Eva makes a scathing noise that tells me more than I wanted to know about her own parents, but Red answers with a soft and terrible brevity. “They did.”
Eva seems to be struggling with something, her lips working until she says, almost angrily, “Why don’t you all leave? Or hide?”
“She always finds you,” Red says, her voice still soft. “She talks to the moon, people say, or maybe a magic mirror. And then…” Her eyes flick to the window again, and this time the warm brown of her skin goes ashen. “And then her huntsman come to fetch you.”
There’s something funny about the grammar of that sentence, but it’s only when I hear the crunch of many pairs of boots through the woods, then the thud of many fists on the door, that I understand I misheard her. She didn’t sayhuntsman, with a singularA; she saidhuntsmen.
MY FIRST, PROFOUNDLYunhelpful thought is:This isn’t how it goes.There’s supposed to be a witch disguised as an old woman, an apple the color of blood, a pretty coffin in the woods. There’s supposed to be three chances and a happy ending. But instead there are fists pounding on the door.
A shrill voice shouts, “We know you’re in there, girlie! Come out, queen’s orders!”
Red is out of her chair, backing against the counter, fingers curling around a bread knife. Zellandine is rising, tightening her apron with trembling fingers. Only Eva and I remain frozen, like a pair of mannequins in a bustling department store.
By the time Zellandine opens the door, her hands are not shaking at all. “You must be mistaken, good sirs. There’s no one here but me.” It’s a brave effort, and a doomed one. She barely says the words before a thin-faced man shoulders his way past her, eyes roving hungrily around the cottage. More men pour in behind him. They all have thesame stringy, unhealthy look, and they all wear the same yellowish necklaces. The necklaces rattle oddly when they move, like chattering teeth. It takes me too long to realize that’s what they actually are: human teeth, strung on leather cords. Acid boils in my throat, sick and hot.
The leader points to Red. “Come with us.”
She shakes her head once, knuckles pale around her bread knife, chin still high, and God, this kid deserves better than this bloody, brutal story. One of the huntsmen draws a knife of his own, one never intended to slice bread, but it turns abruptly to ash in his hand. Greasy flakes drift silently to the floor.
“I did not invite you across my threshold, boy,” Zellandine growls behind him. But she’s panting as she says it, the flesh of her face gone white and thin as onionskin. Back in Primrose’s world she’d seemed ageless, invincible, a woman who could turn knives into feathers with the slightest flick of her eyelash. But maybe that was only true in her own world, and the rules are different in this one. Maybe power has a price here, and she’s paying it.
The knifeless huntsman seems to sense her weakness, because he turns and shoves Zellandine hard, as if she’s not a witch but merely an old woman. Someone yells, and it’s only once I’m on my feet that I realize it was me. The huntsmen are all staring at me and the strap of my pack is tight in my hand, and it’s not like I have a stellar life expectancy anyway. I sling it into the leader’s face.
The fight that follows is brief and embarrassing. In less than a minute I’m facedown on the floor with someone’s knee ungently separating my vertebrae. A hand snarls in my hair and smacks my face almost perfunctorily against the floor. Everything goes staticky and muffled after that, my vision stippled with black starbursts.
There are boot steps. A fleshy thud and a strangled cry. The headhuntsman asking, from far away, “What about you? Going to give us trouble?”
A pause, taut with the promise of violence, followed by Eva’s voice speaking a single, thin syllable. “No.”
The huntsmen leave then, pausing only to offer a few casual kicks to my rib cage as they pass.
In their absence, the only sound is the steadysplishof my blood against the floorboards and the whine of the door as it swings in the wind, and—in the distance, fading fast—the cries of a brave little girl who has come, at last, to the end of her bravery.
6
“SO, OBVIOUSLY”—MY PACKwhumps onto the tabletop—“we have to go after her.”
I’m hoping if I say it with enough calm authority, we can skip the part of the conversation where Eva gets whiny and morally gray about it, but apparently not, because she says, “I assure you we do not,” without even opening her eyes. Her hands are propped on the kitchen counter, her head hanging low. Her fancy braids are hanging loose down the back of her neck now, nothing at all like the sleek black crown she wore when I first saw her in the mirror.
“I mean, I agree, ideally there would be more of us, and Zellandine would be conscious.” After my ears had stopped ringing and my nosebleed had slowed to a jellied ooze, I bullied Eva into helping me scoop the fairy off the floor. I have no idea how we would have gotten her up the stairs, but luckily we didn’t have to. The steps had vanished, replaced by a single bed in the corner, the sheets already turned down. We tucked Zellandine under the covers and receiveda wan smile in return. Her cold fingers covered mine. “You’ll go after her, won’t you?” she asked resignedly. I nodded. The fingers tightened. “But afterward—gohome. Things are tangling, the lines are blurring. You can’t keep running forever.” My second nod was more of a noncommittal jerk of my chin. Zellandine’s eyes narrowed. “Every story ends, Zinnia.”
She appears to be sleeping now, her blackbird perched on the bedpost, considering her with one worried eye and then the other.
“But you know what they say.” I give the queen a hearty shrug. “If wishes were fishes.”
Eva opens her eyes then, but only to squint at me as if she has a sudden headache. “Then what?”
I consider. “Never mind. The point is, we have to go.”
Her mouth hardens. Her eyes close again. “No, we don’t.”
I’m unpacking and repacking my backpack, dispensing with unnecessary weight. I unzip an inner pocket and lay my phone carefully on the table. “You know,” I say, trying very hard—medium hard—well, a little—to keep my tone polite, “maybe we wouldn’t have to go save a kid from a cannibal queen if you’d put up literally any fight at all, but you chose tositthere while the rest of us—”
Now Eva spins to face me, lips curling away from her teeth. “And what did that get you, exactly?” She closes the distance between us and reaches abruptly for my face. I stare her down, refusing to flinch or look away, but her thumb brushes with surprising softness across my chin. It comes away smeared with glutinous red. “I have tried before to explain my position, but perhaps you did not understand.” Her voice vibrates, thick with emotion. “Everything I have done, everything I will do, serves one purpose: tosurvive.”
And there is an un-small part of me that understands that, and more than understands it. Sympathizes with it, admires it, even—okay, yes—desires it. (The way she looks right now, her eyes blazing with that bottomless life-hunger, her face lit with an intensity that burns straight past prettiness and toward something far more dangerous… No jury would convict me.)
But I’ve tried just surviving. I spent twenty-one years pouring all my want and will toward it, adhering to a set of rules—move fast, go hard, don’t fall in love, try not to die—that left me with exactly one friend and zero plans. And in the end, none of it mattered anyway. In the end, it was just me and my nonnegotiable illness, and the only reason I survived was because someone else (a couple of someones, technically) saved me.
