Thorny tendrils snake towards us, the skeletons they bear jostling like grotesque puppets charmed into an unnatural life.
But the heads flopping back and the flailing limbs remind me that they are dead, and I will be too if I don't act.
I sprint for the gate, pulling Lady Rosella behind me. We can outrun the thorns. We must.
A briary branch swipes at us. I dodge, shielding Lady Rosella with my body, but she pushes in front of me.
The thorns will tear into her, peel her pearlescent skin away from her dainty bones as I imagine they have been yearning to do for the last century.
"No!" I grab at her.
Ropes of thorns bite into my ankles. They yank me back. My legs give way. I fall forward and crash into the ground. My head buzzes from the force of the tumble.
I grasp at the ground and crawl forward, pulling at the barbed cords restraining my feet. There's only a sharp cutting into the soft skin at my ankles, no loosening, no mercy.
"Rosella!" I call as they drag me back towards their heart.
My blood trails over the cobblestones like scarlet threads. The thorns creep up my legs, staking their claim on me with every sharp bite.
If the lady of legend has escaped the thorns, if she has fought her way to the freedom I had desired for us both, this wasn't for nought.
Two more tendrils swoop down, curling around my wrists. I cry out as they pull me upright, clenching my fists and tugging even though I know they won't release me from their prickly grip. Blood drips down my arms, tracing wobbly, red paths over my skin. The sight makes me dizzy.
My cry catches in my throat when I behold Lady Rosella standing unscathed before me. The thorns are gathered around her, poised to strike, but I feel as though it's me they have in their sights.
I shudder. Time holds its breath. Then Lady Rosella steps away from the thorns. They slither alongside her like protective watchdogs.
"I know. It has been far too long," she croons.
The thorns scrape against the ground and rustle against each other in reply. An icy shiver runs through me despite the warm sun beating down on me.
Something is wrong, very wrong. I should know what it is, but I can't think through the pain of the thorns' grasp, certainly not when Lady Rosella stares at me with those enchanting, terrifying eyes.
She rests a cool hand on my chest. I would pull away if I could, scale the wall and flee on horseback, but the unrelenting thorns offer me up to the rose among them.
Lady Rosella tilts my face down to hers. I wince away from the cold, unsettling curiosity sharpening her perfect face.
"All this refreshing youth, all this vigour." She squeezes my cheeks.
Now I don't admire the strength in her small hands, only fear it.
"I don't understand. This isn't how the legend goes." My voice trembles.
"Oh?" Lady Rosella tilts her golden head, savage intrigue mingling with the terrible knowing in her eyes.
I gather my strength to tilt my chin up. "The thorns belong to the evil fairy, not the child she cursed."
"Hmm." Lady Rosella's smile is as cold and sharp as icicles hanging from a cavern's ceiling. "The fairy and the child aren't as different as you think."
Before I can comprehend her words, she is melting away before my eyes. I'm afraid to move, afraid of this curse I don't understand.
Lady Rosella's frame elongates until she stands a head taller than me. The colour in her skin leaches away until she's as pale as ivory. Her hair turns black, charred by an invisible fire. Her nose sharpens, and her cheekbones hollow out. Only her eyes are as I remember, as dark as the night, as dazzling as a dream.
She possesses the wicked, mesmerising beauty of a dream turned into a nightmare.
Whoever stands in front of me isn't Lady Rosella. Cold knowing spreads through me because the thorn crown adorning her dark hair tells me who she is.
"You're the fairy who cursed Lady Rosella."
"You would think I didn't have a name with the number of people who have called me that." She scoffs. "Of course the legend didn't give me a name. Why would a dark, cruel fairy deserve one?"
"What is your name?" I ask.
The briar fairy stares into space or perhaps into the past, not noticing my eyes darting about the garden in a fruitless search for escape.
All around me are thorns. I'll never reach the gate without tangling in them. I'll never reach the wall either. The haphazard corpses scattered among the briar roses and thorns remind me of that.
"It's Acanthah." The thorn fairy appraises me, her eyes once again alight, alert. "I've never been asked that before." She caresses my cheek the way I imagine Lady Rosella might've.
I should've known she was too perfect to exist. She was an illusion, but I had been in love with that illusion. Now that it was shattered, my heart was broken.
"Was Rosella real?"
The fairy rolls her eyes. "Of course she was. Where do you think the legend came from? I did curse the girl, and she did fall into an enchanted sleep waiting for a true love's kiss that never came."
I shudder. I thought her to be the girl. I thought myself the true love's kiss, but I was mistaken, and now I was paying for it, like Icarus who had flown too high and grown too proud, then plummeted to his death in the cold, unforgiving ocean.
"It doesn't have to be this way," I say as if my blood wouldn't trail after me after Acanthah granted me my freedom. As if I'd ever use my hands or feet again. I can barely move them, so tight is the thorns' hold on them. "Whatever you want, I'm sure there's some way I can help—"
Acanthah's mouth quirks. "You seem like a nice boy. I wish I could let you go, but I have a use for you, and young blood like you doesn't come around here as often as I'd like."
My blood freezes, along with my breath. "What sort of use?"
Acanthah tilts her head. "A fairy's immortality comes at a price." She steps away from me, turning to her thorns instead. She traces a pointed fingernail over a quivering branch. "I need sustenance. So do my thorns. I cursed Lady Rosella out of vengeance, but when I heard how many young men ventured here in the hope of rousing her once she had fallen asleep, I realised I could turn the legend I had created into a trap." She turns to me, her smile bright but cold. "I got rid of Rosella. She was useless to me, but her name wasn't. Over a century after it was first uttered, it still draws naive romantics here." Acanthah laughs softly.
My cheeks burn. I was one of those naive romantics. I had thought myself brave, blessed, and it had only brought me here, into a garden of bloodthirsty thorns.
"The fortune these young men hope to secure for themselves all flows to me," Acanthah continues. "The life force coursing through their veins sustains me for all the years they should've lived. It keeps me young. It keeps me powerful. It keeps the legend I feed off alive."
My head spins. The fairy had tucked herself so neatly into the legend that nobody would ever know she wasn't Lady Rosella until her thorns cornered them and they smelt their own blood leaking from beneath their skin.
I had believed myself to be the first man to reach Lady Rosella and break her curse, but there had been many before me.
I look around the garden. Those men now lay tangled in briars, their flesh rotting, their bones being bleached by the harsh sun.
They didn't die trying to reach Lady Rosella. They died trying to escape her, or rather, some distorted, deceptive image of her.
I may not have been the first to kiss her or awaken her from her false slumber, but I will be the first to escape her and her briars.
I grit my teeth against the pain. If I can keep Acanthah talking, perhaps I can find some way to elude her.
There must be a way. There always is in the fairy tales my mother read to me before bed when I was a child, in the myths and legends my sisters giggled and swooned about at the edge of the fountain in the courtyard.
"What happened to Lady Rosella?"
Acanthah's face darkens like a cloud containing a storm. "Does it matter?"
I want to say yes. I want the closure of knowing I wasn't a fool to follow the legend, but at the bottom of my heart, I know that I was.
Does Lady Rosella still sleep soundly somewhere I'll never find her, or did she wither away just like the other briar roses in the Vitales' garden?
"Please..." I beseech Acanthah with my eyes, a last resort.
Nobody could resist my eyes, not my mother when I asked her to stay at the party past my curfew, not the head cook when I snuck an extra helping of zabaglione.
Acanthah, however, isn't charmed. Her dark eyes blaze, fiery like stars. The ropes of thorns tighten around my limbs, winding up my arms and legs at her silent command. I see painful white as they puncture my skin. My throat burns, either from the agony of containing my cry or the pain as I release it.
"It's cowardly to beg."
My vision returns for a moment. Acanthah stands in front of me, her eyes cold in a way Lady Rosella's weren't.
I shake myself. I've never met Lady Rosella, only a well-crafted imitation of her. All my dreams and hopes are crushed among the thorns that crush me, bleeding out with me.
The briary strands crawl across my shoulders, engulfing my chest, wrapping around my throat.
Acanthah chants in a language more magical and ancient than any I know. The world disappears in a painful flash of red and black.