Thornwood by Leah Cypess (read after .txt) 📕

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2020 by Leah Cypess

Cover art copyright © 2020 by Kelsey Eng

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cypess, Leah, author.

Title: Thornwood / Leah Cypess.

Description: New York : Delacorte Press, [2021] | Audience: Ages 9–12. | Summary: The younger sister of Sleeping Beauty, relates how their lives have been haunted by a curse, and how she helps save the day once the curse is broken.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019060265 (print) | LCCN 2019060266 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-593-17883-6 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-593-17884-3 (library binding) | ISBN 978-0-593-17885-0 (ebook)

Subjects: CYAC: Sisters—Fiction. | Blessing and cursing—Fiction. | Characters in literature—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PZ7.C9972 Tho 2021 (print) | LCC PZ7.C9972 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

Ebook ISBN 9780593178850

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

To Shoshana,

a sister to reckon with

First, let’s get this out of the way: the fairy tales don’t mention me. They wouldn’t. The stories you’ve heard are all about my sister, Sleeping Beauty, with her gorgeous hair and her lovely eyes, blah blah blah. Nobody wants to hear about me, even if I was the only one who realized—right from the beginning—that the prince wasn’t who he said he was.

But would any adult listen to an eleven-year-old princess who never even got a blessing from a fairy godmother? No.

So I’m going to tell you what really happened.

I’ve always known what would happen to my sister on her sixteenth birthday. Her doom has been hanging over her head since before I was born.

So when I woke that morning, I went straight to her room.

It was before sunrise, so Rosalin was still alone. Soon everyone would descend upon her—her ladies-in-waiting, our parents, the royal wizard. This was the day she would be struck down by her curse—the spell that, even more than her astonishing beauty, made her the center of attention everywhere she went. Today would be like every other day of her life, except a million times more intense.

And nobody but me would know how much she hated it.

From the door, my sister looked like she was still asleep, her head turned to the side and her breathing soft and even. But Rosalin is the one who taught me how to fake being asleep. I wasn’t fooled.

I padded across the room, past delicate wooden tables piled with birthday gifts, and hopped up onto her bed.

“Hi,” I said.

She didn’t move. She didn’t open her eyes.

“Come on,” I said. “Today, of all days, you want to pretend to be asleep?”

Rosalin’s eyes popped open, then narrowed. “That is an incredibly insensitive thing to say! What is wrong with you?” She pulled herself to a sitting position and snorted. “Aside from your hair, I mean.”

I touched my hair instinctively. I hadn’t brushed it before I came—not that it would have been less of a frizzy tangle if I had.

“And your face. You have chocolate on your eyelashes, Briony. How did you even manage that?”

She knew how I had managed it. We had sat up late last night going through her boxes of birthday chocolates, laughing and stuffing ourselves and arguing over who got the cream-filled ones.

Yet somehow, even though I hadn’t left until she was nearly asleep—when I knew my plan to distract her had worked—Rosalin’s face this morning was smooth and clear, unmarred by the slightest hint of exhaustion or chocolate.

“It got you up, didn’t it?” I said. “We need to talk before everyone else gets here. You’re going to make sure you’re never alone today, right?”

Rosalin’s face went tight. “Yes, Briony. I will have one of my ladies accompany me everywhere. I’m sure that’s all it will take to defeat a fairy curse.”

I winced. I wasn’t used to hearing her refer to the curse out loud—even though everyone in the castle, everyone in the kingdom, knew what was supposed to happen to her today.

On the day she turns sixteen, she will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall asleep. She will sleep for one hundred years, and the entire castle will sleep with her. The curse will be broken only when a brave and noble prince fights his way through the thorns around the castle and wakes her with a kiss.

And that was better than her original fate. The curse the fairy queen had put on my parents, long ago, had said that their firstborn daughter would be beautiful, but would prick her finger and die on her sixteenth birthday. Rosalin’s fairy godmother had managed to change the curse from die to sleep for a hundred years, which was an improvement, but still not exactly ideal.

No one knew why the fairy queen was so angry at my parents. Supposedly it was because they hadn’t invited her to their