Thornwood by Leah Cypess (read after .txt) 📕

fault she didn’t agree to sacrifice herself for my sake.” That sentence was a snarl, and it froze me like I was a hunted animal. “You and your doubts and your accusations. You agreed to keep my supposed secret, but you wouldn’t believe in me the way you were supposed to. You can’t imagine how often I wanted to wring your neck.”

My palms were sweaty, and my finger cramped painfully around the thread.

“I said as much to Rosalin. I thought she hated you, too. She certainly complained about you enough. But oh, you should have seen her! Prickly as a porcupine! How dare I attack her little sister!” She laughed again. “And then I realized who, exactly, Rosalin would agree to sacrifice herself for.”

Rosalin looked from me to the fairy queen and back. She made a low, whimpering sound.

“It was so easy,” the fairy queen said, “to get you to put yourself at the center of the danger. You so wanted to believe that you were important.”

I swallowed. “The fairy godmother said—”

“She wanted you to believe you were important, too. She thought you might be more willing to fight me than your sister would be. If she’d had her way, you would be the heroine of this tale.” She leaned forward. Her voice went soft and compelling. “And you still can be. I will let you free, just you, to go out into the world and tell of your escape. You can shape this story however you like. All you have to do is let me go.”

She didn’t get it. She still didn’t.

But now I knew one important thing: the golden thread really worked. The fairy queen was trapped. She needed me to let her go.

Which meant I had something to bargain with.

“Promise,” I said, “that you won’t hurt us. And then I’ll consider—”

She reached out and grabbed me by the throat.

Her hands were long and thin, bony and strong. She lifted me from the floor, and I couldn’t breathe. I tried to scream, and I couldn’t do that, either. Panic filled me as I struggled to draw air into my lungs and no air came.

I wasn’t even aware of letting go of the thread.

I thudded to the ground and took several gasping, painful breaths. The last breaths, I knew, that I would ever take.

But nothing happened.

I looked up and saw, through blurry eyes, that Rosalin had pulled her mass of golden thread over the queen. She held the queen in its tangled mesh, and Edwin held it by its other side.

The fairy queen hissed—a sound exactly like the one the thorn branches made—and struck at Rosalin. Rosalin stood her ground, and the queen’s hand stopped, a thin claw, inches from Rosalin’s throat.

My heart climbed up my chest in desperate, frantic beats. I ran to where Edwin stood, grabbed the thread from him, and shoved him in the direction of the spinning wheel.

The fairy queen snarled in frustration, her face inches from Rosalin’s. But still she didn’t touch her.

I drew in a breath, suddenly realizing what was stopping her.

You agreed to keep my supposed secret.

But I hadn’t just agreed. I had demanded something from her in return.

Swear to me that you won’t hurt her, or I’ll tell her the truth.

“You can’t hurt her,” I said.

The fairy queen gnashed her teeth at me. Her teeth were pointed now, as sharp as the thorns, and there were still too many of them. Behind me, I heard the whir of the wheel as Edwin began to spin.

“Fairies have to keep their bargains,” I said. “When you were pretending to be Varian, I agreed to keep your secret—your fake secret. In return, you promised you wouldn’t hurt Rosalin.”

The fairy queen whirled on me.

“If you hurt me,” I said quickly, “that will count as hurting her.”

“You don’t even like each other!”

“That is not the point!” I pulled the thread harder. “You don’t understand humans. You don’t understand families. But I think you know I’m telling the truth.”

The fairy queen’s face twisted. But in her anger, I saw that she did, at last, know. Even if she would never understand.

“All right,” she spat. “Let me go, and I’ll give you back your castle. I’ll give you back your world.”

“And you won’t hurt us,” I said. “You won’t even try to hurt us.”

“Agreed.”

I stared at her, trying to see the trick, and she smiled. It was a perfectly human smile, which looked terrifying on her completely inhuman face. “Fairies always keep their bargains, child. Don’t you want this to finally be over?”

I looked at Rosalin, and then at Edwin, who was pedaling frantically. I looked at the fairy queen, and her glittering smile made terror arc through me, the same panic I’d felt hundreds of years ago when I’d seen a fairy for the very first time.

But I had a lot of experience, now, with being afraid. I knew how it could make you forget about everything and everyone else.

And I knew that it didn’t have to.

“By us,” I said, “I mean humans. All humans. We’ll set you free, but you can’t hurt any of us, ever again.”

She gnashed her teeth. I pulled the golden net tighter.

“Agreed,” she snarled. “Let me go.”

It was too late to wonder if I had made a mistake. I let the golden thread fall to the ground, and Rosalin did the same.

The fairy queen struggled with it for a frantic moment before throwing it off. It landed in the branches of the Thornwood, which shrank and crumpled, disintegrating into bits of bark.

The fairy queen straightened. Her wings spread, so large they covered the entire space that was free of thorns. She glared down at me, her eyes old and yellow and cruel, showing no trace at all of the man—the disguise—she had called Varian.

Then she vanished.

The thorn branches vanished, too. They didn’t crumple, they didn’t disintegrate; it was as if they had never been there. The room was round and airy, and sun streamed through the window, filling the chamber with golden