THREE
Once upon a time, when wishes still came true, Alyssinia was ruled by a beloved king and his gentle wife.
Aurora’s parents stared up from the page. In the picture, her father’s beard was too thick, her mother too tall, but there they stood, the idea of them, carefully painted and within her reach. She ran her finger down the image, tracing the bumps and flow of the paint.
Aurora had found the book on the otherwise sparse bookshelf. The Tale of Sleeping Beauty. Its corners were battered, the leaf somewhat worn, as though it had been read again and again by the castle’s visitors through the years. Each page was accompanied by an illustration, painted copies of the tapestries she had seen on her tower walls only a few hours before. And the words . . . Aurora swallowed them with feverish speed, running her eyes back and forth over the sentences as though they would fade if left unseen.
The kingdom flourished, but the king and queen suffered a great sorrow. They desperately longed for a child. They hoped, and they wished, and they dreamed, but they grew older, and they remained alone. Then, one day, when they had almost ceased to hope, they had a beautiful baby girl. They named her Aurora.
All in the kingdom rejoiced for three days and three nights, and the king and queen threw a feast in the baby girl’s honor, inviting all the neighboring princes, friends, and even the common folk to celebrate with them. However, there was one creature they did not invite: the witch Celestine, a cold and powerful woman who lived in a tower deep in the forest, and the only being that the people of Alyssinia had to fear.
Aurora’s history books spoke of several powerful witches through the centuries, but none had ever been as terrible as Celestine. When she thought she had been slighted, when she believed that someone had cheated her, or simply when she thought the kingdom’s joy had grown too great, she would attack. She destroyed crops and sent plagues that killed people with no apparent cause or cure. She bewitched men into committing horrific deeds and tricked foreign allies into claiming some insult that had never occurred. Some even said she had drained Alyssinia’s magic away, so that no one could enjoy power but she. But the na?ve and the desperate would still go to her tower, begging for solutions to their problems. She would offer them all their hearts desired, for unthinkable costs, and then laugh as she twisted their dreams into living horrors—exactly what they asked for, but broken in ways they had never thought to forbid.
Celestine saw herself as a queen in her own right. Her exclusion from the celebration of Aurora’s birth had been the worst kind of slight.
Filled with rage at being ignored, the witch appeared suddenly in the middle of the banquet and, before anyone could stop her, gathered baby Aurora in her arms. With a needle, she stabbed Aurora’s tiny fingertip and placed a curse upon her. Sometime before the princess’s eighteenth birthday, she would prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall into a terrible sleep.
“But I am not heartless,” Celestine said, “and it would be a wicked thing to allow such beauty to go to waste. My gift to this child is true love. She will sleep only until she tastes the kiss of her beloved, and then she shall awaken, as fresh and as beautiful as before.”
In all the years that the curse had chased her, Aurora had never heard anyone speak of “true love” as its cure. It sounded like a wild fantasy, a romantic little detail thrown in over the decades, when the reality of the curse had faded away.
Surely people did not really believe it.
The king and queen burned every spinning wheel they found in the kingdom and launched a desperate search for Celestine, but the witch was nowhere to be found. And so Princess Aurora grew up, spending her days in a tower in the castle, hiding from the world, locked away from those who would harm her. But curses cannot be broken so easily. On the night before her eighteenth birthday, Aurora was enchanted by Celestine. She pricked her finger on a forgotten spinning wheel and slipped into the deepest sleep.
The king and queen tried everything to awaken their daughter. Every spell in the land was cast upon her. Every man was sent to hunt for the witch. Every prince from every kingdom came to try to awaken her with a kiss, but the Sleeping Beauty slumbered on.
Aurora tried to picture them, countless strangers, coming into her tower and kissing her while she slept. Princes and nobles, people she had never spoken to, men now old or dead, all bowing before her, pressing their lips to hers, expecting her to gasp in delight and open her eyes again.
An itch crawled under her skin, like something foreign, something unwanted, had nestled inside her.
As the years trickled past, the kingdom of Alyssinia fell into ruin. When the good king and queen died, the line leading back to the great King Edward himself ended. Lords and kingdoms fought over the throne. War came to the land for the first time in centuries. The people suffered, and all the magic in the kingdom melted away, except in that one room, where that one girl slept peacefully on.
And one day, not too long from now, a handsome prince, the chosen future leader of our people, will kiss the princess and awaken her and all the magic that the world forgot. He and the princess will marry and return peace and prosperity to the land.
And we will all live happily ever after.
Aurora stared down at the painting of herself, beautiful, untouchable, lost in the joy of her wedding to the handsome prince. The walls felt too close. She couldn’t quite fill her lungs.
But it was only a story.
She had spent years locked in a tower, unable to see anything of the world but the scrap of forest beyond her window, but stories had provided her escape. New books, old books, dramas and histories and fantastical adventures, stories of ordinary lives, stories of dragons and demons, murders and mysteries and myths from long ago. A hundred possible worlds, more true to her than her own, more compelling than a life of staring at the same walls and same trees, waiting for the day when the lock would click and she would finally be allowed to be free.
A story could not hurt her.
“Princess? Are you all right?”
Betsy slipped into the room. A couple of dresses hung over her arm.
Aurora closed the book, snapping its prophecies out of sight. “Yes,” she said. She pushed herself to her feet, ignoring the way her legs ached.
“I brought you some clothes,” Betsy said. “They might not be perfect, but I think—I hope—they’ll do nicely. A little old-fashioned, but . . . the queen said that would be all right for now.” She held up a glossy green thing, with bubbled sleeves to the elbow and skirts that swished to the floor. It was unlike any dress Aurora had ever seen. Nothing like the dress she had worn before, but similarly unlike the elegant gowns worn by the current ladies of court. A dress to mark her as different. “Prince Rodric will love you in this. The green will bring out your eyes. Or I have something pink—”
“The green is fine.” The color reminded her of the forest after rain, light reflecting off the leaves. “I mean—it’s lovely. Thank you.”
Betsy helped her into it, chatting all the while. Aurora let the words wash over her. The skirts moved around her like water, but the waist was a touch too tight, stealing the little breath she had, while the neckline gaped slightly at the back. “I’ll just fix this,” Betsy said with a quick curtsy, and then she was reaching and pinning and stitching and talking, always talking, about the exciting, amazing, wonderful, dreamlike miracle that had happened today.
“I was so honored, Princess, when they asked me to assist you. I never expected it! But then, I never expected you’d be standing here, if you don’t mind me saying. Not that I didn’t think Rodric could be your true love, because of course he’s wonderful, but it always seemed too much like a dream to ever happen while I was here. Things will be amazing, now, you’ll see. Everyone loves you already. How could they not?”
Aurora thought of the words at the end of the story, the promise to the reader: we will all live happily ever after. Her true love would kiss her, she would awaken, and the curse would be over. But nothing Celestine did could ever be good. Her curse could not lead to happiness for anybody, least of all for her. “What happened to Celestine?” she asked. “The witch who did this to me?” The words were heavy in her mouth, and even heavier in the air, but Betsy barely paused.
“Nobody knows,” she said through a mouthful of pins. “She enchanted you and disappeared. They searched all over the kingdom for her, and beyond, but she was never found. I think,” she added, in a conspiratorial whisper, as she ran a needle up and down, “that she used up the magic when she cursed you. Poof! Gone. And she was too ashamed of her new weak self, so she fled.”
“Oh.” Aurora stared at her reflection. Celestine was dead, she told herself. A hundred years had passed, and even Celestine was dead. Yet she could not shake the creeping sensation that someone was watching her unseen.
Rodric waited for her in the banquet hall. A long table stretched down the middle of the room, surrounded by paintings and hanging tapestries. Some of them were familiar, but most of them were entirely new, bearing foreign crests and scenes from stories she had never heard. She had attended a few small parties in this room when she was young, when her father trusted those attending enough to allow her presence, and it had seemed lively, fun, full of possibility. It had been one of the few places where she could meet strangers, hear music and laughter, live like she wasn’t cursed. With only the prince waiting inside, the room felt abandoned and cold, too large and too austere.
Rodric stood when he saw her enter. “Princess Aurora,” he said, and he hurried toward her, stumbling slightly over his feet. “You look—you look beautiful.” He smiled shyly. “I mean, you always look beautiful. But you look especially beautiful tonight. Is what I mean.”
Aurora stretched her lips into a smile. “Thank you,” she said.
“Shall—shall we eat?” Rodric rubbed the back of his neck. A light blush colored his nose. She stepped toward him, and the ground seemed to twist away under her feet, making her head throb. It was hardly a storybook sensation. She took his arm anyway and let him lead her to the end of the large table.
A servant, dressed in extravagant red clothing, brought them each a bowl of soup. Aurora did not speak. Rodric did not speak. Spoons scraped against bowls, echoing in the otherwise empty hall.
“You missed the snow,” Rodric said eventually. “We had several inches a couple of weeks ago, but not again, I don’t think. It will be spring soon.”
Aurora nodded, staring at her bowl.