Beauty Sleep

by Cameron Dokey

  “Easy enough,” I said.”Considering I never wanted to leave you in the first place.”

  I heard him catch his breath. And, just for a moment, he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, all I could see was gold. There was no gray in them at all.

  “You have to warn me before you say things like that,” he said.”You make me lose my balance, Aurore.”

  “That’s just because you’re so old,” I said, as comfortingly as I could.”Here.” I scooted over.”I think the bench is big enough for three. Come and sit down.”

  “Oh, no,” said Ironheart, standing up just as Oswald slid into place beside me.”I may not be sensible like Valiant, but I know when three is one too many. Besides, I promised the royal fireworks-maker I’d help him get ready for tomorrow.”

  With that, he hurried off.

  “I hope he doesn’t blow us all sky high,” Oswald said after a moment.

  “It would make for a memorable occasion,” I replied.

  He chuckled, shifting to put one arm around me and ease my head down upon his shoulder.

  “I’d say the occasion is quite memorable enough.”

  We sat for a moment, his fingers toying with the ends of my hair.

  “Oswald,” I finally said. “Will you tell me something?”

  “All your life,” he said.

  At which I sat up straight. “What?”

  “All your life,” he repeated. “Isn’t that what you wanted to know? How long I’ve loved you?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I did,” I said.”But that wasn’t what I was going to ask just now.”

  He gave a bark of laughter. “I tell you I’ve loved you since the day you were born, and you tell me you want to know something else. There’s no one quite like you, is there, Aurore?”

  “Well, if you don’t want to tell me,” I said.”If you want to have secrets…”

  He laughed again.”No secrets. Not anymore. Tell me what it is you wish to know.”

  “Whom did you marry, since you promised it wouldn’t be Marguerite de Renard? Did I know her?”

  “Actually, you did,” answered Oswald.”Her name was Jessica.”

  “Jessica,” I repeated, while my mind frantically flipped through the faces of the courtiers’ daughters I had known. Nothing. “Do you mean Jessica the gardener’s daughter?”

  “The same,” said Oswald. “Our wedding day was the first time your father told me I had made him proud.”

  “But not the last?”

  “No, not the last,” answered my cousin. “On the day he rode away, he called me son. Aurore—about your parents.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, laying one of my hands on top of his to silence him. “I think I know. They followed me, didn’t they?”

  Oswald nodded. “I don’t think there’s anything I could have done. They waited ten years. Long enough for your father to make certain the kingdom would be at peace—that the changes we both wished to make were going well. Actually, now that I think about it, it was surprisingly easy. The only one who really made trouble was le Renard.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He raised an army and attacked the castle, after your father had saved him the trouble of knocking down the walls. It didn’t do a bit of good. He still lost.”

  “And after that?”

  “There were no more problems after that. His family left the country. No one was sorry to see them go.”

  “And Papa and Maman?”

  “It was the strangest thing,” said Oswald. “One day, I looked at your father and I knew he had made up his mind. The next, he and your mother were gone. He built them a cottage just inside the borders of la Forêt. Sometimes you could see it from the outside, sometimes not. I used to ride by as often as I could, but the trees had a funny habit of moving around.”

  “I saw the cottage,” I said.”I took shelter in it my very first night. That’s where I found Ironheart. There was one of my rugs by the hearth. That really awful green one with the bumps as big as snakes.”

  “I remember it,” said Oswald.

  “It was a good place,” I said. “It felt—happy— inside. Whatever the Forest holds for them, I think they are—or were—content. I will miss them, but I won’t grieve for them. I don’t think we were supposed to meet again. Not like you and I.”

  He reached to tuck a stray piece of hair back behind my ear. “Thank you for that,” he said. “I love you, Aurore.”

  “Will you give me a gift, if I ask for it?” I said, and had the pleasure of watching his smile flash out.

  “What a shameful brat you are,” he said. “Very well. What?”

  “I have given you my true love’s kiss,” I answered. “Don’t you think it’s time you gave me yours?”

  “Past time,” said my cousin.

  And so he kissed me as I had him. Opening every single door inside his heart. And the kiss was like nothing I can describe. For in that moment, I both lost and gained myself.

  I ceased to be Aurore and yet became her, too. For, with my heart joined with Oswald’s, I became more of what I was. All the empty spaces within me filled to the brim, yet never overflowing. For true love always knows its own measure. And it is the measure of two hearts, combined.

  Two hearts who need no other magic than what they hold inside them, for they have learned to beat as one.

  EPILOGUE

  (A FANCY WAY OF TYING UP LOOSE ENDS)

  The wonder of my reappearance and Oswald’s transformation lasted for a year and a day, long enough for our first child to be born. Actually I suppose I should say our first children, for I bore two girls, so alike it would have been impossible to tell one from the other were it not for their eyes. One had eyes of gold flecked with silver; the other of silver flecked with gold. We named them Jane and Chantal.

  Over the years, they were followed by many others, both girls and boys. All straight and fine as royal children are supposed to be. And every single one of them got to go outside as often as they desired.

  Our youngest daughter is named Sage, just in case you want to know.

  Not long after the birth of the twins, Valiant begged leave to depart. There were rumors of monsters ravaging distant lands. As those able to dispatch them are always in short supply, and high demand, we let him go. Not long after, he wrote from the very end of the world, to say he had dispatched a particularly horrible ogre. The people of that land were so grateful, they gave him the hand of their princess in marriage, and the kingship besides, the ogre’s first despicable act having been to devour the old king, the princess’s father.

  Valiant’s sensible, straightforward approach is much valued in the wilds at the edge of the world. He is there still, living happily ever after himself, as far as we know.

  And what, you will ask, of Ironheart?

  As his nature was not so straightforward as his brother’s, so did the finding of his true love take a little more time. For several years, he lived with us in the palace, alternately delighting and terrifying the children with his strange and wonderful experiments, all the while filling many a leather-bound book with notes. Until the day that the king of the country just to the east sent word that he wished to build a new drawbridge and desired Ironheart’s help.

  While there, he rescued the king’s only daughter, who turned out to be as scientifically minded as Ironheart was himself. A strange and unusual contraption she’d had specially constructed to allow her to hang suspended from trees, the better to pick their fruit, collapsed, causing her to fall and knock herself cold.

  As the tree just happened to be an apple tree, and was moreover located in the heart of the maze the king had recently commissioned, and through which Ironheart just happened to be strolling, he decided perhaps he ought to give kissing the princess just one more try.

  Though this failed to awaken her entirely, some water to the temples soon completed the job. When the princess’s first concern was not herself but her invention, Ironheart ventured t
o make several suggestions concerning the design. The speed with which the princess grasped all his concepts, to say nothing of the way she elaborated upon them on the spot, soon turned their chance encounter into the world’s most unusual case of love at first sight. And so he awakened a princess with true love’s kiss after all.

  As a wedding gift, we gave them a vast tract of land bordering her father’s kingdom, so that they could live surrounded on all sides by those who love them. Her name is Marianna. Their first child was a son, and they named him Oswald.

  Once a year, on the anniversary of my christening, my Oswald and I go to la Forêt. There we spend the night on which I always had bad dreams, sleeping peacefully in the cottage. To this day, we have never seen its occupants. But we bring with us mementos of our family. A rug that Jane and Chantal braided together rests before the fireplace now. It’s a lovely blue, the color of a summer sky. And it lies completely flat. The year after we brought it, we arrived at the cottage to find a bowl upon the table heaped with what can only be described as a fruit still-life.

  Oswald and I haven’t discussed it much, but what I believe is that my parents are alive inside of la Forêt and will be for as long as I live, for they were the others I kept strong and safe inside my heart. Whether they have grown old with the years, as Oswald did, or stayed young within the boundaries of the Forest is a thing that I can never know, though I have my opinions. But I know that they are happy, because I am happy. And so I let that be enough.

  People go into the Forest now, from time to time. But never more than a handful every year, and they never stay for long. Though it has ceased to be frightening, it is still mysterious, and most people find life mysterious enough without going to seek out more.

  As to what happened to me there, is it possible to sleep for a hundred years in the blink of an eye? Perhaps it doesn’t matter how long I actually slept, only how long I was gone. Which was certainly a hundred years, if Oswald’s condition upon my return is anything to go by.

  Let’s see…what else?

  Actually, nothing that I can think of. Which I think means my story has come full circle, curved around to its close. And, for once, the traditional way of ending a story is exactly the way the story of my own life turned out.

  You know the words. Of course you do.

  And they lived happily ever after.

  About the Author

  CAMERON DOKEY’s favorite place to go is Once upon a Time. Her other titles in the series include Golden, Sunlight and Shadow, and The Storyteller’s Daughter. Other Simon and Schuster endeavors include the Charmed books Picture Perfect and Truth and Consequences; Here Be Monsters, a book in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series; and The Summoned, an Angel series title. Cameron lives in Seattle, Washington.

  DON’T MISS THE NEXT MAGICAL TITLE

  IN THE ONCE UPON A TIME SERIES!

  WATER SONG

  A Retelling of “The Frog Prince”

  BY SUZANNE WEYN

  Emma looked up sharply when the German plane appeared. The sunset of pink and gold filtering into the room had drawn her to the high, arched window. The brilliant quality of the light, so vibrant and yet still, poised between day and night, filled her with a quiet sadness.

  But the unexpected appearance of the plane jolted her from her melancholy, diverting her into a state of hyperattentiveness.

  Sometimes a lone plane like this was only spying on the Allied troops, reporting back their numbers and position in the field. At least that was what she’d read in the newspapers. In minutes, though, another plane appeared over the rolling fields below, first as a dot in the sky and then slowly coming into clearer focus. She could just barely make out the high whine of the planes’ propellers.

  Two planes was not a good sign. It meant they were bombers, not reconnaissance planes. These fighter planes always showed up first, and the strategy seemed to be to bomb from above before attacking with ground troops.

  Emma sighed bitterly. It was amazing how much she’d learned about war these last few months. Back at the Hampshire School when she had studied art, music, mathematics, English literature, German, French, and Latin, she’d never have suspected that months later she would become a student of war.

  Nothing was more important than war now. In fact, everything else seemed almost ridiculously irrelevant. Back in London she’d pored over the papers, which were full of the war—troop locations; whether they were winning or losing; what nations had joined the fight.

  In Belgium she’d learned about war firsthand, seen much more than she’d ever expected or wanted to know. She’d seen things she longed to forget.

  Had her parents really thought the Great War wouldn’t touch them; that she and her mother could safely visit their family estate in Belgium? How shortsighted that decision now seemed; though back in early September of 1914, her father had been certain all the fighting would be concentrated on the Russian border—the Eastern Front—and Belgium’s neutrality would be respected.

  He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  The insectlike buzz of the plane grew louder. Surely they weren’t going to bombard the village of Ypres again. What could possibly be left there that hadn’t already been blasted into rubble?

  Lately she drifted from one empty day to another here in the huge, rambling estate with only old Claudine and Willem, the manor’s caretaker couple, there to help her. Thank god they’d stayed on. If they’d left, Emma knew she wouldn’t have been able to cope at all.

  She’d been stuck there for nearly seven months, since last September. The seventeenth-century manor house sat right on the line between the Allied French, English, Dutch, Canadian, and Belgian troops and the enemy, the Austrians and Germans. Both sides had dug in to filthy trenches on either side of the fighting. She was right on what had come to be known as the Western Front of the Great War.

  The mansion sat on several miles of elevated cliff known as The Ridge. It gave her a perfect view of the trench-torn fields below. It was just like her to be stuck in the thick of things, right smack in the middle of trouble. Only, unlike the schoolgirl mischief she’d gotten into back at the Hampshire School, this was a mess to end all messes—a disaster on a worldwide scale. Some people said it was the end of the world.

  It felt like the end of the world.

  She and her mother should have gone home right away, but then a week later, the German hydrogen vessels, the zeppelins, flew over England and dropped missiles. No one had expected that!

  Her father sent a telegram saying it might be better to stay where they were for the moment. But they’d waited too long. Now a fight had begun to control the North Sea, and the English Channel wasn’t safe to cross. The Germans had declared any vessel in those waters fair game for attack. Besides that, she couldn’t get past enemy lines in the north.

  If only her mother were still there with her.

  Rose Winthrop had been too near a missile that exploded in Ypres during an assault on the medieval city. They’d been in a restaurant having lunch. The owner pulled the shutters closed and barricaded the door when the attack began, but the blast tore open the entire front of the restaurant. Emma had desperately mopped blood from her mother’s brow and watched the once vibrant eyes grow dull as she slipped away.

  It infuriated her to think that people thought her mother had run off, had abandoned her father. It was awful! Why didn’t her father set the ugly rumors straight? Hadn’t he told people that she had been killed?

  It suddenly struck her that maybe he didn’t know! Her mother had been buried outside of Ypres. Emma had written her father a letter, telling him what had happened; but maybe he’d never gotten it. She hadn’t received a letter back from him in all this time. She’d assumed it was because they couldn’t get letters across the enemy lines. It had never occurred to her until that moment that her letter to him had not made it to London.

  A knot twisted in her stomach. Did her father think she and her mother had abandoned him? Was that why no one h
ad come to get her?

  In the beginning, right after her mother’s death, she’d spent every day expecting her father to show up, to console her, to take her home. But he never came. No one came. She hadn’t known what to think of this but she’d imagined every possible scenario: her father getting the news and dropping dead of a heart attack; England being attacked and her father taken prisoner; her father being killed in another missile attack. Her imagination spun out endless reasons why he had not come. Most likely, he couldn’t get through to her just as she couldn’t get to him, but it still didn’t stop her from imagining the worst.

  This letter from Lloyd meant that her father was alive but not telling anyone that her mother was dead, leaving them to think that she—and Emma— had run off and left him. Was it truly what he thought had happened? If so, how could he think that of them? Her mother would never do that—her loving, good mother—never!

  Thinking of her mother made Emma’s eyes well with tears. It was so senseless! So stupid! Her mother had died for no reason! Her mother had always been the one she could count on to understand her feelings; the one ready with a hug and comforting words. It was her mother to whom she’d always confided. How she missed talking with her.

  And though her mother would have been her first choice, it would have been a pleasure to have anyone at all to talk to these days! Willem and Claudine only spoke Flemish. And, although the sounds of Flemish were a bit like French—and somewhat like Dutch, which was likewise akin, in some ways, to German—she found it nearly impossible to communicate with the couple. Many Belgians spoke German, French, or English. Emma was fluent in all three, having excelled in language at school. Her own mother had been able to speak German and Dutch, being raised as a girl here in the manor. But with Claudine and Willem, it was Flemish or nothing, and so it was nothing.

  The rattle of the first round of shelling drew Emma’s thoughts back to the planes. Two more fighter planes had joined them, their red and white cross insignias just barely visible from her window.