Puberty comes to all girls, even fairies. Grounded by their increasingly soft and unpredictable bodies, Vivian and Mirth drink elderflower spirits while their parents sleep. Running through the humid, moonlit forest, half-drunk on stolen liquor and hormones, is almost as fun as hurtling through a rain-choked cloud.

Vivian, no longer a weightless, agile sprite, trips on a root and collapses onto a pile of rotting leaves that stick to her face and hair.

“Well, isn’t that fashionable!” chuckles Mirth, her antic green eyes reflecting the moon and stars.

Vivian, who envies her friend’s dramatic coloring, sighs. Something died in these leaves, she can smell it. Now she is wet, cold, and faintly redolent of decayed rodent. The fun, for her, is over. “I want to go home.”

Mirth frowns. “You promised we’d watch the sunrise.”

“Well, I’ve changed my mind,” snaps Vivian, walking away in the wrong direction, towards the human settlement.

Mirth has always regretted not calling after her friend.

Lost and exhausted, Vivian doesn’t notice the two hulking mortal men who follow clumsily in her footsteps. When she stops to rest her aching legs, they set upon her, rending her gossamer dress and tearing her wings. They grunt. She screams. They, for all practical purposes, die.

When it is all over, she has used two out of her three curses. The two men, now overgrown birch trees with painfully peeling bark, groan vegetal protests as she wraps herself in the bloodied tatters of her dress and stalks away.

Her cheeks are wet with dew, not tears. Never tears.

No Fae man will wed a woman tainted by a mortal’s touch, so Vivian marries a human king. It could be worse, she thinks. Mortal rulers prize fairies for their mysterious powers and ability bear long-lived children. Besides, Vivian is sure she will make a good queen.

After the wedding, Vivian dines with her new husband in his gilded receiving room. They sit at opposite ends of a golden banquet table. Servants hover like angry bees.

She inspects her husband with increasing dismay. His face is rough and pale like birch bark, and his head is as bald and pockmarked as the moon. His gnarled fingers remind her of the men she cursed. Her food sticks in her throat.

When they are done eating, the king rings a small, silver bell. A sturdy, ruddy-skinned girl with a deep scowl on her face charges into the room. She can’t be more than four years old, but she has the presence of a much older child.

“Wife, meet your new stepdaughter, Cora.”

Cora rolls her narrow, wrathful eyes and stamps her foot. “It isn’t fair! I am the firstborn. I should be your heir. I would make a great and terrible queen.”

The king’s voice is as old and sad as the winter wind. “I’m sorry, daughter, but my successor must have fairy blood.”

Vivian’s daughter Selene is gentle, poetic, and dreamy. She heals small animals with a touch and a whisper, and calms squalling babies with the barest of smiles. She quails and sulks at even the gentlest criticism. She is utterly unsuited to be queen.

“Please husband,” Vivian begs, “make Cora your heir instead of Selene. It’s what she wants so desperately. It’s what you want.”

The king shakes his head sadly. “The people demand a half-fairy queen who will rule for a century. I am merely their servant. There’s nothing I can do.”

Vivian is wiping away a tear with her sleeve when a high, keening cry cleaves her heart.

Before the king’s guards can react, Vivian half-runs, half-flies into the audience chamber where twelve-year-old Cora is standing over Selene’s convulsing body, her jut-jawed face contorted by triumph and despair.

Vivian looks at Cora and then at Selene, and remembers her last curse. The words taste like ashes. “I curse you, dearest daughter, to sleep peacefully, forever.” She pauses, and then amends her curse, salting the next decades of her life with false hope. Or until you are awakened by true love’s kiss.