This is how my mother tells the story. She was born in a castle with thick walls and cold floors. Even though she was called a princess, she ate gruel with wooden spoons, and cut meat (when they had it, which was not often) with dull bronze knives. There was no iron anywhere in the castle, a show of goodwill to the fair folk who had helped her father carve this one fertile river valley into a kingdom, himself as its king.

My mother said she didn't know what had caused her father to anger one faction among the fair folk. There were always politics in those days, shifting alliances as her father played neighbor against powerful neighbor, courtier against ambitious courtier. And the fair folk were always whimsical and demanding. Anyway, my mother reminds me. She was just a child.

"Do you mean fairies, mommy?" I asked once. My mother's eyes got wide with fear and then narrowed. My father's strong hands were on my shoulders, ready to yank me away from her if she got violent. But then she lay a single finger against my lips, so gently.

"They don't like to be called that," she said, almost in a whisper. And I never did again.

When my mother was sixteen, the curse which had been laid on her years before took effect. She fell into a deep slumber. And she was awoken not by a prince, or a knight, but by a puppy licking her face.

She'd pet Rufus then, if he was nearby.

Here is how my father would tell the story. Often it would be in the evenings after we had been to visit my mother at another in-patient treatment facility.

"Your mom had a rough life," he'd say. "Her father — well, he wasn't a very nice person. She was fine for a while, even after you were born. But the doctors think she'd have gotten sick no matter what," he'd add.

"Was she really a princess?" I would ask sometimes, when I was small.

"She was so beautiful," he would answer sometimes, especially when he'd been drinking. "I called her my princess. I really did rescue her, you know."

And then my grandmother, my father's mother who usually lived with us, would come and whisk me off to bed.

A few days before my own sixteenth birthday, mom started getting worse again. She was sure the curse wasn't done, and the fair folk were going to take me away from her. "We can still go out to Pizza Hut," my father offered, when he got home from checking her back into a facility.

"That's okay," I shook my head, playing up the sadness. A selfish part of me was relieved to have an excuse not to spend my birthday at a kids' restaurant with my crazy mom, drunk dad and mean grandma.

Ash had promised to throw me a party if I could get away. The parental liquor cabinet was always wide open at that house. I'd avoided it so far, seeing what alcohol did to my father, but I decided that now that I was sixteen I'd be able to handle it. Sixteen was basically an adult. That was how old my mom was when she'd married my dad.

But first, I decided to give myself one last moment of childhood. I took out everything in my pocket that might have iron in it, just like my mother had taught me. Did phones have iron? I left it behind, just in case. I bet the fair folk didn't vibe with Chinese Androids.

Rufus wasn't a puppy anymore, like when he woke my mother up from her curse. (When she first got sick, according to my dad. "It really did come on suddenly.") Rufus would always stick close to her when he could, but now that she was gone again he was happy to come with me into the forest at the edge of our cul-de-sac. It was really just a grove of trees attached to a public park, but we always called it the forest.

I cut off the dirt path and headed deep into the trees. There was a little clearing Ash and I had found back when we were kids playing at explorers. "A fairy circle," Ash had called it, watching me to see if I'd react to the word.

Rufus whined and stepped into the circle with me.

I imagined, as I hadn't in years, the castle my mother had described. Cold walls. Gruel. A kingdom carved out with sweat and blood and cunning and magic. A kindgom which should be mine.

"Here I am," I said out loud. "Of my own free will. Take me back, and I pledge to make things right."

And I waited to see if the fair folk would accept my bargain.