FIVE
AURORA COULD NOT SLEEP THAT NIGHT. Exhaustion burned her eyes, but every time she closed them, panic surged through her, the sense that she was drowning, smothered by the sheets, and her eyes would snap open again. The room was too small, too cold, too bare, the air stale and heavy on her tongue.
When she finally began to doze, the floor creaked, and blue eyes pierced through the dark. She sat up with a jolt, clutching the blankets to her chest. Nothing was there.
Aurora slipped out of bed. Her feet recoiled from the cold stone floor, but she pressed them down, savoring the shudder. She pushed open the window and leaned out, letting the early spring breeze rustle through her hair. The chill pinched her cheeks.
The city seemed to glow, lights scattered across it like a reflection of the sky. Far below her, two girls ran along the street. She felt the sudden urge to run after them. To step outside, see the world she had fallen into, escape from these suffocating walls and breathe again.
Maybe if she saw it for herself, if she walked along the streets, she would start to understand what had happened to her kingdom while she slept. As she watched the lights glow across the city, she had to admit that she was hypnotized by their possibilities. Fascinated by the things she dreamed she might find.
Aurora doubted that anyone would recognize her from the brief glance of the day before, but she quickly changed into her plainest new dress, the one that seemed least likely to attract attention, and pulled a woolen cloak tightly around herself. Then she crept to the bedroom door and pushed it.
It was locked.
Aurora did not remember seeing a key or hearing a click, but the lock rattled when she pushed it again, holding the door in place. Sometime after Betsy had brought her supper, Aurora had been locked in.
Aurora swallowed her panic. She had been trapped behind many locked doors before. A single lock was much simpler than the heavy metal things that had once held her tower door in place. But then, the explanation had been plain. Sensible, even. The door must be locked to keep her safe. What was the explanation now? Was the queen protecting her?
Or was she keeping a valuable asset in?
Aurora hurried to her dressing table and picked up a couple of hairpins.
Her parents had locked her in her bedroom when their paranoia got particularly excessive. When they decided that two locked doors were safer than one, and that one room was harder to break into than a whole tower. She had been locked in at night, and some parts of the days, away from the other rooms in her tower, from the library and the old playroom and her instruments and all her books.
In her boredom, in the claustrophobia that had seized her, opening the door had seemed like the perfect challenge. She had little else to do with her time. She moved books with details on locks from her library into her bedroom, but even with careful study, it had taken her the better part of a year to master the trick, so that she could perform it every try. She was not the most dexterous person. But eventually, she had learned.
By then, of course, her father had stopped locking her bedroom door. He told her, with a guilty expression on his face, that he believed her trustworthy enough to have the run of the tower. She knew better. It seemed too much like real imprisonment if she was confined to one room, and her father always had been a gentle sort of soul.
The lock clicked, and Aurora gave the door an experimental push. It slid open a few inches, and she peered out. The corridor was deserted. She hurried along it, and the next, slipping through the shadows by instinct until she reached the door to her tower. It was an imposing thing, with ornate swirls carved into the wood and several heavy locks and bars. The handle was cold in her hand, and she pulled hard, half expecting the door to resist.
It swung open with a creak, and Aurora darted inside. When she closed the door behind her, the darkness became so thick that she could not tell where the walls ended and the air began. She bent down and groped in front of her until her hands brushed stone, then began to trace up and down, left and right with her fingertips. Somewhere, she had scratched a tiny star into the wall, marking the exact block she needed.
There. She pried her fingernails into the gap between the stones and tugged. The scraping set her teeth on edge, but the stone came loose, then the one next to it, and the one after that, until a small crawl space appeared.
It had been her escape route. She had spent years exploring every inch of her tower, hunting down secrets, but this one had been the hardest won, and by far the best. Every time the castle walls pressed too close around her, she would wrench the bricks free and crawl out into the forest, enchanted by the risk, the thrill of endless space. The tunnel had been built on purpose, she had told herself every time a voice insisted she should tell her father about its existence. He had included it in the tower himself, so that if anything terrible happened, she could slip out into the forest and escape. No one could see it from the outside. No one else could move the bricks. It was safe. So she told herself.
Now she paused at the edge of the space. Was this how Celestine had entered her tower, all those years ago? Through the tunnel that Aurora had kept secret, convinced that the freedom it offered was worth the risk? She swayed for a moment, staring in the blackness, and then shoved the thought aside. It was too late for those kinds of questions and regrets.
She wriggled inside. Dust clung to her clothes and her knees, but before she had crawled a few feet, the floor sloped downward, creating a narrow corridor she could stand in if she crouched. The tunnel was pitch black, apart from the occasional glint of light peeking in through the cracks in the stone. Cobwebs snatched at her hair, and there was a scuttling noise she did not want to think about, but her groping hands knew the way well, and soon fresh air fluttered at her face.
The exit was still open, covered with little more than ivy and grass and a few loose stones. She scraped at them with her nails, fighting her way through, and then she was outside, crouched on a slope that led onto the street.
She stepped onto the cobbled road, and her feet curled around the uneven stones. The streets wove in and out with no apparent logic, and Aurora followed them blindly, chasing the sound of activity and the distant movement of others. A century ago, she had always been too scared to visit the nearby town, certain that someone would recognize her. The same fear prickled the inside of her stomach now, the dreadful, thrilling feeling that she was doing something dangerous and forbidden, but she walked on, not entirely sure what she was looking for.
The larger roads near the castle were lit by lanterns, hanging from the walls like eyes gleaming in the dark. Not magic, she knew, but something like it, some strange power that let the fire burn bright and bold. The same power, perhaps, that held together this cramped, sprawling, impossible city. The buildings climbed on top of one another, chasing up into the darkness, and ropes hung from window to window, clothes fluttering underneath. Even at this late hour, the city was alive with people, pausing at market stalls, leaning against walls to chat and laugh, hurrying about their business. The smell of food filled the air, escaping from windows, wafting from a few stalls she passed.
One market holder caught her eye and began to yell. “Fabric!” he said. “Beautiful fabric, all the way from Eko.” He held up a length of red material, too stiff and too shiny to be of true quality. His stall was illuminated by a lamp overhead, and the fabric glimmered in the dim light. “Worth its weight in gold, but I can cut a deal for a pretty lady like yourself. Two silver coins for a ream. Can’t say fairer than that!”
“Don’t listen to him,” shouted a woman from across the way. She held up another length of fabric, green and translucent. “He buys his fabric in Alyssinia, tries to scam everyone. But this stuff—this stuff is from Vanhelm. Inspired by the color of dragon eyes, it is.”
“Sorry,” she blurted, and she hurried away, her eyes fixed on the ground. Small paving stones covered the street, gray with dust. A groove had been worn into the brick. Another ran parallel to it, a few feet away.
“Move, girl!”
Something clattered toward her, and she jerked aside. A horse cantered past, held to a carriage with steel bars and a gleaming harness. The carriage itself was almost square, black lined with bronze, with a single lamp swinging ahead of it, and another behind. A man sat on the roof, whipping the reins.
The wheels ran through the ruts in the road, spitting dust in Aurora’s face. She stepped back, coughing, then turned aside and ducked into a side street, away from the crowds.
There was no market here, only shuttered windows, hanging laundry, and the occasional person leaning against the walls. Not a trace remained of the forest that had stood here a hundred years ago, but some of the houses had boxes of flowers and plants hanging below their windows. Private patches of green amid the never-ending stone and dust.
Aurora took one turn, and then another, always heading downhill, following the curve of the streets, until they were so narrow that she could reach out and touch the walls on either side with her fingertips. Voices bounced out of the windows, laughter and chatter and the occasional shout. When Aurora glanced over her shoulder, only the tips of the castle towers were in sight.
A few people idled around a tatty building that jutted out of an alley. The Dancing Unicorn, the sign said. Aurora doubted that real unicorns were as fat and ungainly as the picture suggested. A woman’s voice floated on the breeze as Aurora paused. She was singing, haunting notes that rose and fell like a sigh. The sound seemed to slip into Aurora’s veins, as soft and delicate as silk. She had heard court singers and performers before, at the few celebrations she had attended as a child, and she played the harp herself in a clumsy, tentative sort of way, but she had never heard anything like this, nothing that sounded so raw and naked and sweet.
The music lingered in the air, tugging on some unknown part of her, the hollowness that had filled her ever since she awoke. She peered through the entrance and saw a large crowd of people, all moving, talking, laughing, dancing together. The rush of chatter made her pause, glance around warily, but there were so many people here that she truly was invisible. She could slip in, have a taste of that music, and no one would know.
She raised her chin and walked tentatively through the door.
The room inside was low and cramped, the air spiced with smoke. Lanterns hung from the rafters, swaying back and forth in time with the steps of the crowd, throwing scattered patches of the room into shadow. Mismatched furniture filled most of the floor—torn armchairs and stools of different colors and tables that rocked, seemingly without provocation—except for the space near the stage where people danced. And the people . . . they filled every inch, talking, playing games, dancing, arguing in more languages than Aurora could imagine. Several people around Aurora’s age stood behind a roughly cut bar, and more were scurrying around, laughing and joking and ferrying drinks.
On the stage at the far end of the room, a tall girl played an alien instrument of wood and strings. She had a willowy look about her, with long black hair hanging over small, sharp eyes and pale brown skin. Half of her face was in shadow, the lines of her cheekbones sharpened by the distant lanterns. She swayed as she sang, her eyes closed against the hot buzz of the room. The music ached with a desire that Aurora could not name, a longing that loosened the knots in her stomach. She took a few steps toward the girl, weaving between the tables, letting the atmosphere of the place, the notes on the air, soak into her skin.
“Aurora—” Her name stuck out of the chatter as clearly as a shout. The speaker was an older woman, talking to a man who might have been her husband. She had a loud voice and animated hands, acting out every word with gestures and nods. “It’s a miracle, is what it is,” she said. “An absolute miracle. I told Maureen, I told her, I will never forget this day. I won’t, and neither will she, I bet. I never thought, in my lifetime—” The woman stopped and looked up at Aurora. Her smile was almost toothless, welcoming. “Can I help you, dear?”
“Oh.” Aurora’s heart fluttered and warmth rushed into her cheeks. “No. I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry, dear. Pull up a chair if you like. We were just talking about the ceremony.”
“The—ceremony?”