by Liz Braswell
Aurora paused just outside the door and took a deep breath.
She moved to go in…
And then stopped.
Whatever she had expected to see—Maleficent talking with her guards, Maleficent chastising or questioning Lady Astrid, Maleficent standing in front of her large mirror, adjusting her outfit—none of it was what was actually happening in the room.
Lady Astrid was in there with Maleficent. Gagged and tied up. The rope cut into her flesh and made her gold dress balloon in ridiculous folds between the cords. She was only upright because she was held that way by the two guards. Astrid’s face, pale and sweaty, strained her gag and her gold-and-white wimple.
“An excellent choice, my pets,” Maleficent was saying with a throaty laugh. She looked like she wanted to stroke one of the horrible guards, but pulled her hand back at the last moment and clasped it into a fist. “The lady is certainly…robust. True royalty would be the best—their blood would be the strongest. A pity about the Exile being gone—that was a mistake. But she will serve for now.”
The queen reached deep into her cloaks. She pulled out a strange ripple-bladed black stone dagger that looked sharp but awkward.
Before Aurora could even guess what it was for, Maleficent plunged it deep into Astrid’s chest. The movement was swift and yet unending; the queen had to jiggle it back and forth to get all of its sinuous bends into the woman’s flesh.
Astrid screamed, or tried to, the muffled cries sounding wet and useless behind her gag.
The guards holding her whistled and hooted with glee.
With a determined set of her jaw, Maleficent wrenched the dagger out.
A fountain of blood streamed from the poor woman’s chest—too purely, too neatly to seem possible considering the jagged imprecision of the wound.
Aurora ground her knuckles into her mouth to keep from screaming.
Maleficent chanted:
“Magic of the darkest power,
Grant me this, but one more hour.
I give thee blood for one who sleeps.
My body dead, but my spirit keeps
Alive in her thoughts and dreams—
Though to her this world seems
As real as the waking one.
I will live again, my will be done.”
Almost delicately, like she was watering a fragile flower, Maleficent took her staff and held the crystal orb at its tip in the stream of blood. The world blurred; the orb was a hole in the air itself and the blood bent and gushed into it, pulled into its vortex. Somehow it passed through the wall and filled the glassy vessel, churning and frothing redly.
When it was full, the queen pulled her staff back and gave it a dramatic twirl. The blood inside glowed and bubbled furiously. Then it changed, losing its redness and becoming the familiar bright, glowing green of Maleficent’s magic.
The queen sighed, shifting her shoulders and stretching out her arms as if she had just woken from a long, restful sleep or come out of a hot bath. The shadows under her eyes were gone. Her skin looked fresher, plumper.
But she didn’t look entirely happy.
“It wasn’t enough. It’s taking more and more blood from those idiot nobles to sustain me for fewer and fewer minutes….”
Lady Astrid was apparently already forgotten. The two monsters let her fall forward. Blood pumped out of her in ragged spurts directly onto the floor. Blood moistened her gag as well, and began to collect in large, heavy drops on her chin.
Aurora found herself praying that the lady was dead. There was something about the way the guards couldn’t keep their eyes on their mistress but let them slip to the pale body they now held. Their tongues hung out of their mouths and they slavered hungrily.
Maleficent moved her staff in a circle.
“Spirits of evil, open the window to that other realm!” she commanded.
The orb traced a silvery outline in the air that shimmered and shivered. The view through it was of the same room, but distorted. Or…less distorted. The details in the image were somehow more distinct than reality, the colors more complicated. It was both uglier and more fascinating than the real room.
But that wasn’t what caused Aurora to gasp.
In that other room, through the shimmering window, the queen’s bed wasn’t empty; Aurora herself slept in it.
The princess fell against the castle wall. It wasn’t like looking at a statue or a painting of herself; it really was her. She knew it. She knew there would be a teeny tiny freckle on the inside of the left pinky finger. She could feel the way her belly flattened out when she lay on her back. She knew her own breathing.
Which…the other Aurora…wasn’t really doing….
She who sleeps.
Aurora was the one who slept.
Though to her this world seems
As real as the waking one.
This…wasn’t real….
The whole world wasn’t real.
As soon as she thought it, she knew it was true. Felt it was true. Over there, in that complicated, ugly world, that was reality.
This was all a dream….
Aurora felt like fainting. Just letting go. Letting whatever insanity that made up the world continue on without her.
Maleficent looked at Aurora’s bed thoughtfully.
“All I need to do is hold on for a little longer,” she murmured. “Until the clock chimes twelve and her sixteenth birthday is over….”
She regarded the blond hair, the petite frame, the delicate feet, the pixie nose of the sleeper.
“I suppose her body will have to do until I can find better,” she added with an only slightly disappointed shrug. “But I will have an entire kingdom at my disposal at that point.”
Do not faint.
A tiny voice, a tiny glimmer of a voice insisted annoyingly in Aurora’s mind. But it was her own voice, from inside her head, not a hallucination or a visit from an Outside fairy.
Passing out would not solve anything. This was all very real. It was happening. It would not go away. She would have to deal with thinking about it and processing it and weeping over it—and all of the real ramifications—later.
Right now she had to run.
“Your Majesty, Princess Aurora is…”
Lianna had been hurrying up the stairs but stopped when she saw Aurora in the shadows. The two girls regarded each other.
Then Aurora’s eyes drifted from the other girl’s face to her feet.
Lianna had picked up the skirt of her dress to run quickly up the stairs, just as the princess had. But where Aurora had golden shoes, Lianna had…
Trotters.
Splayed, ugly, fleshy trotters.
Which was why she always walked so oddly, Aurora realized. It wasn’t a foreign habit.
She was one of Maleficent’s creatures.
“Your Highness,” Lianna whispered, addressing the princess this time.
Somehow this spurred Aurora into action. She swept past the other—girl?—quickly down the stairs, slamming her shoulder into her as she went.
“TRAITOR!” she hissed, almost like her aunt.
Where could she go? Her first urge was her bedroom. Safe, lonely, comfortable bed.
That was dumb.
Her second thought was to hide under her bed. Like a little child. Which was also dumb.
Her third thought was a broom closet, which—with the entire castle of monstrous guards and a powerful fairy queen after her—was also dumb.
She stood for a moment, frozen, terrified. There was no place to go.
There was only one place to go.
Outside.
She moved like she was diving, lunging toward the back entrance, where just days ago she had gone to meet Cael. Aurora didn’t have the time or energy to be terrified of the dark green dome of vines overhead; she just made straight across for the outer defenses of the keep. One lone old crone marked the princess’s presence with a vaguely curious raised eyebrow as she emptied a water skin over her parched plot of beans. G
olden ball or not, things died without help in this world.
The princess dashed into the nearest tower in the outer wall. Even through the heavy stones, she was sure she could start to hear movement, an alarm raised once it was realized she had fled.
Up, up, up, she climbed the staircases she had played on as a child, free to roam the castle at will like a rat.
Her dress kept tangling with her legs despite her nimbleness and grace; she paused just long enough to rip the train off. She felt a twinge of sorrow for the women who sewed the cloth and the old women who wove it. But her legs were now free, and she could take the steps several at a time.
She doubled her speed past the floors with barracks. Not all the human guards had gone to the ball; people still had to patrol, despite the safety of the thorny barrier. They looked up at her from benches where they were sharpening their swords or polishing their helms. Perhaps they were not as surprised as guards might have been in other castles, in other times, with princesses who stayed nicely in their rooms and chapels and gardens.
Aurora paused at the top of her tower and looked around wildly. Her goal was the barbican: the main entrance to the castle with the portcullis and drawbridge. It was the point that stuck out farthest from the keep and leaned farthest into the vines.
But the passage to it from where she had emerged was a terribly exposed length to run. The tall crenellations on the right of the stone walk were meant to protect guards from invading forces. There was nothing on the left but a low wall; who would attack a castle from within?
In the courtyard below, a half-dozen misshapen figures tumbled together out of the castle, armed with bows and slings. They had a perfect view of her.
“There she is!”
One pointed an arm that terminated in a single terrifying hooklike claw.
Aurora ducked and ran.
Maleficent appeared at an arched window in a castle tower, fury informing her every gesture. “Guards, seize the princess!” she cried. “She means to do herself harm!”
But at the same time, she raised her staff and began to mutter an incantation.
The princess willed her feet to move faster. She narrowed her vision to the path before her, the ancient rocks that slipped by on either side of her. The barbican was once a place of extreme security, with murder holes for dropping boiling oil on the heads of invaders, but had been more or less abandoned since the world had ended. The giant gate was sealed in place; there was no cause to raise it, ever. The platform on top was now just used as a private escape for castle teens and drunken servants. Aurora hadn’t expected to find anyone there.
To her dismay, the shiny helms of guards began to pop out of the narrow entrance to the stairs like moles.
“Your Highness!” one called, immediately leaping to grab her.
Up here the vines were distressingly close. They laced together just a man’s height above her head before bending over and shooting straight down a hundred feet, where their thick trunks made a living wall just outside the castle’s stone ones. The moat was gone, the water sucked up by their greedy, unlikely growth.
The foul dust of their aging and shifting lay brownly over everything. It smelled unwholesome.
Aurora looked around wildly, unable to believe she was about to do what she was about to do.
A guard lunged for her.
She leapt.
Aurora fell harder than she thought she would—and landed on a thick branch. She coughed and gasped, the breath knocked out of her. Her ribs were bruised and her stomach hurt. But that was all.
Now that she was within the tangled world of the plants, it would be a piece of cake: climbing down from one closely entwined vine to another.
The guards continued to shout from somewhere above her.
“My lady!”
“After her!”
“Queen Maleficent, what do we do?”
With a grin she wasn’t sure why she had, Aurora began her descent.
And then the vines began to move.
Not the oldest, thickest trunks; small whippets of young vines, curlicued like a cucumber’s tendrils. They shot around her legs and arms and pulled.
“NO!” Aurora cried out, frustrated with the world. She shook and pulled and kicked. The greenery snapped away as easily as bean sprouts.
The princess was taken aback by her own ferocity and its accomplishments. She really hadn’t expected it to be so easy.
A little less cocky but more resolute, Aurora moved more quickly downward.
Then thorns grew much faster than they were supposed to, erupting wide and thick and unseemly in the way they pushed through the skin of the vines and each other. They pierced Aurora’s flesh, sharp as needles. Everywhere she tried to place her hands, they sprung up. Very quickly, she was covered in cuts and punctures and rivulets of blood.
Also, they screamed.
They screamed as they forced their way through their own stalks and into one another; they screamed in delight when they pricked her.
They grew strange faces, long and lined like old men’s. But when they managed to speak, they sounded like Maleficent.
“Go back….”
“There is nothing for you out here….”
“Return to the castle….”
Aurora bit her lip and tried not to sob. She couldn’t move for the sharp thorns everywhere.
“GO AWAY!” she shouted in rage and bitterness. “I wish you would just disappear!”
The thorns receded, melting like lumps of sugar in hot tea.
Aurora blinked. She wanted to think about what had just happened.
But she had to move quickly, before Maleficent attacked again. Throwing herself with almost careless abandon, she plummeted down, bouncing from branch to branch like a pebble tossed down a deep well.
She hit the dark ground with a sickening hardness. Her head was snapped back and jarred so badly that everything went blurry. It didn’t help that the air was thick and dusty and in a permanent twilight.
But there, some distance away from the castle, just barely visible through the interlaced vines, she could see a faint flicker of yellow light.
Golden and bloody, Aurora straightened her shoulders and walked toward sunshine.
A CASTLE LAY ASLEEP. A kingdom lay asleep. The people, horses, mice, and even fountains and gnats lay asleep. A hush lay over everything, and all seemed sweet and peaceful at first. Beautiful, ancient-looking brambles protected the sleepers within and occasionally bloomed pink honey-scented roses.
There were only two groups of things that didn’t sleep. One was the dead.
The other was a trio of concerned-looking fairies who flitted around the castle and watched over the sleepers—especially the royal princess.
Aurora lay perfectly, beautifully, hands clasped below her ribs like she was in constant prayer. Her lips were parted. Her eyes rolled. Something was happening in what was supposed to be a dreamless, swift sleep.
Collapsed in an ungainly heap on the floor next to her was Prince Phillip. The one who was supposed to wake her up and end the whole thing.
Instead, the silly boy had fallen asleep himself…the first hint the fairies had that something was terribly amiss.
And then the people had started dying.
Flora, the fairy watching over Aurora, had a worried, weary hand to her head. Her strange, flowing vestments of red drifted sadly around her like mist rather than cloth. Her face appeared mostly human except up close. There was a strange serenity behind all her normal-seeming emotions.
Her companions, a plump little pixie in blue and a hamadryad in green, floated in from their rounds.
“All’s quiet,” Merryweather, the one in blue, said. “I mean, they’re all still asleep. So of course they’re quiet.”
“She’s doing it again.” Flora pointed at Aurora’s face. For a split second, the beautiful princess’s features twisted up in agony or upset. They recomposed themselves almost immediately.
Fauna, the one in gr
een, moaned in despair. “I cannot believe this is happening. We were supposed to save the princess and everyone. Not just hand them over to Maleficent. We’re sure they’re all in there?”
“Sadly, yes.”
“How did she ever plan all this?” Merryweather demanded.
“I don’t think she planned it,” Flora said, sighing. “I think she just took advantage of the situation. I think she always had sort of a…backup plan in case she was ever killed.”
“If I’m ever killed, I want you two to resurrect me,” Merryweather said with a humph. “If she actually had friends, she could have done the same.”
“Be kind!” Fauna admonished her, swooshing back and forth in the air. “If she actually had friends, maybe she wouldn’t have turned out so nasty and evil. And besides,” she added reluctantly, “if she actually had friends, we’d be in worse trouble now.”
“Worse? How could it be worse? We can’t wake up anyone here. Not with a spell, not with foxglove, not with holy water.”
“We have not ruled out everything,” Flora snapped. “We haven’t tried everything.”
“True. Have you tried kissing anyone yet?” Merryweather asked archly.
Flora gave her a withering look.
A horrible, piercing cry rang out through the castle.
“Oh, no. Not another one!” Fauna cried in alarm.
Immediately, the three fairies shrank into red, blue, and green balls of light and went whisking through the air, will-o’-the-wisps on a mission. They streaked through the bailey, the courtyard, the bedrooms, and the chapel until they found the source of the scream: Lady Astrid, asleep at her needlework, her face a mask of horror and fear.
The three balls quickly resolved into human-sized figures who gathered her up in their arms. Fauna kept the woman’s head upright; Merryweather grabbed a cloak and crumpled it up, to try to prevent what would come next. Flora regarded the dreamer with a critical eye.
All seemed fine at first.
And then thick dark blood began to soak the lady’s gown, over where her heart was.
Merryweather immediately pushed the cloak onto the wound, pressing it down with her hands as hard as she could. Fauna closed her eyes and invoked the healing power of the woods, an ancient, usually infallible, incantation. Flora drew symbols in the air with her naked ring finger, trailing gold behind it in a strange three-dimensional rune.
