“With the princess,” the woman added, as though Aurora was rather slow. “Sleeping Beauty. Surely you saw it.”
Aurora’s stomach twisted. “I missed it,” she said.
“Missed it?”
Aurora jerked her chin in an awkward imitation of a nod. She wanted to ask the woman to tell her about it, to spill every detail, share what she thought of the princess. But the words would not move off her tongue.
“Young people these days,” the woman said to the man who might be her husband. “I’ve been waiting all my life for this, and these young things miss it. Tristan!” A boy, cleaning off a table a few paces away, looked up. “I’ve found you a friend.”
The boy had scruffy brown hair and a lazy smile, like he was enjoying a joke that he hadn’t yet shared. He walked over to them, balancing a tray of mugs in his hand. “A friend, Dolores?”
“Someone to get rid of that sullen look you’ve been wearing all night.”
“It’s not sullen! It’s deep.”
“Deep nonsense if you ask me. It’s not like you.” The woman shook her head. “How anyone can be miserable at a time like this, I really don’t know. But don’t you worry. I’ve found the only other person in Petrichor, if not all of Alyssinia, who missed the show. You can commiserate with each other, or complain, or whatever you young folk like to do.”
He looked at Aurora, and there was a little hitch in his smile, as though something were tugging down at the corner of his lips. Aurora forced herself to look him in the eye, her heart pounding. Then his smile grew again, and he gave her a casual nod. “Glad to have you in the club.”
“You’ll regret it, you know,” Dolores said with a knowing wave of her finger. “When you’re old and gray like me, and your grandkids ask you where you were when Sleeping Beauty woke up. Tell them you missed it, and see what they say!”
“Don’t worry, Dolores. I won’t have grandkids. Are you finished with these?” He gestured toward the mugs on the table.
“Oh, yes, take them then, if you won’t entertain an old lady’s hopes.”
“Sorry, Dolores,” he said as he scooped them onto his tray. “I’m a hopeless cause.” With a nod to each of them, he headed back to the bar.
“That boy,” Dolores said, after he had gone. “If I ever see him care about anything, I’ll be so shocked, it’ll be the end of me.” Aurora gave another awkward nod, and Dolores turned to her husband again.
With the conversation apparently over, Aurora drifted away, wandering closer to the stage. She leaned against a wall and closed her eyes, allowing the singer’s voice to surround her. The sound was new and wistful and right, and as Aurora listened, it filled her empty stomach and soothed her throbbing head. One song melted into the next, and the next, until Aurora began to feel that she could breathe again.
“Good, isn’t she?”
She opened her eyes. The boy she’d met earlier leaned against the wall beside her.
“Yes,” she said. The music still filled her, leaving her oddly confident, almost bold. “I’ve never heard anything like her before.”
“Yeah, Nettle’s pretty new. Arrived in Petrichor maybe three weeks ago? One of those traveling performing types.”
“Nettle?”
He shrugged. “Stage name. Don’t ask me why. She’s bristly enough for one, but the girl knows how to sing, so no more questions asked.” He had a casual, comfortable air about him, like the whole world was his friend, and he was waiting for them to realize it. “Sorry about Dolores,” he added. “She always thinks a ‘nice young man’ like me needs a friend. Seems to think I’m some kind of charity case, and ropes any pretty new girl into the cause.”
“Oh.” For some reason, the casual compliment seemed more genuine than all the voices that had ever called her beautiful. “That’s okay.”
“I lied, you know,” he said. “To Dolores. I did make it to the ceremony. But her annoyance at the idea that I didn’t was just too good to miss.”
“Oh,” she said again. She could feel him watching her out of the corner of his eye.
“How about you? What did you see?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Only the crowds.” It wasn’t entirely a lie. “What was it like?”
“How about I tell you over a drink? My treat.”
“Oh.” It seemed to be the only thing she was capable of saying. “No, thank you.”
“You can’t come to an inn and not get a drink.” He pushed himself up from the wall with one hand. “Don’t worry. I won’t actually be buying it. Bartender’s privilege.” When she did not move, he grabbed her hand. “Come on. We’ll get you sorted out.”
He set off toward the bar, and Aurora found herself following, suddenly conscious of her unbrushed hair and dusty knees. The boy didn’t seem to notice. He gestured at a wobbly stool, and she pulled herself onto it without question.
“Made a new friend, Tristan?” The girl behind the bar had a mass of brown hair and a sternly cut mouth. Her expression was somewhere between an eye roll and a sigh.
Tristan laughed. “I’m always making new friends, Trudy.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“Dolores says this one skipped the ceremony yesterday. Wanted to introduce me to the only other sensible person in this city.”
Trudy glanced at the other customers and then across to the far wall. She frowned. “Don’t let Nell hear you talking like that. You know how she gets.”
“It won’t hurt anyone,” he said, but he stopped talking all the same.
“So what drew you in here?” Trudy said. “No offense, but you don’t look like our usual clientele.”
“I came in for Nettle,” Aurora said. Her tongue tripped over the name. “I could hear her from outside. She’s . . . she’s really good.”
Trudy smiled, revealing crooked teeth. “Got good taste then. I was beginning to wonder, seeing you come over here with this one.” She tilted her head at Tristan, who promptly elbowed her in the side.
Aurora glanced back at Nettle, standing on the stage alone, now singing to an upbeat rhythm that made Aurora’s toes twitch.
“There we go,” Tristan said, pressing a large mug into her hands. “One mug of mead.” She raised it slowly to her lips and took a sip. She was surprised to find it sweet and rich like honey. It warmed her throat, and she took a bigger gulp.
“Like it?” Tristan asked, and she nodded.
Another customer appeared at the end of the bar. “Evening, you two,” he said. “Two pints of ale, please. And one for yourselves, in celebration of the princess’s return.”
“I’ll take this one,” Trudy said, and she bustled off, leaving Aurora alone with Tristan again. He swung himself over the bar and settled on the stool beside her.
“So,” he said, “that was my dear, demented cousin, Prudence Middleton. But don’t tell her I called her that.”
“Demented?”
“Prudence. She thinks it sounds like the name of a shriveled-up old shrew. I think it suits her.” Aurora tilted her head, unsure if he was joking, and he laughed. “And I’m Tristan Attwater.” He stuck out a hand, and Aurora took it with tentative fingers. “So,” he said again. “You got a name, or am I going to have to make one up for you?”
Aurora looked him in the eye. Her fingertips tingled. “What would you choose?”
“Let’s see.” He brushed her hair back from her face and looked at her with exaggerated care. “I dub thee . . . Mouse.”
“Mouse?”
“Were you expecting something more regal?”
She shook her head and took another sip of mead. The sweet burn down her throat made her daring. “Why Mouse?”
“You look like you’re hiding away.”
He still offered her that lazy smile, but there was intensity in his eyes that hadn’t been there before, a fleck of something that seemed to cut to the core of her. She stared down at the mug in her hands, but she could still feel his eyes on her. “I’m not hiding from anyone.”
“Never said it was a person.”
She gulped the mead to avoid a reply. Her heart pounded, but it was a different sort of fear than the one she had felt in her tower. Thrilling. Nettle was still singing, and her music brushed against Aurora’s skin like the heat from a flame. Here were people, treating her like she was normal, like she had no fate and no duty and no trauma around her. Someone to talk to, not protect or manipulate. It was, she thought, a first in her life. She wanted to dwell in it longer, in this freedom, where she could breathe and talk and listen and not hide everything behind expectations.
Yet Tristan was watching her closely, and his eyes seemed to see through it all, the myths and pretenses, to whatever lay curled beneath. The part of her that even Aurora could not see.
“You were going to tell me about the ceremony,” she said. “What it was like.”
“So you can paint a mental picture for your future grandkids?”
“I just want to know what I was missing.”