Thornwood by Leah Cypess (read after .txt) 📕

“What?” He blinked several times. “I—I don’t know how—”

“You don’t need to know how,” I said. “Not with this spinning wheel. Now, Edwin!”

He nodded.

I slid off the stool. In the moment before Edwin took my place and got his feet on the pedals, I grabbed the new thread—the one spun with my blood—and yanked it free. It was just long enough for me to stretch my arms wide and hold it taut.

Rosalin and Varian finally broke apart as I approached them. Around us, the branches hissed and shook. One snagged in my hair, and I jerked myself loose.

“No, Briony!” Rosalin said. “I won’t let you sacrifice yourself.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.” I faced the writhing branches and pulled the thread tight. My hand throbbed dully.

“That won’t work,” Varian warned. The gleam I had seen earlier was back in his eye.

“It’s magic thread,” I said. “Spun not only with my strength, but with my blood. It will hold off the Thornwood.”

I turned and stepped toward Rosalin, thread held high. But I wasn’t looking at her. I was looking at Varian, seeing him through new eyes, filtered by what I should have realized the moment the fairy flew me over the woods and showed me that the Thornwood didn’t surround the castle. That the Thornwood was all there was.

No one, no prince, no savior, had come to us through the Thornwood.

He had come from it.

Rosalin flinched and ducked, right before I whirled.

Varian blinked at me. That was all he had time for before I brought the thread down over his head and around his neck. I crisscrossed the ends and pulled them, making a noose that tightened against his throat.

“And it will also hold a fairy,” I said. “Isn’t that true, Your Majesty?”

Varian threw his head back and laughed.

As he did, he changed. His body shimmered; his face lengthened; his eyes grew larger. Two wings, blacker than black, snapped shut over his shoulder blades.

He didn’t look like a woman, but he wasn’t a man, either. He was a creature. A being. A center of power.

Memories flashed through me.

The one who calls himself a prince.

The Thornwood belongs to the fairy queen.

The thorn branches pouncing on the sword. It wasn’t the sword they had been avoiding all this time. It was the person holding it.

And the fairy vanishing every time Varian entered a room. Saving us only after he tried to abandon Rosalin to the thorns. Offering her bargain while he lay unconscious…

And then vanishing again in the second before he woke.

That poison had been meant for Varian after all. The fairy godmother had poisoned him. Her. So that she could appear at the ball.

I cannot appear in the presence of my queen, not after defying her like this.

“Varian?” Rosalin whispered.

The fairy queen smiled at her. “My love. Won’t you throw yourself on those thorn branches? For me?”

Rosalin shrank back. I tightened my grip on the gold thread.

My love. My heart ached for my sister, but I kept my focus on the creature I had trapped.

“That’s why you pretended to be her prince,” I said. I was inches from the fairy queen, and there was so much power on her face, so much cold hatred, that I had to fight the urge to step back. The malevolence in her eyes was not at all hidden now. “Because in order for fairies to use our blood, our sacrifice has to be voluntary. You wanted Rosalin to fall in love with you so she would agree to die for you!”

The fairy queen laughed. She no longer looked at all like Varian. There was nothing human left in her face—her eyes were yellow slits, her mouth a gash across her too-white skin.

“You humans have so much energy,” she said. “So much strength that we can put to good use. But you have to give it to us willingly. Which means we have to spin stories to convince you to do it.” She kept her gaze on Rosalin. “All I needed was your life, freely given, and I could have freed myself from the trap my ungrateful subject set for me. I could have taken revenge on her and regained my throne. It’s a disappointment, really, how little you were willing to sacrifice for true love.”

“But you saved me!” Rosalin said. She backed away, her eyes wide and pleading. “You saved me from the Thornwood! Why?”

“Because your death then would have accomplished nothing. I needed you to volunteer to die. To sacrifice yourself willingly.” The fairy queen smiled, and her smile stretched so wide it wrapped around the sides of her face. “Everything I did, Princess, was designed to make you love me. The guise of a prince. The trickery with the sword—which was never a magic blade, by the way. I found it on the floor of the guard room and made sure that wretched boy saw me hide it.”

And then used it to save me from the Thornwood—but all the sword had done, in Edwin’s hand, was cut through and damage the branches. When Varian had swung it, they had disintegrated into dust. Yet we had still believed it was the sword, and not Varian himself, that the trees were afraid of.

“I did everything I could to fit myself into the story your fairy godmother concocted. To make you believe I was the prince, to make you fall in love with me, to make you willing to sacrifice your life for me. And it almost worked, didn’t it?” She turned to me, her eyes glittering. “It would have worked. If not for you.”

I forced myself not to loosen my grip on the gold thread.

“You humans so love to tell yourself stories, and her story had a prince and true love at the end. It was working. Every time I saved her, every time I confessed a supposed truth to her, she fell in love with me a little more. It’s your