Aurora stared down at the painting of herself, beautiful, untouchable, lost in the joy of her wedding to the handsome prince. The walls felt too close. She couldn’t quite fill her lungs.
But it was only a story.
She had spent years locked in a tower, unable to see anything of the world but the scrap of forest beyond her window, but stories had provided her escape. New books, old books, dramas and histories and fantastical adventures, stories of ordinary lives, stories of dragons and demons, murders and mysteries and myths from long ago. A hundred possible worlds, more true to her than her own, more compelling than a life of staring at the same walls and same trees, waiting for the day when the lock would click and she would finally be allowed to be free.
A story could not hurt her.
“Princess? Are you all right?”
Betsy slipped into the room. A couple of dresses hung over her arm.
Aurora closed the book, snapping its prophecies out of sight. “Yes,” she said. She pushed herself to her feet, ignoring the way her legs ached.
“I brought you some clothes,” Betsy said. “They might not be perfect, but I think—I hope—they’ll do nicely. A little old-fashioned, but . . . the queen said that would be all right for now.” She held up a glossy green thing, with bubbled sleeves to the elbow and skirts that swished to the floor. It was unlike any dress Aurora had ever seen. Nothing like the dress she had worn before, but similarly unlike the elegant gowns worn by the current ladies of court. A dress to mark her as different. “Prince Rodric will love you in this. The green will bring out your eyes. Or I have something pink—”
“The green is fine.” The color reminded her of the forest after rain, light reflecting off the leaves. “I mean—it’s lovely. Thank you.”
Betsy helped her into it, chatting all the while. Aurora let the words wash over her. The skirts moved around her like water, but the waist was a touch too tight, stealing the little breath she had, while the neckline gaped slightly at the back. “I’ll just fix this,” Betsy said with a quick curtsy, and then she was reaching and pinning and stitching and talking, always talking, about the exciting, amazing, wonderful, dreamlike miracle that had happened today.
“I was so honored, Princess, when they asked me to assist you. I never expected it! But then, I never expected you’d be standing here, if you don’t mind me saying. Not that I didn’t think Rodric could be your true love, because of course he’s wonderful, but it always seemed too much like a dream to ever happen while I was here. Things will be amazing, now, you’ll see. Everyone loves you already. How could they not?”
Aurora thought of the words at the end of the story, the promise to the reader: we will all live happily ever after. Her true love would kiss her, she would awaken, and the curse would be over. But nothing Celestine did could ever be good. Her curse could not lead to happiness for anybody, least of all for her. “What happened to Celestine?” she asked. “The witch who did this to me?” The words were heavy in her mouth, and even heavier in the air, but Betsy barely paused.
“Nobody knows,” she said through a mouthful of pins. “She enchanted you and disappeared. They searched all over the kingdom for her, and beyond, but she was never found. I think,” she added, in a conspiratorial whisper, as she ran a needle up and down, “that she used up the magic when she cursed you. Poof! Gone. And she was too ashamed of her new weak self, so she fled.”
“Oh.” Aurora stared at her reflection. Celestine was dead, she told herself. A hundred years had passed, and even Celestine was dead. Yet she could not shake the creeping sensation that someone was watching her unseen.
Rodric waited for her in the banquet hall. A long table stretched down the middle of the room, surrounded by paintings and hanging tapestries. Some of them were familiar, but most of them were entirely new, bearing foreign crests and scenes from stories she had never heard. She had attended a few small parties in this room when she was young, when her father trusted those attending enough to allow her presence, and it had seemed lively, fun, full of possibility. It had been one of the few places where she could meet strangers, hear music and laughter, live like she wasn’t cursed. With only the prince waiting inside, the room felt abandoned and cold, too large and too austere.
Rodric stood when he saw her enter. “Princess Aurora,” he said, and he hurried toward her, stumbling slightly over his feet. “You look—you look beautiful.” He smiled shyly. “I mean, you always look beautiful. But you look especially beautiful tonight. Is what I mean.”
Aurora stretched her lips into a smile. “Thank you,” she said.
“Shall—shall we eat?” Rodric rubbed the back of his neck. A light blush colored his nose. She stepped toward him, and the ground seemed to twist away under her feet, making her head throb. It was hardly a storybook sensation. She took his arm anyway and let him lead her to the end of the large table.
A servant, dressed in extravagant red clothing, brought them each a bowl of soup. Aurora did not speak. Rodric did not speak. Spoons scraped against bowls, echoing in the otherwise empty hall.
“You missed the snow,” Rodric said eventually. “We had several inches a couple of weeks ago, but not again, I don’t think. It will be spring soon.”
Aurora nodded, staring at her bowl.
“My sister, Isabelle—she was excited to meet you,” Rodric continued. “She is so quiet, but—she is excited. She’s just not good at meeting strangers.”
Well, that makes three of us, Aurora thought. She nodded again.
“Is it true,” Rodric said as he finished his soup, “that before—” He stopped and blushed again. “I’m sorry. You might not want to talk about it. About before.”
Aurora tightened her fingers around her spoon. They must talk about something. “What were you going to ask me?”
“Some of the books mention that you had magic to entertain you at feasts.” He smiled, sounding lively for the first time. “Not tricksters and magicians. Real magic.”
“No,” Aurora said. The thought made her shiver. “No, that isn’t true.”
“Oh.” Rodric was staring at his plate, but Aurora got the feeling he was actually watching her closely, out of the corner of his eye. “People hoped—I hoped—” He trailed off. “Magic as common as that, brought back with you . . . it might be useful.”
“Hoped?” Aurora closed her eyes. How could he be so naïve? “You’re better off without it.”
“So your family never—”
“No,” she said sharply. “Why would my family use magic? They were not fools.” But they did use magic, she thought. If the book could be believed. They poured it into her to try to break the curse, to save her from this place.
Rodric frowned down at his empty soup bowl. “I am sorry, Princess, I do not mean to contradict you, but—magic cannot be foolish. It brought you here.”
“A curse brought me here.”
“But still—we have been without magic for a long time, Princess, and nothing has been quite right since you fell asleep. Now things will be better. That has to be good, right?”
She shook her head. “I can’t imagine magic creating anything good. Once, perhaps, it could, but not since I was born. Only a few sorcerers were left, even then.” Men who charged riches for their talents, women who offered cures and fed poison instead. And Celestine. The witch who cursed her. “They were not good people.”
Her father had tolerated a few who used magic, before she was born. There was always the hope that one would be able to cure disease or protect the kingdom from threat. But after Celestine’s curse, he had accepted that the magic itself was twisted, and that anyone who controlled it was a threat to them all. The use of magic became punishable by banishment. The use of curses became punishable by death.
“My father—” Rodric paused, as though unsure whether he should speak. “My father says that some people still have magic now. Only a little. He says that they stole it for themselves, and if we fight them, it will come back.”
“You can’t steal magic.”
“Why not?”
She opened her mouth, ready for a firm reply, but no words came. Magic came from outside you, that she knew. It was drawn from the air. Some said that you had to be wicked to tap into it, that all the good magic had been used up and all that was left was resentment and ill will. But what it actually involved, Aurora did not know. She had read many books, but the truth of magic had always been kept from her, as though even the idea itself could snatch her away.
Rodric plowed on over the silence. “It will come back,” he said firmly. “Now that you’re here. And it will do all the good things I said. I mean . . . why else—why else would you be here?”
Her hands shook. The spoon rattled against the side of the bowl like a drum roll, and the loss rushed up inside her, squeezing her chest until she could barely breathe. No home. No family. Just empty promises of true love and the idea that she would restore something that should never have existed at all.
She stood up. Her chair fell back with a scrape and a thump. “I have to go,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”
Every step jolted her knees, and suddenly she was running to the end of the banquet hall, her feet pounding the floor. Outside the room, a window hung open, and she pressed her hands against the stone frame, letting the cool breeze brush her face. She gulped down the fresh air, eyes closed tight.
“Princess?”
Rodric. She kept her eyes closed, her face lost in the breeze. He seemed nice. A bit hapless, a bit unsure, but nice. Yet he was a stranger, a strange, ungainly boy who claimed her as his own, and she did not know what to do. She had nothing else, no one else, and the threat of loneliness tore at her stomach until she almost swayed from sickness at the thought. She could not leave. But she could not stay here, with his presence so near, his awkward eyes seeking out salvation in her own. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I would like to be alone.”
“Princess, I am sorry I upset you.”
“I am not upset.” She forced herself to take another breath and opened her eyes. “This place—it is foreign to me. I don’t belong here.”
“I know. But—here we are, Princess. Fate.”
She flinched. Fate. “Why do you keep calling me Princess? That is not my name.”
“I know, but—it’s what everyone’s called you for so long. The Princess. That or Sleeping Beauty.” He smiled shyly. “And it really was true. You are beautiful.”
“My name is Aurora.”
Silence. He nodded, head slightly bowed, pink burning his nose and cheeks.
“I really would like to be alone.”
“Please,” he said, offering the crook of his elbow, “let me escort you back to your room.”
She smiled, a tight, shivering, broken smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know the way.”
She did not sleep that night.
When she tried to close her eyes, her breath caught in her throat, leaving her lungs gasping and empty. Her heart raced, and her limbs itched. A mishmash of a person, forced into a space where she did not belong.
She paced back and forth, her feet beating a steady rhythm against the smooth stone floor. She sped up with each lap of the room, walls pressing in closer and closer with every breath. If she stopped moving, even for a moment, she might melt away, vanish like everything else in her life. So she walked around the room, staring at the foreign walls and her familiar hands, her mind running over everything that had happened.
Every now and again, it would strike her, like a punch to the stomach, that this was real. That her family, her whole life, was gone. She would pause in her pacing, knees bending, stomach caving, her breath stolen away. But the certainty slipped away within moments, too impossibly huge to grasp for long. It would slip back into the realm of fiction and dreams, and she would continue to pace, until she thought, so casually, of whether her father would visit tomorrow, and it would strike her all over again.
And so she spent the night.
FOUR
MIST TRAILED IN THROUGH THE OPEN WINDOW at dawn, wrapping around Aurora’s clammy, feverish skin as she leaned against the sill. She ached all over, in the insides of her elbows and the backs of her knees.
The city below was gradually coming to life. The buildings seemed to climb on top of one another, far into the distance, until they met a large wall, as tall as the castle at least, dotted with towers and flags. Women hurried along the cobbled street below Aurora’s window, baskets balanced on their arms. A couple of carts passed too, slow things hauled by donkeys, half-full of grain or bursting with cloths.
The door creaked open. “Aurora, dear. I’m glad to see you’re awake.”
The queen stood in the doorway. Even at this early hour, she looked the picture of royalty, her eyes clear and bright, her black hair braided around the crown of her head. Aurora caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the glass on the wall: beyond pale, with lips like bruises amid a tangle of golden hair. Sleeping Beauty indeed.
“I do hope I haven’t disturbed you,” the queen said as she swept into the room. “I thought we might have breakfast together.”
Aurora fought the urge to step back against the window. “But I am not dressed, Your Majesty.”
“That is no matter,” she said as she beckoned in a servant with a wave of her wrist. “We are all women here, aren’t we? Besides,” she added as the servant set a tray of fruit and tea on the table, “I wished to speak with you before the day grew too late.” The queen was smiling, all politeness and ease, but something sharp nestled in her eyes and in the points of her cheekbones. “Shall we sit?”
Aurora nodded. She got the feeling the queen wasn’t someone you refused. The queen sat, carefully, sweeping her skirts out of the way with one smooth motion. Aurora balanced on the edge of the other chair, her stomach tight.
The queen poured herself a cup of breakfast tea. “I am sure you must be excited,” she said. “About the wedding. I am afraid I must disappoint you. I know you will want to be married as soon as possible, but my advisors have informed me that the best time will not be until three weeks from today.”
“Three weeks?” They planned to marry her in three weeks. Twenty-one days.
“I know,” the queen said. “I was quite upset as well. But our best dressmakers are away in Fellbridge, the stewards tell me that we do not have enough food for an adequate feast, and we must declare it a holiday, of course. . . . I am afraid to say that you have caught us quite unawares.” She sighed and sipped her tea. “However, we shall have an engagement ceremony in eight days, which is what I wanted to discuss with you. The people already love you, but it never hurts to be prepared—”
“Your Majesty.” The queen paused, her cup of tea suspended halfway to her lips. I have to stop this, Aurora thought. Her lungs were squeezed in a fist, her heartbeat little more than a tremor in her chest. I have to speak. “It’s so soon,” she said. “I don’t—I mean . . . I hardly know him.”
The queen frowned. “The wedding has been prophesized for a hundred years,” she said. “Surely you know him enough.”
“But . . .” She stared at her hands. Say it, she thought. You have to say it. “What if I don’t want to marry him?”
The queen placed the teacup on the table. The clatter of porcelain sliced through the air. “This is why I wanted to talk to you now, dear. It would not do for others to hear you speaking this way. Prewedding jitters are perfectly natural, but in the end, we cannot let these silly fancies take control of us. You know it is for the best.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t mean to hurt Rodric’s feelings—”
“Oh, I do not mean Rodric, my dear. Everyone is going to be talking about you, and if you do not marry him as soon as possible . . . do you not see how dangerous that would be? You spent your whole life in the castle, is that right? You have never seen the outside world. So tell me, Aurora. Do you know what happens to valuable resources when they remain unclaimed?” Auror
a forced herself to look the queen in the eyes. She could think of no reply. “You mean so much to so many people. Everyone will fight to control you, to lock you up and use you for their own ends.”
“Everyone?” Aurora said. “Who is everyone?”
“It is enough to say that many people, ruthless people, want to gain control of this kingdom, and many will see you as the key to doing so. If you do not take your rightful place here . . . well, I dread to think what will happen.” The queen raised her two perfectly arched eyebrows into a look teetering between admonition and concern. “Do you want to be the cause of war in the kingdom? Do you want innocent people to die because of you?”
Aurora dug her fingers into the arms of the chair. Once, when she was very young, she had broken into her father’s library and stolen a book of stories. In one of the tales, a girl had wished for beauty that would enchant everyone who set eyes on her. So many men fell in love with her that they began to fight, chopping off one another’s heads and running children through with swords. When the men surrounded the girl, they all grabbed a limb, a piece of clothing, a scrap of hair, and pulled, until she was torn into enough pieces for everyone to share. Aurora had had nightmares for weeks, of hands grasping her out of the darkness, pulling her left and right, snatching every second of her life away. And that was just for beauty. They will hurt me, she thought, if I do not do as they say.
“Well?” the queen asked. “Do you?”
“No,” she said softly. “No, I don’t.”
“No,” the queen said. “And we cannot protect you until the marriage takes place. Do you see?”
Aurora saw. The king and queen would not help her until she confirmed that she was theirs. “Yes,” she said. “I see.”
“I knew you would understand. I know I was terrified before my marriage to John, but we are women, Aurora. We can be strong.” The queen still watched Aurora, her forehead dented by the smallest of frowns. “The wedding will be in twenty-one days. You should not concern yourself over it. Smile. Curtsy. Be quiet and predictable. We can practice, if these things are beyond you.”
A Wicked Thing Page 3
