Thornwood by Leah Cypess (best value ebook reader TXT) 📗

wedding, but it had been decades since the fairies had attended any royal parties. According to the court minstrel, it was the fairy queen herself who had commanded that all fairies withdraw from the human world and stop meddling in human affairs. My parents had assumed inviting them was just a formality, and they hadn’t gotten around to it.

And then the fairy queen had taken offense and cursed their first child.

I wanted to reach for Rosalin’s hand, but the way she held herself—like her body was made of porcelain—told me she would slap me away if I tried.

“The guards have been pulling extra patrols for weeks,” I said. “There’s not a single spinning wheel left in the kingdom.” Now I was just parroting what my father said. “You’re going to be all right, Rosalin. Really.”

She did her best to smile, but she didn’t meet my eyes.

In my fantasies, I was always coming up with plans to save her. Ways to lift the curse and change everything. Sometimes I dreamed that I bargained with the fairy queen to place the curse solely on me and spare the rest of the castle. I imagined everyone gathered around my sleeping form, amazed at my sacrifice, while Rosalin thanked me through her tears.

I wasn’t sure, deep down, that I was brave enough to sacrifice myself to save my sister. But I liked to think I was.

“Rosalin—” I began.

The door flew open, and half a dozen ladies-in-waiting poured into the room, arms full of ribbons and cloth. They fluttered around the bed, and Rosalin pasted a far more convincing smile on her face for their benefit.

Their gazes slid right past me. I pushed myself off the bed, and one of the ladies stepped on my foot.

“Ouch!” I said. She sighed heavily, annoyed that my foot had been in her way.

They gathered my sister up and swept her in the direction of the bath. I stood staring after them until she was out of sight, but Rosalin didn’t look back at me even once.

I trudged back toward my room, to rouse my own ladies and convince them that I had to get ready for the party, too.

As far as I could recall, that was the last thing I did that day. That year. That century.

The next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes and shifting uncomfortably on a cold, hard floor. I didn’t remember falling asleep, but I must have; my mind felt fuzzy, and my muscles slow and sluggish, as if I hadn’t moved them for…

…a hundred years.

My eyes snapped open.

The last thing I remembered was walking out of Rosalin’s room, striding down the hall as the early-morning light began to filter through the windows. But now the sunlight was beating strong and bright on my face, and the floor beneath me was bare stone.

Which meant…

I closed my eyes again, as if I could change what I was seeing. Then, reluctantly, I opened them.

I was on the floor of a large, drafty room. In the center was a crooked wooden table with a wooden wheel perched precariously on top of it—

A spinning wheel.

“Oh, curses,” I said.

That sort of language would have gotten me yelled at (even though it was the literal truth) if anyone else had been in the room. But no one was. I was all alone, just me and the spinning wheel.

I’m sorry, Rosalin, I thought. I’m so sorry.

But something was wrong. Even more wrong than the obvious.

If this had happened because of the curse, it should have been Rosalin here. Why was I in the room with the spinning wheel? Where was my sister?

A chill slithered up my spine. I turned my hands over and checked all my fingertips. No blood. No sign of a prick. They were my own stubby, scratched fingers. These weren’t the fingers cursed to be pricked. I had no curses hanging over my head—and no blessings, either.

I should have been waking up in my bed. Or in the courtyard. Or in the kitchen, or on the roof of the stables. Any of the places where I spent my time.

Instead, I was in a room I had never seen before, with a very large, very illegal spinning wheel casting a shadow on the floor.

And I couldn’t remember how I had ended up here.

Fear climbed up my throat. I tried to swallow it and managed to reduce it to a churning sense of wrongness in my chest. It made it a little hard to breathe, but at least it was possible to think.

Clearly, the curse had struck. And just as clearly, it was now over. If I was awake, the prince must have come, and that meant everyone was awake. Including my sister.

I had to find her.

I got up, and my muscles creaked painfully, like I had been in the same position for hours and hours. How many hours were in a hundred years? Twenty-four hours a day multiplied by—

Not now, I told myself firmly, and started toward the door.

I wasn’t sure what made me look back. Maybe a sound. Maybe an instinct. Maybe habit; I had a tendency to lose things, so I always tried to look behind me before I left a room.

There was a woman sitting at the spinning wheel.

The woman definitely had not been there a few seconds ago.

Also: she wasn’t human. Her face was a bit too long, like a reflection in a warped mirror, and the tips of her ears stuck out from her silky black hair. Her eyes were large and angled, yellow like a cat’s. A pair of wings was folded flat against her back.

A fairy.

“Princess Briony,” she said. As she spoke, she began to spin. The wheel whirred as she pedaled, and her fingers fed lumps of wool into the spinning bobbin. “You are not who I was expecting.”

Her voice was low and mocking. Like I was exactly who she had been expecting and there was something funny