by Holly Black
“Quite a strategy, to leverage love against itself,” said Lord Ortolan.
True love.
That was the cruel turn of phrase Maleficent had come up with as Stefan begged for her to remove the curse on Aurora. It was the thing she’d thought of as impossible.
But now, even as it bound her and Aurora, it still felt like a miracle that there was such a thing.
True love.
Love between people who took care of each other.
She’d been wrong to try to convince Aurora to protect her heart to the exclusion of all else. There was nothing wrong with Aurora’s willfulness or her sweet nature. There was nothing wrong with Aurora’s trying to see the best in people. There was nothing wrong with her generous heart. Those were all the things Maleficent had always loved about her. And if Maleficent had to spend her whole life locked in darkness and iron knowing that Aurora was free, it would have been worth it.
But she would not spend her life in darkness and iron knowing that Aurora was also in chains.
Lord Ortolan approached Count Alain and Aurora. “Come now, you’ve held the girl like that long enough. Her arms must be in agony. And there’s no danger. The faerie is locked up, and there’s nowhere for our little queen to go. Be chivalrous to your bride.”
Alain eased his grip, and Aurora pulled away from him. Stumbling, she fell to her knees, humiliated and hurting.
“I am going to perform the ceremony marrying you and Count Alain before we leave the cave. I hope you understand that this is a formality,” Lord Ortolan said. “It doesn’t matter if you consent or not, but it would be better for all of us if we observe the proprieties.”
Aurora wanted to spit in his face, but she knew that she had to wait for the right opportunity to get away from them.
Count Alain smiled at her. “You are very angry with me now, but I think we will grow used to each other. I am not so much of a monster when you get to know me.”
She knew him well enough, she thought. She certainly knew he was a monster.
Count Alain guided her to stand to one side of Lord Ortolan, then stepped back a few paces.
Lord Ortolan cleared his throat.
Before he could get a sentence out, Phillip stepped out of the shadows. He was carrying a sword.
“Apologies,” he said. “I didn’t mean to take so long. First I had to sneak into the guardhouse and find a blade. Then I had to wait until Alain let you go. What a lot of dull speeches you’ve endured!”
Despite the horror of the situation, Aurora laughed.
“Oh, and the mouse,” Phillip went on completely nonsensically. “I had to find a safe place for the mouse.”
Count Alain’s hand went to his own sword hilt.
“I thought I told you to leave,” said Maleficent, although she didn’t sound particularly displeased.
“As a prince,” said Phillip, his gaze on Count Alain, “I practically have a duty to defy the commands of a foreign power.”
Count Alain sneered, circling Phillip. “You ought to have run when you had the chance. You’re, at most, a dilettante at the art of swordplay. But my family mines iron. Steel is my birthright. I am going to enjoy this.”
“Embarrassing to you if I so much as get a hit in, then,” said Phillip, moving into a fighting stance, holding his sword in front of him, the blade tipped slightly forward.
Alain matched him.
Lord Ortolan moved toward Aurora. “My dear, this is useless—”
She punched him in the mouth. She’d never hit anyone before, and it hurt her knuckles. But she had the satisfaction of seeing him stagger back, utterly shocked. He pressed a hand to the corner of his mouth, which looked a little red. One of his teeth must have cut the inside of it.
She felt a bit shocked, too, but it didn’t stop her from prying the key out of his other hand.
Phillip and Alain traded blows back and forth, striking and parrying with a terrifying intensity, their blades whistling through the air. They looked evenly matched.
But as Phillip turned, she saw that blood soaked his side. Looking closer, she saw a binding of ripped cloth around his waist. A wound he’d already had, then. A wound he’d reopened.
No matter how good he was with a blade, he wasn’t going to be able to fight for long like that.
Aurora ran to Maleficent’s side and slid the key into the lock of her manacles. As the iron slid off her pale wrists, two bands of blistered red skin showed.
“Don’t worry about me, beastie,” Maleficent said with a smile, but Aurora couldn’t help noticing how slowly she moved.
The iron chain, with manacles on each side, was heavy in Aurora’s hand. She looked at Count Alain.
Phillip lost his footing. It was just a small stumble, perhaps from his boot hitting a rock, but it was enough for Alain to strike, shoving his sword into Phillip’s wound. Phillip pivoted out of the way before the blade could sink into his side, but even the graze of the tip made him gasp in pain. He brought up his sword just in time to parry a blow that would have run through his heart.
Holding on to one manacle, Aurora swung the other at Alain’s back. It hit him hard, sending him sprawling onto the floor of the mine. Phillip turned his blade, the point at Alain’s throat.
Lord Ortolan walked forward but stopped at a fierce look from Maleficent. Aurora went to him and held out the manacles, her heart racing. “Give me your hands,” she said.
The old man looked mutinous.
“Step to it.” There was a new voice. Diaval walked into the cave and nodded to Aurora, rolling his shoulders. “Yes, it’s me, finally with thumbs and a tongue fit for speaking. As soon as Maleficent had her hands free, I started hopping around the entrance, hoping she’d see me. Better late than never, Diaval is here to help.”
“I should have broken your neck when I had the chance,” Count Alain said to Phillip, ignoring the new arrival.
“You’re a fool,” Phillip returned, looking down at him. “You had wealth. You had influence. You had the ear of a queen. And because you could not see what you had, you will have nothing.”
Aurora noticed that Phillip looked very pale, almost like he had in her dream. There was even a touch of blue to his lips.
“I played the same game you’re playing,” Alain spat at him. “Just because you played it better, that’s no reason to sneer at it.” With those words, he pushed aside Phillip’s blade and lifted his own to strike.
Aurora screamed. There was no way Phillip would react in time.
“Into a bug.” Maleficent waved her hand, and in a wild rush of glittering gold magic, Alain was no longer there. In his place was a large black centipede. His sword fell with a clang beside it.
Phillip lifted Alain’s blade from the ground, squinting at the centipede. “He’s going to be difficult to catch if he crawls up on the ceiling,” he said, then sagged to the floor. The blood from his wound had soaked all the way to his boot.
“Phillip!” Aurora shouted.
“Oh, no, don’t worry about me,” he said faintly. “I’ll have a little lie-down and then be fine—”
“Don’t be more of a fool than usual,” Maleficent told him. “We need to rebind your side. Diaval, go find me some yarrow, the crumblier the better.”
“Yes, mistress. No need, by the by, to thank me for bringing Aurora to your rescue,” he said. “No need for me to have freed myself and thought of nothing but coming back here, flying through the night and day. No, no need to thank me at all.”
Maleficent gave him a fierce look. “You mean for bringing Aurora straight into danger?”
Aurora left them bickering and knelt beside Phillip. “If you move onto your side,” she said, “it will elevate the wound and help slow the bleeding.”
As he turned, she pillowed his head onto her lap. He looked up at her and gave her a lazy smile. She stroked his hair back from his brow, her heart aching.
“I do love you,” she told him. “I was afraid to tell you that. I was afraid to
admit it to myself. But I do.”
Afraid the way she was frightened to fall asleep at night, because it felt like giving in to something she couldn’t control.
Or the way humans were frightened of faeries. Love was as unpredictable and powerful as any magic. But maybe it was also as marvelous.
His smile grew. “Now I know I must be delirious, since the only time you say things like that is in my dreams.”
In the distance, there was the sound of horns.
Smiling John arrived soon after, one of his scouts having discovered Aurora and Alain’s camp and tracked them from there. He found an exhausted group resting beneath a newly grown tree, its limbs shimmering with magic and some of its roots formed into a mossy, bark-covered cage that held an enormous scuttling black centipede. On the other side, the roots seemed to have grown over Lord Ortolan’s ankles, holding him in place.
“My queen,” Smiling John said, bowing stiffly, “your leaving your camp after dark had us in quite a panic. We came as soon as we got a signal from the raven, but—” He looked around and swallowed the rest of the lecture he had clearly been planning on giving. “I see you have everything well in hand.”
Maleficent eyed them with suspicion. “How do you come to be looking for her?”
“Queen Aurora ordered us to follow behind her with a large battalion and to await a summons from the bird. She said she thought she was going into a trap, but she couldn’t be certain who had set it. She suspected the count but believed that the only way to prove it was to go along with the scheme and see who the traitors were and what they were planning. I disagreed, as I thought it was too great a risk. But in the end, it seems she was correct.”
Maleficent eyed Aurora with an obvious desire to scold her. “So you knew you were going into danger—”
“I knew you were in danger,” Aurora reminded her.
Smiling John went on. “A rider came to tell us that Lady Fiora turned in packets of letters between her brother and Lord Ortolan. We were very worried for you, Your Majesty.”
Aurora recalled Lady Fiora trying to prevent her from traveling with Count Alain. At the time, she had just thought Lady Fiora didn’t want her to leave the party, not that she was trying to save her from her brother’s schemes. “I would not have thought it of her,” she remarked softly to herself.
Smiling John’s people bustled about, trying to make Phillip more comfortable and telling him how fortunate he was that the wound hadn’t been deeper or in a different spot.
Phillip, for his part, was trying to prevent Diaval from being the one to hold Simon.
“Give me the mouse,” Phillip called, “right now. Aurora, make a royal proclamation that the mouse is for me to hold until your godmother turns him back.”
“You don’t trust me not to eat him?” Diaval asked with a raised brow, letting the rodent run up one arm and onto the other, his gaze following the movement with a disturbing fixedness.
“I do not,” Prince Phillip said.
“You are the one who ate a mouse heart, I should remind you,” said Diaval, bringing his head eye level with a terrified Simon, who stopped running. “He did, you know. Gobbled it right up.”
“It was one time,” Phillip protested.
Maleficent allowed the royal guard to take Lord Ortolan from her tree prison into the cart. With a wave of her hand and a whorl of glittering golden magic, both he and the cage of roots that held Count Alain the centipede were loosed from the tree. The guards walked around the cage in confusion as to how to move it without getting close to the thing inside.
“Well, my queen, since we don’t have your carriage, may we offer up our humble carts?” asked Smiling John. “I wish we had something more fitting, but we were moving too quickly to bring more.”
“Oh, no,” said Maleficent. “I will return them to the castle.”
She gestured toward Diaval, and gold sparked at her fingertips.
He threw up his hands as though he could block the magic. “Wait, what exactly are you planning on turning me into this time? You ought to ask my permission for these things. It had better not be a dog!”
“I doubt you’ll mislike this so very much.” She waved her hand, and he grew longer and larger until a black horse stood in his place. From the sides of his back, enormous shimmering raven wings unfurled. And from his mane, a mouse peeped out.
The guards sucked in their breath, perhaps thinking of the dragon she’d once turned him into, perhaps just awed by such magic. Maleficent smiled her widest and most sinister smile.
“You should do something about Simon first,” Phillip said. “I don’t think he ought to be flying. Perhaps he can return with the guard.”
“Very well. Into a boy.” Maleficent gestured with a negligent wave of her hand, and in a wash of shimmering gold, Simon was human again.
He fell off the horse’s back, stumbling as he moved into a standing position. The poor boy was clearly getting used to not being on all fours. He looked around, then saw Aurora and bowed hastily.
“The missing lad!” Smiling John said. “So he was under a faerie curse.”
With so much attention on him, Simon sputtered a little. “No, sir,” he said. “Or at least, I was, but only for this past little while. The elf lady and Prince Phillip freed me from a cell where I’ve been locked for days and days. She thought I’d be safer traveling in a pocket and turned me into a mouse, which I’m sorry to say I didn’t like above half.” He paused with a look at Maleficent. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, though, for you’ve done me nothing but a good turn.”
Smiling John’s gaze went to the cage and the centipede inside, then to Maleficent. “I don’t suppose that you’ll turn him back.”
“Of course she will,” Aurora said over whatever Maleficent was about to say. “Centipedes can’t stand trial.”
“Can’t they?” Maleficent asked with a mischievous quirk of her mouth. “Are you sure?”
Aurora gave her a stern look.
“As soon as we’re back in the palace, then?” Maleficent said.
Aurora’s expression did not falter.
“Very well!” With an exasperated wave of her hand, the centipede grew larger and larger until its arms and legs broke through the cage and it returned to the shape of Count Alain. He looked ridiculous.
“John,” Alain shouted, trying to shuck off the remains of the cage. It was remarkably hard to remove from his head. “You can’t believe all this nonsense! She put a curse on me. You have to see that she’s the one you should be putting in chains!”
Smiling John shook his head and spoke to Maleficent. “You may have had the right of it. If you’d left him as he was, we wouldn’t have to hear his mouth all the way back to the palace.”
With that, he headed off to his troops, steering Simon toward one of the mounted soldiers.
Diaval, in his winged-horse form, knelt down so that Phillip could more easily get onto his back. Phillip did, gingerly, and Aurora got up behind him.
Then, with a great sweep of his wings, Diaval pushed off the ground and they were flying. Higher and higher they climbed. Moments later, Maleficent was beside them, a wide smile on her face and a rare light in her eyes.
Maleficent was always graceful, but being in the air was her natural state, and she moved through it like a dancer. She dove and spiraled and flew with irrepressible joy. And her unfurled wings beat strong and steady on her back.
Phillip knotted his fists in the horse’s mane. Aurora put an arm around the side of his waist that wasn’t hurt, leaned back her head, and looked up at the clouds, her hair streaming behind her like a banner.
Aurora slept that night, out of sheer exhaustion. When she woke, dawn was just breaking on the horizon. She watched the sun come up and thought over what she needed to do. By the time Marjory entered with a breakfast tray, she had come to some decisions.
Marjory put the tray down, rushed to her, and clasped Aurora’s hands. “Oh, I am so glad you’re well. I was so
worried.”
“I was worried myself at times,” Aurora admitted, squeezing Marjory’s fingers.
Aurora drank her tea and ate a piece of bread with butter and listened as Marjory told her about dancing at the festival. She’d even gone around the maypole with one of the Fair Folk and blushed at telling Aurora some of the compliments he paid her.
After breakfast, Aurora put on a robe and went up the stairs to Prince Phillip’s room. If they could meet in the middle of the night, then she wasn’t going to stand on ceremony now, when she wanted to know how badly he’d been hurt.
She didn’t expect to find him bare to the waist, having his wound rewrapped by an elderly doctor with wild white hair and long tufted sideburns.
“Oh, hello,” Phillip said, clearly a little embarrassed.
Aurora felt her cheeks heat and tried hard to keep her eyes only on his shoulders. “I just wanted to make sure you’re well.”
“No dancing for a few weeks,” he said. “But I’ve had stitches, and an ogre came over this morning bearing packets of a special tea in which I’m supposed to soak my bandages to speed healing.”
Aurora glanced at the doctor, wondering if he was suspicious of faerie remedies.
He saw her look and smiled. “Once your treaty is signed, most of the people in Perceforest will be excited to trade for gems, but for me there is no greater treasure than the herbs of the Moors. Ones humans have not been able to gather for generations, but which are rumored to be able to cure many diseases that plague us.”
“I hope you will come to the ceremony today,” she told the doctor, and then gave Phillip a smile. “And I hope your patient will as well.”
It was with a light step that Aurora returned to her room to get ready for the treaty-signing ceremony.
The pixies interrupted her on the stairs. They had a lot to tell her about, most of it regarding Nanny Stoat and how clever she was. Apparently, she had pressed Thistlewit, Flittle, and Knotgrass into service, getting them to do little magics around the castle and managing them with such flattery that they enjoyed it.
