I think of Charm and Prim, who saved me, who are still hoping I’ll stick around and hold up my half of the bargain. “That’s been my experience, yeah.” My voice sounds thick in my ears.

  “I believe they’ll crown Red as their new queen soon. I mean, I overheard some very dense discussion of the monarchy as a symbolic rather than political position, and something about a body of elected representatives, which all sounds rather messy, but”—Eva shrugs—“I suppose it’s close enough. The innocent girl sits upon her throne, the wicked witch is dead.”

  “Is she? Dead, I mean.”

  Eva looks at my face and then quickly away. “No,” she says softly. “I don’t know how her story will end, or whether redemption is possible for a creature like that, but I … asked that she be spared. They will build a glass tomb for her so that anyone who likes can see the proof of her defeat. And make sure she still sleeps.”

  I have an urge to reach across the table and put my hand over hers, which I squelch before remembering that I’m not a dying girl or a hero anymore. I put my hand over hers. “So how did you end up here? Wherever here is.”

  Eva’s hand turns palm-up under mine. Her neck is now a definite shade of coral. “I didn’t feel I should linger long in the castle. Red and her parents seemed grateful, but their friends didn’t seem especially fond of witches or queens, so I left. And I found a little house waiting for me in the woods, just like there always is.” Her smile this time looks like hard work. “So I suppose I shall rot away in a little hut, after all. It’s better than being tortured to death.”

  I can hear the compromise in her voice, the same mediocre deal I cut in my own world. She’s not dead, but she’s still nameless and powerless, still trapped at the margins of a story that doesn’t belong to her. Not a happy ending, but then, she’s not the main character.

  I find myself grasping desperately for alternatives. A voice that sounds very much like my therapist says, Bargaining again? I ignore it. “What if—maybe you could…” My eyes fall to the table, where she’s arranged a glittering jigsaw of mirror shards. She’s fit them all carefully back into the battered silver frame, with a single gap left for a missing piece. “You could come back to my world. With me. The mirror still works—”

  Eva’s fingers tighten around mine, but her voice is wistful. “And who would I be in your world?”

  “I don’t know, nobody in particular I guess?”

  “Here I’d hoped to be somebody, one day. Isn’t that silly?”

  I want to shake her. “I didn’t mean literally nobody, just like, not magical or royal or whatever. You could be a chemist or a fortune-teller or something, anything you wanted. I’d help.”

  She sighs in a way that reminds me forcibly of Dr. Bastille. “I know. Thank you.” She slides her hand gently away from mine. “But I heard what Zellandine told you. I can’t go with you, and you can’t stay here without causing great harm.” Her voice lowers. “We can’t keep running from our stories forever.”

  “No.” I don’t know whether I’m agreeing or disagreeing with her. My lips feel numb.

  Eva rises slowly from the table and takes a book from the shelf. The cover is worn red cloth, with a purplish stain on the back. “This was here when I arrived, somehow. It belongs back in your world, I suppose.” She tries to say it casually, but I see the way her thumb moves along the spine.

  I reach for the book with a feeling of profound unreality, flipping through the pages because that’s what you do when someone hands you a book and you don’t know what to say. Rackham’s art flutters past like tangled shadows: branches and ball gowns, towers and thorns, dozens of dark tales told so many times they came true.

  I think of Dr. Bastille saying tartly, The existence of any story implies the existence of a storyteller. I guess there must have been a first time each of these stories was told, somewhere in the way-back reaches of time, centuries before the Grimms ever tried to turn a profit on them. It was probably just some ordinary person whispering across a fire or carving pictures into whalebones or daubing mud on the walls of a cave, casually calling a new universe into existence.

  It occurs to me with a sudden, slightly hysterical surge of hope that I am a pretty ordinary person, myself. That the only thing stopping me from writing a new story is the fact that I’m bad at it, and dropped my creative writing class after three weeks rather than suffer a B+. I felt self-conscious and stupid every time I sat down to write, very aware that I was just making things up. But maybe every story is a lie until it isn’t; maybe I’m not the one who has to tell it, anyway.

  “Do you have a pen?” My voice sounds completely normal, as if my pulse is not double-timing in my throat, as if my whole heart isn’t resting on the success or failure of this extremely sketchy plan.

  Eva produces a trimmed feather and a pot of ink, looking at me as if faintly worried about mental stability. I turn to the very back of the book, past the afterword and the publisher’s note about the typeface, past Rackham’s final, curling vine. There are three extra pages at the end, entirely blank.

  I set the quill to the page and write: Once upon a time …

  And I swear, the universe listens. I feel it as a silent thrumming through the soles of my feet, the plucking of a string too vast to hear. The windows rattle in their frames.

  I add another clumsy sentence or two about a princess who grew into a queen who became a villain and then, eventually, a hero. I spin the book to face Eva and slide it across the table. “Your turn.”

  She reads the page and her face goes tight and still. A muscle moves in her jaw. “I don’t know what happens next.”

  I twirl the feather. “It’s your story. You tell me.”

  I can’t tell if she understands what I’m trying to do, or if she thinks the whole thing is some sort of inane therapy exercise, but when she takes the pen, her hand is shaking. She sits for a while, rolling the quill in her fingertips and staring at the page with a faint frown, before she begins to write.

  It takes a lot longer than I expect it to. Eva pauses after every sentence to do some more staring and frowning. She blots out entire paragraphs and starts them over, often several times in a row. At one point she actually makes a motion as if she’s going to ball the page up and toss it away like a novelist in a bad movie, before apparently recalling that she’s writing in my favorite childhood book. She restrains herself to crossing out another paragraph.

  I watch her, listening to the sound I can’t really hear, hoping for a future that doesn’t yet exist.

  Night has fallen by the time she finishes. She doesn’t set her pen down in triumph or anything, but I know the story is done because I feel it. The thrumming stops. The air changes. It’s like someone has opened an invisible door and let in a breeze that smells like frost and fresh apples.

  Eva gives a little sigh and un-hunches herself from the page.

  “Looks good,” I say over her shoulder, and the queen startles so badly she chokes. Apparently she hadn’t noticed me getting up, rummaging for candles, asking three or four times if she was hungry, and eventually giving up and standing behind her. I thump her good and hard on the back. “Needs a title, though.”

  When Eva stops coughing, she flips back to the beginning of her story and runs her finger across the empty space above the words once upon a time. “I don’t know what to call it.” Her voice is hoarse and low. “I’ve never done this before.”

  I drag my chair around the table so I can sit catty-corner to her. “Well, it’s your call, but the Grimms generally named their stories after the protagonist.”

  She goes still beside me. Only her eyes move, meeting mine. I assure myself that it’s just the candles that make them look that way, bright and burning. Nobody’s eyes are full of literal light; nobody’s gaze actually smolders.

  She writes a name without speaking.

  I read the word, pretending not to notice the pair of watery tear drops blotting the page beside it. “You know I was just teasing when I called you that. You can choose any name you want.”

  “I have.” Her tone might manage to be imperious, if there weren’t tears in it. “How do we know if it … worked?”

  I don’t answer. I slide the last shard of mirror across the table, the one Prim plucked from my hair, and fit it neatly into the frame. Our faces look up at us from the surface, fissured and cracked, but exactly as we are: a skinny, sharp-chinned woman in a dirty T-shirt and a hard, hungry queen with a surprising number of freckles.

  The only difference is what’s behind us. There are no whitewashed walls in the mirror. It’s distant and blurred, but I think I see a rich, rolling landscape, a stone shape that might be a castle. A new story, unfolding around us in all directions.

  I take Eva’s hand and place it gently on the mirror’s surface. Her fingers fall through the glass as if it’s an open window.

  She doesn’t drag me into the space between worlds this time. She looks at me with a question in her eyes, and I shrug. “One more time can’t hurt, can it?”

  Eva smiles. We fall together into the vast nowhere, where my imaginary body fights for air that doesn’t exist, where the only real thing is the heat of her hand holding tight to mine.

  11

  THIS IS, DEPENDING on how you count it, either my forty-ninth or fiftieth happily ever after, but I don’t mind. It turns out I’m not quite sick of them yet.

  It shouldn’t be daylight for hours, but somehow we’ve arrived at that perfect moment just after dawn, when the air rushes away from the horizon and lays tall grasses low. The sunlight transforms the frost into dew and the dew into mist, which coils catlike around our skirts. There are trees surrounding us again, but they aren’t dark or tangled. They stand in long, neat lines, their branches spreading low. An orchard, at dawn.

  Eva is turning in a slow, wary circle, as if she’s waiting for someone to leap out from behind a tree and shout, “Seize her!” No one does. Instead, the mist parts to reveal a pale stone castle standing on a distant hill. It’s not very big or grand—in castle terms, it might even be called modest—and there’s a shabbiness to it that suggests empty halls and unclaimed thrones. But it’s enough for Eva, I can tell. Her mouth falls open as she looks at it.

  A throne of one’s own. A happily ever after fit for a queen. I have to remind myself forcefully that I’m not a queen or even a princess, and this story doesn’t belong to me.

  I expect Eva to stride straight for the castle, but she turns back to me. Her smile is wide and young, almost giddy. There are no convenient candles to blame for the bright blaze of her eyes. “It’s better than I imagined.”

  I grab my own elbows so I don’t do anything stupid, like fling myself at her. “Yeah, it’s not bad.” It takes a moment to unglue my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “It suits you.”

  A little wariness creeps back across her face. Her tone turns haughty, the way it does when she’s uncertain. “Do you think it might suit you, as well?”

  “I mean, sure.” I find it easier to speak to her if I close my eyes. “But you know I can’t stay.”

  “Because of the harm it would do to the universe.” There’s a flattering amount of grief in her voice.

  “Yeah, and because Charm would murder me.” And Prim would hide the body, and my parents would testify in court that I deserved it. “There are these people, back in my world, who need me.”

  “Still playing the hero.” A note of bitterness this time.

  “No, I need them too. It’s just—they’re my story. And I can’t keep running away from them.” I scrape together enough guts to open my eyes and find Eva looking at me with whatever the opposite of pity is—admiration, maybe, or compassion. I dig my fingertips into my elbows.

  “So anyway. Enjoy your happily ever after.”

  Her lips curve in an expression too sad to be called a smile. “You know, I don’t think I believe in those.”

  I raise my eyebrows at the bucolic perfection surrounding us, a Cézanne painting come to life. “Could’ve fooled me.”

  Eva takes a step nearer and hands me the red-bound book of fairy tales. “The last line was the hardest to get right. I tried to write it in the usual way, but it gave me goosebumps. It felt like a promise that couldn’t be kept, a story that couldn’t end.”

  I flip to the last page of my book, no longer blank. Her hand must have stopped shaking by then, because the last three words are firm and smooth on the page: She lived happily. The period is an emphatic black circle.

  And then I’m on the sudden, embarrassing verge of tears. Maybe because I’ve gone a really long time without eating or sleeping and my nerves are shot. Maybe because I’ve fallen pretty hard for the (former) villain and don’t want to leave her. Maybe because it never occurred to me that it could be enough just to live, as happily as you can, for as long as you have.

  There are more wet splotches on the page now, distorting Eva’s neat handwriting. She’s gracious enough not to mention it.

  I hear the soft tread of her bare feet, then the rustle of leaves, like she’s plucked something from a branch. When she returns, she stands close enough that I can see the hem of her shift, the grass-stained ends of her toes. If I had the nerve to look up, her face would be inches away from mine. I don’t look up.

  “So. I will stay, and you will go home, and both of us will live happily.” Eva’s voice is light and easy. I nod at my book and cry a little harder.

  She reaches for my hand and turns it palm up. She places something smooth and round in it: an apple. The skin is a glassy, poisonous red that only exists in fairy tales.

  My laugh is watery. “Old habits, huh?” I scrub my face on my own shoulder. “Will I fall into an endless sleeping death if I take a bite?”

  Eva’s breath stirs my hair. “If you did, I know someone who would kiss you back to life.”

  On this, both our stories agree: a girl in an accursed sleep is woken by her true love. It’s a strange point of plot convergence, a resonance that makes my skin prickle. I elect to ignore it; it feels too much like hope.

  Instead, I look up at Eva and raise the apple to my lips. She watches my teeth pop through the skin and her eyes go suddenly wide and dark, as if she’s just solved some very complex equation.

  I’d like to say something seductive and clever, which maybe raises the chances of this scene ending with us making out, but what I say is, “You know there’s no kiss in the Grimms’ version, right? Snow White just barfs up a chunk of apple.”

  A cool finger touches my chin, tilts my head upward until I’m looking straight into the black satin of Eva’s eyes. “This is my story, and I’ll tell it how I like.” If we were in a sexier sort of romance, I might call the tone of her voice a purr; I might note that her finger is still curled beneath my chin, that if I stood on my tiptoes our lips would touch.

  “Uh.” I swallow. The apple is sharp in my throat. “I don’t actually have to leave right this second. I mean, I told Prim I’d come back, and I meant it, but I didn’t give her like, a specific date and time—”

  I don’t finish the sentence, because the queen kisses me, and I kiss her back. I don’t even have to stand on tiptoes, because she bends to meet me.

  It’s technically our third kiss, I guess, but the first two barely count. They were conducted under stressful conditions and interrupted by trips through the multiverse or attempts on our lives. Nothing interrupts us this time. We stand at the crossroads of our stories, in a kingdom of two, kissing in the rising light of a new world. We do a lot more than kiss, actually, but that’s between the queen and me.

  Later—like, much later, not that I’m bragging—we leave the orchard and wander over the hills, into the castle. We drift through the halls without speaking, our hands clasped, our steps unhurried. But eventually I find a staircase that circles upward, and a round room waiting at the top of the tallest tower.

  Eva kisses me once more, a brief heat against my cheek. “Thank you,” she whispers, and slips something round and smooth into my left hand.

  “We have apples in Ohio, you know.”

  “Good,” she says. “Then you can save this one for the very end.” She says it lightly, but I can see that vast equation in her eyes again. I guess evil queens can’t help but scheme.

  Eva holds her magic mirror to face me. I just stand there for a minute, looking at her, trying hard to convince myself that this is enough, that I’m content. My reflection in the mirror doesn’t buy it; my face is pale and sharp, fractured with grief.

  At least this time, when I touch the mirror and fall into the space between worlds, I’m not running away or rushing to anyone’s rescue. I’m not looking for a new once upon a time or hoping, secretly and shamefully, for my happily ever after. This time I’m just trying to live. Happily.

  * * *

  I OPEN MY eyes when my feet touch cold tile. I’m standing in Charm and Prim’s tiny bathroom, looking at my own face in their medicine cabinet mirror. I can hear small, domestic sounds through the door: the hum of a vacuum, the clink of a spoon.

  I can’t make myself open the door just yet, so I study the apple in my hand. It’s that same slick, unlikely red, but this one isn’t unblemished. It looks like someone has pushed their fingernail through the skin, again and again, writing a message into the white flesh:

  BITE ME

  I smile, a little painfully, and then Eva’s voice echoes in my skull: I know someone who would kiss you back to life, and for the very end. I stop smiling. My heartbeat sounds uneven, very far away. I wonder, distantly, why I’m so surprised. When you save someone, sometimes they save you right back.

  I don’t know if it would actually work. I don’t know if Eva would wait for me that long, or if her kiss could cure me, or if we would irrevocably break the rules of the universe. But what rules would we be breaking, really? An unlucky girl falls into a terrible sleep; her true love wakes her. That piece of the plot could belong to either of us, couldn’t it? It feels like a loophole, a cheat code, a chance. It feels like hope.

 

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