Aurora continues to wander through the cottage. Though much seems to change—the location of doors and windows—the little chair she’d noticed the first time is still in the parlor room, facing the wall as it had before. It looks like a spot someone would send a child in trouble to sit for hours as punishment, she realizes.
Curious, she approaches the chair, noticing grooves in the wall just above it. She bends down to look closer. Someone has etched words into the wood. Much of it is barely legible, caked in dust. A scattering of initials, perhaps, and code words. One entire phrase she’s able to piece together, a limerick. The secret boy—we almost kissed—he won my jewel—in a game of whist!
The words seem to ooze in and out of the wood, sometimes more prominent, then fading again. It gives Aurora a horrible feeling of uncertainty.
The secret boy? This was a childhood crush.
Her mind reels with the simplicity of it. Could the queen have been waiting all these years for a lover to come rescue her?
And the reference to the jewel: this reminds her of the necklace, and the pearl that somehow unlocked one of the enchantments on the forbidden wing at Blackthorn. Why would a piece of jewelry have been so important to the queen that it would, effectively, cut through her magic? If Belcoeur had created this whole world and everything in it, why would she have created a necklace that could do such a thing?
But Belcoeur didn’t create everything. She didn’t create Heath, or Wren, or any of the other living peasants. They were all descended from the original servants who worked for the queen. They are just as real as Aurora.
Something tingles in her chest. It’s the feeling of discovery, of things slotting together like the strands of warp and weft on a loom. Her heart races. The tingling sparks into flame. Maybe the necklace came from the real world. Maybe in that sense, the object itself is immune to the power of the queen’s dreams. The rose lullaby too comes from her world. And when she sang its lyrics, the wall opened for her.
She’s not sure what it means, but she has become certain of one thing: the key to getting out of Sommeil is not going to lie in any pattern, or any place you could mark on a map. It is going to lie in a story. A true story about Belcoeur and her secret love.
The one to whom she lost her jewel . . .
The missing bead on the necklace, Aurora guesses.
No one knows romances better than Aurora does.
Energized by this revelation, she moves back through the room toward the door with little difficulty . . . until she steps outside.
The forest is still, but Aurora has the oddest sensation that everything has rearranged itself. She thinks of her discovery: items from the real world can shatter the spell of Sommeil, can see their way through the illusions. Shouldn’t Aurora herself then be able to see clearly, to shake the cloudiness from her mind, to navigate the changing landscape? She tries to concentrate, but the velvety strangeness of the air itself continues to ebb and flow within her, infecting her thoughts. Of course it makes a peculiar sort of sense that objects might be impervious to illusions in a way that people are not. People are susceptible. She is susceptible.
She takes a deep breath, and begins singing the rose lullaby again. It seems to help. The trees don’t move. No wolves appear. She steps into the woods as confidently as she can.
After only a few repetitions, she sees a parting of the trees, and between them, a steep riverbed. A harsh, rocky cliff juts out, dropping down about thirty or forty feet into a dried-up ravine. Perhaps she can climb to the top for a better vantage point.
As she hurries toward it, she can almost hear the former waterfall in its heavy silence, a dull and constant roar. Sickly moss still clings to some of the stones, indicating the stream that once flowed freely here. Aurora can picture what it must have looked like, water tumbling over the ledge and sparkling in the sun. One of the boulders looks distinctly like a man’s face. Her heart leaps. It looks just like the one she and Isbe named for its odd shape years and years ago, in the stream that runs just past the cattle pastures beyond the palace of Deluce. Nose Rock!
She runs toward the riverbed.
This is no different from climbing the palace towers with Isbe, she tells herself as she reaches the rocks and looks for a foothold. For a moment, she could swear she hears Isbe’s voice calling out to her from far away. Hurry, Aurora! she’s saying. Before they find us! In her memory, she and Isbe are on the roof, searching for a spot to hide from angry council members. Aurora is both nervous about getting in trouble and filled with Isbe’s contagious joy.
But this isn’t a game.
Her heart beats hard in her ribs as she reaches hand over hand, beginning to climb.
20
Belcoeur,
the Night Faerie
“Someone’s coming, Sweet Pea!” The queen bursts into the throne room, her heart full of crows’ wings beating, beating. “Sweet Pea?” Belcoeur nearly trips over the lace of her floor-length gown as she turns a full circle. Her crown weighs heavy on her head. Has her Sweet Pea gone off? Another one vanished? She drops to her knees, searching. She would pray, but the fae don’t believe in such things.
There you are. Relief is a burst of sunshine in her chest. She can breathe again as she retrieves Sweet Pea from beneath the throne, running her fingers along its hand-carved name. The hairbrush—her favorite, for its silver filigree and gentle teeth—must have fallen. But what is this, caught in its furry mouth? The queen extracts a large clump of thin white strands, like frayed threads, or giant cobwebs.
“Sweet Pea,” she whispers, horrified. “What have you eaten?”
She’ll have to have everything cleaned. The castle must be spotless.
“We must be ready. Someone is coming, haven’t I told you?” She calls for the courier, who scurries in. “Have there been no deliveries?” she demands.
“Your Majesty, no . . . ,” he replies helplessly.
She stares at him hard, watching his hairy ears twitch and his tiny hands tremble. Then he tucks his head and scampers away. Belcoeur is certain she sees the tail of a mouse darting through the doorway behind him. She shudders. Things are slipping, slipping between the cracks, like a stream eddying helplessly through moss-damp rocks. She can’t help but fear she has forgotten some important detail.
She hastens to her hall of tapestries and walks up and down its length, studying her creations, looking for an answer. She pauses next to an image of a little riverbed bent over a ledge, where a rock juts out, noselike, over the rest. Why has the river gone dry? That’s not how it should be. That’s not, she’s certain, what her visitor would want. All of her dreams . . . ready to be dashed in an instant if things don’t go precisely as planned.
Her pulse stutters: a broken metronome. It’s wrong. All wrong. She has made some vital mistake! Desperately, she reaches out and claws at the tapestry. Her nails snag.
The ravine becomes an angry gash, revealing a wide flow of loose, unwoven blues and grays.
The miniature silk river pours forth.
It floods.
21
Aurora