The raindrops are different here.

Rain is one of those things that is nice in fantasy but not in real life. The idea of rain is nice when it’s embroidered on a cushion that’s all, ‘Live your life like no one is watching and learn to dance in the rain’, but when you’re caught outside in it, dancing isn’t ever the first thing on your mind. All you want to do is get home and change into dry clothes before you start smelling like wet dog.

But the rain here is a fantasy of rain. It’s a perfect summer night, and there’s music in the distance, and the water is warm, the raindrops like gentle fingertips on his skin.

The voice comes from behind him, unsure, uncertain. ‘Valentine?’

‘Yes,’ he replies, turning. ‘Yes, I’m here.’

The girl won’t look at him. She has her head bowed, a curtain of dark hair falling around her face. Her spine is ramrod straight, but even though she’s clearly trying to hide it, she’s shaking.

‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘You don’t need to be scared. I won’t hurt you.’

‘You are not the one I am afraid of.’

But she won’t look at him, and he’s not entirely sure she’s telling him the truth.

‘Let’s do this quickly, then,’ he says, trying to sound as non-threatening as he can. ‘I don’t want to put you in danger.’

‘Wait.’

She lifts her chin, and with her dark hair damp from the rain and the starlight catching the light in her brown eyes, all he can see is Marie Jessup late at night at the after party for the Year Ten formal at Cam’s place. She’d just broken up with Julian and she’d put a hand on his chest and pushed him against a wall and said, ‘Finn Blacklin, I am single and I am angry and I am drunk and I have always wanted to do this,’ and kissed him, and he had felt like he was catching a grenade in his hands.

‘I need to hear you say it,’ the girl who is not Marie but is not not her either says. ‘You have seen what the prince has done to Rhymer. He will do the same or worse to me if he discovers I have shown you to his private garden. It is not you who will pay the price for disobeying his edict, but us.’

‘I promise I won’t tell anyone that you showed me where she was,’ he says. ‘And I promise I’ll do my best to put right what he’s done to her.’

He knows the look in her eyes, because he’s seen it before, the look that says that’s not enough, he’s not enough. How many times has he seen it on Holly-Anne’s face? He saw it on Marie’s face too, a few weeks after that night at the party, when she realised that what she wanted was not him at all, but some idea of him he had never been able to live up to.

When he sees it on Pearl’s face – when he lets her down – it’s the worst of all.

‘I’ll do everything I can to help her,’ he says. ‘I promise.’

The girl who is Marie and yet not Marie nods. ‘This way.’

They walk quietly through the trees, accompanied only by the rain and the dim sounds of music and laughter in the distance. Sometimes, they hear voices, but when they get too close, he pulls her into the forest and wraps his cloak around her, pressing her to him and covering them both with the best mask he can produce. Don’t look here, he sends out into the air. There is nothing to see.

Her body is stiff against his. She’s still scared of him.

Has he railroaded her into this? Has he forced her into doing something she didn’t want to do? How would she even go about saying no to a fairy prince?

Time is strange here, and he’s not sure if they’ve been walking for ten minutes or ten hours when she finally stops. ‘This is where I must leave you,’ she says. ‘The prince’s garden is lethal to humans.’

‘Of course. Thank you.’

‘You should not thank me,’ she says. ‘It means you owe me a debt, and that is a serious business in this place.’

‘I know,’ he says, and he does know, deep, deep in his bones, has known every day since his mum taught him saying thank you was polite and he knew it was so much more than that. ‘But I do owe you a debt. Every fairy here owes you a debt for what they’ve done to you, and I intend to pay it. If there’s any way I can make up for this, then I will.’

She looks up at him. ‘Thank you.’

He shakes his head. ‘No. You don’t owe me anything.’

She turns to go, but, ‘Wait,’ he says.

‘I cannot linger,’ she replies.

‘Have they given you a name?’

She shakes her head.

It floats up to him, the way things sometimes do. Seelie, Pearl said to him once, and he felt like she was a fisherman and the word was a fish and she’d hauled it from the depths of his brain. Unseelie. Changeling.

Now he has to catch the fish alone, but this one leaps out of the ocean and into his hands. ‘Rosemary,’ he says.

‘You are not my master,’ she says softly. ‘You cannot name me.’

‘Please,’ he says. ‘The name is yours. Take it.’

Long moments pass before she nods her head, just once, and disappears back the way they came.

He watches for a few long moments, even after the dark of the forest has swallowed her up. He clenches his right fist once, twice, three times, grits his teeth, runs his hand through his hair.

Even if Pearl tapped him on the shoulder right now, and said, Hey babe, remember me? The girl you tried to break up with for my own good? I’ve come to take you home, it wouldn’t fix everything. It wouldn’t fix anything.

He closes his eyes for a moment and laces his fingers together, imagining he’s lacing them through hers. Imagines he can live up to everything she deserves. You can’t fix everything at once, he imagines her whispering, her breath warm against his ear. But you can fix something.

He takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and walks into his brother’s secret garden.

The branches of the trees have tangled together overhead to form an archway. Vines trickle down from them like ropes, some leafy, some studded with tiny white star-shaped blossoms, their fragrance permeating the night air. He has to lift them to get through, and it reminds him of nothing more than the fish and chip shop near the beach he goes to after surfing sometimes, which has these streamers over the door that tangle themselves around every single person who tries to go in.

Wouldn’t his brother love that comparison?

He flicks a vine off his shoulder absently, but the next second it’s back, winding its way down his arm and around his wrist. He tries to take a step forward, but there’s a vine coiled around his ankle as well, and then there’s one snaking its way around his neck, squeezing tight.

‘Let me pass,’ he commands.

A moment. A heartbeat. Two. Three.

‘I am a prince of this land,’ he says. ‘You will let me pass. Please.’

Another moment, another heartbeat, and then the tight coils loosen.

He keeps walking. He tries to keep to the centre of the path, but it narrows and narrows, the foliage blocking out the sky, until it’s so narrow he’s not even sure it’s a path any more. It twists and turns and loops back on itself, the kind of path you get when you’re driving down a mountain, even though the ground is perfectly flat.

Maybe it’s not a path. Maybe he’s just stumbling blindly through his brother’s garden, and maybe he’ll keep stumbling forever and ever and ever. Pearl will come, and she won’t be able to find him, but she’ll charge into the garden just the same, and he’ll always hear her voice in the distance, calling out to him, but he’ll never be able to find her, and the garden will eat her up, and it’ll be his fault, his fault, his fault –

And there she is.

She lies on a bed of roses, hands daintily folded over each other on her chest, her impossibly long honey-blonde hair dripping down to pool in golden puddles on the ground.

It’s not Pearl. He knows it’s not Pearl, with her short spiky hair and her angry flashing eyes. He’s seen her sleep, and she’s anything but peaceful. The first night he spent with her – the night she said you make me want you so badly that I can’t think, and kissed him so hard their teeth smashed together – they’d been spooning quietly in the early morning, and she flipped over and nearly punched him in the face.

This is not his Linford, lying totally still in a frothy white dress, looking like a drawing of a fairytale princess. Yet it is her – her face, her hands, pressing a red rose to her heart.

There’s a stinging behind his eyes and a lump in his throat. She looks dead.

‘Shit,’ he whispers.

Gently, he lifts Oyster’s left hand, slides the rose out of her grasp, and flings it aside. There are tiny spots of blood on her skin from the thorns, but they disappear as he touches each of them with his fingertips.

He bends over her. ‘I’m going to get you home to your sister,’ he whispers into her left ear. ‘I promise.’

The thorns dig into his skin as he hoists Oyster up into his arms. She’s lighter than Pearl, so light it’s like she might disappear, but she’s harder to carry, because of the trailing waterfall of her hair. He tries to balance her with one arm, bracing his leg against the bed of roses to hold her weight, ignoring the thorns in his skin while he coils up her hair with his free hand.

But it’s impossibly silky, impossibly shiny, the way he’d always imagined Pearl’s hair would be before she lost it, when he’d sit behind her in class and imagine burying his face in it, and it slithers out of his grasp again and again.

He lays her on the ground. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and pulls a knife out of his boot.

He takes a handful of her hair and hesitates, because all he can hear is Pearl sniffing back tears when he grew all her hair back and then she made him cut it off again, and the longing for a moment is so intense, so blinding, that he can’t breathe, can’t see, can’t move, and she would be horrified if she could see him now – don’t you dare, Finn Blacklin, don’t you dare DON’T YOU DARE –

‘I will have to be clearer with my retainers,’ his brother says, ‘that you are not permitted to wander off alone.’

He stands. Oyster’s hair slides from his grasp. He holds the knife in front of him with both hands.

‘It would seem you are lost,’ his brother says. ‘This is my private garden.’

‘I didn’t see a keep out sign,’ he replies. ‘Don’t you remember? I’m new.’

His brother just smiles in return – a broad smile, showing all his teeth.

‘What did you do to her?’

‘Nothing she did not earn, I assure you,’ his brother replies. ‘I was kinder than some might have been, allowing her a simple slumber as punishment.’

‘When will she wake up?’

‘She wakes when I will it.’

‘So, what, you put her back in her box when you have no use for her? Like a toy?’

‘She is my pet. She is mine to do with as I wish.’

His brother is still smiling, and he’s never wanted to smash someone’s face in so badly, not even when Julian splashed those pictures of him and Pearl and the piano all over the internet.

He wraps his fingers tighter around the knife to keep himself from shaking with rage. ‘You’re a monster.’

There’s something almost sad in his brother’s eyes. ‘You are so very, very young, little brother.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘You have not yet learned the ways of the world,’ he says. ‘There is so much you do not know. So much you do not understand.’

‘I know that keeping people in comas is wrong,’ he snaps back. ‘I know that forcing people to be your servant is wrong. I know –’

‘You know so many things, it seems. Yet you have not considered what I know.’

His brother stalks toward him, and the gleam in his eyes is catlike, predatory. ‘I know that you are soft, and so I knew that you would seek out my pet,’ he says. ‘I knew you would seek to heal her, even though she is mine and you have no rights to her. I knew that you would defy me, and even though it saddens me, brother, I knew you would have to be punished.’

He raises his chin and refuses to move. If Pearl can stand her ground, so can he.

‘Kneel,’ his brother tells him.

‘No.’

‘This is not a negotiation. You are a prince, but so am I. I am the prince that rules here. I am the prince that wears the crown. You will kneel before me.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I won’t.’

His brother is so close now they’re almost nose to nose. His amber gaze is unwavering, but he’s not going to break. He’s not going to blink first. Liar, Pearl called his brother, and he’s not going to let her be wrong, he’s not going to let her down again, he won’t, he can’t, he –

The pain is sudden, side-splitting, and it forces him, spluttering, to his knees. He retches again and again, and whitish-green foam pours out of his mouth, the same colour as Oyster’s dress.

He braces his hands against the ground as he throws up again, and the scratches on his arms stand out red and angry. ‘The roses,’ he manages to choke.

‘They’re poisoned, yes,’ his brother says, as calmly as he might say that the next bus was coming in five minutes.

He kneels down beside him. ‘Know that you are powerful, but I am greater,’ he says. ‘Know that you are a prince, but I hold the crown. Our people may cheer and cry and lay wreathes at the feet of their lost Valentine, but I am the one who commands, and though they kneel before you, you kneel before me. You will always kneel, or I will make you kneel.’

He’s on fire. He’s drowning. He’s falling off a cliff. The world is closing in on him and expanding all at once, a big bang, a big crunch.

He’s flying through the air. When he lands, the thorns of the roses are like hundreds of knives in his skin.

‘A year and a day is what you promised us,’ his brother says, laying Oyster down beside him. ‘And that is what I shall take from you for your transgressions.’

I wake up with a cannonball exploding in my stomach.

I barely make it to the bathroom before I throw up every meal I’ve eaten in the last three days.