by Anna Sheehan
It was only then that I noticed how cold she was. The water was dripping from her rags, and her eyes were red. ‘Let me see to you,’ I told her.
‘I’ll b-be all r-right,’ she said. ‘I’m just c-cold.’
‘How are your eyes?’
‘Fine. A b-bit blurry.’
‘Here.’ I was tired from spinning the thorns into submission, but I could do this. I reached for the kit’s white hair and twisted two hanks of it into an elf knot. She sighed with relief as the pain faded from her eyes.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘Can you get home alone?’
‘You’re not coming with me?’
I shook my head. ‘Not unless you think you can’t make it. We shouldn’t try going back through town together.’
She shuddered. ‘I c-can’t. N-not all wet like this,’ she said.
I nodded. ‘Don’t move.’ I pulled out my spindle one more time and tried to shake the weariness from my eyes. With a deep breath I set the spindle going again. ‘Spin!’ I told her. She spun quickly, turning sunwise like my spindle, and the water around her flew out in a sudden circle, dropping in a ring around her, and splashing my trousers.
She looked at me. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
I sighed. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It was my spell. Can you make it now?’
‘Still cold, but I think I’m all right.’
‘Good. You go the outskirts. I’ll go through the town. I’ll meet you at the burrow.’
She nodded and slipped through the poorer houses back towards the distant forest, and our burrow.
I looked down at my sodden trousers. They were freezing in the snow. I didn’t want to waste the wool to shed the water from them. And I’d sent the kit the safer route – I would now have to make my way back through the hostile town in order to walk back to our tiny, filthy burrow. I was a bug. A Nameless, filthy, sodden bug. And inside that huge, beautiful palace behind me sat Fair Queen Amaranth, her prince charming, and her two devoted children. And what did I have? A price on my head and an empty belly.
It wasn’t fair. So Queen Amaranth had to spend a hundred years asleep because my aunt was a drag at parties. All was well now, wasn’t it? Why did they have to continue to hold her curse against my family? After all, what had we ever done? My ma, the kit, myself, my cousins, what exactly had we done to warrant the theft of our identities? Queen Amaranth the Asleep knew who she was. Everyone knew who she was. Even I wasn’t allowed to know who I was. My cousins had all disappeared years ago. They had probably been killed, the same way the kit and I were always in such danger. We were alive only because of the strength I had in my hands, the skill I had with my spinning, the knowledge I constantly sought as I strove to improve my magic. Only these had been our protection, since Da left.
That thought did cheer me up a little. Not as much as seeing Queen Amaranth and her daughters carted off to be eaten by trolls would have done, but the thought of my magic always warmed me. And there was one good thing about having to go through the town. I could stop off at Madam Paline’s bookshop.
There was a book at Madam Paline’s I was slowly getting through. It was a trick reading at Madam Paline’s. She didn’t approve of people without money going through her stacks. However, she was trying to slim her waistline (a venture which struck me as pointless. If you have enough for food, you should have the courage to accept the consequences. It’s far better than starving). So she would frequently skip lunch. If I arrived shortly after midday, I could tie a knot in my spool and tease her hunger, which would make her head off to the nearest tavern.
I could have stolen the book. I frequently considered it. I stole food, clothes, wool and flax. Somehow, whenever I left Madam Paline’s, it was without a book in my hands. Part of it may have been because I knew I couldn’t keep it safe – my family and I frequently had to run from our makeshift lodgings, and were almost never able to take anything with us. But there was more to it than that. I may not have been honest, I may break the law every day of my life spinning my magic, but I wasn’t about to steal from a bookseller. If the booksellers went out of business, where would I find books? And particularly from Madam Paline’s, the only place I’d ever found any books on magic.
Besides, Madame Paline’s was considerably warmer and more comfortable than our tiny, filthy, freezing burrow. So I’d tease her to luncheon and spend an hour reading blissfully amongst the stacks. The book I’d just found was called The Ages of Arcana, an old book on magic theory, which had miraculously escaped the purge. Most books on magic were burned with the spinning wheels when the then-Princess Amaranth was cursed at her christening. While the laws against spinning had never been revoked, the laws against magic were eventually lessened, until magic as a whole was only frowned upon, but not forbidden. Still, most of the old grimoires and spell books were lost in the purge, so a book on magic theory was a rare find indeed. I was very much looking forward to reading through another chapter. Particularly as there was a chapter there about the theories of healing magic. I wanted to be sure I could protect the kit’s eyes.
With one last impotent curse toward the palace, I set off for Madam Paline’s.
Chapter 2
Will
There was a trick to sneaking out of Rose Palace without being horribly killed. It took a pinch of magic, a great deal of courage, and some plain old-fashioned quickness. Willow had mastered the trick some three years since, but even she felt nervous when she passed the hedge. She was always afraid that the leaves of the ivy used to combat the thorns would turn out to be the briars, and they’d find her bled white in the morning, hung upside-down with her skirts around her ears.
They said that the palace wasn’t always so dangerous, but no one Will knew really believed it. For more than a hundred years the palace had been immersed in deadly briar roses, and Will was sure that a hundred years on they’d still be finding the unaware hung up in their twisting coils.
The thorns were a curious curse. No one was really sure why they were included in the curse that had troubled Will’s mother. Everyone knew the story of beautiful Princess Amaranth, and how the thirteenth fairy arrived at her christening and cursed her to fall down dead when she pricked her finger on a spindle on her sixteenth birthday. The curse was softened by the youngest fairy who had not yet given her gift and, instead of dying, Amaranth fell into an ensorcelled sleep for a hundred years.
Many people were of the opinion that simply letting her die would have been kinder for the kingdom. The interregnum caused chaos and confusion and wars without cause and seemingly without end. The kingdom would have utterly dissolved but, as luck would have it, politics intervened. Seven years after the princess’s curse befell, the king of a neighbouring country, Hiedelen, pledged to annex Lyndaria, and sacrificed his firstborn son to the thorns. Prince Alexi had tried and failed to pierce the hedge at the palace at Lyndaron. His death was witnessed by hundreds, and as much of his body as could be retrieved from the thorns was carried in a state procession through Lyndaron to be buried back in Hiedelen.
From that first princely sacrifice, the Hiedel line had sacrificed one son a generation to the thorns. Their perpetual sacrifice rallied the people, and Lyndaria was ruled through those hundred years by the Hiedelen kings. Will had to honour those four dead princes. Everyone did. The princes’ memorial was a national holiday.
Will’s father’s name was Ragi, and he was the Hiedel prince who finally made it through the hedge and woke the sleeping beauty with a kiss. (Ragi always said it was a little more complicated than that, but that was the official story, and no one had ever written down anything different.) Twenty years before, Will’s mother had been awakened and become queen. Everyone thought that the thorns would disappear then. But they didn’t. Instead they renamed the palace at Lyndaron ‘Rose Palace.’ The kingdom was too poor to build another royal seat, and the city of Lyndaron couldn’t be moved from the banks of the River Frien. It was cheaper to battle the thorns from the pal
ace than to build a new one.
They told the story far and wide. It had almost become a legend already. The beautiful princess, deep in an ensorcelled slumber, in a palace guarded by briars, is one day awakened by a prince, and they live happily ever after. The thing about ‘ever afters’ is that ‘ever’ is a very long time, and ‘after’ involves more than people expect. Including, it would seem, Will and her sister Lavender.
Will’s mother was the sleeping beauty herself. Will’s sister Lavender, the eldest, had also always been considered the beautiful princess. And Will? Well, she was glad she didn’t make people scream when they looked at her. No one fell at her feet with protestations of adoration, either.
Not that she needed suitors. She’d been betrothed from the age of nine, when the Hiedelen king’s youngest grandson was born. Will had grown quite used to Narvi, who was also some distant cousin of hers – very distant, she thought, if her suspicions were correct. They sent him to Rose Palace regularly to learn Lyndarian law and for official functions. He spent three months out of the year at Rose Palace. He was a nice enough boy. Of course, she didn’t love him.
It wasn’t expected that either of them would amount to much. Narvi was little more than a lesser duke, and while Will had the title of princess, it was not a title of inheritance. Lyndaria would go to Lavender. Will’s fate was most likely to be shunted to some cornerstone duchy and invited to Midwinter’s and royal christenings. Narvi and Will would marry dutifully when he turned sixteen. Their children would be marriageable pawns to strengthen Lyndaria’s alliances. That was always to be the case, and Will had been content with that. Until she had the misfortune to fall in love.
She knew how banal it was. It was not something she was proud of, and not something she indulged. But she couldn’t help it. Anyone could understand why she should love Prince Ferdinand. One had only had to look at him. Prince Ferdinand was tall and courageous, with white-blond hair, a hawkish profile, ice-blue eyes that could pierce to the core of your soul, and a dignified and genteel manner. He was also betrothed to Will’s sister.
To understand this, one had to understand Lavender. There could be no mistake about it – Will’s older sister Lavender was beautiful. Small and willowy and graceful as a swan, a fine embroideress, an excellent dancer. Hair like autumn leaves. Eyes like the summer sky. Skin soft and pure as spring rose petals. Voice clear and crisp as a sunny day in winter. She looked just like her mother, and was as beloved as Queen Amaranth had always been.
Will loved her, she supposed, but in truth she also loathed her. It turned out that, contrary to popular opinion, those two emotions were not exclusive. And when looked at together, it wasn’t hard to figure out what Will’s resentment stemmed from. Her name of Willow was a cruel joke fate played on her parents and herself. Willow was not willowy. She was not graceful. She was not delicate. She was tall and stocky, a combination which made seamstresses throw up their hands when they tried to fit dresses to her. By the age of sixteen she could wear her father’s clothes, and frequently did when she snuck out of the castle. By eighteen, even her father’s clothes were tight in some awkward places. She was not shaped like a man, but she took after her father. She felt, with some resentment, that she should have at least had the regal bearing of the Hiedelen line, but she didn’t.
Her father didn’t, either. He’d been considered the black sheep of the family, and wasn’t even the son of King Lesli himself. He was the son of King Lesli’s brother, the Prince of Ethelbark (a small province of Hiedelen). Ragi wasn’t even a prince. Technically he was the Duke of Rendaren (an even smaller province of Hiedelen) and when he was selected as the representative of Hiedelen to try and wake Princess Amaranth, he was convinced that King Lesli was mostly trying to get rid of him.
There was some question as to Ragi’s legitimacy. Apparently he’d been born more than nine months after the Prince of Ethelbark died in a ‘hunting accident’. Princess Meggi (who was herself of the Hiedelen line, though rather distant) insisted that she’d been pregnant when he died, and it was a story she stuck to. Despite this, all his life everyone had looked at Ragi askance. The fact that he had made it through the thorns was taken as proof that he was in fact a legitimate prince.
Will was inclined to believe otherwise. Though she never told anyone her findings, her study of the hedge had led her to believe that the briars had a taste for royal blood. One was considerably more likely to get through if one was an honest woodcutter’s son than a royal prince. But all of the honest woodcutter’s sons that had made it through the hedge (and there had been a few) had all succumbed to the sleeping beauty’s contagious sleep once they set foot in the palace. There was a small pile of honest miller’s apprentices and virtuous woodcutter’s sons discovered in the receiving hall upon Amaranth’s awakening. They were all so handsome and bold and kindly and clever they promptly ended up married to Amaranth’s ladies-in-waiting, most of whom had lost their betrotheds during the interregnum.
Which was why the hedge was so confusing. One could only battle the sleep if one was of royal blood, but that was less than helpful in getting through the hedge. And it wasn’t that the hedge invited virtue, either. There were several thieves discovered upon Amaranth’s awakening, too, who had planned to rob the sleeping palace. Many of them were wretched and sinful in the extreme.
In the end, it was the thinness of Ragi’s royal blood which enabled him both to bypass the hedge and battle the sleep. Unfortunately, that same thinness of blood left Will looking, she felt, like a soldier off the battle field, or the daughter of an ogre. Her face was too strong to be considered handsome as a woman, and her body so large that she towered over visiting princes. She towered over Ferdinand, too, which only served to remind her how futile her love was.
Prince Ferdinand was fiercely in love with Lavender. He had saved her life. She was abducted by a dragon while out picnicking on Midsummer’s Day. (Will had told her it was a stupid thing for a princess to go and do.) She was missing for six months, and all were sure she’d been killed. Will had had the horrifying prospect of being groomed as the heir. They’d already fitted a new wardrobe for her, and had doubled her diplomacy lessons, which left her even less time to pursue her magic. Then Prince Ferdinand arrived on a white horse with a white hound at its heels, holding a white hawk on his arm, with Lavender riding pillion behind.
The adventure surrounding Prince Ferdinand’s rescue of Lavender was daring and clever. He was the youngest son of the king of the distant country of Illaria. His father had set him out to make his way in the world. Very traditional story – Ferdinand gave his last piece of bread to a beggar woman, who turned out to be a faerie and gifted him with the three animals who led him over hill and dale, through a dozen different adventures, until he finally slew the dragon through courage and cunning and freed the kidnapped princess. And almost from the moment he arrived with Will’s sister, Willow had been desperately in love with him.
It was torment. It was also flat stupid, she knew, far more foolish than going picnicking on Midsummer’s Day while being a princess. Ferdinand was handsome and clever and bold. He had wit, a sense of honour, a charming and noble grace. Who wouldn’t have fallen in love with him?
Anyone with a modicum of self-control, Will supposed. But, she reasoned, not everyone knows themselves well enough to control themselves. And those who do, don’t always have the power. Like the roses, she thought. They could train them and guide them, but if they left them alone for long they’d take over the entire castle.
The evening she realized she was in love with Ferdinand was agonizing.
It was less than three days after Lavender’s return. They were holding a ball in honour of her survival, and her betrothal to Ferdinand. Will hadn’t wanted to go. For one thing, though she was glad Lavender had returned and Will was no longer going to be saddled with the running of the kingdom, she was envious of all the extra attention Lavender was receiving. Moreover, Will couldn’t dance. She may have been fast for a n
oble, and she may have been strong for a woman, but she felt clumsy when it came to dancing or embroidery or curtseys. Her deportment tutor had given up on her years before, focusing her attention on Beautiful Princess Lavender. (Sometimes, Will suspected that this might have been one of the reasons why she was so dismal at it, as she was mostly forced to struggle though on her own.)
At this celebratory ball Will mostly loitered around the buffet table, tripping on her skirts (which were not accurately tailored to her frame) feeling as useless as a fifth leg on a horse. Amaranth and Ragi and Lavender and Ferdinand danced like butterflies around each other, while Will sat stuffing her face with pheasant, trying to figure out how soon she could make her excuses and escape.
‘What are you doing here all alone?’
Will turned and gaped at Ferdinand, whom she’d barely spoken to in the three days since his arrival. They hadn’t had much time for ordinary pleasantries. What with hearing his story, confirming the destruction of the dragon, contacting Ferdinand’s kingdom, announcing Lavender’s return to the populace, and arranging the betrothal, there hadn’t been a moment of his day that wasn’t scheduled. He and Will had been formally introduced, but that was about it. Will found him a little intimidating. As far as the men in Lyndaria went, he was quite tall, and fair. His skin was tanned golden from his adventures, and it made his fair hair look almost as white as his beasts’. He tended to dress in black, which made his fairness shine out all the more, though for this ball he had brightened his sober colours with a lavender cravat that matched his beloved’s dress, and of course the medals of bravery that Queen Amaranth had bestowed upon him at Lavender’s return. ‘Ahm … just … here,’ Will said. She was famed for her wit. She had no idea where it had gone in that moment.
‘We haven’t had much chance to get to know each other,’ Ferdinand said. ‘I hope we can come to be friends, Willow.’
