Free Fairytales for Wilde Girls by Allyse Near Page A

the bony leg protruding like a bleached-white clue. A dead girl was here, somewhere in the tangling gloom and Grimm. But she was supposed to forget about it, according to Alejandro and the others. Nothing doing now.
    Her footsteps crackled in the leaves, and she pretended she was clad in a gown of flame, her train fanning out, devouring the solitude of the forest. She loved these woods, the thick undergrowth and hammocks of spiderwebs.
    In Vivien’s Wood were dangerous creatures that had never sought human contact, like each of her brothers had. At best, they were indifferent to humans like her, and the princes urged Isola to never speak with them while she was alone.
    There were wild swans that transformed into beautiful young men in the moonlight. Isola had long been warned that they would try and trick her into kissing them, and through her lips steal seven years of her semi-precious life.
    The wood imps were out today – these little straw men resembled voodoo dolls and lived underground, only coming up when Jupiter was visible in the night sky. She could hear them snuffling through the grass. The smoking feathers of phoenixes wafted ash from their secret tree-hollows.
    Vivien’s was an eternally dark forest, and even Isola sometimes confused her way in the maze. She only knew she had reached the centre of the woods when she found certain landmarks. They were –
    The Devil’s Tea Party: A ring of toxic toadstools circling a small clearing where the canopy was as thin as gauze.
    The Wish-You-Well: Not a wishing well, but a natural pond where the water was perfectly clear and where Christobelle liked to sun herself.
    Vigour Mortis: A beautiful tree that looked different every time Isola saw it, and, like her plum tree, appeared periodically close to death. The next day, however, it would be fit to bursting with life, and she only recognised it because of the bells she had tied to the lowest boughs with thick ruby ribbons.
    The Bridge of Sighs: A tree sprouting sideways out of another, the parasite twin, its topmost branches sinking into the earth. A mossy archway to another dimension.
    By the Bridge of Sighs was where Isola had first found it. The cage, strung high in an old oak tree. The outline of a girl stuffed unceremoniously inside it.
    Now, finding herself under the bridge, she looked up. Nothing but a rope, its ends chewed and frayed. No body – the unicorns would probably have got to her by now, as Alejandro had predicted.
    But there was no cage, either.

 
    Wilde Child
    Like most obsessions, Isola Wilde’s began with a story.
    Mother was retelling a Pardieu fairytale called The Seventh Princess . The seventh-born child of an adored King and Queen, their first daughter, had been kidnapped by a tribe of treasure-loving dragons. She would be eaten up within the week if the royal family did not pay a ransom of everything gold in their kingdom.
    The King and Queen offered all the gold in their vaults immediately – they could put no price on their precious daughter’s life.
    â€˜But they soon discovered it was an impossible ask,’ said Mother, in her dramatic storyteller cadence, ‘because theirs was a fair-haired kingdom by the sea, of hilltops drenched in golden wildflowers and beaches of sand, and the dragons coveted everything gold – the yellow hair scalped from the peasants, the golden flowers hacked at their stems, every last grain of sand stolen from the dunes, not to mention every ray of sunshine that fell on their little seaside kingdom.’
    â€˜Greedy dragons,’ commented chubby-cheeked four-year-old Isola. ‘Poor people. They’d have to live bald and in the dark!’
    â€˜Not to mention without flowers, and isn’t that a terrible way to live?’ Mother smoothed Isola’s hair on the pillow and continued, ‘Luckily for the seventh-born princess, she had been blessed with six older brothers, or, as they put it, they had been