Fractured fables, p.15
Fractured Fables, page 15
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 the same 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 head huntsman 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 steady splish of 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 PACK whumps 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 received a 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—go home. 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 to sit there 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: to survive.”
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.
So I just look at Eva for a while, in all her selfish, ferocious, sexy will to survive, and shake my head. “Fine.” I hold down the power button on my phone and wait for the screen to light up, steadfastly refusing to think why I’m turning it on or who I might call. “But I’m going.”
Eva’s eyes flicker. “Why?”
“Because…”
There are noble ways to finish that sentence (because Red is brave and clever and she deserves better; because the hot nerd on The Good Place was right, and the meaning of life basically boils down to what we owe to each other) and less noble, potentially more honest ways (because as long as I’m saving other people I can forget, briefly, that I can’t save myself; because storming an evil fortress is easier than showing Charm my X-rays and watching her understand, all over again, that I’m not in it for the long haul, that there’s still a trolley barreling toward both of us).
I finish boringly. “Just like, because. Someone should.”
Eva’s expression remains hard and fixed, like a marble statue titled Monarch Who Is Unmoved by the Pleas of the Peasantry, but there’s an odd wistfulness in her eyes, almost as if she envies me. As if she wishes she, too, were a stupid twenty-six-year-old with the reckless bravery of the terminally ill rather than the predictable villain doing the predictably villainous thing. I think of Zellandine telling me that we don’t get to choose our stories, but we get to choose what we do next.
A very bad idea occurs to me then. I slide my arms into my backpack straps and meet her eyes very squarely. “If you come with me and help save Red, I’ll tell you how to get out of this story.” I lean forward and tap the back of her magic mirror, which is never far from her hand. “For real.”
Eva’s eyes move from the mirror to my face, widening as she realizes I don’t just mean out of this particular version of this story but out of this kind of story more broadly. Out of her own horrible ending, away from the cruel logic of her character arc.
Her face finally moves, and it takes me a moment to recognize the expression for what it is. I’ve seen her sneer, and smirk, and bare her teeth in a dozen cruel grins, but this is the first time she’s genuinely smiled at me.
I’m obliged to blink several times. “So.” There’s an answering smile spreading helplessly across my face. “It’s a deal?”
* * *
IN RETROSPECT, IT’S possible that Eva and I could have spent more time in the planning stage of our rescue attempt.
All we really did was consult the magic mirror, which confirmed that Red was still alive (Eva had stared at Red’s face, terrified and tear-streaked, with something very close to guilt), and shove supplies in my bag. Bottled water and snacks, my cool magic compass, her cool magic mirror, a functioning, fully charged phone, and two of Zellandine’s sharpest knives, which we—well, I—fully intended to return. But after we stepped across the threshold there was a slight, inaudible pop, and a rush of wind that smelled very faintly of roses. When we turned around, Zellandine and her hut were gone.
There didn’t seem to be anywhere to go after that except onward. I pulled out my compass and thought of Red, with her watchful eyes and her grim mouth, her hair twisted by someone who fought for her and lost. The needle spun southwest, and the two of us followed it.
It was an uneventful journey. Most things—and boy, did this forest have more than its fair share of Things—didn’t bother us, either because of the knives or because they were looking for even bigger, juicier Things to eat. Around lunch (half a carrot cake Clif Bar apiece, which Eva considered with scientific curiosity, palpating it gently before realizing she was expected to consume it), something horrible landed on my open pack. It tore at the contents, shredding and shrieking, long talons flashing.
Eva had it pinned to a tree with her knife through its heart before I could properly scream. I would tell you what kind of animal it was, but I have no idea, and looking at it made my brain cramp. So I’ll just say it was bad. Like, if a snake fucked a tarantula and their baby died in a tar pit and was later reanimated by a necromancer who graduated at the absolute bottom of his class.
“Thanks,” I said in a voice that was a mere two octaves higher than usual.
I received nothing in response but a contemptuous curl of Eva’s upper lip. But both of us moved more carefully after that, and startled at small noises. By the time dusk settled over the woods—although I’m not convinced it’s ever fully not-dusk here; it seems to exist on a limited palette ranging from gloaming to gloomy—we were shivery and tense, and I’d spent the last several miles trying and failing to think of a funny name for the twitch in my left eye.
Eva held up her hand and I flinched backward. “What, where—”
She was pointing silently through the trees. I followed the line of her finger and saw it: a high stone wall stained a viscous, tarry black. I looked upward through the dark lace of the leaves, and that was the moment it occurred to me that Eva and I could have prepared better for what struck me now as a laughable attempt at a rescue mission. We could, for example, have brought siege weaponry, or a smallish army, or one of those big mech suits from Pacific Rim. Instead, we brought two kitchen knives and an assortment of underpowered magical objects, like video game characters rushing to the boss battle without leveling up.
I say, “Oh, yikes,” which really undersells the enormity of the yikes we’re facing.
I mean, sure, when one is looking for the lair of a cannibal queen, one expects to encounter a certain degree of spookiness. One might anticipate something resembling the Beast’s castle pre-makeover, with gargoyles and buttresses and more lightning storms than is statistically likely. One does not anticipate what I’m seeing now, which is a jagged ruin of black glass and bones that makes the Black Gate of Mordor look like the Barbie Malibu Dreamhouse. Trees press against the walls, reaching over the battlements with fawning fingers. Dark, winged things circle the towers, screeching in too-human voices.
“Well.” Eva makes a sardonic gesture at the walls. “What are we waiting for?”
After another brief round of hissing (“This was your idea.” “I know! There’s just like, more skulls than I was expecting! Give me a second.”), I gather myself and say calmly, “Okay, there has to be a back way in.”
“I very much doubt it. If I built an impregnable fortress to hold my desperate victims, I certainly wouldn’t—”
“Yeah, I know, but there’s always a back way in. Trust me.” Eva’s face makes a funny flinch, which I can only assume is her natural response to the concept of trust, but she trails huffily behind me as we circle the wall. A few guards go clomping past us along the battlements, but none of them seem to see us creeping below them. I guess this isn’t the kind of place that people often try to get into.
After less than fifty feet of sneaking, a damp, foul breeze emerges from somewhere nearby and wafts across us. It smells like old meat and human suffering, and it leads us without much trouble to a rusted, weed-choked grate set in the earth.
I wave my hand and whisper, “Voilà. A back way in.”
Eva squints sourly at the sewer grate. She sniffs. “It must be nice. Being the protagonist.”
I give her my cheekiest smile and say, “It suits you.” It comes out more sincerely than I intended, and Eva’s eyes flick to mine, then away.
I haul the grate aside and shimmy down the hole, landing with a fairly repellent plop. The water (it is not water) is sludgy and cold, running halfway up my thighs. It feels like an obvious moment for Eva to cut and run, but she lands beside me without fuss and strides onward, looking—just for a moment, in the dark—a little like a hero.
* * *
WE WADE THROUGH the muck for just long enough that I’m starting to worry that these sewers function as actual sewers rather than plot devices and don’t lead anywhere useful, but then we hear things echoing off the wet stone walls: cries and pleas, the miserable clink-clink of chains dragging across stone floors. The unmistakable sounds of a castle dungeon.
There’s a grate directly above us, casting a sickly shard of light across Eva’s face. I nod upward. “This is our stop.”
We slither out into a space that looks like a slightly larger version of the sewer we just left, except that there are greasy torches spitting along the walls and cells with iron bars for doors. Most of them are empty, and some of them contain … pieces … that I refuse to look at long enough to identify. We pass a cell with actual, live occupants, but my heart sinks when I see that they aren’t children.
But one of them is a tall woman with a proud arch to her nose and warm brown skin. The others are slumped listlessly against the walls, but this woman is on her feet, reaching through the bars to wiggle a shard of bone in the lock. Her hair is twisted neatly away from her face.
She gives us a wary once-over as we approach the bars, but apparently we don’t look like a threat or salvation. She returns her attention to the lock, manacles clanking softly against the bars.
“You’re Red’s mom, aren’t you.” I don’t say it like a question, because it isn’t one.
At the sound of the word Red her eyes snap to my face. “Where is she? Who are you? Did they catch her?”
I hiss the word “chill” between clenched teeth, just as a broad-shouldered man stands and sets a hand on the woman’s shoulder. She chills, reluctantly, but her eyes are a pair of knives pressed to my jugular.
I decide to be blunt and quick. “The huntsmen took her a few hours ago.”
The woman closes her eyes. The big man grunts as if he’s taken a physical blow.
“It’s okay, we’ll save her.” I look up and down the dungeon, wishing for my bobby pins. “We’ll, uh, we’ll find a guard and steal the keys—”
I’m trying to comfort her, but Red’s mother isn’t listening to me. She’s speaking in a calm voice to the big man behind her. “Looks like we’re out of time, love.”
He sucks air through his teeth. “It’ll be loud. Bring them down on us.”
“Let them come.” Something in her voice makes me think of snapping bones, blood on the walls.
The man tears a seam at the hem of his shirt and withdraws a waxy twist of paper. He unwinds it to reveal a mound of grainy black sand, which he pours neatly into the keyhole. I have the somewhat humbling suspicion that I’m not necessary in this story, that I’m lucky I even got a speaking part.
The woman raises her hands and seems to recall, at the last moment, that Eva and I exist. “Stand back,” she says. We do.
She strikes her manacles against the bars, sending showers of angry white sparks over the lock. Once, twice. All the prisoners are standing now, watching her, murmuring to one another. I can feel the weight of their hope like a physical thing, urging her on. I wonder how many of their children were stolen.
On the third strike, a tendril of smoke leaks from the keyhole. Shortly afterward I find myself lying flat on my back with a shrill ringing in my ears. The air smells hot. I think one of my incisors is loose.
I sit up to see Red’s mother stepping through the mangled remains of her cell door, black smoke trailing her limbs. She’s followed closely by the big dude (Red’s dad? I don’t want to make assumptions about heteronormative family structures in alternate universes, but the way he shadows Red’s mom suggests he belongs to her) and the rest of the villagers. They flock silently around her as if they’re waiting for a command, which I guess they are. Red’s mother sends the oldest and youngest villagers down into the sewers and assembles the rest into rough formation. She nods once to me, like a commander acknowledging a new recruit, and sets off, heading upward out of the dungeons and into the castle itself.
