by Liz Braswell
She picked up a single long, golden lock and began to systematically brush it.
“I didn’t ask for any of these things,” Aurora mumbled. She pulled the feather out of her chatelaine and began to roll it desultorily through her fingers.
“Nobody asks for the things they are given, most of the time. I didn’t ask for…black hair…or…my clumsy feet…or…what I am now. Where I am now. Would you rather you were a servant, forced to scrub all day? Or one of those peasants out there, pretending you’re still farming the land? It’s rather ridiculous, you know. I actually heard several of them discussing the prospect of breeding those sad, silly sheep they keep in that…petting zoo, trying to save the line. And the horses.”
Aurora smiled knowingly.
“You don’t like animals much, do you?”
Her handmaiden shrugged.
“They have their uses I suppose.”
“I love them. I wish there were more of them. I wish…” She stopped herself, thinking about what Maleficent had said about wishes. Lianna cocked her head at the princess curiously. Aurora quickly changed the subject. “Did you…did you ever have a pet or anything at all? Where you grew up?”
The girl stopped brushing. Her eyes grew unfocused, like Aurora had never seen before. Her face softened at an unseen memory.
“I…I had a bird once. A raven.”
Aurora blinked in surprise.
She stayed as quiet as possible, not wanting to disturb Lianna out of her story.
“He had fallen out of his nest. A fledgling. His flight feathers hadn’t come in yet. I picked him up and brought him home. Raised him from a baby.”
Without realizing it, Lianna was miming the motions of what she had done, making her hands tuck the invisible bird into some soft cloth, carrying it delicately.
“He lived. He grew into a strong, healthy man-bird with ebon feathers and a bright yellow beak. Such bright eyes, too! He went with me everywhere. He sat on my shoulder. He sat on the back of my chair, behind me, at meals. He never left my side….”
Lianna trailed off, lost in the memory.
Aurora didn’t want to break the spell, but couldn’t help asking.
“What…happened to him?”
And the spell was broken.
Her handmaiden shook herself. “He was turned into stone. By a fairy. A stupid, stupid fairy. The only thing I ever loved, and she killed him.”
“I’m so sorry,” Aurora said, reaching out to clasp Lianna’s hand. “It seems like fairies do nothing but evil. To all of us.”
The other girl looked down at her princess’s hand clasping hers, then up into Aurora’s face. A rare confused stream of emotions ran across her own.
“I know a song about ravens,” Aurora said brightly. “I’ll sing it tonight, just for you. In memory of your friend.”
“Thank you, Your Highness,” Lianna murmured. She smiled, too—a genuine, rare smile from her heart.
Unused to the expression, her face only allowed half of her mouth to tilt.
But if the royal princess could bring even a little happiness to people tonight, as she had her handmaiden, she would absolutely do it. And do it gratefully and happily every time Maleficent asked, Aurora decided.
No matter how much she hated it.
THE CONCERT WAS a rousing success. Aurora sang beautiful songs that made people sigh with wonder, sad songs that made people weep for things that were never real, and almost bawdy, funny songs to bring them back from the brink. When she sang “The Raven of the Evercliffs,” she looked at Lianna. Her handmaiden’s eyes remained wide and unblinking for the entire song.
As a surprise encore, a little servant boy sang a simple country ballad that had everyone clapping and shouting. Aurora held him high in her arms so the whole crowd could see.
For one evening, at least, everyone was happy again. There was a little bit of hope in the Thorn Castle once more—enough to get them through to the next ball. Even Maleficent seemed cheered.
All this strengthened Aurora’s new resolve and crystallized her intentions. She came up with a Plan.
A Plan to improve herself. To keep herself busy (like Lady Astrid). To make what was left of the world better for those around her (like Lianna).
The Plan was this: each month she would work on one quality she felt she was lacking in until she was a better person. First was Gratitude. Next was Patience. After that was Pure Thoughts.
She made lots of wonderful little lists chock-full of ideas for exercising each deficient part of her psyche. It was much easier than math.
One of her first to-dos for Gratitude was to give a thank-you speech at the Gold Ball as a surprise for her aunt.
“And we thank you, gracious queen…”
Aurora held the carefully penned speech in her right hand and moved her left hand across her body, indicating an imaginary crowd. It didn’t feel right. She should be gesturing at the queen, not the audience. Or maybe if she just emphasized the we.
“We thank you, gracious queen, for our safety, our health, our well-being, our very lives! Without your foresight and kindness, we would be as dead as the world around us, as extinct as the rabbits….”
She faltered on that word. She tried not to think about the playing card with the tender brown-furred thing lifting its nose to the golden-haired girl—who resembled her so closely. She tried not to think about what the animal would have looked like in real life, whether it was really that friendly, if its fur was soft, if its nose twitched or stayed still….
“Extinct as the rabbits.” She began again, taking a breath. “For…”
A movement flickered at the edge of her vision. At the base of her desk, next to one of the long legs that ended, ironically, in paws.
There, of course, was a rabbit.
Somehow she had known what it was before she even made herself look at it. And now that she had, she felt her heart beating out of control, her breath catching in her throat.
It looked both exactly and not at all like the picture. Its eyes were brown, large, glistening, and mostly empty. It leaned forward, hesitantly, to sniff the leg of the desk, putting its whiskers and silly long ears back. It turned its head to look directly at Aurora. It had no tail, only a stupidly endearing puff of white on its rear end.
“You’re not real,” Aurora said, hopefully and doubtingly. “You’re extinct.”
The rabbit cocked its head and turned its ears like a windmill. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought its face showed the animal equivalent of a smile.
Oh, she wanted to touch it.
She wanted to bend down and put her hand out, the way she did to the few baby goats and sheep that were born to the castle each year. She wanted to be the girl in the picture and have it breathe its warm, moist breath on the palm of her hand.
She thought of Maleficent’s words. About the Outside finding unexpected ways into the castle. About the implication that she was weaker than most in this respect because of her parents, because of her tainted, evil blood.
Aurora closed her eyes.
“You’re not real.”
When she opened them, the rabbit was gone.
What she felt then had nothing to do with relief or thankfulness. It was as if all of her little stores of energy, of hope, of happiness, were now suddenly being forcibly drained from her and into the floor. She let the speech drop in a sad flutter and lay down on her bed, too empty to do anything else.
Lianna was starting to worry about Aurora.
She even tried to arrange a tryst between the princess and Cael; difficult, because he couldn’t read the notes she sent. Aurora just didn’t care that much. The stable boy would always be there. He would be there next month, if she cared by then. And so would the ball. And so would the musicians and the food, and then there would be another month….
“Besides, stable boys are no fit match for a royal princess,” she said aloud, imitating Maleficent’s voice and dramatic speech. She sat alone at her des
k, playing with her tiny pile of illicit treasures—the three cards she had managed to keep, the blue feather—instead of working on math or her lists. “They’re all dirty and work with animals and live outside and…”
She stopped, and it wasn’t to wonder—as she occasionally did—who would be a fit match, since all the princes in the world were dead. No, it was a murky, intriguing thought, involving stable boys and animals.
She picked up the feather, regarding it.
Lady Astrid was right. She couldn’t talk to anyone about it inside the castle.
The old lady had said it very specifically and carefully.
The stable boy was not inside the castle. He lived in the stable. In the bailey.
And he knew something about animals. Birds, maybe…
This was an interesting idea. An idea that actually involved doing something. An action of some sort. Which was where things usually fell apart for Aurora. Actions were tiring. She mostly found it better to lie on her bed and think about actions. Just the thought of getting up these days seemed exhausting and unreasonable.
Sometimes she had to surprise her body into doing something.
So without thinking, she leapt off the bed and fastened her chatelaine to her girdle. She hurried to find Lianna before she could find some reason to change her own mind.
The handmaiden was sitting in front of a woodless magical fire, just staring into it, warming her hands. Which would have been odd if Aurora didn’t know that she came from a hot country.
“I think…I think I’d like to have a word with the stable boy, after all,” Aurora said. It wasn’t a lie.
But she still felt guilty when the usually impassive Lianna leapt up immediately, joy and mischief in her big black eyes.
“We will go out through the summer kitchen,” she said, clasping the princess’s hands in her own. “Come! When we get down to the outer courtyard I will run ahead and prepare the way. We will say you are just visiting the animals, as you love to do.”
The two girls hurried through the passageways, hand in hand. When a stolid-looking matron of the lesser nobility rounded a corner, the girls immediately slowed down to a more decorous pace, nodding serenely at the woman. As soon as she was out of sight, they raced ahead again.
“Wait here. I’ll wave to you from the dairy window when it’s safe,” Lianna said at the door before the courtyard. She started to open it then stopped and turned, suddenly seized with conscience. “Whatever you do…do not—do not do anything that would shame yourself. He is just a stable boy.”
Aurora smiled. “I plan on just talking. Thank you for your concern, though,” she squeezed Lianna’s arm. “You are such a good friend.”
The girl cocked her head at Aurora with an unreadable expression; the princess could not help being reminded of the imaginary rabbit she had seen. Then Lianna was off through the dark greenish-black murk of the courtyard. It wasn’t long before her head popped up across the way, and she waved her hand frantically, like a little child.
Aurora waved back and stepped through the door.
She didn’t like leaving the castle; only the prospect of petting animals could draw her out. Despite her longing for sun and sky and freedom, she felt safer under mountains of cool gray rock. Inside, you could almost forget there was an Outside, that anything had happened to that Outside.
In the courtyards and bailey, there was no possibility of forgetting. Giant black-and-green vines, some as wide as a man was tall, arched up overhead from beyond the castle walls. They twined and joined and wove themselves in strangely nauseating patterns. Humungous thorns, some the size of swords, clasped and gouged and held the vines together; the plants’ skin puckered where they pierced, almost like it was painful. A few thin, unhealthy-looking leaves decorated the undersides of the largest branches as if they were merely an afterthought on the monstrous plants.
The whole bailey and all of the courtyards were bathed in a perpetual twilight. On good days it was shot through by narrow beams of sun, but even those seemed sickly by the time they reached the ground. The peasants had managed to arrange long, thin, unhappy-looking gardens that traced along the route of the feeble light that made its way through.
Aurora hurried as daintily as she could, trying not to close her eyes. She wrapped her shawl tightly around her.
One peasant had been killed by a falling thorn.
As soon as she was under the overhang of the stable—at one time necessary when clean rain fell freely from the sky—she breathed deeply. Royal princesses were not supposed to show fear. But only when she was under the cover of real shadow from solid dead wood and stone walls, and enveloped with moisture from cool, dark interiors and the breath of animals within, did she feel safe.
Once recovered, she turned to pet the nag Fala, who was old when the world was destroyed; even the stoniest-hearted peasant wouldn’t think of putting her down now. Aurora kissed the horse’s warm nose and stroked the muzzle below her blind eyes. Then, slowly, as if it was something she was just attending to, she went into the stable itself.
It smelled strongly of strange, magicked hay, of horse and cow dung, of leather and oils and humans who didn’t bathe as often as a royal princess. She didn’t mind.
“Your Highness!”
Cael came forward out of the gloom, no longer wearing his borrowed finery. In a loose tunic and carefully bound-up, ancient leggings, he still cut just as handsome a figure. In his own territory, he certainly had more swagger and braggadocio.
“Cael,” Aurora said, tipping her chin gently. If this was an actual—illegal, unsanctioned—tryst, what would come next? Would it end with him trying to kiss her? Would she pull him into a clean pile of hay, as she had heard some of the serving girls whisper about?
“How may I be of service?” he asked, a twinkle in his eye. “It’s not the best weather for a ride around the kingdom today, I’m afraid. What with the monsters and demons and everything being dead and all.”
“Yes, I am aware of the present circumstances of the world we live in. I came to ask you a question. What is this?”
She took the feather out of the silver pouch on her chatelaine and held it up.
“Why, it’s a feather, Your Highness,” Cael started to joke. Then he stopped, suddenly peering at it harder. He took it from her without asking. Aurora saw the intrigued look in his eye. “Well, smack my flanks—it’s a bluebird feather. Wherever did you get it?”
“How do you know it’s from a bluebird?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“I’m a few seasons older than you,” he said, touching his forelock in a sort of salute. “My memories are still cloudy, like all of us. But when I was a babe, I remember being left outside on my own with my siblings supposing to care for me, a heel of bread for my lunch. Birds would come peck at my crumbs. Sparrows and others and even a couple of these fellows, as blue as the sky on a winter’s day.”
Aurora listened to his story with wonder. Imagine having birds as playmates…
“May I ask where you got this, Your Highness? It doesn’t look like it’s from a hat or a pin or a cloak…it’s too small and not crushed at all.”
“I don’t think I can reveal that,” she said slowly, taking it back.
“Oh, aye,” the stable boy said slowly. “But…if…it’s from Outside…”
Aurora looked at him sharply.
“Begging your pardon,” the boy mumbled, looking down, suddenly seeming years younger. “It would just be…a miracle…a godsend…to know there was still bluebirds out there.”
Aurora felt herself melt. Here she was feeling caged and useless, a princess who spent her whole life inside castle walls, and there he was—one of many who had lived most of their lives Outside. Those who knew what they were missing, even if they couldn’t precisely remember it. Who had, in some ways, lost far more than she had.
She reached out and clasped his hand.
He looked at her, surprised.
“On my honor, as soon as I wo
rk out this little…mystery, I shall let you in on it,” she promised. “As soon as I hear word about…the safety of going Outside, I will let you know. Myself.”
“Th-thank you, Your Highness,” he stammered. He offered her a spontaneous, jerky bow.
“Good day, Cael,” she said with a royal nod of her head.
“Good day to you, Your Highness,” he said solemnly back. “You’re…as wise and kind as you are beautiful.”
The glow that rose up on her cheeks warmed her on the walk back to the castle.
He might not have been her favorite boy in the castle—but he was a boy. And it felt nice.
A strange, quick hissing noise caused her to look up.
Lianna was standing, otherwise motionless, near the door of the summer kitchen, a basket over one arm as if she had been intending to do something useful. Two bothersome, gossipy girls stood with her: none other than Mistress Laura herself and her chaperone, the only slightly older Lady Malder. Neither had seen the princess yet.
Lianna shook her head very slightly. Aurora could not return to the castle that way.
The princess bit her lip and quickly dashed to the stone wall, pressing herself up against it as closely as she dared without ruining her dress. The next entrance was all the way around the side, where the chambermaids went to empty the pots and the cooks tossed the offal. It stank, but no one would see her there. She hurried as carefully as she could, holding the train of her dress high out of the dust.
As she rounded the corner, she saw one of Maleficent’s servants nosing around the door.
Off duty?
Did they even go off duty?
It was on its knees and hands, snuffling in the midden like an animal.
Aurora had to turn her head when it found a length of entrails and worried it out of the pile, stretching it until the tube of flesh snapped.
Holding her nose and gagging, she slipped past it. The last entrance that was unlikely to be guarded was a once-upon-a-time secret passage for quick escape in case of invasion. Almost everyone knew about it now—there were few secrets left in the remaining population. But it was rarely used because the stairs were slick, the tunnels dark and damp…and they led right past the chamber where King Stefan and Queen Leah were imprisoned.
