Briar Rose knew everything was wrong a week into living at the castle. If she was being honest with herself, she knew things were not right the night of her sixteenth birthday. A ball was thrown in celebration of her surviving until her sixteenth birthday. Surviving. Rose was cursed at birth, something she did not know of until she woke to find Prince Philip’s face hovering over her own. She didn’t know why she was asleep in that tower. The last thing she remembered was that Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather had left her alone in a room in the castle. She was thinking about how desperately cold the room felt with its stone walls and high ceiling.

She missed the cottage. She missed the forest. She wasn’t thinking about the boy she met earlier that day at all. She was thinking about how she was a princess and her whole world had turned upside down.

Rose learned that her aunts were really not her aunts at all- they weren’t even human. Aunt Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather were fairies, something Rose didn’t even know existed in the world.

And that night, Rose danced with Prince Philip, which was absolutely divine. She felt as if she was flying, her feet barely touching the ground, as he swung her around on the ballroom floor where dignitaries from far and wide watched entranced.

Earlier that day, Philip had snuck up on her in the forest, back when she thought he was simply a village boy and not a prince at all. She was surprised when he came upon her dancing and singing to herself with the forest animals prancing amongst her feet. Even though she didn’t know anyone outside of her aunts, she wasn’t frightened. He had a kind face. That was what she remembered most about him. He had a kind face because he was kind.

He didn’t deserve what she did to him.

***

Rose left two notes. One for her parents, King Stefan and Queen Leah. Though they tried desperately to accept Rose as their own daughter, to begin raising her as a true princess, Rose faltered. She couldn’t tell the difference between the different sized spoons and when to use them at dinner, didn’t know how to address the fellow members of the aristocracy (she made the blunder of curtsying to the maid or footman one too many times and outright ignoring a visiting king), and she hated wearing shoes and never did so whenever she could. She played with the children in the surrounding villages, chatted away with beggars, and spent hours upon hours planting flowers alongside the gardeners. She could see the exasperation on the king’s face and the disappointment in the queen’s eyes every time she returned to the palace with the hem of her gown brown with dirt and sweat plastering her hair and making it stick out in odd ends. Rose would never be the princess, the daughter, they wanted.

The second note was for Philip explaining why she couldn’t be with him. If she could not survive as a princess, she never would as his queen. She watched what her mother did day in and out, sitting quietly embroidering elaborate patterns into miles and miles of unending fabric. Rose asked once what the queen was doing, and she said she was making a tablecloth. Later, when Rose asked again when she saw the queen begin a new project, she said she was now decorating some curtains. To Rose’s disappointment, it was always a tablecloth, curtain, bedspread, or pillow that needed to be decorated. It was an unending chore where Rose joined her mother and spent hours hunched over her thread and needle until it felt as if her back would break and her eyes would stay permanently crossed. She could take no more.

It tore her heart to write the letter to Philip, but if she was to be free of the royal life, she would need to be free of him as well. She kissed the letter before sealing it and disappearing into the night.