Beauty Sleep

by Cameron Dokey

  This is a thing about magic that is greatly misunderstood. Magic isn’t all that interested in change, which explains why things like love spells almost always backfire. And why those of us who grow up with magic don’t use it nearly as much as people who haven’t might think. (The boiling of tea water aside.) Nothing about magic is simple or straightforward, to be used lightly. And it’s definitely not a substitute for what you can do just as well with your hands and your mind.

  The people who end up with the strongest magic are the ones who are quickest to recognize this. Who see that magic’s true power lies not in attempting to bend it to your will but in leaving it alone. Because if you do that, you’ll discover an amazing thing. The will of the magic becomes your will of its own accord. For magic is a part of nature. It, too, hates a void. And the voids magic most wants to fill are the spaces that exist inside a person. It longs to strengthen that which is only waiting to be made strong.

  Have you ever heard it said that somebody has shown her or his true colors? That’s exactly what I’m talking about. The thing that interests magic is your true colors. Who you really are. And it can make you more powerful only if you first accept this. Which means, of course, that you have to be willing to accept yourself completely. Your virtues and your flaws. Most people shy away from doing this, another reason why magic doesn’t get used as much as you might suppose.

  But not Jane. She must have looked at herself without flinching. Unlike my mother, who has no time for magic, thereby making sure it has no time for her, Jane soaked it up, like a stunted plant in freshly watered ground. And herein lies magic’s greatest danger. Remember what I said about the way it strengthens that which is waiting to be made strong?

  If your virtues make up your true colors, that is well and good, for you as well as for the rest of us. But what about those whose true colors are comprised mostly of their flaws? These are the ones most likely to use magic for evil, even if they’re not evil to begin with. For the things within them that the magic strengthens are like hunting knives: double-edged, wicked-sharp, and strong. They stick deep, cut both ways, are honed by power and pain alike. Such things cannot be held inside forever. Sooner or later, they must be released or they will slice their own way out.

  What better way to release pain than to take revenge on the people you believe have wronged you? An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. My power casts down your power, if only for a moment. Your pain replaces mine.

  If Jane had been invited to my christening, who can say how much longer she would have held her pain locked up inside? Who can say what might not have happened? But she wasn’t invited, and so something did.

  “Little Princess, lovely as the dawn. Well-named Aurore.”

  This is what she is supposed to have said when, the last in a long line of wish-bestowers, she stood at my cradleside. By then, a horrible hush had fallen over my christening, a clotting sense of dread. Nobody recognized her, you see. Or (perhaps) nobody but Oswald. But her malice, that was an easy thing to recognize. Nurse has told me that the very air turned hot and tingled, the way it does right before a thunderstorm. You just knew that something bad was about to happen, she said.

  As it happened, she was right.

  “Yet even the brightest of sunrises must come to an end. Tant pis. Too bad,” Cousin Jane went on.

  Then, before anyone could prevent her, she reached down and scooped me from my cradle, holding me above her head so that her face looked up and mine looked down. I reached for her, my small fingers working to take hold of something, anything, for I wasn’t all that sure that I liked my present situation.

  At this, Nurse says, Cousin Jane smiled. As if I, myself, had provided the final inspiration for the pain she was about to unleash upon us all.

  “Your end will come with the prick of a finger,” she said, as she slid one of her own into my fist and I held on tight. Though everyone but Nurse has told me this is impossible, I swear I can actually remember this moment, what her finger felt like. Smooth and cool, but not the smoothness of skin. I know that now, though I didn’t at the time.

  Several years later, when I was judged old enough not to choke myself on it, I was given a chicken drumstick as a special treat at a picnic we were having on one of the many palace lawns. Any opportunity to get messy always delighted me, according to my mother, and all went well, until I’d gnawed my way down to the bone. At the first touch of it, I became hysterical, and it wasn’t until several hours later that Nurse finally managed to calm me down enough to tell her what was wrong.

  That’s what Cousin Jane’s finger had felt like. Not smooth skin, but the smooth caress of cool, hard bone.

  “The prick of a finger,” she said again, giving hers a little shake, as if everyone hadn’t heard her the first time around. “One sharp wound. One bright drop of blood. That’s all it will take to cut your life down. Sixteen years, I give you, ma petite Aurore, lovely as the dawn. The same number I was given before I had no choice but to follow your mother to this gilded prison, so far from my home.”

  There was a moment of stupefied silence.

  Then, “Jane?” my mother gasped out. A question, an uncertainty, even now.

  At which point Cousin Jane tossed me high into the air and swept my mother a bow. “Well met, Cousin,” she said. “You will remember me from now on, will you not?”

  With that, she vanished in a puff of smoke, through which I plummeted straight down into my nurse’s desperate arms. Behind her, she left just the faintest tang of sulphur, and the ghost of a laugh that never quite died. It lingered in the air, like an elusive smell. Vanishing for days, for weeks, on end, only to creep around a corner and assault you when you least expected.

  Haunting us all for more than a hundred years to come.

  TWO

  Maman swooned, of course.

  She always does what a lady is supposed to do, though, to be fair, on this occasion even I must admit her behavior had good cause. For many moments, all was pandemonium. But at last, I was restored to my cradle, Maman to her senses, and the guests to relative calm.

  Interestingly enough, it is Nurse’s recollection that the person largely responsible for the return to order was Oswald. This in spite of the fact that he was only ten years old. Whether he performed this good deed out of the goodness of his heart, or from some other motive, I cannot say.

  Though the goodness of his heart theory seemed doubtful to me for many years. Before you can act out of the goodness of your heart, it helps to actually have one.

  But it was after order was restored that the next dreadful thing happened, because it was then that Maman said: “Do something, someone.”

  A thing which probably doesn’t seem so bad, unless you understand that what she really wanted wasn’t for somebody to do something, but to undo it. Specifically, of course, to undo what Cousin Jane had done. And even this probably makes perfect sense to you—why not do everything you can to undo a great evil? Why not just erase it if you have the power?

  The thing is, you can’t just go around undoing other people’s magic. In the first place, it’s considered terribly impolite, not to mention impractical. If you do it to someone else, what’s to stop them from doing it to you? Before long, you’d have absolute chaos.

  There is a more important consideration, of course.

  If you start undoing magic, any kind of magic, you run the risk of undoing everything else. That’s how tightly magic is bound up in the way things are where I come from.

  And so my mother’s request, so reasonable on the face of it, actually contained within it the seeds of the direst consequence: the unraveling of the way our world is woven. Because, as even the world’s clumsiest weaver can tell you, you can’t pull on one thread without affecting all the others.

  Everyone who heard her plea knew this. Indeed I think she knew it herself. I also think she simply didn’t care at that point. She’d never been comfortable with magic. Always, it had seemed unnatural to her. As unnat
ural as having your wish for a child snatched away almost as soon as it had been granted, for example. If that was the way the world worked, why not unravel it and start again?

  “Do something, someone.”

  At least she didn’t ask my father. To have begged a king to make a choice between saving his daughter or saving his kingdom would have been a dreadful thing. One that had the power to tear his heart apart without any magic at all. And I think my mother knew this, and wished to spare him. For she truly loved my father. Their long years of waiting for a child had drawn them closer together, not pushed them farther apart.

  So it wasn’t to my father she turned in her desire to erase what Cousin Jane had done. It was to her closest friend and number one lady-in-waiting: my godmother, Chantal.

  No, she was not a fairy godmother. There aren’t any fairies where I grew up; how many times must I tell you? But it is true that Chantal was generally acknowledged to have the most powerful magic in all the land, stronger even than my father’s. And all of it good. Her true colors were as bright and clean as the colors of a rainbow. If anyone had the power to undo what Cousin Jane had done, it would be Chantal.

  I often wondered, as I grew up, what her answer must have cost her. And the thing about understanding yourself, knowing your true colors, is that you have to be true to them. For if you don’t, they change, and so do you. And so there was really only one thing my godmother could reply.

  “I cannot do what you ask, Mathilde. What is done cannot be undone. You will know that if you think reasonably for a moment, just as you will know how sorry I am to answer you so.”

  But my mother was beyond reason. “For pity’s sake, Chantal! This is my child. Your godchild,” she cried. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Of course it does,” my godmother answered in a voice that Nurse told me once sounded like and old piece of wood. “But this child is not worth unraveling the world for. No one is.”

  My mother struck her then. In anger, in pain, and in despair. If Chantal would not save me, no one could. And how much worse must it have been for my mother to hear my doom pronounced not by an enemy, a stranger, but by someone she knew well. Someone she trusted and loved.

  “Leave me,” she said, in a voice that sounded as if she had something hard and sharp stuck in her throat. “Leave this kingdom and don’t ever come back.”

  Nurse has always maintained Maman took another breath, intending to say more. To proclaim a dire end should Chantal disobey her, should she dare to show her face anywhere within our borders. If she would not commute my fate, then hers would be to suffer a death sentence of her own.

  But at that moment, Papa intervened. Not with words, for that was not his way. He simply placed a hand upon my mother’s arm. As he did so, my mother swallowed the sharp thing inside her throat and her words choked off.

  My godmother showed her true colors to the last. She gave my mother one perfect bow. Then she slowly walked down from the dais where she had been standing behind my mother’s throne, toward where my cradle rested at the bottom of the steps. As she did, there occurred something odd. She began to weep. Not that that is strange in and of itself, but as her tears struck the marble steps, they made a clatter. All looked, and were astonished at what they saw.

  For Chantal was weeping pearls so lustrous and fine their match has never yet been brought up from the depths of the ocean. At a signal from my father, attendants gathered them up. To this day, I have a necklace of them as tall as I am. But every time I put it on, the urge to weep becomes so overwhelming that I have never worn it.

  When she reached my cradle, my godmother stopped and turned around, and bowed again.

  “Your Majesties,” she said. “All others here have given their gifts to the Princess Aurore. But I have not yet bestowed mine.”

  Though she had made a statement, my father understood that she was asking a question, and so he nodded his head, tightening his hold upon my mother’s arm.

  “If what is done cannot be undone, then let it at least be done again,” said my godmother. “This child shall prick her finger at sixteen, but this need not bring death. Instead she will sleep for a hundred years, and be awakened by a kiss at the end of that time. If it’s true love that awakens her, so much the better, but this is a thing I cannot promise. For true love comes when it will, not when it is called.”

  She ran a hand over my cap of golden hair, then leaned down low, as if her next words were for my ears alone. They weren’t quite, of course, for Nurse heard them, which is how I know.

  “May you keep what you hold in your heart safe and strong, petite Aurore.”

  Then Chantal straightened and looked right at my mother. “That’s the best that I can do, Mathilde,” she said. “Whether or not it is enough, only time and Aurore herself can show.”

  I’ve often wondered what my life would have been like if Maman had answered, if she had called Chantal back to her side. But she didn’t. The sharp thing she had swallowed slid down her throat to her belly. There, it mingled with her pride. And so she let Chantal turn and walk away. None of us ever saw her again. Perhaps she found her place in another story, one with a happier ending. I hope so.

  And this was Cousin Jane’s greatest accomplishment, I sometimes think. More than the pain the threat of my death caused. By her desperate actions, she drove others to desperation, and so we came to be deprived of our brightest light, our purest colors. Our truest friend and best ally.

  And, with Chantal’s banishment, it may be said that I truly embarked upon the first ten years of my strange and unusual childhood.

  THREE

  Do you have any idea how challenging it is to live your life deprived of sharp objects? To live each day as if the presence of a butter knife constitutes a threat?

  Of course you don’t.

  Unfortunately, I do, so let me tell you this. A good time is not had by all. In fact, by hardly anyone. Sometimes I think the only person who really enjoyed those first years of my childhood was Oswald. And why should he, you might well ask. I know I did. He wasn’t the one being reminded every day that he’d had two spells cast over him when he was only one month old.

  The truth of the matter, as he often found occasion to mention, was that, in spite of my birth, Oswald’s situation really hadn’t changed very much. He was still my father’s heir. For, as the years passed, Papa did nothing to change the decree of succession. In fact, contrary as this might seem, my birth might even have improved things for my cousin. I was only going to be around till I was sixteen, after all. At that point, something nasty was going to happen in spite of all my parents were doing to prevent it. Somehow or other, I was going to manage to stab myself. (Oswald was particularly fond of this word. Stab. It had such a healthy, gruesome sound.)

  The resulting wound didn’t have to be very big. One bright drop of blood was all that was required to activate the spell(s). After which, I’d probably just fall right down on the spot. Saved from death, that much was true. But, in its place, condemned to the nap from hell. A hundred years is a long time to slumber. More than enough to give Oswald and his heirs time of their own. Time to consolidate their hold upon the kingdom that should, by rights, be mine when I awoke.

  And then of course there was a possibility that could not be dismissed, according to my cousin anyway, and that was that I might not wake up at all. Who in their right mind was going to want to kiss someone who’d been sleeping for a hundred years? Would I still be young? Or would I age as I slept and so grow old? Chantal’s counterspell hadn’t been very precise upon that point, even I had to admit.

  Not a very promising future for me, all in all.

  Which brings me to a second set of things I’ve always wondered: Did Oswald and Jane know each other? How much of what happened at my christening did my cousin know about ahead of time, even though he was just a boy?

  There is no proof they knew each other at all, of course. Or none except the way the certainty of it, the rightness, s
eemed to ring in my heart like a great bronze bell.

  Here is what I think happened: They met by accident, Jane and Oswald, in some musty little-used corridor. Or perhaps it was in Oswald’s favorite hiding place, the one that enabled him to overhear the most secrets. He simply turned around, and there she was. For it has always seemed to me that their magic was complementary. A perfect fit, like the way Oswald’s hand looks in one of his immaculately tailored kid gloves.

  His great talent in those early days was for uncovering secrets. Hers, for being a secret in and of herself. What could be more natural than that they should discover one another? And that they would be drawn together having done so? It made no difference that he was young while she was grown. Kindred spirits are what they are. Their talent lies in recognizing their own true colors in another, and this recognition forms an unbreakable bond.

  Perhaps Cousin Jane did what she did for love of Oswald. Who can tell? Certainly not I. Or perhaps she simply saw a way to hurt my parents and at the same time benefit the only person in all those years to have seen her truly. Perhaps it is even the case that her motivations aren’t really all that important in the long run. She did what she did, then left the rest of us to deal with it. But there is no denying that the one who came out best was Oswald.

  I probably don’t have to tell you that I did my best to stay away from him. Most of the time, it wasn’t really all that hard. In the first place, he was much older than I was. Eight when I was born. A gap that pretty much guaranteed we’d never have much in common, even if we were fond of each other.

  Which we were not.

  But about the time I turned ten and Oswald turned eighteen, a funny thing happened. The only way I can describe it is that Oswald grew up. My best guess is that he simply awoke one morning and realized that things might be better for him if he was known as Prince Charming for a reason other than the current one.