“I need wool to feed in,” I said.
“No.” The fairy godmother’s eyes were bright, like there was a dark light leaking out of her pupils. “You don’t.”
I closed my fingers in midair, as if around a tuft of wool. I imagined I felt it sliding through my fingers, soft and scratchy against my palm. I opened my eyes and it was there, dingy black wool appearing in my hand out of nowhere.
I gave the wheel a slight push with my other hand and began to spin.
Gold thread spun out of the smooth wood and wrapped around the bobbin. My legs were too short for the pedals, so I had to tilt the stool forward, but even with that, the movement felt easy and natural. As if I had done it before.
Had I done this before?
How did I know that the pedals made the wheel spin? That I had to pull the wool out as I fed it in, give it enough twist to make sure it didn’t break, and use one hand to pull on the fibers while holding the front threads steady with the other? I had never seen a spinning wheel; they had been illegal my entire life. Yet my legs moved smoothly, making the wheel whir steadily, and my hands fed in black wool, and the wheel pulled it through and twisted it into golden thread.
I drew too fast, and the thread went thin and broke. I grabbed it swiftly with my right hand, smushed it with the wool in my left hand, and kept going without slowing my pedaling.
I was good at this.
I was very, very good at this.
And I shouldn’t even have known how to start.
I searched my memory for where this ability came from. Had I smuggled a spinning wheel—this spinning wheel—into the castle? Spun in secret? Could I really have been so selfish, so stupid?
I couldn’t remember anything like that. I could have sworn that the first time I had ever seen a spinning wheel was when I’d woken from the spell.
But this clearly wasn’t the first time I had used one.
The wheel made a whirring sound, with occasional faint clicks. The bobbin spun hypnotically, reacting to the rhythm of my feet. The spindle jutted out, sharp and thin, but it didn’t seem to be doing anything to the wool—it was as if the only reason it was there was so people could prick themselves on it. Which struck me as a serious design flaw.
Or maybe that was the only reason it was there.
I stopped. The wheel whirred slower. The thread shone on the bobbin, a thick layer of silken gold.
I felt like I might throw up.
“Tell me now,” I said. “How do I make the Thornwood go away?”
The fairy godmother turned her head so sharply that her hair whipped across her wings. “I must go. So I will trust you to keep your part of the bargain. You will continue spinning until the bobbin is full.”
“Yes,” I promised. “I will.”
“Very well. The human who can make the Thornwood stop is your sister.” She snapped her wings together and vanished. Dust motes swirled in the air where she had been, and her clear, musical voice echoed through the room. “And the way she can stop it is by dying in it.”
The spinning wheel was still turning slightly when Rosalin and Varian walked back into the room.
They weren’t arm in arm anymore. Varian’s face was drawn, and Rosalin’s was pinched. My stomach flipped when she looked at me.
“He’s not a prince,” she said in a hard voice. “And he’s not a hero. He didn’t fight his way through the Thornwood to save us. My fairy godmother invited him in.” Rosalin kicked at a small stool near the wall, as if it was in her way. It fell over with a crash. “Apparently, he didn’t think it was important to mention that small detail before risking our lives by taking us into the Thornwood.”
“I know this is a shock,” Varian said a bit desperately. “Even to you, Briony. I could tell you suspected me of something, but I’m sure it was nothing like this.”
I blinked at him, and he gave me a small, firm nod. It was a moment before I understood.
He hadn’t told her. He hadn’t told Rosalin that I already knew, that I had lied to her. He was keeping my secret, just like I had kept his.
“I’m sorry I lied. To both of you,” Varian went on. “I didn’t know you. I only knew your story, or at least the version of it they told where I’m from. I thought I had to fit myself into that story in order to gain your trust.”
“Um,” I said. There was no way to thank him, not with Rosalin there. “That’s all right. I understand.”
He turned to Rosalin. “Does it really matter to you that I don’t have royal blood?”
“That’s not what’s important,” Rosalin said. “What matters is that you lied to me.”
It was such an obvious answer. She almost had to say it.
But I knew it wasn’t true.
Don’t be convinced to marry below your station, Rosalin had told me once. We had been hiding from our language tutor, who was making us read a long, unlikely story about a princess who married a frog. (Or something. Since it was in Gnomish, it was a little hard to follow.) We both knew the story had been chosen to convince Rosalin to accept a marriage proposal from the duke’s sixth son. Don’t let them think so little of you. This whole idea is insulting. I may be cursed, but I am still a princess!
Varian’s birth did matter to Rosalin. It would matter to anyone in this castle.
But Varian, who had come to us from a time when different things mattered, couldn’t
