ve forgotten the crowded chapel around us, the impending guards, everything in all the infinite universes except one another. I don’t know if I believe in love at first sight in the real world, but we’re not in the real world, are we?
I break away from the other beauties to flick the back of Charm’s head. “Let’s go, huh?”
“Right.” Charm detaches herself with some difficulty and leads Primrose by the hand. I linger long enough to glance up at the Queen and give her a final, unmilitary salute. She nods infinitesimally back, a captain remaining with her ship.
I’m turning away when Prince Harold says, his voice thick and fleshy through his swollen nose, “I don’t understand.” His eyes are on Primrose and Charm, on the place where their hands are joined together so tightly they look like a single creature.
“Well, Harold,” I say gently. “They’re lesbians.” The Prince stares back at me with the dull, suspicious squint of a man who has been mocked on previous occasions by words he doesn’t know.
“Guards!” The King bellows again, but whatever order he’s about to issue is interrupted by a soft gasp from the Queen. She appears to have fainted, contriving to drape herself perfectly across her husband’s lap.
It would be a shame to waste whatever seconds she’s bought us. I join my fellow sleeping beauties and we make our way back down the aisle surrounded by the blue sizzle of blaster fire and the clang of blade against blade. Some brighter-than-average guard has drawn and barred the chapel door, entirely failing to calculate the breadth of Brunhilda’s shoulders or the circumference of her biceps. She barely breaks her stride as she crashes through it.
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