“Not anymore,” she said. “Now it’s Shanandoah’s story.” She leaned back with a heavy sigh. “And it turns out you can’t have a fairy tale without anything bad happening in it. Fairy tales need heroes. Heroes need dragons. Princes and knights need enemies. Life needs death. I wish it was easier, but it’s not. Not even here.”

Emilie wiped tears off her face and took a breath to settle herself. “But we can leave?”

“You can leave anytime,” Skya said. “If the price of magic is too high for you, you can leave. The door might only let you in three times, but it will always let you out. That’s how magic works. It will only give you so many chances to accept what it offers before it finds someone else who’s willing to pay the price.”

“So we can leave but we can never come back,” Emilie repeated. “Do they know? I mean, they will go back eventually. Rafe promised his mom.”

And Jeremy would go with him. She’d found a sister in Skya, but it felt like she’d also found two brothers in Rafe and Jeremy.

“I’ll tell them,” Skya said. “I didn’t know how to tell them then, and I don’t know how to tell them now, but—”

“I can tell them,” Emilie said. “You don’t have to do everything anymore.”

“It’s my story. I’ll do it.” Then she smiled. “You’re starting to act like a real princess, you know? I’m proud of you.”

“Great, I want to puke.”

Skya laughed. Emilie closed the story, sealing it shut with the Velcro flap. She carried it back to the golden box. Skya came over and locked it inside with the key.

“I’m sorry, kid. I just wrote the story. I didn’t make the rules.” Skya put her arm around her.

“Maybe you could write another story? A sequel?”

“I haven’t written a story in a long time. Been a little busy running a kingdom.”

“But what if you tried—”

“Can’t do it. Lost my magic pencil in the trunk of that guy’s car. Lost my pencil, lost my stories with it.”

“Maybe your stories aren’t lost. Maybe they’re just missing. Maybe…maybe we can find them?”

“Maybe.” Skya kissed her forehead. “For now, let’s just be happy together, all of us, for as long as we can. The end of this story can wait awhile.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

Meanwhile, Rafe was sleeping peacefully, more peacefully than he’d slept in fifteen years. He woke when he felt a shadow blocking the sun. He opened his eyes, propped himself up on his elbows, and saw Jeremy standing in the entryway to his balcony.

“Knock, knock.”

“Nice outfit,” Rafe said, blinking and yawning.

“I call this palace casual.” Jeremy stepped inside and turned a circle in the last of the evening sunlight. He wore a light tunic with a black vest and black trousers. Cleaned up and polished, he looked more like a prince than Rafe did in his T-shirt and boxer briefs. He looked like a dream, like something he’d dreamed or painted or painted in a dream.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in your room?” Rafe asked. “Queen’s orders.”

“Do you know how long it’s been since someone sent me to my room?”

“I know your mother never did it.”

“Never had to. I loved my room,” Jeremy said. “Like yours better, though. This one, I mean.”

Rafe had to agree. His bedroom was more than fit for a prince. An enormous bed with posts carved like animal heads—a wolf, a dragon, a rabbit, an owl. A tapestry on the wall embroidered with a maypole scene, a hundred children in white clothes dancing and twirling pink, blue, and gold ribbons. A painting of Skya on her ivy throne hung over the stone mantel. Rafe knew he’d painted it. He’d signed it in the corner.

But he knew Jeremy wasn’t talking about the décor.

“It’s not bad,” Rafe said and stacked the pillows behind his head. Without realizing it, he’d re-created this room back home in his cabin, down to the carved posts on the bed.

“Let me guess…” Jeremy leaned across Rafe, almost laying on him as he reached for something behind the bed. For a split second, Rafe thought he was going to kiss him, but no. Jeremy pulled up Rafe’s bow from the hook on the back of the headboard.

“You always slept with your bow,” Jeremy said. “You still do.”

He leaned over Rafe again and put it back on the hook, hiding it behind the headboard. Then he sat back on the edge of the bed.

“Asshole,” Rafe said.

“What? I was just checking.” Jeremy gave him an innocent look that Rafe didn’t buy for one second. “Nice to see some things never change.”

In the Ghost Town, they’d kissed twice. Not that he was keeping count, but two was an easy enough number to remember. All their secrets were out. They’d been much, much more than friends here, and yet it seemed Jeremy still didn’t want to talk about it. Why?

Rafe noticed Jeremy glance at the black book on the table by the bed, still latched, its secrets shut up inside.

“Are you ever going to open it? You already know what’s in there.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Rafe said, wincing. “Do you think I want to remember what Dad did to me?”

“Fair. Very fair. But I promise there’s more good than bad in there.”

Rafe raised his eyebrow. “Like what? If it sounds good enough, maybe I’ll consider it.”

Jeremy gave a low laugh. “All right, let me think.” He pointed to the tapestry of the maypole dancers. “See that? They have that festival at Ravencliff on the summer solstice. These two beautiful girls made flower crowns for us and ‘sold’ them to us for a kiss.”

“Not bad. What else?”

Jeremy moved a little closer to him on the bed. “Oh, you’ll like this one. The queen liked to take us out on her dragon ship at night. When you’re on the Painted Sea, you can watch the stars falling.”

“Meteor shower?”

“Not here. Here the stars actually fall. And if you’re fast enough and lucky enough, you can catch one with a net.”

“I highly doubt that’s true.”

“If you open your book, you’ll know…”

“Try again.” Rafe was enjoying this game.

Jeremy’s head fell to the side and he stroked his chin. In his eyes, Rafe could see him sorting through memory after memory, looking for the right one, the best one. Then he raised a finger.

“One night…about a month after we came here, Skya showed us that some of the trees in the Sweet Spring Forest had stairways carved inside them. Enormous spiral staircases, and you could go five hundred feet or more up the interior of the tree and then walk out onto the branches.”