SIX
AURORA’S DREAMS THAT NIGHT WERE FILLED WITH smiling, contorted faces and laughing eyes. She awoke before dawn and sat by the window, watching the beginnings of the day burn across the sky.
The click of the lock announced Betsy’s arrival. Relocking the door had been beyond Aurora’s skill, so she listened as Betsy unwittingly relocked it herself, then shook the handle of the unyielding door. After a few pushes, the lock clicked again, and the door swung open. A small frown marred Betsy’s face, and she stared down at the key in her hand, as though trying to puzzle it out. When she noticed Aurora watching her, she slipped the key into her pocket and gave her a slightly uncertain smile. “Good morning, Princess,” she said. “The queen says you’re to have breakfast with Prince Rodric. Won’t that be lovely?”
Lovely was not quite the word to describe it. Once they bumbled through the initial pleasantries, they fell into awkward silence, broken only by the scrape of knives and the crumbling of bread. Rodric looked everywhere except at Aurora. The declarations of true love had bothered her, but the silence was worse. It pressed heavily on her, as though Rodric had finally seen her true self and did not like what he’d found.
A thousand different conversation starters floated through her head, but it seemed too late to try any of them. They had been quiet for too long. She continued to pick at the food, not saying a word.
“Do you have any plans for the day?” she eventually asked, after servants had appeared to clear away the plates and crumbs. If he did not want to talk to her, at least she could give him an excuse to leave.
He shook his head. “Not beyond spending it with you. Getting to know you.”
“Oh.”
“Is there anything you would like to do?” He finally looked at her, and his voice rose hopefully. All it took were a few words on her part, and he appeared optimistic about the two of them again. Aurora could not muster the same enthusiasm. The prince seemed harmless enough, but the silence of the past half an hour felt far more truthful than his suddenly renewed friendliness. They were strangers, and pretending otherwise seemed ridiculous.
Yet things would be easier if they got along.
“Perhaps you could show me around,” she said, staring down at her hands. “So much has changed since I slept. I would appreciate a guide.”
“Around the city?” He looked alarmed. “I’m not sure that’s—”
“No,” she said quickly. “Not the city.” She could still taste the sweet shadow of mead on her lips, feel the goose bumps on her skin from Nettle’s song, and see the lamps, glowing like fairies along the paths, lighting up the darkness. They were her secrets, something that could not be tainted by curses or expectations. She did not want to trample through them with Rodric and guards and her story shouted before her. “Just inside the castle.”
Rodric let out a breath. “I could do that,” he said.
He led her through the half-familiar corridors, pointing out rooms and gifts from foreign guests, naming guards and servants who bowed as they passed. He parroted every word he must have heard from his parents, walking with an official air and a straight back. Although Aurora saw glimpses of the new, an eclectic mix of foreign tastes and sigils of rearing bears, the tour gave her no sense of the castle as Rodric saw it. Not unless the castle, to him, was the dullest place in all of Alyssinia.
“Is there still a garden?” she asked, after he pointed out the gilded chairs in the dining hall. “In the center of the castle?”
“Oh, yes,” Rodric said. “It is my mother’s. Would you like to see it?” She nodded. “I should have thought of it,” he said. “Girls—girls like flowers.”
And boys like fighting and mead, she thought with a snap, but she swallowed the words. Rodric was blushing enough already. “I don’t know about girls,” she said instead, “but I would like some fresh air.”
Aurora remembered the gardens so clearly, so completely, that she could almost feel the brush of grass between her toes. The castle was hollow inside, its stone walls wrapped around a patch of undergrowth and trees, as though part of the outside world had settled within it, full of lush grass and clear skies above. But when she stepped out of the archway into the sunlight, she saw only paved paths, weaving their way around neat flower beds and the occasional fruit tree.
“My mother had flowers brought here from all over the land,” Rodric said as he led her onto the path. “And she has a team of gardeners, the kingdom’s best, to care for them. There aren’t any flowers now, obviously. But there will be. Soon. When spring comes.”
Aurora nodded. It was lovely, truly it was, but compared to the garden she remembered, it all looked so refined, almost restrained, as though even the winter grass had been bent to the queen’s will.
“Is anything the same?” she asked. It was only a garden. She knew that. Nature did not wait for anyone. But it had always seemed so ancient and eternal, a living remnant of the land stretching back to the time of Alysse, full of ancient spirits and dreams that would reach out into forever. It was the only patch of the outside world she had been allowed to visit as a child, before confinement to the castle turned into confinement in the tower. “Has everything changed?”
“I don’t know,” Rodric said. “It’s always been this way for me.” He stared at the barren trees. “We still live in the castle,” he said with an optimistic tilt to his voice. “And we—and you’re here.”
She stepped away from him, numbness tingling in her lips and fingers.
“There are some quite old apple trees,” Rodric said, after a long, awkward pause. “Just over here. I’ll show you—”
“What happened while I was gone?” The question burst out of nowhere, all of her unspoken desperation blurring into one simple thought. Rodric stopped, startled.
“I don’t know. I mean—lots happened. What do you want to know?”
She knew what she wanted to ask. What had happened to make people obsess over a fairy tale? To make a prince believe a single kiss meant true love, and that a girl who knew so little could mean so much? People needed hope, Tristan had said. But he had not mentioned why. “Why do people like me so much?” she said. “Why do they care?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask, Princess,” he said. He still would not look at her. His cheeks burned red.
“Your mother has told you not to tell me.” It was only a guess, but his eyes shifted as though searching for an escape route, and she knew it was true.
“She does not want to overwhelm you,” he said eventually. “She thinks that talking too much about the past would make it harder for you.”
“The only thing overwhelming me right now is how little I know, about anything.” She stared at him until he looked at her. “Tell me why you were so happy when I woke up,” she said. “Let me be happy too.”
“I’m not sure the past is happy, Princess.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and set off along the path. She followed him, an arm’s length to the side, her hands clasped in front of her so tightly her knuckles turned white. “Things were all right, I think, as long as your parents were alive. But once they died . . . what were people supposed to do? You were the heir, but you were fast asleep. No one knew whether there should be a regent, or a temporary king, or a new line—they still hoped you would wake up within the next month, the next year. Or some people hoped. My father says other people got greedy, saw the curse as the chance to take power for themselves.”
“And if I woke up, the succession would be settled again?”
“Perhaps,” Rodric said. He kicked the ground, scraping a groove in the dust. “Greedy people don’t always step back, just because they run out of excuses.”
“So that’s it?” she said. “That’s the reason everyone was so excited for me to wake up?”
“I don’t know,” Rodric said. “I mean—I don’t think so. Not anymore. Of course, it’s good that you’re here. Fifteen different people have been king since you fell asleep, not including your father. Fifteen, in the past eighty years. My father tries his best, but it’s not easy to keep the throne secure. So with you here, and me . . . it looks promising. It’s more than that, though. It’s . . . I don’t know how to explain it.” He stared at the ground, as though the answers hid among the stones. “I guess . . . people think that things were right when there was magic. And then there wasn’t any. Except you, and you were far out of reach. And ever since you fell asleep, everything has gone wrong. Like things were right before you were cursed, and everything fell apart as soon as you pricked your finger. There used to be enough food, and now the weather is terrible almost every year, and nothing grows. People used to feel safe, and now they’re terrified that someone else will claim the throne, that Vanhelm will threaten us, that Falreach will march across the mountains again . . .”
“They found a way across the mountains?” She had pored over the eastern maps herself, trying to imagine what it would be like to climb through the snow, to be utterly alone in the wilderness. To be the first and only person to figure out a way across.
“They did. Although their last attack was many years ago.”
Many years ago, but long after the world Aurora had known, where Falreach was a foreign, faraway place that could only be reached by sailing around the mountains, not a threat powerful enough to march across them. It took such an effort to communicate with them that few people ever did. When letters did travel across the sea, they always smelled of roses and honeysuckle. According to Aurora’s mother, the court of Falreach had so many nigh contradictory rules of etiquette that a child had to be born there to ever understand them properly. When ambassadors for other kingdoms visited, they said the court would ridicule them in ways so subtle that it took them years to understand the intent. “My mother was from Falreach,” Aurora said. She had always been jealous of her mother, her ability to leave her home and travel to somewhere entirely new. It seemed Alysse-like somehow.
“My mother is too.”
“She is?”
Rodric nodded. “I think—” He turned away, looking up at the bare branches of a fruit tree. “It is hard. People are still distrustful. Of Falreach, and everything to do with it, after the invasion. Everyone is stuck in the past here.” He shrugged, then stood up straighter, as though forcing himself back into brightness. “But now—now you’re awake, Princess. Things will start moving again.”