Once Upon a Dream (30 page)

“I’m an idiot. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not. And my tragedy doesn’t diminish yours. You just found out your parents are dead. Grieve for them—it’s right.”

“I can’t do this, Phillip,” she finally said, covering her eyes with her hands, trying to squish the rest of the tears out. She felt completely drained, beaten up, bloody, weak, and
done
. “I can’t….”

“You have to,” he said firmly. “Take another moment, and then get up. Now that your parents are gone, your people really have no one to lead them. You are the only one. You have to save them and then lead them out of the chaos when we all awake.”

“I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE WE’RE GOING!”
she shouted in despair. She pointed around the tall cathedral of trees, then at the path, which petered out. “I don’t know if our cottage even
exists
here! It was all a long shot, wasn’t it? Find the cottage, maybe find the fairies, maybe find a way out? We don’t know if any of this will really work!”

And that was when they heard the singing.

“I can’t take much more of this,” she said in a low voice.

“No, wait,” Phillip said, cocking his head. There was a strange look on his face. “I know that song….”

“
It’s going to be a demon!
Or a sociopathic villager or a rabid fox or some sort of horrible little boy who looks like you with a giant spiky mace….”

“FEAR NOT!” the voice called, coming closer. “I HEARD SHOUTS. I AM SENT ON A QUEST TO GIVE SUCCOR AND AID. I SING, YOU KNOW, TO KEEP THE BEARS AWAY. IF THEY HEAR YOU COMING, THEY SORT OF JUST AMBLE ALONG AWAY FROM YOU.

“FEAR NOT! A KING APPROACHES. A KING OF THE WILDS! IF YOU BE TRUE, YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR….”

“Let’s go,” the princess said, finding the strength to leap up. “Come on. Let’s avoid this.”

But Phillip held her and pointed in the direction the voice was coming from, like a hunter waiting for a stag to appear.

“BUT IF YOU’RE ONE OF THOSE DEMONS SENT BY THAT HAG MALEFICENT, I WOULD STAY AWAY. FOR I WIELD A MIGHTY STAFF AND CUDGEL….”

Out from behind a tree stepped someone who was very probably not a demon.

He wore a ragged black-and-red cloak with torn orange sleeves and undershirt. His boots had probably once been fine but now were bound up and relaced with vines and awkward pieces of badly cured leather and sinew. What was likely white hair sprouting in all directions from his head and brow and neck and chin was gray and brown, well dusted with dirt and twigs and leaves.

One of his eyes was missing, the skin hanging loose over the socket in sad bags.

He did indeed have a mighty staff—or, more precisely, a giant branch used as a crude walking stick. His cudgel was just a large skull-shaped rock he carried in his other hand.

“Father…?” Phillip whispered.

“Phillip…? No…it cannot be.” The old man’s voice fell and he looked around distractedly. “I am seeing things again. Like I used to. Before I lost the bad eye that made me see things that weren’t there. Before it was put out, to keep it from lying to me.”

“Father, it
is
me,” Phillip said, choking.

He ran forward and threw his arms around the crazy, dirty old man.

The princess watched in silence, trying to put it all together. It was too shocking to make sense.

The king began to weep and clasped his bearlike arms tightly around Phillip.

“Phillip…Phillip…I wish you were
not
here, glad as I am to see you. I only remained sane at all by assuming you were safe, away from all of this, slipped out to be with your little peasant girl….You were right about getting away from the castle….It
is
the
fourteenth
century, after all….Isn’t it?”

“Oh, Father. You
have
been out here all this time…by yourself…” Phillip said, his own eyes wet.

“The Exile…” Aurora Rose murmured. “I am so sorry….”

“YOU!”
King Hubert rounded on her. “Maleficent’s little ward!”

“No, no,” Phillip said. “It turns out
she
was the peasant I thought I was going to marry…but she’s actually Princess Aurora. She was in the woods because she was sent away to be raised by the fairies.”

“Wait, I remember that, I think,” King Hubert said, raising his eyebrows. It stretched the skin over his socket oddly. He scratched it thoughtfully. “Wait. What?”

“Maybe we should start from the beginning,” Phillip said. “But quickly. Time is short.”

“Time?” King Hubert asked bleakly. “I’ve been wandering in these woods for years, lad. All I
have
is time.”

She let Phillip do the talking. It was strange, once her adventures outside the castle had begun, to suddenly be sitting aside and letting someone tell the story. It was both restful and unsettling.

“But I don’t understand…tell me again.
Why
was he exiled? What did he do?” Phillip finally asked when he finished the story. He turned to her, as if sensing she felt left out.

She shrugged. “I think…it wasn’t much, really? He wanted some say in the ruling of the castle. But it probably had more to do with his presence in the castle.” She frowned, thinking. “There was no easy explanation for his being there. He was there in the real world because of our wedding. I’ll bet Maleficent was afraid of some sort of…irregularity in her dreamworld. Of him or me remembering something.”

King Hubert nodded. “When that witch threw me out, she said something like ‘And now we’ll have no problems from
you
, King Hubert.’ But it was in a nasty tone. Nasty woman.”

“And then…what happened to you?” Phillip asked, reaching up as if to stroke his father’s brow. Then he stopped, seeming to think better of touching the king in so casual a manner.

“ONCE EXILED, DID I GIVE IN TO FATE?”
the king demanded. “I did not! The damn fools in
there
thought the world was dead out
here
! Didn’t even take a look. Just took her word for it. It was beautiful! Green and glorious! Got to go on walkabout. Haven’t done that since I was a lad. Ate off the
land
, children! Nuts and mushrooms and rabbits and fruit of the trees! HEALTHY, I tell you!

“Sometimes I would run into some of Maleficent’s minions,” he added philosophically. The skin over his missing eye twitched. “Had to arm myself. Didn’t have my father’s sword anymore…made myself
new
weapons. King of the Wilds! Hubert may be exiled, but he is still KING!”

Aurora Rose found herself putting her arm around the old man as he got worked up again. At her soft touch, he jumped and looked around. Then he smiled and settled down.

“I couldn’t find my kingdom,” he continued quietly. “It shouldn’t have been hard. Stefan and I could see each other’s towers on a clear day. We joked about putting up a rope between them…making quick work of a visit. But it wasn’t there….It should have been there…but it wasn’t.”

“This is the world inside Aurora’s mind, Father,” Phillip explained gently. “She’s asleep. We’re in her dream. She has never been to our kingdom.”

“Quite right, quite right. Lost in some girl’s sorcerous dream,” Hubert said faintly. “Nothing
is
ever quite what it seems. The further I got from that blasted castle, the more things got confused. But also clearer. Memories of another world came back…the real world, I suppose. Stefan and Leah—as
good
people. Good friends. It was all mixed up. Rather like the mind of a young lady, I suppose.”

Instead of taking umbrage at that, the princess asked the question that had been bothering her. “Isn’t it odd that you found us just when we were talking about my parents? When I was about to give up on the quest?”

Hubert drew himself up and looked smug. “Nothing is odd in these woods, dear lady. I was
called
. By a higher power. Some being, an angel, a protective spirit, guided me to you. Told me you were lost. Told me that I should seek you out and guide you home.”

“The fairies,” Aurora Rose whispered. “It must have been them.”

“Fairies?” the king asked, intrigued. “I suppose it could have been. All golden and twinkly, now that I think about it.”

“Brilliant! It’s all coming together!” Phillip said with a sigh.

“But
can
you help us with what we’re looking for?” she asked, pressing him. “We need to find a cottage in the woods. Looks like the one where I grew up, in the real world, with my aunts. Small, with a thatched roof…I think….”

“I know
all
these woods, dear lady,” the king said, getting up and giving her a deep bow. “Even when they change. Which they do. I
knew
duty would call. And here I am, answering! Needed, at last! Follow me, children!”

He marched forward, a serious look on his face, holding his staff high and his rock firmly.

“He wasn’t like this in real life,” Phillip whispered as they set off after him.

Aurora Rose gave him a look.

“All right…maybe a little. But a lot of it was for show. Underneath he was a stern, solid ruler. Big drinker, big eater, and a very good friend to those who were good friends to him. But if it came to executing criminals of the realm, he had no problem taking a sword and doing it himself.”

She shuddered, though she wasn’t sure if it was for the Hubert of the past or the Hubert of the present. Phillip was speaking about him like he was already gone.

They followed him on what seemed at first to be a random meander through the trees, completely at odds with where they had been walking before. Hubert strode like a proper king, as if his robes were still long and thick and trailing behind him. But he also kept a watchful eye on everything around him: shadows, the world above, the distant movements. He wasn’t
nervous
, precisely. Just aware.

It also looked like he occasionally waved to certain trees and rocks.

The princess decided not to call him out on it. From the way he almost saluted one large boulder, it was obvious that whether or not he actually had discourse with the landscape, he definitely recognized it. And Aurora Rose, broken and beaten up, grieving and wounded, was just relieved to let someone else take the lead for a while. It took all of her concentration just to keep up with the father and son, swinging her stiff and injured left leg into place with every stride. Her side hurt when she breathed; it was a strange pain that felt
wrong
, like bones were doing something they shouldn’t.

She wondered what they would have done if Hubert hadn’t come along—if the fairies hadn’t figured out how to send him.

For the first time on the journey, Phillip walked ahead of her, keeping pace with his father. They didn’t talk about anything serious; they just exchanged the occasional strange, manly platitudes that seemed out of keeping with the present situation. Phillip would remark on the weather, and his father would guffaw and tell a story about a terrible downpour during which he had hidden in a small cave—along with two foxes and a badger.

Aurora Rose wondered if she had made that rain. She wondered if it reflected something else that had gone on in her head.

Eventually Phillip seemed to remember the princess and dropped back to be with her.

“You doing all right?” he asked.

“Not great. But all right,” she admitted.

“We’re almost there,” he assured her.

They wandered down the path, not quite touching, not quite bumping shoulders.

The sun must have climbed high beyond the trees; time passed and the light shifted, filtered though it was.

“My lady,” King Hubert said. He swept his hand forward dramatically and bowed.

There, starting in the middle of nowhere, was a path of neat little mossy flagstones that led into the darkness of the forest.

Her heart began thumping.

The path didn’t look
familiar
, exactly, but she was overwhelmed with nostalgia. Which was strange when she thought about it. In the real world she was less than a day away from her home in the forest, and less than a day had passed since she had left it. And in this world she had never been there at all. But she felt oddly tall, huge really, as if she was coming back to some place she hadn’t seen since she was a small child.

She started to run down the path, but Phillip grabbed her hand and held her back.

“Doesn’t this look familiar to you?” she whispered.

“It looks very much like the area where we met,” Phillip said guardedly. “But not exactly. The trees and the plants are the same, and the…”

“Rocks!” she cried in delight, seeing a giant gray boulder with sides so tall and straight it was like a small mountain with sheer cliffs. This time she
did
try to run and was rewarded by stumbling over her bad leg and experiencing a painful tear in her belly.

She bent over, hand to her waist.

Phillip and Hubert looked at her with worry.

“Are you all right?”

No,
she realized. Her body wasn’t up to much more adventuring.

But she shook her head, put up her hand; she was fine.

“Let’s just continue on,” she suggested.

Then there was a crackle in the underbrush behind them, where they had come from. It wasn’t loud and it wasn’t heavy.

It was, however, extremely ominous.

“I thought none of Maleficent’s demons could make it here,” Phillip said warily. “Here, in the deepest part of Rose’s mind.”

“That wasn’t a bear,” Hubert pointed out. “I know from bears.”

“The little girl back there wasn’t a demon,” the princess said wearily. “And she could be just, you know,
waiting
for us. To come back out. We can’t hide in the deepest part of my mind forever.”

There was another—very tiny—shuffle of leaves. And the sound of air sucking in from someplace else. A very unnatural
hoooomph
.

“CALLED UPON AGAIN!” Hubert said enthusiastically in response, straightening his robes. “I’LL DEAL WITH THE DEMON. You two go on. Finish your adventure.”