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BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD, LEST THAT YOUR HEART’S BLOOD SHOULD RUN COLD.
Boldness is rewarded. But what about all those girls, all those obedient girls who trusted and loved and wed and died? Weren’t they bold, too?
Everyone makes mistakes. They trust the wrong people. They fall in love.
Let’s start with a love story. Or maybe it’s another horror story. It seems like the difference is mostly in where the ending comes.
All stories are lessons. Fairy tales have a moral: Stay on the path. Don’t trust wolves. Don’t steal things, not even things you think no normal person would care about. Share your food but don’t trust people who want to share their food with you; don’t eat their shiny red apples, nor their candy houses, nor any of it. Be nice, always nice, and polite to everyone: kings and beggars, witches and wounded bears. Don’t break a promise. Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.
It started with Locke slipping a note into my rucksack.
“How does it feel?”
“To be stuck in a fairy tale?”
“How does it feel to...
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“I like stories,”
“And perhaps I like you as well.”
Fairy tales are full of girls who wait, who endure, who suffer. Good girls. Obedient girls. Girls who crush nettles until their hands bleed. Girls who haul water for witches. Girls who wander through deserts or sleep in ashes or make homes for transformed brothers in the woods. Girls without hands, without eyes, without the power of speech, without any power at all. But then a prince rides up and sees the girl and finds her beautiful. Beautiful, not despite her suffering, but because of it. A...
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Etiquette demanded some kind of response.
‘You must be particularly kind to people. Other kids can act like monsters, but not you.’”
her expression pure confusion. As though I had no reason to be afraid of a broken heart. She had no idea how dangerous a broken heart could be.
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Taryn. She suffered many indignities at the hands of the magical people called the Folk, yet she never was anything but kind, no matter how they despised her. Then one day, a fox-haired faerie boy looked upon her and saw her virtue and her loveliness, so he took her to be his bride. And on his arm, dressed in a gown as bright as the stars, the other Folk saw her for the first time. They knew that they’d misjudged her and…
“I like you,”
“Unwisely. I am fair sure I like you far too well.”
“You can like me all you want, can’t you?”
“Nicasia might not agree,”
“So if I mean to keep visiting you,”
“will you promise to tell no one? Absolutely no one, no matter what, until I allow it’s safe?”
“No one,”
“I promise.”
Locke took my hand and kisse...
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if I figured you’d be suspicious of his motives, then maybe I should have been suspicious, too. That if fairy stories warn us about keeping promises, I shouldn’t have given my word so easily.
Faeries despise humans as liars, but there are different kinds of lying.
we’ve lied to each other plenty. We pretended to be fine, pretended the possibility of being fine into existence. And when pretending seemed like it might be too hard, we just didn’t ask each other the questions that would require it. We smiled and forced laughter and rolled our eyes at the Folk, as though we weren’t afraid, when we were both scared all the time. And if there were hairline cracks in all that pretending, we pretended those away, too.
Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.
Trust me, Locke had said.
But I didn’t. How could I?
This will be over quickly, he’d said. But not everything is better for being fast.
Be bold, be bold, but not too bold. Be good, but not too good. Be pretty, but not too pretty. Be honest, but not too honest. Maybe no one got lucky. Maybe it was too hard.
Without her to make us a flying pony from weeds or a boat that would travel by puffs of our breath, there was no way off the isles.
Before, it was important that we found a place we belonged in Faerie, but with Vivi leaving, it was imperative.
“Love is a noble cause,”
“How can anything done in the service of a noble cause be wrong?”
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Taryn and she had a faerie lover who came to her at night. He was generous and adoring, but visited only in the dark. He asked for two things: one, for her to keep their meetings secret, and two, never to look upon his face fully. And so, night after night she took delight in him but, after some time had passed, wondered what his secret could be.…
“I know what you did,”
“Wicked girl. Yet you let your sister take the brunt of my ire. That wasn’t very nice, was it?”
He was dressed in a velvet doublet, with buttons of carved jet. Loose black curls framed his sharp cheekbones and a mouth set in a cruel line. He’s handsome, but that makes his horribleness worse, somehow. As though he’s taken something nice and made it awful. Being the single focus of his attention ...
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“Oh, I see why Locke likes you.”
“You’re awful.” He said it as though he was delighted. “And the worst part is that you believe otherwise.”
“Does that mean you’re going to leave her alone now?”
“It’s much too late for that.”
his face as handsome as heartbreak.
“Come down, my beauty, my darling, my dove,”
pictured Locke’s heart shot through with an arrow and then shook my head to get rid of the image. It wasn’t like me to think things like that. It especially wasn’t like me to have a brief jolt of satisfaction from it.
“It was hard to stay away from you,”
“You shouldn’t have.”
