Once Upon a Dream (15 page)

“That sounds terrible,” Aurora Rose said. It came out more fatuously than she intended.

He looked at her with wide, hurt eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she corrected herself. “It really must have been terrible. But…you faced a dragon and killed it, and it was over.”

“Well, obviously not…”

“All right, but
I
have just learned that the world I thought I lived in for the past nineteen years is all unreal. A
dream
. It didn’t
feel
like a dream at the time—it still doesn’t, exactly. Each one of those years really, fully happened to me. And now I have these
other
memories, sixteen years’ worth, of what is supposedly the real world….”

“It is, trust me. I’ve lived there my whole life.”

“It was real for
you
, because you knew who you were, and you were raised by your own parents and lived in your own proper home. I was lied to about who I was, who my parents were, where my real home was, and
what
my aunts were! The real world, as you call it, was all a fake.

“So it’s a little hard to deal with right now, thank you. I would rather kill a dragon and get it over with than have to think about all of this!”

She was close to shrieking, despite trying very hard not to.

“Even the fake people in my fake dreamworld were fake. Er. Faker.” She paused to wipe her nose and tried not to feel like a child as she did so.

“Tell me about it,” Phillip said softly.

Replacing the anger were now tears that spilled down her cheek as she spoke. She wasn’t sure which she preferred.

“There was this girl, Lianna. She was my…this is so dumb…she was my best friend. When we all were confined to the castle, Maleficent found a girl close to my age and made her my handmaiden. Her parents were far away, killed by the demons of the Outside….Not really, though, I guess. Forget that part. The point is, she was odd but we were close. I told her
everything
. All the time. Who I liked and when I had my moon blood and everything.”

She stopped still, remembering Lianna being as confused by it as her fairy aunts had been. Of course, it made sense now; like them, she wasn’t human. She was a creature, a spirit called up from the depths and forced into the awkward shape of flesh Maleficent had managed to form.

I’m the opposite of Lianna,
she realized. Aurora Rose had a body—a natural, real, pretty princess body that different lives and memories and ideas had been forced into. A real mother had given birth to her.

It was her thoughts and memory pictures and everything else that were false.

“As I was escaping, I saw her feet. They were pigs’ feet. She was one of Maleficent’s creatures. She was working for the queen the whole time, telling her everything. Just pretending to be my friend.”

“Oh, Rose,” the prince said sadly, running a hand through her hair. It got stuck in some pine pitch.

She began to sob. “I don’t remember much from the real world, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t have any friends. Except for squirrels and rabbits. No one my own age or human or anything. Lianna betrayed me! I mean, I know it wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t do anything else…she’s not even a real person! Not even a real
dream
person. But…”

The prince put his arms around her and pulled her in close. She crumpled into his shoulder, feeling so small. Small as a dormouse. She enjoyed the weight of his chest and arms and the darkness when she closed her eyes, and she wept for many things, not just Lianna.

“THAT WRETCHED PRINCE!”

Maleficent’s lips stretched taut and thin over her teeth until even her molars were bared in a rictus of frustration. She was not very pretty.

In the air before her was a scene of almost ridiculous pastoral romance: a shabby but beautiful girl in the arms of a prince on a path in the woods. They were quite obviously—and ominously—headed toward the fairies’ house.

“That murdering, foul swine,” she hissed.

Her hand moved unconsciously to her chest, feeling a place over her heart, which, even in the dreamworld, still bore the ugly scar of a sword.

Her guards, the misshapen horde summoned from the dark places below, remained silent and shuffled uneasily. Even when things went a
little
bit wrong, the punishments were painful, random, and certainly not evenhanded.

This
was major.

Alone among them, unmoving, was a single human-seeming girl—though ragged skirts revealed her trotters. Her eyes were large, unblinking, and black, fixed entirely on the vision in the air. A thin film of wet coated them.

Maleficent held her staff aloft. The blood in the orb glowed bright green. She swirled it, slowly, carefully, like a wine connoisseur examining a particularly tricky vintage. From inside the green, a strange, strung-out drop of red began to pulse, caught within but not
part
of the rest of the liquid.

“The battle has just begun,” Maleficent said with a knowing leer. “I still have the dreamer’s blood from the spindle. It may be time to use it….”

THREE EXTREMELY
concerned aunts came upon her lying in a hollow at the bottom of what she called Fern Hill. It was after dusk, growing dark, and she should have left hours ago…but the hollow was
so
comfy and she didn’t feel like moving.

“Briar Rose!” Flora said with a spank in her voice. “We were looking
all over
for you!”

There was real emotion on her face, the thirteen-year-old Rose had noted. On all of their faces. The usual presence of serenity was gone.

The girl knew she should feel bad—or at least concerned—but she didn’t really feel much of anything. It was like they were far away.

“You can’t be in the woods after dark!” Merryweather scolded. “Wolves could get you! Or bears!”

“They won’t hurt me,” she had said, slowly getting up. The words came with difficulty. Like she was speaking through a mouth full of honey.

“Bunnies and owls are one thing,” Fauna said with a gentler tone of caution. “They are not the same thing as bears.”

“Or rapists,” Merryweather added.

The two other aunts glared at her.

There was something they weren’t telling her, some great fear adults had for children that they never shared. Rose was only vaguely intrigued. She let them lead her back to the house. She apologized, because she was a good girl, and promised she would try not to let it happen again, because she was a good girl.

Then she went straight to bed and slept for thirteen hours and still didn’t want to get up.

She came to on the ground, the sickening smell of bile filling her nose and mouth. Phillip was kneeling next to her, holding her hair and shoulders, looking into her face with concern.

The memory had hit her like a sudden falling tree: out of nowhere, splitting her head open. It was so real….

…but, of course, it
was
real.
That
really had happened. Her mind was just recovering all of those lost moments.

There was a strangely comforting familiarity in the sadness of the memory. It felt like so many similar days in the castle…sleeping the hours away, staring at nothing. Not wanting to do anything. Hoping to disappear.

“I’m fine,” she said, before Phillip could ask her. Her head felt like it was sloshing around some but, other than that and a little lingering dizziness, she really was good to go. She put her hand out to the comforting solidity of a tree root to push herself upright. Funny little memories streamed up her arm and into her head. Before she could process them, the prince was helping her. His arm was as sturdy and unrelenting as a rock. She felt no weakness or give when he lifted her.

The path remained steady for a time before dwindling down to dusty silt. The sky opened above as trees fell away on either side. To their right, the land dipped down into a tiny, almost impossibly beautiful valley. A stream ran through its lowest point, its bank lined in pink lupine. Before that, tall, dark green grass sparkled with white flashes in the sunlight. Late season dandelions and breathy, tiny white flowers on slender stems were avoided by bees, while purple thistles and asters thronged with them.

“I could do with a little bit of a break,” she said, looking longingly at the soft, moss-covered braes above the tinkling water.

The prince made a big show of cautiously surveying the scene. Aurora Rose hid a smile. Nothing seemed harmful. “All right,” he finally said. “My face could definitely do with a wash. Feels all dusty.”

They stepped down into the quiet valley that smelled like all of summer crushed into a single flower. She collapsed with thankfulness on a soft sunlit patch of moss. The prince carefully lay down on his stomach and cupped his hands in the stream.

“Wait—should we drink this?” he suddenly asked. “I mean, in fairy tales they always get you with the food or drink.”

“We’re already trapped in a dream. How much more
trapped
could we get?”

“Hm. Excellent point,” Phillip said, and lapped up several mouthfuls.

“So…my parents,” Aurora Rose mused, chewing on the sweet end of a stalk of grass. “Who are, by the way,
not
evil. They did, however, give me away to a bunch of fairies when I was a baby.”

That was the part that was currently confusing her the most. Maleficent was obviously terribly clever in the way she had constructed the false world with its false history; it sinuously, evilly mirrored the real one—and in each, her parents had given her to fairies. For different reasons and at different times.

“Why, exactly, did they do that? And keep it a secret from me?”

“They thought it was the best way to protect you, I gather,” Phillip said. He picked a clump of moss and soaked it in the water, then handed it to her. “Here, maybe you can use this like a sponge.”

She smiled and dabbed her face slowly, still thinking. Unconsciously, she began to rub the itchiest bits, where the pine pitch was.

“But if Maleficent’s curse was that I should die—or fall asleep—or whatever on my
sixteenth
birthday, then who cares what happened until I turned that age?”

“I think there was some question of how enraged Maleficent was at the way her curse was mitigated,” Phillip said with a shrug. His word choice cut through her thoughts; there were moments when the silly, handsome boy almost sounded like a future king. “And that she would just come at you some old-fashioned way, with her army or something. Me, that’s not the way I would have handled it. I would have kept my daughter at home where I could keep an eye on her, and surrounded her with armed guards at all times, and had those fairies hang out around the castle.”

Those words sounded strangely familiar….

Suddenly, Maleficent’s speech to her parents made sense.

Aurora Rose rolled onto her stomach, spreading out full-length on the moss like a little girl. She stared at the dirt, part of her marveling at how from this close she could see individual grains and the perfect eyes of ants. How everything tiny was magnified like magic by the globe-shaped teardrop that landed on a patch of moss.

Tiny like a princess. Useless. Unwanted. A girl tossed aside until it was time to marry. A strategic alliance. A useful pawn.

“Hey,” Phillip said, noticing her sudden change of mood. He put his hand on her back. Despite the warmth of the sun, his fingers were warmer. “Does it matter now? Didn’t you love your aunts—didn’t they
really
love you? Surely they must have.”

“I guess.”

“Believe me,
I
can tell you, as someone who was raised ‘properly,’ a royal prince in a royal castle, you probably had more love and freedom and fun than any prince or princess I know.

“Before she died,
my
mother was someone I saw once a day at the end of the day for a very proper kiss on the cheek and recitation of the day’s lessons. And my dad…well, my dad was pretty great. Except when he was punishing me. But all of his lectures, all of his lessons, all of his time with me—it was all only to groom me to take his place. Think about
that.
My one role in life was to prepare for the day the man I loved most would die. Birthdays were marked by the sigh of accomplishment that I had made it that far and the worry of how many years I had left before I turned eighteen—and could rightly rule if something happened to him.”