She opened her mouth to say something but I didn’t let her. “Well not yet,” I said quickly. “But he obviously is my true love since he woke me up. So maybe I just need to give it some time.”

I couldn’t tell if she was hurt or understanding. I realised it was the latter when she said, “I’m sorry Snow. It gets better.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I don’t. One can only hope. Otherwise, what else do we have to live for?”

A tear rolled down my cheek and she held my hands. We turned away from Charming so he couldn’t see the emotional roller coaster happening right in front of him. I immediately felt better. I could tell her anything. Ask anything of her. And there was one thing, if nothing else in this world, that I desperately needed to do. I knew that to ask her meant to tell her every single detail.

But she would understand and help me… I hoped.

“I have a favour to ask of you,” I said.

“Anything,” she replied.

That reply made me even more confident in what I was going to say next.

“I need you to help me do something.”

“Do what?”

“To free the Evil Queen.”

Ella’s emerald eyes doubled in size and as it widened she opened and closed her mouth as if trying to grasp just what to say.

“Why?!” she asked, flabbergasted.

“It’s not some sick revenge plan, I swear,” I reassured her.

“Although it definitely would have been…if she really was guilty of poisoning me against my own will.”

She was at a loss for words again.

“It was me. I asked her to do it.”

“Why?” she asked again. I wasn’t surprised this was the only question she asked.

“I was tired of living but not being…alive. Being able to feel. Ella, I was numb. I used to do – things.”

I lifted my pink sleeves slowly and showed her my arms. Even a life time couldn’t take away those scars.

Her face full of understanding. Did she do the same thing?

“I understand,” she said simply, tears streaming down her face.

She moved forward to hug me. But I stopped her. Eric would get suspicious and would want to know what was going on.

“Eric,” I pointed out.

“He won’t understand,” she said.

“We need to ditch him.” It sounded harsh. Especially saying it to his twin sister, but her strong nod told me she didn’t take any offence but thought it was the right thing to do.

“We can’t tell the whole kingdom that you poisoned yourself,” she whispered.

“They would lose faith in the royals. Or just this one royal in particular,” I whispered back.

“There’s only one way to get the queen out without revealing the truth,” she continued. I had a feeling I knew where this was going. “We have to break her out. We have to help the Evil Queen escape prison.”

The plan was simple, yet involved so much deception, that it made it complicated. I could only imagine how Ella felt doing what we planned to her brother.

It was custom for the Prince to stay awake and guard the Princesses while they sleep when camping out in the woods especially. Usually they take shifts but since there was only one Prince here, he had to stay up all night. We couldn’t have that. I could see that it pained Ella to slip a little sleeping potion in his tea. Once he was asleep we grabbed the necessities and took off.

Of course we had left Charming with enough resources to continue his own journey back to the castle. He couldn’t follow us anyway. He would never even find us.

After all, I did have the best tracker in the land with me. Which meant that she was also the best at covering her own tracks. It was a journey we walked through in a comfortable silence.

After a day of walking we both decided we needed a rest. We stopped by a lake and refilled our bottles, ate some bread and made a fire. We sat looking at the stars. It was hard to fall asleep with this knot in my throat. I guessed it was the same for her. “Are you okay?” I asked. Stupid question. She obviously wasn’t.

I couldn’t see her face but could guess that it displayed a nervous look.

“He would be waking up about now, wondering where we are. So lost and confused.” I didn’t need to ask who the ‘he’ was.

“It’s for his own good. He can’t get mixed up in what we’re about to do. Especially if we get caught. His name would be dragged through the mud.”

I had the same fears about her. But I knew that it would be impossible to talk her out of it or do it alone. And anyway I had a plan for that. I had a supply of fairy dust in the chain around my neck. I never took it off. It would be easy to magic one person with fairy dust but two at the same time with such a short supply of the dust was virtually impossible.

I would convince everybody that I’d used fairy dust on Ella to help me so she wouldn’t be blamed if we got caught. Although I would never really do such a horrible thing, I needed to keep her safe so I would lie and say that I used fairy dust to control her.

***

Tell us: Would you lie for a friend? To what extent would your lies be?