Once Upon a Dream (9 page)

But—far more importantly—there was something terribly
familiar
about them. Something her body immediately recognized but her mind didn’t; she was overwhelmed with an urge to put out her hand and have them land on it. To try and hug them.

Why?

“This is not the world in which you are supposed to reside,” the green one said. The voice was still very high-pitched, but Aurora could just make it out this time.

The blue one rolled her eyes. “You are running out of time. Years and hours are tangled, it’s true, but both go fast. If you want to save yourself and those you love, you need to figure out how to get out of all this.”

“Wake up, you don’t
belong
here,” the third one, the red-lit one, piped up. “Wake
up
already!
Do
something!”

There were footsteps in the hall, Lianna’s strange, syncopated gait.

No, wait, just a moment….
Aurora was torn between panic and frustration.

“Time for your bath.”

Her friend appeared at the door holding a towel and a brush.

The fairies were simply gone. Like they had never been there at all.

The princess succumbed to her bath thoughtfully. She had accidentally wished…and
something
had happened.

Aurora was glorious in her golden gown. Without a trace of envy, Lianna declared it was the most beautiful the princess had looked yet; somehow the seamstresses had managed to create a dress several perfect shades lighter than her hair, and it sparkled when she moved. With her tresses up in intricate loops of braids and a golden diadem on top, the royal princess was an image of the sun itself, her tippet and skirts rays that just touched the earth.

Probably. No one could quite remember the sun.

Aurora gave her speech of gratitude and thanks to her aunt with verisimilar emotion. And by the end of it, she actually felt the way she had when she first wrote it.

The queen wore golden horns that night in deference to the theme. She kept her eyes modestly lowered during the speech and then thanked her ward warmly when it was over. The crowds cheered. Everyone seemed a little wilder that night. Dancers danced faster and harder. The musicians played like the devil was after them now that their leader was truly gone. Laughter was far too loud, and the drinking far too copious. Time may finally have taken a toll on the survivors in the castle.

Aurora watched it all distractedly from her usual spot next to Maleficent’s throne, but she wasn’t really paying attention.

What if the fairies were actually evil demons from the Outside trying to get in? What if they had discovered her mind was weak, like the drunken minstrel’s? A perfect, pliable vessel on which to work their evil influence. Wasn’t she
just thinking
about how great it would be if everyone died before the fairies arrived?

What sort of person even
thought
those kinds of things? Who imagined opening a door and letting death in?

A new idea interrupted this familiar spiral of thoughts she had been torturing herself with.

What if she wasn’t the only person these visions appeared to?

What if there were other minds in the castle, as weak and diseased as her own, prone to self-destructive thoughts—gateways of evil?

Like the minstrel…

Aurora looked back and forth over the golden-hued crowd, searching for something. Some sign of a weak or evil mind. Nothing immediately revealed itself.

The laughter may have been borderline hysterical, but that could have been relief that things were back to…“normal.” If they questioned the source of their magical banquet, the gilded quail eggs and golden soups, they were at least eating it. If the musicians sorely felt the absence of the minstrel, still they played in key for the twirling golden dancers. There wasn’t an off note anywhere, actual or metaphorical.

“Why aren’t
you
dancing?” Maleficent asked. She clasped a golden goblet that held some thick black wine. Her eyes were shadowed, and her movements were slow. She would be her old self again, in just a few hours….

Aurora bit her lip. She was almost overwhelmed with a drowning sense of déjà vu. She had done this before. At least once. She would do it again at the next dance probably. And again and again and again…

Panic was building in her head, and she wasn’t sure what to do with it.

“
Go,
” her aunt said, flicking her wrist imperiously, shooing her away. Aurora nodded and obediently trotted off, glad to have an order to follow and give her body something to do.

But her mind wasn’t on the dance. It was on the fairies and traitors and what the Outside really looked like. It was on what had happened to the minstrel and the feather and her aunt. Her feet were merely going through the motions with no joy. No one noticed, however; the princess’s innate grace and skill and beauty and poise made her the most beautiful dancer in the room without her even having to try. Golden torches were reflected a thousand times in the soft golden folds of her dress; her golden shoes sparkled like candle flames.

Count Brodeur avoided her like the plague, not even looking at her face when they twirled around each other in the middle of a set.

In the middle of an endless chain dance, Aurora saw Maleficent get up quietly and slip away from the throne, out of the room.

Maybe it was a good time to take a break. Get a mug of cider. Clear her head. Over by the bowls of punch, Lady Astrid had a grim smile on her face and a flagon in her hand and was nodding at something the much older Countess DeShabille was shouting in her ear. Just a week—or whatever—ago, the princess wouldn’t have given a second thought to either one of them. She would have danced, flirted politely with the cuter boys and men, and done anything she could to impress her aunt.

But now…

Lady Astrid seemed like a breath of fresh air in the tightly locked castle and Aurora’s own head. At the very least, the lady deserved to hear the truth about what had happened with the minstrel and where the feather had come from.

And then two of Maleficent’s servants came up to the lady. The cockscomb one and the doggish one—very obviously flanking her. They spoke tersely and gestured with their spears; the lady looked confused.

Aurora apologized to her partners, disentangled herself from the other dancers, and made her way over as quickly as she could. But by the time she got there, all three were gone. No one else seemed to have noticed. Countess DeShabille stood still, nodding to herself, humming quietly.

“DID YOU SEE WHERE LADY ASTRID WENT?” Aurora asked carefully and loudly, knowing the woman was mostly deaf.

“VERY COURTEOUS AND NICE WOMAN,” the countess shouted back. “SHE CHECKS IN ON ME EVERY DAY, YOU KNOW, TO MAKE SURE THAT I AM ALL RIGHT.”

“WHERE DID SHE GO?” Aurora repeated, trying not to be rude.

“ALL OVER, I THINK. SHE AND HER HUSBAND LIKE TO TRAVEL. NOT ME.”

The princess couldn’t stop one huff of disappointment, but she forced herself to nod courteously before rushing off to the closest stairs.

Where were Maleficent’s guards taking Lady Astrid? And
why
?

Maybe there was something wrong with one of the residents of the castle. Lady Astrid was the closest thing the nobles had to a nurse.

But as Aurora looked all over, running through the castle halls and ducking into every likely place—and finding nothing—she began to suspect that it wasn’t for so noble a cause.

With a sickening twist of her stomach, she thought about the feather. Of her ill-advised revelation to Brodeur and then Lady Astrid…and the implications of where the feather had come from….

The minstrel was gone, Count Brodeur was on edge. Astrid herself had said the whole matter was dangerous. And now the lady had been whisked away by royal guards.

Praying she was wrong, Aurora hurried up the last flight of stairs. The one that had originally led to her father’s solarium, which Maleficent had claimed as her own chambers. She chose it out of respect for Aurora—not wanting to appear to replace her parents entirely, especially in their own bedroom. Plus, it was a little removed from everyone else and in a tower, just the sort of thing a fairy queen would like.

Aurora paused just outside the door and took a deep breath.

She moved to go in…

And then stopped.

Whatever she had expected to see—Maleficent talking with her guards, Maleficent chastising or questioning Lady Astrid, Maleficent standing in front of her large mirror, adjusting her outfit—none of it was what was actually happening in the room.

Lady Astrid
was
in there with Maleficent. Gagged and tied up. The rope cut into her flesh and made her gold dress balloon in ridiculous folds between the cords. She was only upright because she was held that way by the two guards. Astrid’s face, pale and sweaty, strained her gag and her gold-and-white wimple.

“An excellent choice, my pets,” Maleficent was saying with a throaty laugh. She looked like she wanted to stroke one of the horrible guards, but pulled her hand back at the last moment and clasped it into a fist. “The lady is certainly…robust. True royalty would be the best—their blood would be the strongest. A pity about the Exile being gone—that was a mistake. But
she
will serve for now.”

The queen reached deep into her cloaks. She pulled out a strange ripple-bladed black stone dagger that looked sharp but awkward.

Before Aurora could even guess what it was for, Maleficent plunged it deep into Astrid’s chest. The movement was swift and yet unending; the queen had to jiggle it back and forth to get all of its sinuous bends into the woman’s flesh.

Astrid screamed, or tried to, the muffled cries sounding wet and useless behind her gag.

The guards holding her whistled and hooted with glee.

With a determined set of her jaw, Maleficent wrenched the dagger out.

A fountain of blood streamed from the poor woman’s chest—too purely, too neatly to seem possible considering the jagged imprecision of the wound.

Aurora ground her knuckles into her mouth to keep from screaming.

Maleficent chanted:

Almost delicately, like she was watering a fragile flower, Maleficent took her staff and held the crystal orb at its tip in the stream of blood. The world blurred; the orb was a hole in the air itself and the blood bent and gushed into it, pulled into its vortex. Somehow it passed through the wall and filled the glassy vessel, churning and frothing redly.

When it was full, the queen pulled her staff back and gave it a dramatic twirl. The blood inside glowed and bubbled furiously. Then it changed, losing its redness and becoming the familiar bright, glowing green of Maleficent’s magic.

The queen sighed, shifting her shoulders and stretching out her arms as if she had just woken from a long, restful sleep or come out of a hot bath. The shadows under her eyes were gone. Her skin looked fresher, plumper.

But she didn’t look entirely happy.

“It wasn’t enough. It’s taking more and more blood from those idiot nobles to sustain me for fewer and fewer minutes….”

Lady Astrid was apparently already forgotten. The two monsters let her fall forward. Blood pumped out of her in ragged spurts directly onto the floor. Blood moistened her gag as well, and began to collect in large, heavy drops on her chin.

Aurora found herself praying that the lady was dead. There was something about the way the guards couldn’t keep their eyes on their mistress but let them slip to the pale body they now held. Their tongues hung out of their mouths and they slavered hungrily.

Maleficent moved her staff in a circle.

“Spirits of evil, open the window to that other realm!”
she commanded.

The orb traced a silvery outline in the air that shimmered and shivered. The view through it was of the same room, but distorted. Or…
less
distorted. The details in the image were somehow more distinct than reality, the colors more complicated. It was both uglier and more fascinating than the real room.

But that wasn’t what caused Aurora to gasp.

In that other room, through the shimmering window, the queen’s bed wasn’t empty; Aurora herself slept in it.

The princess fell against the castle wall. It wasn’t like looking at a statue or a painting of herself;
it really was her.
She knew it. She knew there would be a teeny tiny freckle on the inside of the left pinky finger. She could feel the way her belly flattened out when she lay on her back. She knew her own breathing.

Which…the other Aurora…wasn’t really doing….

She who sleeps.

Aurora was the one who slept.

Though to her this world seems

As real as the waking one.

This…wasn’t real….

The whole
world
wasn’t real.

As soon as she thought it, she knew it was true.
Felt
it was true. Over there, in that complicated, ugly world,
that
was reality.

This
was all a dream….

Aurora felt like fainting. Just letting go. Letting whatever insanity that made up the world continue on without her.

Maleficent looked at Aurora’s bed thoughtfully.

“All I need to do is hold on for a little longer,” she murmured. “Until the clock chimes twelve and her sixteenth birthday is over….”

She regarded the blond hair, the petite frame, the delicate feet, the pixie nose of the sleeper.

“I suppose her body will have to do until I can find better,” she added with an only slightly disappointed shrug. “But I will have an entire kingdom at my disposal at that point.”

Do not faint.

A tiny voice, a tiny glimmer of a voice insisted annoyingly in Aurora’s mind. But it was her
own
voice, from inside her head, not a hallucination or a visit from an Outside fairy.