“My sister, Isabelle—she was excited to meet you,” Rodric continued. “She is so quiet, but—she is excited. She’s just not good at meeting strangers.”
Well, that makes three of us, Aurora thought. She nodded again.
“Is it true,” Rodric said as he finished his soup, “that before—” He stopped and blushed again. “I’m sorry. You might not want to talk about it. About before.”
Aurora tightened her fingers around her spoon. They must talk about something. “What were you going to ask me?”
“Some of the books mention that you had magic to entertain you at feasts.” He smiled, sounding lively for the first time. “Not tricksters and magicians. Real magic.”
“No,” Aurora said. The thought made her shiver. “No, that isn’t true.”
“Oh.” Rodric was staring at his plate, but Aurora got the feeling he was actually watching her closely, out of the corner of his eye. “People hoped—I hoped—” He trailed off. “Magic as common as that, brought back with you . . . it might be useful.”
“Hoped?” Aurora closed her eyes. How could he be so na?ve? “You’re better off without it.”
“So your family never—”
“No,” she said sharply. “Why would my family use magic? They were not fools.” But they did use magic, she thought. If the book could be believed. They poured it into her to try to break the curse, to save her from this place.
Rodric frowned down at his empty soup bowl. “I am sorry, Princess, I do not mean to contradict you, but—magic cannot be foolish. It brought you here.”
“A curse brought me here.”
“But still—we have been without magic for a long time, Princess, and nothing has been quite right since you fell asleep. Now things will be better. That has to be good, right?”
She shook her head. “I can’t imagine magic creating anything good. Once, perhaps, it could, but not since I was born. Only a few sorcerers were left, even then.” Men who charged riches for their talents, women who offered cures and fed poison instead. And Celestine. The witch who cursed her. “They were not good people.”
Her father had tolerated a few who used magic, before she was born. There was always the hope that one would be able to cure disease or protect the kingdom from threat. But after Celestine’s curse, he had accepted that the magic itself was twisted, and that anyone who controlled it was a threat to them all. The use of magic became punishable by banishment. The use of curses became punishable by death.
“My father—” Rodric paused, as though unsure whether he should speak. “My father says that some people still have magic now. Only a little. He says that they stole it for themselves, and if we fight them, it will come back.”
“You can’t steal magic.”
“Why not?”
She opened her mouth, ready for a firm reply, but no words came. Magic came from outside you, that she knew. It was drawn from the air. Some said that you had to be wicked to tap into it, that all the good magic had been used up and all that was left was resentment and ill will. But what it actually involved, Aurora did not know. She had read many books, but the truth of magic had always been kept from her, as though even the idea itself could snatch her away.
Rodric plowed on over the silence. “It will come back,” he said firmly. “Now that you’re here. And it will do all the good things I said. I mean . . . why else—why else would you be here?”
Her hands shook. The spoon rattled against the side of the bowl like a drum roll, and the loss rushed up inside her, squeezing her chest until she could barely breathe. No home. No family. Just empty promises of true love and the idea that she would restore something that should never have existed at all.
She stood up. Her chair fell back with a scrape and a thump. “I have to go,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”
Every step jolted her knees, and suddenly she was running to the end of the banquet hall, her feet pounding the floor. Outside the room, a window hung open, and she pressed her hands against the stone frame, letting the cool breeze brush her face. She gulped down the fresh air, eyes closed tight.
“Princess?”
Rodric. She kept her eyes closed, her face lost in the breeze. He seemed nice. A bit hapless, a bit unsure, but nice. Yet he was a stranger, a strange, ungainly boy who claimed her as his own, and she did not know what to do. She had nothing else, no one else, and the threat of loneliness tore at her stomach until she almost swayed from sickness at the thought. She could not leave. But she could not stay here, with his presence so near, his awkward eyes seeking out salvation in her own. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I would like to be alone.”
“Princess, I am sorry I upset you.”
“I am not upset.” She forced herself to take another breath and opened her eyes. “This place—it is foreign to me. I don’t belong here.”
“I know. But—here we are, Princess. Fate.”
She flinched. Fate. “Why do you keep calling me Princess? That is not my name.”
“I know, but—it’s what everyone’s called you for so long. The Princess. That or Sleeping Beauty.” He smiled shyly. “And it really was true. You are beautiful.”
“My name is Aurora.”
Silence. He nodded, head slightly bowed, pink burning his nose and cheeks.
“I really would like to be alone.”
“Please,” he said, offering the crook of his elbow, “let me escort you back to your room.”
She smiled, a tight, shivering, broken smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know the way.”
She did not sleep that night.
When she tried to close her eyes, her breath caught in her throat, leaving her lungs gasping and empty. Her heart raced, and her limbs itched. A mishmash of a person, forced into a space where she did not belong.
She paced back and forth, her feet beating a steady rhythm against the smooth stone floor. She sped up with each lap of the room, walls pressing in closer and closer with every breath. If she stopped moving, even for a moment, she might melt away, vanish like everything else in her life. So she walked around the room, staring at the foreign walls and her familiar hands, her mind running over everything that had happened.
Every now and again, it would strike her, like a punch to the stomach, that this was real. That her family, her whole life, was gone. She would pause in her pacing, knees bending, stomach caving, her breath stolen away. But the certainty slipped away within moments, too impossibly huge to grasp for long. It would slip back into the realm of fiction and dreams, and she would continue to pace, until she thought, so casually, of whether her father would visit tomorrow, and it would strike her all over again.
And so she spent the night.