“I spun for you,” I said quickly, before she could fly away. “Now take me to Edwin so I can see that he’s all right. And then show me how we can get out of the castle.”
The fairy smiled. She kept her lips shut over her teeth, so for a moment, she looked almost human. “Certainly. Come with me. I’ll start by showing you where the Thornwood ends.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. I knew, in my bones, that this was not going to end well.
But what choice did I have?
I took two steps to the window. The fairy’s smile widened, revealing her teeth. She reached for me.
I had just enough time to think better of this—but not enough time to do anything about it—before she pulled me through the window.
The air rushed past my face. My feet dangled in the vast empty space between me and the thorns below. The tops of the trees quivered in the wind, a dark tangle of rough bark and shiny thorns.
I tried not to scream. What came out of my mouth instead was a cross between a squeak and a sob.
Above me, the fairy godmother laughed. “Where do you want to go, Princess?”
I forced myself to look up. Just enough to see where the Thornwood ended, where the red village rooftops and familiar rolling hills began.
But that wasn’t what I saw.
The forest went on and on, as far as I could see, until its branches tangled with the dark blue of the horizon.
My breath froze in my chest.
“Back,” I whispered. My small, weak voice was ripped away by the wind. “Back to the castle. Please.”
The fairy turned in midair, so suddenly that it felt like we were falling. I screamed and reached up, grabbing her wrists.
Then, when it was clear we weren’t falling, I couldn’t let go. I also couldn’t pull air into my lungs.
The Thornwood unrolled below me, forever and ever and ever. It had no end. There was nothing at all on the other side of it. There was no other side.
We weren’t barred from the village, from the world we had left. We had been ripped from that world and placed in the fairy realm. And there was nothing I could do to get back to the world where I belonged.
The fairy swooped low when we got to the castle. I squeezed my eyes shut—we were going too fast to make it through any of the windows; we were going to crash—
She let go of me, and I fell.
It was just a brief drop before I hit stone and rolled. I went on screaming for several seconds, even after I felt the solid stone below me, even after I opened my eyes and saw where we were: the rooftop. She had deposited me on the rough, flat surface between the battlements and a chimney.
She settled on one of the crenellations and crouched on it, her wings half shut.
“Are you done?” she asked when I paused for breath.
I thought about it. “Probably.”
“Good. My ears are quite delicate.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m only done because I need my breath for questions. You promised to show me where the Thornwood ends.”
She smiled. “And now you know, don’t you?”
I did know.
Nowhere. It never ended.
We’d had it all wrong. The Thornwood hadn’t grown up around our castle. The Thornwood must have always existed, in the fairy realm, and our castle had been plunked down in the middle of it. There was no way we could ever cut through those trees.
And even if we did, there was nothing on the other side. No way back to the human world.
“How do we get out?” I said. “How do we get back where we belong?” I got to my feet. The rooftop around me was splattered with white specks of bird poop, and beyond the rooftop, gnarled brown branches stretched on and on. “How…how did you get Varian in?”
“Ah, yes. Prince Varian.” She laughed. “Your sister’s brave prince knows more about the fairies than he pretends. And more about the curse, too. You should ask him your questions.”
That made sense. In the outside world, they’d had years and years to study our curse; everyone there probably knew more than we did.
But why wouldn’t Varian have told us what he knew?
Unless it couldn’t help us. Unless what he knew could only make things worse.
But he must have known where we were. He must have known the Thornwood was impassable. That we were in the fairy realm, that it was the fairies who…
All at once, I remembered Varian’s amused expression when my sister and I were arguing over whose story this was. Now I knew what he had found so funny.
It wasn’t either of our stories. It wasn’t a human story at all.
“But it’s not our curse,” I said. “Is it?”
The fairy raised an eyebrow. “Clever girl.”
A chill breeze whipped past, and I hunched my shoulders. “This spell isn’t about us. It has nothing to do with Rosalin. She just got caught in it.”
“Not quite.” The fairy clicked her tongue. “Your sister isn’t the target of the spell, true. But she is what made it work. When she pricked her finger, she set the spell in motion.”
“Then who,” I said, “was the spell’s target? Who was it meant to put to sleep…”
My voice trailed off.
I would sleep for a hundred years, and so would the fairy queen.
“The fairy queen,” I whispered. “This was an attack on her.”
My fairy godmother smiled at me like my governess used to when I came up with a surprisingly good answer. “The castle had to be put to sleep so the Thornwood would sleep, so that the fairy queen inside the Thornwood would sleep. The spell had to be that roundabout or I couldn’t have done it.”
“Why did it have to happen at all?” I said. “Why couldn’t you
