“So it really is true, then,” she mutters, adjusting herself against her giant stack of pillows; her body—a mountain underneath the thick burgundy quilt—heaves with the effort.
She’s heard the story by now. News travels fast in winter, when there’s nothing else to do but gossip: Princess Aurora of Deluce was found motionless on the upper floor of an abandoned summer cottage, lying next to an enormous golden spindle. A maiden’s scream drew others to the site. The princess, presumed dead at first, was in fact sleeping far too deeply to awaken. The maiden who’d discovered her promptly fell into a similar state. Others were able to send a messenger to gallop back to the palace for help.
The council sent out six of their best men and a wagon through the rutted, frost-covered roads to rescue the young princess. As the men loaded her onto the cart, however, one of them grew weary and hardly made it out of the woods before falling to the ground in an unshakeable sleep. The others hurried on their course, wrapping the princess in thick cloaks. But on the short ride back to the palace, the remaining councilmen too succumbed.
So the tale goes. The horse driver hardly made it past the chains of the drawbridge glimmering in the morning sun before he fell asleep on his perch. The horse, confused, whinnied and tried to bolt, yanking the cart the rest of the way into the palace, where the strange contagion continued to spread.
There has been no movement since, no message, no wave of a flag from within those walls to signify life; all roads to the palace have been cordoned off.
Strange stories, Claudine thinks. Faerie curses. She’d be amazed if any of the fae still have the power they once did. These days, a faerie curse carries hardly more magic than it takes to boil a kettle. And yet, the unlikeliness of the princess finding that particular abandoned cottage . . . it reeks of faerie magic.
“A sleeping sickness . . . ,” she says now to her maid. “It reminds me of something my cousin Violette once said. At the child’s christening.”
“The child?” the maid asks timidly.
“The princess, of course,” Claudine says. “Now leave me.”
She lumbers out of her bed, humming to herself in a voice far purer than should belong to someone of her age. She waddles to the window, throwing open the sash and shutters and breathing in the harsh air. It is winter outside, and it is winter too, always, within her. Nothing can fill the void. Nothing satisfies the hunger. Nothing can take root, no matter how much sweetness she consumes.
Except something has taken root. For even now, a thick, dark-vined briar pushes its way out of the hard, frozen dirt surrounding the cottage where Aurora was found. Thorns splinter along its stems as it grows eagerly, with a hunger as powerful as Claudine’s own, stretching along the path through the royal forest, reaching the road and eventually winding toward the palace itself, thickening as it grows long, doubling, tripling, quadrupling, pressing onward, blossoming with purple-white buds, and rising, rising, rising.
14
Isabelle
Timing is everything. One might even say it was bad timing that Isbe was born in the same year the king decided to banish all of his mistresses from the land, ensuring the new queen would never be made jealous—and that Isbe would never know her own mother.
And because she understands how crucial timing can be, Isbe is not surprised to hear her spear whiz a few feet into the air before splashing uselessly into the sea, missing the rope entirely. Her palm stings; her skin’s raw, her pulse loud in her ears. Throughout the din of the hunt, she had been listening carefully to the high, faint whine of the harpoon’s rope as it pulled taut. It was the sound of fraying, of fibers untwining and splitting. She had tried to point her spear not at the whale but directly at that sound. Even though she missed, she was right about one thing: there’s a terrible wrenching sound as the narwhal gives a final angry heave—and the rope snaps.
A tiny spark of hope lights in Isbe’s heart even as her body is thrown backward from the aftershock and the icy waves envelop her.
The whale has gotten free.
She thrashes, as the beast had done. She tries to scream underwater. She burns from the inside. Her body struggles for many minutes, and then begins to let go, to soften. Her mind follows, turning numb. From that numbness, a faint pressure emerges, a pattern against her open hands. It’s a message. The sea is speaking to her in the same way Aurora does: by tapping in their secret language. Or maybe it isn’t the sea but Aurora herself, or a memory of Aurora. I’m afraid, the water pulses into her hand. I need you.
The tapping becomes angry, nonsensical, frantic. It is no longer a message. It is . . . wood. The end of a stray oar. Isbe grasps for it, but it eludes her. She tries again, her mind beginning to awaken. The desire to live shoots through her with the power of cannonfire and she grabs again, holding on as the slippery oar yanks her upward, toward the surface—and her face breaks free.
She gags on saltwater as air whooshes into her lungs.
Someone is pulling the other end of the oar.
Someone has saved her.
PART
III
THE SHADOW AND THE CHILD
15
Aurora
Night is a gasp, and then over.
Opening her eyes, Aurora needs no gauzy sway of a curtain to signal the wind’s presence. The unseen forces of the world all have bodies, she understands now. Phantoms fill the air.
A soft moan comes from her throat. The pain in her ankle has subsided into a distant throb. Yet the bed, the sheets, the weight of the blanket over her, the tickle of fresh breeze across her brow—these gather into a complex melody that makes her want.
More and more every day.
She’s not even sure what she wants, but she knows that obedience, grace, kindness . . . these no longer form the only standards by which she can live. Not with this new, lush thing borne inside her: desire . . . for touch, for the breath that inflates her chest, for her voice, for life—the feeling of it.
She sits up, letting memory slowly sift back into her like flour through a sieve. She had tried to keep track of the days at first, but Sommeil has a way of blurring things together; time seems to glide by almost invisibly, like a skitter bug across a lake. How long has she been gone?