Once Upon a Dream (10 page)

Passing out would not solve anything. This was all very real. It was happening. It would not go away. She would have to deal with
thinking about
it and
processing
it and
weeping
over it—and all of the real ramifications—later.

Right now
she had to run.

“Your Majesty, Princess Aurora is…”

Lianna had been hurrying up the stairs but stopped when she saw Aurora in the shadows. The two girls regarded each other.

Then Aurora’s eyes drifted from the other girl’s face to her feet.

Lianna had picked up the skirt of her dress to run quickly up the stairs, just as the princess had. But where Aurora had golden shoes, Lianna had…

Trotters.

Splayed, ugly, fleshy trotters.

Which was why she always walked so oddly, Aurora realized. It wasn’t a foreign habit.

She was one of Maleficent’s creatures.

“Your Highness,” Lianna whispered, addressing the princess this time.

Somehow
this
spurred Aurora into action. She swept past the other—
girl?
—quickly down the stairs, slamming her shoulder into her as she went.

“TRAITOR!”
she hissed, almost like her aunt.

Where could she go? Her first urge was her bedroom. Safe, lonely, comfortable bed.

That was dumb.

Her second thought was to hide
under
her bed. Like a little child. Which was also dumb.

Her third thought was a broom closet, which—with the
entire castle
of monstrous guards and a powerful fairy queen after her—was also dumb.

She stood for a moment, frozen, terrified. There was no place to go.

There was only one place to go.

Outside.

She moved like she was diving, lunging toward the back entrance, where just days ago she had gone to meet Cael. Aurora didn’t have the time or energy to be terrified of the dark green dome of vines overhead; she just made straight across for the outer defenses of the keep. One lone old crone marked the princess’s presence with a vaguely curious raised eyebrow as she emptied a water skin over her parched plot of beans. Golden ball or not, things died without help in this world.

The princess dashed into the nearest tower in the outer wall. Even through the heavy stones, she was sure she could start to hear movement, an alarm raised once it was realized she had fled.

Up, up, up, she climbed the staircases she had played on as a child, free to roam the castle at will like a rat.

Her dress kept tangling with her legs despite her nimbleness and grace; she paused just long enough to rip the train off. She felt a twinge of sorrow for the women who sewed the cloth and the old women who wove it. But her legs were now free, and she could take the steps several at a time.

She doubled her speed past the floors with barracks. Not all the human guards had gone to the ball; people still had to patrol, despite the safety of the thorny barrier. They looked up at her from benches where they were sharpening their swords or polishing their helms. Perhaps they were not as surprised as guards might have been in other castles, in other times, with princesses who stayed nicely in their rooms and chapels and gardens.

Aurora paused at the top of her tower and looked around wildly. Her goal was the barbican: the main entrance to the castle with the portcullis and drawbridge. It was the point that stuck out farthest from the keep and leaned farthest into the vines.

But the passage to it from where she had emerged was a terribly exposed length to run. The tall crenellations on the right of the stone walk were meant to protect guards from invading forces. There was nothing on the left but a low wall; who would attack a castle from within?

In the courtyard below, a half-dozen misshapen figures tumbled together out of the castle, armed with bows and slings. They had a perfect view of her.

“There she is!”

One pointed an arm that terminated in a single terrifying hooklike claw.

Aurora ducked and ran.

Maleficent appeared at an arched window in a castle tower, fury informing her every gesture.
“Guards, seize the princess!”
she cried. “She means to do herself harm!”

But at the same time, she raised her staff and began to mutter an incantation.

The princess willed her feet to move faster. She narrowed her vision to the path before her, the ancient rocks that slipped by on either side of her. The barbican was once a place of extreme security, with murder holes for dropping boiling oil on the heads of invaders, but had been more or less abandoned since the world had ended. The giant gate was sealed in place; there was no cause to raise it, ever. The platform on top was now just used as a private escape for castle teens and drunken servants. Aurora hadn’t expected to find anyone there.

To her dismay, the shiny helms of guards began to pop out of the narrow entrance to the stairs like moles.

“Your Highness!” one called, immediately leaping to grab her.

Up here the vines were distressingly close. They laced together just a man’s height above her head before bending over and shooting straight down a hundred feet, where their thick trunks made a living wall just outside the castle’s stone ones. The moat was gone, the water sucked up by their greedy, unlikely growth.

The foul dust of their aging and shifting lay brownly over everything. It smelled unwholesome.

Aurora looked around wildly, unable to believe she was about to do what she was about to do.

A guard lunged for her.

She leapt.

Aurora fell harder than she thought she would—and landed on a thick branch. She coughed and gasped, the breath knocked out of her. Her ribs were bruised and her stomach hurt. But that was all.

Now that she was within the tangled world of the plants, it would be a piece of cake: climbing down from one closely entwined vine to another.

The guards continued to shout from somewhere above her.

“My lady!”

“After her!”

“Queen Maleficent, what do we do?”

With a grin she wasn’t sure why she had, Aurora began her descent.

And then the vines began to move.

Not the oldest, thickest trunks; small whippets of young vines, curlicued like a cucumber’s tendrils. They shot around her legs and arms and pulled.

“NO!”
Aurora cried out, frustrated with the world. She shook and pulled and kicked. The greenery snapped away as easily as bean sprouts.

The princess was taken aback by her own ferocity and its accomplishments. She really hadn’t expected it to be so easy.

A little less cocky but more resolute, Aurora moved more quickly downward.

Then thorns grew much faster than they were supposed to, erupting wide and thick and unseemly in the way they pushed through the skin of the vines and each other. They pierced Aurora’s flesh, sharp as needles. Everywhere she tried to place her hands, they sprung up. Very quickly, she was covered in cuts and punctures and rivulets of blood.

Also, they screamed.

They screamed as they forced their way through their own stalks and into one another; they screamed in delight when they pricked her.

They grew strange faces, long and lined like old men’s. But when they managed to speak, they sounded like Maleficent.

“Go back….”

“There is nothing for you out here….”

“Return to the castle….”

Aurora bit her lip and tried not to sob. She couldn’t move for the sharp thorns everywhere.

“GO AWAY!”
she shouted in rage and bitterness. “I wish you would just
disappear
!”

The thorns receded, melting like lumps of sugar in hot tea.

Aurora blinked. She wanted to think about what had just happened.

But she had to move quickly, before Maleficent attacked again. Throwing herself with almost careless abandon, she plummeted down, bouncing from branch to branch like a pebble tossed down a deep well.

She hit the dark ground with a sickening hardness. Her head was snapped back and jarred so badly that everything went blurry. It didn’t help that the air was thick and dusty and in a permanent twilight.

But there, some distance away from the castle, just barely visible through the interlaced vines, she could see a faint flicker of yellow light.

Golden and bloody, Aurora straightened her shoulders and walked toward sunshine.

A CASTLE LAY ASLEEP.
A kingdom lay asleep. The people, horses, mice, and even fountains and gnats lay asleep. A hush lay over everything, and all seemed sweet and peaceful at first. Beautiful, ancient-looking brambles protected the sleepers within and occasionally bloomed pink honey-scented roses.

There were only two groups of things that didn’t sleep. One was the dead.

The other was a trio of concerned-looking fairies who flitted around the castle and watched over the sleepers—especially the royal princess.

Aurora lay perfectly, beautifully, hands clasped below her ribs like she was in constant prayer. Her lips were parted. Her eyes rolled. Something was happening in what was supposed to be a dreamless, swift sleep.

Collapsed in an ungainly heap on the floor next to her was Prince Phillip. The one who was supposed to wake her up and end the whole thing.

Instead, the silly boy had
fallen asleep himself
…the first hint the fairies had that something was terribly amiss.

And then the people had started dying.

Flora, the fairy watching over Aurora, had a worried, weary hand to her head. Her strange, flowing vestments of red drifted sadly around her like mist rather than cloth. Her face appeared mostly human except up close. There was a strange serenity behind all her normal-seeming emotions.

Her companions, a plump little pixie in blue and a hamadryad in green, floated in from their rounds.

“All’s quiet,” Merryweather, the one in blue, said. “I mean, they’re all still asleep. So of course they’re quiet.”

“She’s doing it again.” Flora pointed at Aurora’s face. For a split second, the beautiful princess’s features twisted up in agony or upset. They recomposed themselves almost immediately.

Fauna, the one in green, moaned in despair. “I cannot
believe
this is happening. We were supposed to
save
the princess and everyone. Not just hand them over to Maleficent. We’re
sure
they’re all in there?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“How did she ever plan all this?” Merryweather demanded.

“I don’t think she
planned
it,” Flora said, sighing. “I think she just took advantage of the situation. I think she always had sort of a…backup plan in case she was ever killed.”

“If
I’m
ever killed, I want you two to resurrect me,” Merryweather said with a humph. “If she actually had friends, she could have done the same.”

“Be kind!” Fauna admonished her, swooshing back and forth in the air. “If she
actually had
friends, maybe she wouldn’t have turned out so nasty and evil. And besides,” she added reluctantly, “if she actually had friends, we’d be in worse trouble now.”

“
Worse?
How could it be worse? We can’t wake up
anyone
here. Not with a spell, not with foxglove, not with holy water.”

“We have not ruled out everything,” Flora snapped. “We haven’t
tried
everything.”

“True. Have you tried kissing anyone yet?” Merryweather asked archly.

Flora gave her a withering look.

A horrible, piercing cry rang out through the castle.

“
Oh, no.
Not another one!” Fauna cried in alarm.

Immediately, the three fairies shrank into red, blue, and green balls of light and went whisking through the air, will-o’-the-wisps on a mission. They streaked through the bailey, the courtyard, the bedrooms, and the chapel until they found the source of the scream: Lady Astrid, asleep at her needlework, her face a mask of horror and fear.

The three balls quickly resolved into human-sized figures who gathered her up in their arms. Fauna kept the woman’s head upright; Merryweather grabbed a cloak and crumpled it up, to try to prevent what would come next. Flora regarded the dreamer with a critical eye.

All seemed fine at first.

And then thick dark blood began to soak the lady’s gown, over where her heart was.

Merryweather immediately pushed the cloak onto the wound, pressing it down with her hands as hard as she could. Fauna closed her eyes and invoked the healing power of the woods, an ancient, usually infallible, incantation. Flora drew symbols in the air with her naked ring finger, trailing gold behind it in a strange three-dimensional rune.

It was no use.

Lady Astrid screamed and screamed and screamed. She was somehow aware, despite the strange half-life she lived between dream and sleep, that her death was coming, and it was unavoidable. Her cries were of pain and fear and anger and horror and everything terrible the fairies had never felt themselves—in human quantities.

The blood came faster until it was gushing through the cloth like a fountain, heaving with each pump of the heart.