Thornwood, page 1
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 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 rem
…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 about that.
“Who are you?” I demanded, shrinking back. “Are you the fairy who cursed my sister?”
The fairy snorted, still spinning. “Of course not. Do I look like the fairy queen to you?”
Since she was the first fairy I had ever seen, I had no answer for that.
The wool lumps were dingy when she fed them in, but gleamed like gold when they came out. The fairy looked at me, her feet still working the pedals. “I’m your sister’s fairy godmother. I’m the one who saved her.”
Not that she had done a very good job of it. Turning “prick her finger and die” into “prick her finger and fall asleep” was, admittedly, an improvement. But it wasn’t as good as, say, “Prick her finger and turn everything she touches to gold,” or, “Prick her finger and sneeze,” or, you know, “Prick her finger and nothing will happen, enjoy your sixteenth birthday, Rosalin!”
But I wasn’t about to bring that up. The court minstrel said ordinary fairies didn’t have enough power to cancel a curse set by their queen. He also said they were sensitive about that subject.
“If you’re Rosalin’s fairy godmother,” I said suspiciously, “shouldn’t you be helping her?”
“Maybe that’s what I’m doing,” the fairy said.
She didn’t particularly emphasize the maybe. But I noticed it.
I focused on what was important. “Where’s Rosalin?”
The fairy smiled. Her teeth were too small for her mouth, and there were too many of them. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s the question. What’s the answer? I need to make sure she’s all right.”
“Do you?” She spread her wings. They were long and gossamer, like a dragonfly’s. “Maybe you should worry about yourself instead of running after your sister. Maybe today you’re the important one.”
It was like she had reached right into my heart and pulled out my deepest, most secret wish. Fairies are good at that.
But they’re also tricky, and dangerous. And good at distraction.
“My sister,” I said again. “Where is she?”
The fairy’s fingers went still, and the wheel came to a stop. There was already a thick coil of gold thread wound around the bobbin.
“Too late,” she said. “The one who calls himself a prince has already found her.”
She snarled slightly on the word prince, like she meant something else entirely.
“Obviously the prince found her,” I said. “He found her, he kissed her, that’s why we all woke up. But where is she?”
“Come here,” the fairy said. “Spin some thread for me. While you do, I will tell you where your sister is.”
I didn’t hesitate.
“Sorry,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like a good idea. I’ll go find her myself.”
“You might not like what you find,” the fairy warned.
I turned and walked out of the room without responding.
The door opened onto a landing, the top of a curved stairway. The stairs went steeply downward, curving around and around a slick stone pillar. There were three narrow windows set high in the outer walls, but the light that filtered through them was weak and dusty.
I don’t like heights. I took a deep breath, put one hand on the damp stone, and started down,
down,
down,
down,
down.
My knees creaked like I was an old woman, or like I hadn’t moved them in years. Both, I supposed, were sort of true.
But as I descended the stairs, my legs warmed up, and I started feeling more like myself. Aside from the stiffness in my muscles, it felt like I had been asleep for no more than a night. There was no dust in my clothes, there were no cobwebs on the stairs, and my nails were trim—they had been cut for Rosalin’s party.
I let a small part of myself believe that only a single day had passed. That made it easier to stay calm as I trudged down the stairs toward whatever waited for me.
I hadn’t known our castle had towers this high. And I couldn’t tell how much farther I had to go. The stairs circled the pillar so tightly that I couldn’t see more than six or seven steps below me. I also couldn’t hear anything. Not a sound.
The one who calls himself a prince has already found her.
The fairy had said it like it had just happened. And she hadn’t said he’d kissed her. What if he hadn’t? What if Rosalin hadn’t woken?
