Sometimes, Sarah wished she had red hair. Her friend Steffi from middle school had red hair even though nobody else in her family did. Steffi survived the teasing about milkmen and FedEx drivers and went on to become a model on the runways in Paris and Milan, or at least that's what Sarah had heard last. Having just gone over Punnett squares in biology, Sarah knew even then that Steffi's case was most likely just a quirk of genetics. Some ancestor had passed it down long, long, long ago so that it could grace the head of the girl today. If Steffi had children, they might have red hair too; that would all depend on who was filling out the other half of the Punnett square.

Magic was a lot like red hair.

Long, long, long ago there existed a king. His name was Berwyn, and he trapped a god inside the thought of a fairytale. Berwyn trafficked in magic himself, so it was more of a fair fight than it should have been. The god cursed him just before he was sealed away. Berwyn's glory would fade. He was forgotten by history, except for those few scholars who almost seemed to exist outside of it.

King Berwyn the Brave, Conqueror of the Low Lands, Lord of the Castle of the Moon, Protector of the Bronze Sun, passed into legend much more completely than others passed into legend. He simply ceased to exist in any meaningful way; his castle disappeared, his accomplishments faded away, and his people largely forgot him. The only reminder that he existed at all were his children.

All fifteen of them.

The god had never been one to take his wrath out on children, which would one day be his undoing.

Berwyn's family scattered in the hundreds of years since his disappearance. Most of them died out through disease or war or because they were witches. His family tree withered and died as the last remnants of the god's retaliation found them and destroyed them.

All but one branch, anyway, which is how a forgotten queenling came to be living in the suburbs of New England.

Magic, like red hair, is sometimes a quirk of genetics. Sometimes it skips generation after generation, leaving people to forget that their family ever once had red hair. Red hair (or magic) can sometimes be so completely forgotten that when a child is born with it, nobody is quite sure what to do.

Sarah was not born with red hair, but she was born with magic and a curse hanging over her head. The curse might once have manifested as a vengeful spirit, or a great beast. It appeared instead to her as a book, sputtering along on what little magic it had left. Sarah, who might not have had survival instincts as strong as they should have been, almost immediately fell in love with the book the moment she saw it sitting on the public library's shelf.

So she stole it.

But was it theft if it was meant for you, if it had followed your bloodline through the ages? Sarah, if asked, would have said no, but nobody asked and so she never knew. Besides, nobody ever came looking for it again. The librarians never even knew it was gone, much less that it was there in the first place. The long-lost great, great, many-times great granddaughter of Berwyn, who did not have red hair but did have magic, forgot about the book for four years after she plucked it from the shelves of the public library. It lived, like lots of other half-magical things, under her bed where it collected dust. It sat, and waited, and like the god trapped within its pages, it was almost completely forgotten.

Sarah only remembered it again when Karen had yelled at her enough that she finally actually cleaned her room instead of just shoving everything under her bed or into her closet. Once she rediscovered the slim little novel, she wondered if she should be ashamed of herself. After all, thievery was a crime, and she had forgotten she even committed it. Feeling that she might as well justify it to herself, she sat down and read it.

And then she read it again.

Her room did not get cleaned that day.

It wasn't long before she knew the book by heart and had conscripted her stepmother into helping her fashion a costume so that she could act her favorite parts of it out. Sarah became a frequent installation at the park not too far away from her house because her backyard was not grand enough for the sets called for in the book. The park wasn't either, but at least it had a small pond and a bridge.

And then

She wished away her brother on the night of her sixteenth birthday. She hadn't really meant to, except she sort of did. The Goblin King, the creature from her book, appeared and spirited her little half-brother away in the dark of the night.

No matter, Sarah thought. She was sure that she was the protagonist in this story. It didn't help her ego that in this matter, she was correct; she won her brother back and was home by midnight, like so many other fairytale princesses. Real life was welcome back, after her experience. She appreciated it—who, when finding that they are leaving their childhood behind, would say no to one last magical adventure?—but also appreciated being able to go back to school the next Monday with a fantastic secret burning within her.

She could never tell anybody about the labyrinth, of course, not like she actually expected them to believe her. But she could write story after story about it in her creative writing class and daydream about other adventures with her friends. Eventually, she daydreamed so often that she half-convinced herself that it wasn't quite real, that she had eaten a bad peach that afternoon and dreamed the whole thing up. Sarah was clever enough to know, however, that just because something was a dream didn't mean it wasn't real.

Sarah settled into believing that it was a real dream and went about her life. Toby didn't need to know that he was once wished away (maybe) or that she had come so, so close to possibly losing him. She spent an almost conspicuous amount of time ignoring the fact that in her not-dream, she had reached out for the wish at the very last moment.

But her many-greats grandfather was Berwyn, so one bout of folly could be forgiven. Perhaps many bouts of folly. Not once did she think about the state of the dream she left behind. If she had, she might over pondered over how some of her maybe real friends from the labyrinth were doing now that the sky had, quite literally, crashed down upon them. That part of the fairytale was torn down because it was no longer the fairytale that Berwyn had created to contain the god. It had forgotten, in the long years of his absence, what Berwyn's touch felt like; with Sarah's return it remembered all at once and shook itself out like a dog, ridding itself of everything the god had introduced.

The god was not pleased. He had liked how he had everything set up, and to see it all destroyed irritated him quite a bit. But here was a problem; he was not sure which of the siblings caused the destruction. The girl had been the ones to say the words, but in the service of the baby. The girl had not looked like Berwyn, his old foe; the baby had.

But only one of them had the long-dead king's magic, that much he could tell. Unlike the god's curse, it had only grown over time. The power of what had once surged through an entire family's veins was now concentrated in one of the two interlopers to his kingdom. It had scrambled his senses enough that he could barely tell the two apart. Only two things were sure. The first sure thing was that this last descendant of Berwyn was the only one who could free the god from his warped reality of a prison. The second thing was that he was pretty sure it was the baby.