THIRTEEN
“GOOD MORNING, PRINCESS.” BETSY LOOKED AT THE floor as she slipped into the room. Her hair was pulled back into a sloppy bun, and her normally rosy skin was blotchy. “I am sorry I am late.”
“Betsy.” Aurora stood up and hurried toward her. “I’m so sorry—”
“There is no need to apologize to me, Princess,” Betsy said in a flat, steady voice. “I am only the maid.”
“That’s not true,” Aurora said. Betsy still did not look at her. “I didn’t mean for you to get hurt. I didn’t think—”
“Prince Rodric will be here soon,” Betsy said, as though she had not heard her. “The queen wishes you to take a walk together. Which dress would you prefer to wear?”
“Anything,” Aurora said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I cannot choose one for you, Princess. Please make a choice.”
Aurora stared at Betsy’s back. One of the few people she could count as a friend here, lost through her own idiocy. “The green one,” she said. “The green one is fine.”
Betsy helped her dress and styled her hair in silence. Then she left with a small curtsy, still not looking Aurora in the eye. Aurora sat by her dressing table, braiding and unbraiding the ends of her hair. She should have been more careful. Betsy had warned her, but she had stupidly, blindly gone on. And for what? A few dances, a kiss in the dark? She had been a fool to trust him, and this was her reward.
“Are you ready for our walk?” Rodric said when he appeared half an hour later. “The garden is looking lovely today.”
Aurora watched him, all stiff back and burning cheeks, as he bowed his way into the room. He was, she thought, rather sweet. He did not keep things hidden, like Tristan, or smile and flirt and manipulate, like Finnegan. It was a na?ve sort of honesty, but honesty nonetheless.
Maybe, if she took Rodric someplace where she could be her old self, just a girl in a tower, waiting for the day when she would be freed from the curse . . . maybe then, she would feel more comfortable around him. “Actually, I was hoping we could go somewhere else,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
“Do you not like the garden?” Rodric asked. “I am not sure my mother would approve if we went too far. . . .”
“I do like the garden,” Aurora said quickly. “I just—please. Let me show you.”
Rodric gave her a small, tentative smile. “Okay,” he said.
She strode down the halls, Rodric falling in step behind her. Aurora’s heart pounded as she approached the heavy wooden door that led to the tower, seized by a fear she could not quite define. This place had been her prison and her escape, all at once. Frozen remnants of her old life were scattered through its rooms.
She climbed the spiral staircase slowly, pressing her feet into the worn carpet. She kept her eyes fixed directly ahead, trying to ignore the tapestries that adorned the walls. Rodric followed, not saying a word.
She paused one landing from the top. She could not go back into the bedroom where she had slept for over a hundred years. She did not want to look at the dust-free fireplace and still-rumpled covers, and think of how she had slept while the rest of the world continued on. Instead, she turned to another door: the playroom she had not entered for years, even in her own time. Its hinges were stiff from lack of use, and when she shoved it, a cloud of dust burst into the air. She stumbled forward with a hand pressed over her mouth, coughing.
“Princess? Perhaps this is not a good idea.”
Aurora brushed a cobweb aside and peered into the gloomy room. “It’ll only take a moment.” Speckles of dust spun and danced in the beam of light that fell from the window. Beneath the decay of a hundred years, the playroom looked exactly as Aurora remembered it. A rocking horse waited in one corner, his mane tattered and worn, the glorious red saddle faded to a shade that was not really a color at all. Her old dollhouse stood by another wall, and wooden games and balls were strewn across the floor. Aurora picked her way through them, her skirts dragging and catching on the mess. Once she had made it across, she sat on the rocking horse, balanced sidesaddle, her toes brushing the ground. She rested her hand between his ears and closed her eyes tight, trying to imagine that she was six years old again, hidden away in this room for hours on end.
It smelled all wrong. The dust, the rotting wood, the neglect that clung to everything . . . it scratched her nose and the back of her throat, and she could not forget.
“Is this what you wanted to show me?”
Aurora opened her eyes. Rodric stood at the edge of the room, staring around with a mix of trepidation and curiosity on his face. “I guess,” she said. What had she thought this would achieve? “I don’t know.”
“He’s lovely.” Rodric stepped toward her, his eyes fixed on the horse. “I wanted one when I was little—a rocking horse, I mean—but . . . well. My father wouldn’t let me. He said I should be busy learning to ride a real horse. If I’d known one was here . . .”
“I never rode a real horse.” Aurora ran her fingers through the remnants of his mane. It caught in knots, and she tugged her fingers free. “My parents didn’t like me to leave the castle.”
“Never?”
She ran her fingers through the mane again. “I visited the stables once,” she said, “but when my father found out, he was furious, and it never happened again.”
“I can teach you. If you like.” Rodric did not look at her, and his cheeks flushed red, but he sounded sincere.
“Thank you,” she said. “That would be nice.” When she was little, she had imagined galloping across fields, ducking under trees and leaping gorges as the heroes always did in books. The wind would whip her hair back, and mud would splatter over her dress, and she would laugh, free and uncatchable. Perhaps not all of her dreams were completely lost. She slid off the horse. “Would you like to try?”
“Oh,” Rodric said. “I couldn’t—I am too tall. . . .”
She smiled. “Please. Sit.” She patted the saddle.
He placed his hands on the horse’s shoulders, watching it with uncertain eyes as it rocked slightly. He drew in a breath, as though steeling his courage, and then swung his leg over the back of the horse so that he sat on it like an overgrown knight. Even with his knees bent, his feet were planted firmly on the ground.
“You have to put your feet in the stirrups,” Aurora said. He nodded and pressed his knees up toward his chest, squeezing his toes into the metal rings on either side of the horse. The movement made the horse rock forward, then back, and Rodric snatched up the rope reins with a jump.
Aurora couldn’t help it. He looked so ridiculous, squeezed on a child’s toy less than half his size, all determination and unease. She giggled. Rodric looked up at her. He was smiling. “Do I look that silly?”
“Worse,” she said, “but I don’t think Franksworth minds. Must have been lonely, sitting up here by himself.”
“Franksworth?”
She shrugged. “A horse has to have a name. It was in a book, and it seemed suitably regal. To a five-year-old.”
Rodric nodded, and the horse rocked again. From his unsteady seat, the prince almost flew over the horse’s head; he grabbed a handful of mane just in time, and swung himself to the ground with a nervous laugh. “Perhaps I can keep him company on the floor.”
The pressure in Aurora’s chest returned as soon as his feet touched the ground. Without the horse, without a focus for conversation, everything felt awkward and clumsy again, made worse by the memory of their silliness not a moment before. His blush deepened, and he looked around the room, at anything and anywhere but Aurora herself. “This was your playroom?”
“Yes.” Aurora moved a wooden doll from a chair and sat down. “I spent a lot of time here.”
“It’s hard to picture it,” Rodric said. “You as a young girl.”
Aurora looked down at the doll in her hand. It still had both glass eyes. They stared up at the princess in an accusatory manner. “I wasn’t allowed playmates, so I spent a lot of time here alone.” She brushed her fingers through the doll’s hair, trying to recall the feel of it, the smoothness that flowed past and vanished like silk.
Rodric still stood beside the rocking horse, his tall frame completely out of place among the girlish toys. He stared at the floor now. Their footsteps had left marks in the dust. Make an effort, she told herself. He is. Why can’t you?
“Did you have a playroom?” she asked.
Rodric shook his head. “A nursery, and a few toys, but . . . my father wanted me to grow up as fast as possible. It was swords and horses for me. Not that I was any good at any of it.”
“No?”
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said. “You’ll think less of me.”
“I won’t.” That much was true. There was something deeply human about the lanky, blushing prince that made her like him far more than any godlike figure on a tapestry.