Once Upon a Dream (12 page)

By reflex, her psyche tried to grab at the snippets of dark memories that were starting to shrink now, like the skins of discarded fruit.

But…Maleficent.

That great woman who had swept in as a savior, who had kept her parents from handing her over to—wait, that wasn’t real, was it? Well, she would work that out in her head in a while. Maleficent had swept in, magnificent and regal and commanding, and put a protective arm around the scared and neglected princess.

And in the years since…how Aurora had waited and prayed for and then treasured the moments when her aunt dropped the drama and graced her with a genuine smile of fondness. How she did everything to impress the beautiful, royal, and commanding lady. How Maleficent filled her waking thoughts with awe and gratitude…when the princess wasn’t mired in restlessness and its twin, languor.

Aurora had
loved
her. With all of her innocent heart and soul.

She saw, with a ripping in the very essence of her being, Maleficent standing at the balcony and ordering her capture. The words the queen had spoken hadn’t matched her face: she had talked of clemency for a deranged princess, but her lips had been peeled back in a grimace and her eyes had been filled with hate. There had never been
any
affection there. It had all been a ruse.

Aurora Rose felt the tears spill out soundlessly and endlessly.

The worst part was that she would have forgiven Maleficent everything—even what she had done to Lady Astrid—if only the queen had lied about it. If she had taken Aurora into her arms and said,
Shhh, it’s all over, I do love you.
Even if Aurora didn’t believe her aunt entirely, she would have forgiven her and forgotten it.

“I…am so…
pathetic
!” she shrieked, letting the terrible, climbing, hysterical, inhuman cry overwhelm her tears and take over her whole shaking body.

It felt good, but it didn’t get her anywhere.

When she opened her eyes, she was surprised to see a little bird before her, sitting on a branch and giving her a skeptical look.

Aurora Rose had the urge to look around to see if anyone else had noticed.

The bird stretched out and gave a single impatient
cheep
. Puffing its chest in the sunlight, it revealed a coat of feathers that were the purest sky blue imaginable.

The princess gasped. She went to find the feather the minstrel had given her, to see if it would match. But her chatelaine was gone, along with the cards and the feather and everything else. It must have been torn from her in the escape.

Muscle memory prompted her, without thinking, to start patting the rest of her ripped dress. Did she have anything in her pockets for the little bird?

It cheeped at her impatiently.

“Sorry,” she said with a weak smile and a shrug. “Not myself today.”

She knew this bird had a name. It wasn’t
bluebird.
When as a child she had asked her aunts what kind of bird it was, Fauna had dismissed her question as irrelevant. Aurora Rose couldn’t have pronounced what the birds called themselves to distinguish them from other types of birds, and
little blue bird
was just as meaningful as anything else. But, of course, birds were individuals, and it was rude to address one by the name of its whole race.

The bird seemed to do the bird equivalent of rolling its eyes and set about preening itself, as if it had never
really
been interested in a handout, anyway. Aurora Rose smiled. Leave it to a bird to make the situation all about him.

She rubbed her face in exhaustion, smearing it with pine pitch in the process and not caring. Everything was insane.

At the base of the closest tree was a clump of wild mint. She broke off a stalk and chewed it, beginning to walk again. The world was beautiful. There was an ancient oak tree heralding a shift in the forest. At its roots underground would be the mushrooms the wild pigs liked.

Hey, if wild pigs are still around, are unicorns, too?

She closed one eye, trying to remember if she had ever seen one as a child. She had seen a magnificent white stag once, with golden antlers, but nothing with one horn.

The world Outside…outside…was just as amazing as she had always wished in the Thorn Castle. She could live in this forest and meadow happily until the thoughts inside her head sorted themselves out.

OF COURSE,
as with everything in her complicated, unreal existence, that was not the way things played out.

She was wandering around the twisty bend of a game trail, humming a little half-remembered song to herself, when she came upon a scene out of a tapestry:

A deer. A
doe
, she knew, not just from its lack of antlers but also the shape of its face and the size of its flanks. Beautiful and large and slim and as elegant on its tiny toes as any made-up fairy-tale creature.

Standing some distance away from it was the most breathtakingly handsome man Aurora Rose had ever seen.

Not that she had seen that many, of course. In either of her childhoods.

He was as magnificent as the deer: tall, well-muscled, sleek, and healthy. He tossed his head of thick, shining brown hair like an animal’s mane. His face looked like it had been carved by an ancient sculptor whose skill had never been surpassed: strong nose, strong chin, high cheekbones whose apples were still a little soft and pink with youth. Long eyelashes. Sparkling brown eyes.

He was reaching out to the deer with one upturned hand.

Suddenly, she noticed a shining steel sword on his hip, its grip in easy reach, its blade no doubt deadly sharp.

He was going to kill the deer. He was
hunting
it.

“NO!”

Aurora Rose ran forward, throwing herself at the handsome, awful man.

She had rediscovered a world of beauty and nature and life and animals, and not ten minutes later, here was someone all too ready to destroy it.

“STOP IT! STOP!” she screamed.

The man looked up, alarmed.

The deer cocked its head and bounded off.

The man blinked, and his face broke into a happy grin.

“It’s
you
!” he cried.

Just as she was about to pummel him with her fists, he put his arms out and wrapped her in a gigantic hug.

“What?” She pushed at his arms desperately, with a growing panic. “LET GO OF ME! GO AWAY!”

“I can’t believe it’s you,” the man said again, heedless of her actions. He closed his eyes and squeezed her like a bear. She stopped fighting for a moment, suddenly wondering how she knew what a bear squeeze felt like.

“Who the hell are you?!”
she finally demanded, getting ahold of herself. With one hand free, she managed to lean back and slap him across the face.

She wasn’t sure who was more surprised, him or her. She had never done anything like that in her entire life. She had never hit
anyone.
In any memory.

The man put her down and looked less hurt than confused, like a boy whose toy had stopped working correctly. The red marks of her fingers angrily stung his face, but he didn’t seem to notice.

He stepped back, taking in her tangled hair, her ragged dress, her bloody and pitch-covered face, the mint stalk still hanging out the side of her mouth. “You escaped? From the castle, right? Are you all right?”

“I…
did
escape,” she allowed.

He waited.

She continued to regard him silently.

“You don’t remember me?” He tried very hard not to sound hurt.

“I remember a
lot
of things,” she said. “
Too
many things. None of it makes sense. I don’t really remember you. Things are kind of confused.”

She hated sounding apologetic. The man had basically just assaulted her.

“Oh. Well—that’s all right,” he said brightly. “Even though
I
remember
you
—and we completely
did
meet, even if you don’t remember it—we were never properly introduced. So you can’t remember my name, at least, because you never knew it.”

“All right,” she said slowly. Despite her initial distrust, his glibness, his sunny smile, and—she had to admit it—his general gorgeousness were melting her fairly quickly. His speech seemed genuine and completely free of nuance, unlike if Count Brodeur had been saying the same words.

“I’m Phillip.
Prince
Phillip.”

He executed a beautiful bow but finished it with a boyish grin.

She found herself smiling, unable to stop.

“I am Princess Aurora,” she said with the slight curtsy of one member of royalty greeting another. “Or…possibly…Briar Rose, peasant and lady of the forest. It’s a little confusing right now.”

“No, that’s actually beginning to make sense,” Phillip said with a thoughtful nod.

“Well, I’m glad it is for
somebody
,” she said dryly.

“I like
Rose
better, I think.
Aurora
implies something ethereal and unattainable. Not like a beautiful, sweet-smelling flower. May I call you Rose?”

“If you like. You could also call me Henry for all it really matters,” she said, deciding to ignore the implications of “unattainable.” Also, there was the whole double meaning of “plucking a rose,” the verbal path down which Count Brodeur certainly would have gone.

“I don’t like Henry so much. Doesn’t roll off the tongue,” the prince quipped. “
Aurora
does, though: Aurora, Aurora, Aurora. Oh…maybe it doesn’t.”

Why, when just moments ago she had been having a crisis over her very existence, torn between two lives she seemed to have led, was she suddenly being so ridiculous? This prince was completely distracting her.

This prince whom she had caught
hunting
in her dreamworld.

“Why were you killing that deer?” she demanded, recovering her anger.

“Killing?” he asked, eyes wide with confusion. “I wasn’t trying to kill it. I was trying to talk to it.”

“You. Um. What?”

“You…I was trying to rescue you. In the castle.” He pointed. She looked. She felt a moment’s stinging disappointment. Here she was thinking she had wandered off into the wilds of the world, away from everyone, never to see another living human again…and there loomed the castle, just one ridge of trees away. Covered in thick black vines and floating in a murky haze of dust. A little flock of blackbirds flew by in the foreground, not giving a whit about the strangeness of the scene or the plight of the humans captured within.

“There’s some sort of force keeping me out, though,” he said, frowning.

“Thorns. They’re called thorns,” she said helpfully.

“No, besides that,” he said with a gentle smile. “I keep hacking at the vines, and they grow back thicker. Then I remembered how close you were to the animals of the forest, and I thought maybe they could help. I was trying to talk to the deer.”

“You were…trying…to talk to the deer? To get it to help rescue me?” she asked slowly, trying to make sure she understood correctly.

“Well,” the prince stammered, suddenly flushing. “I mean, it seemed like
you
could almost talk with the animals. They were all around you when I met you, all these wild animals—very close to you. It didn’t seem unreasonable….I don’t know…I ran out of other options.”

“Oh, oh, you were, ah…”

She was in danger of falling into hysterics. She could see that. She tried to control her laughter. She only half succeeded.

“Talking to a…no, that’s sweet.”

The prince shrugged helplessly and smiled again. She felt herself warming to him. A person—a boy—who could laugh at himself was instantly likable. Maleficent might have been many things, but self-deprecating wasn’t one of them.

“All right,
Prince Phillip
,” she said. “You were trying to rescue me. How did you
know
me? Before?”

“I didn’t
know
you,” the boy said with a sigh. “I
loved
you. We loved each other.”

“We did?” She blinked in surprise.

He looked less
hurt
this time than
frustrated.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”

She shook her head. “It’s not like that. I just told you. I have
too many
memories. Why don’t
you
tell
me
about
us,
starting from when we first met?”

“We met once upon a—” He stopped what he was saying suddenly, and shook his head. “I came upon you in a clearing deep in the woods. I was on my way to the castle. I was supposed to meet the princess I was going to marry. For the first time. Meet, I mean. Not marry for the first time. The whole thing was arranged when we were children.”

She stared at him hard. There was too much information in what he said; she had to untangle it from the beginning.

“That castle,” she finally said, pointing at the vine-covered monstrosity that was now behind them.

“Yes. That castle.”

“You were riding to
that
castle. There.”

“In the real world, yes,” Phillip said.

“To marry the princess of that castle.”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” She twisted a lock of hair around her finger, thinking. “Who was it?”