Zellandine clears the cups as Snow White climbs the steps to the loft, which I’m 98 percent sure didn’t exist the last time I had tea in this hut. “There are three beds up there,” Zellandine observes.
The queen makes a visible effort to un-slump herself from the table. “I thank you, but I’m afraid Zinnia and I must be on our way.” Her tone aspires toward chilly rebuke, but lands closer tovery tired.
“Oh my God, give it arest.” I tap the silver frame of her mirror on the tabletop. “You can get back to your jailbreak first thing in the morning. I promise.”
Even her venomous glare is exhausted. After a long and weightypause, she grates, “Your word that you will neither flee nor damage the mirror while I rest.”
I’m tempted to roll my eyes, but I restrain myself to a flat stare. “Sure, yeah. Scout’s honor.” I slide the mirror across the table and she stops it with two long fingers against the frame, her lips slightly parted in shock. “See what you get when you ask nicely?”
The queen cuts me a look, dark and inscrutable, before following Snow White upstairs.
“Sorry about her,” I say to Zellandine. “She’s the villain, obviously.”
Zellandine unties her apron, fingers slower and older than I remember them, and settles across from me. “Oh, we villains aren’t all bad.” A flash of humor in the pale blue of her eyes.
“No, she’s like, alegitvillain, not a misunderstood protofeminist fairy.”
Zellandine makes a very neutral sound, her eyes glinting with that subterranean humor. “We don’t all get to choose the parts we’re given to play. You should know that better than most.”
I think unwillingly of all the other roles the queen was given: the ugly princess, the barren queen, the foreign monarch. A string of women with just enough power to be hated and not quite enough to protect themselves. I swallow a lump of inconvenient sympathy. “Sure, okay, but we all get to choose what we donext. A sad backstory is no excuse for being a dick. I should know.”
This feels to me like a solid rhetorical win, but Zellandine undermines it by murmuring, “You should, yes,” under her breath.
“And what’s that supposed to—”
“How’s the princess?” Zellandine asks it blandly, even pleasantly; there’s no reason the question should feel like a sucker punch.
I try to make my face equally bland and pleasant. “She’s good. Fine.She’s married now, actually.” My smile feels weird but I can’t seem to make it un-weird. “Doing the happily-ever-after thing, I guess.”
Zellandine gives me a nod containing more sympathy than is strictly warranted. “So how long has it been since you last saw her?”
“A while. A few months.” Six months and twelve days, but whatever. “Anyway, I don’t know why it matters. What matters iswhat the hell is going on? What are youdoinghere?”
Zellandine doesn’t look even slightly thrown by the topic change; it’s annoyingly hard to surprise a prophetic fairy. “I could ask you the same thing,” she replies evenly. When I squint, she lifts one shoulder. “This isn’t your story either.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not my fault. I’m headed back to the Sleeping Beauty–verse as soon as I can.” I don’t mention the secret, wild hope that I don’t have to return to my own story at all. That I’ve found a way to break free of this endless cycle of cursed girls and pricked fingers, to punch through the walls of my own plot and bust into other narrative dimensions like a fairy-tale Kool-Aid Man. And if I can make a new beginning for myself in some other story—what’s to stop me making a new ending too?
There’s a pause before I can speak through the hope now crawling up my throat. “I was kidnapped by an evil queen. How didyouget here?”
Zellandine sits back in her chair, watching me as if she knows exactly what I didn’t say. “It’s happened a few times now. I step outside and find myself in deep woods I’ve never seen before, on a mountaintop that isn’t mine. Once, I woke to find my house all covered in sweets, with gingerbread for shingles and boiled sugar for window panes.”
I think:Oh shit. I say: “Oh shit.” I remember the talking wolf in the queen’s world, my juice-stained copy of Grimms’ fairy tales, thingsshaken loose from their moorings and set adrift. “You’re slipping between stories.”
Zellandine tilts her head. “There do seem to be a lot of tales that require someone old and magical living alone in the woods. I don’t mind it, mostly—cursing the occasional haughty prince, letting a handsome knight or two warm themselves by my fire.” I check her face for innuendo and find it suspiciously absent. “But it’s been happening more and more often. And I’m starting to feel like…” She trails away, her hand stroking the inside of her wrist. The flesh there has milky translucence I don’t remember from five years before.
“Like butter spread over too much bread?”
“Yes, like that,” she breathes. “And I confess, I was fond of my home on the mountainside. We miss it.” Her blackbird trills to her, but I hardly notice because the wordhomeis rattling between my ribs like a stray bullet, carelessly fired. I think of my phone, fully charged but turned off, zipped in one of those inner backpack pockets no one ever opens. I think of three hands buried in the same popcorn bowl. I think of Charm’s face the last time I saw her, asking me for something I couldn’t give.
“Well.” I clear my throat, searching for levity and finding nothing but sickly sarcasm. “You have to admit, your story kind of sucked.”
“But it was mine.” Zellandine’s tone is sharper than I’ve heard before, grief-edged. She bites the inside of her cheek before adding, “I might not have chosen it, but I always chose what to do next.”
“Often on other people’s behalf, if I remember right.”
I meant it as a stinging rebuke, but Zellandine is nodding thoughtfully. “To their detriment, I think now. I was trying to save others from a fate like mine, but perhaps I was taking away their own right to choose, to make of their stories what they would.”
She gives me such a mild look that I bristle defensively. “Hey, I’mnot—it’s not like that. I’m helping people fix their stories. And if they can’t be fixed, I help them escape.”
