Once Upon a Dream (24 page)

Aurora stumbled backward, hands out to either side, feeling for trees. There was nothing she could do. She couldn’t run blindly deeper into the woods. She didn’t have Phillip or even her own voice. She had
nothing
.

And then the last tiny part of her that was still Aurora Rose, angry and rightfully terrified, remembered it was
her
dream. She could have anything she wanted. If she knew what she wanted.

A sword appeared in her right hand. Without looking, she knew it was an exact replica of Phillip’s. There would probably be a nick on its left edge.

The demon swayed sickeningly from one side to another, like a snake trying to decide which way to pounce.

Aurora Rose screamed again to give herself strength. But again, nothing came out.

The thing suddenly rushed at her. Inhumanly fast, with no warning.

She raised her sword.

In complete silence:

And suddenly, there was light and speed and
noise
again. The demon screeched and howled and whipped its forked tail around. The princess swung her sword again, trying not to lose her advantage by staring at where she had sliced the thing in half: the flat, raw wound and white-and-black ichor that issued from it. Its tail kept wiggling on its own while its head and body squirmed and drifted through the mist.

Sunlight slashed through the fog and suddenly her scream turned on, hoarse and ragged and horrible, and everything was bright and painful.

When her sword connected this time it made a ringing metallic noise—as if it had crashed against something equally metal and dangerous.

“ROSE!”
Phillip cried out as he saw her raise her sword again.

It was
his
sword she had struck; it was his body she was aiming for. The fog had thinned some, and she could see his confused, defensive stance.

“You almost struck me…” he started to say, then noticed the piece of demon on the ground that twisted and sprayed viscous black blood from where she had hacked it off.

“But where…” he started.

The other half of the demon flung itself out of the fog at the prince’s face. Phillip immediately deflected the attack, hitting it to the side.

Before she could even think about it, Aurora Rose raised her sword and hacked at the thing again. While her blow didn’t cut cleanly through this time, it
did
injure it, causing it to scrabble and scream on the ground, grinding its head into the dirt. Phillip took careful aim and stabbed the demon in the throat.

The two watched, heaving, as the thing hissed and died.

Phillip shakily ran his hands through his hair. It was unclear if he was recovering from the brief fight, the surprise attack, or Aurora Rose’s almost killing him by accident.

“Nice job,” he finally said, pointing at the two halves of the creature on the ground.

She looked at him—he was a little pale, to be sure, but he spoke as if she had just recited a poem from memory or some other little mundane thing. She didn’t understand fully how he could be so…blasé.

“Thanks for the help,” she said, trying to match his tone. Maybe it was the princely thing to do. “We…make a great team.”

“We do indeed—although it seemed like you were doing pretty well on your own. A princess
and
a monster slayer. They’ll be singing epics about
you
!” he said with a grin.

She gave a courtly curtsy in response. “All in a day’s work.”

“Nice
sword
,” he added. “Where did you get it?”

She looked at the sword in her hand, which was balanced so well she had honestly forgotten it was there. It was almost a part of her already.

“Oh, this old thing? I, um…summoned it?”

“Handy,” Phillip said, nodding.

The last bit of blood from the demon bubbled up and hissed into the ground. Its body faded.

“I wonder if there was a real demon in the real, waking world that matched this one,” the prince said. “I wonder if it’s dead over there, too.”

“Well, it’s dead
here now
. But there may be more. And we won’t see them coming,” she said, shivering. The fog was cold and swirled around them again. Icy little tendrils caught her ankles.

“Hey,” Phillip said with a grin. “You know what
wind
is like, right?”

“Of course I know what wind is like! I didn’t live in a windowless cave in
either
life. I’m not a…”

“So summon one and blow this all away!”

She stopped her rant and thought about what he had just said.

Of…course. Of course she could.

She closed her eyes.

She imagined the little bit of breeze that had managed to come through when she cracked a window in the castle. The hot and dry—but not ostensibly tainted—air of the Outside. She remembered the bailey of the castle, the tiny dust devils that would sometimes wend their way across it, among the scattered and guerilla garden plots.

She remembered being in a meadow at the edge of the forest in the fall, feeling chilly but unable to stop watching the birds play in the growing ferocity of the air. The strong fliers, the jays and the woodpeckers and the crows, cavorted like eagles.

She felt something tickling her cheek.

She opened her eyes.

There was a small dust devil in front of her: it was lifting up twigs and leaves and scattering them, playing at her feet almost like a cat.

She arched an eyebrow—unconsciously imitating Maleficent.

The wind grew, widening its invisible arms and sweeping more detritus into its center. Then it shot straight up into the air. It stretched into the sky, its long, powerful tail whipping behind it. Everything loose and small was dragged up into its vortex: leaves, pebbles, the ends of the princess’s hair and the tips of Phillip’s cape—and the fog.

Great swathes of heavy gray mist funneled into the sky, turning the whirlwind dark.

The princess shielded her eyes as the sunlight grew clearer and brighter, all of the darkness pulled away into the whirlwind.

In the forest surrounding them there were distant strange cries of demons being caught in the cleansing light.

It wasn’t horrible, the princess realized.

It was strangely satisfying.

The winds grew wider and wider and slower and slower until they seemed to fill the sky…and then they gradually slackened, leaving the sky as clear and blue and perfect as a summer’s day after a sudden thunderstorm.

Phillip was grinning like a boy watching a really good magic trick—even laughing out loud when it was over. He grabbed her and impulsively kissed her on the cheek—quick and hard and a little sloppy and wonderful.

Then he saw the blood on her face, the gash in her head.

“You’re hurt!” he said, embarrassed that he hadn’t noticed it before.

She shrugged. It hurt a little when she wiggled her brow; she could feel the skin pulling and cracking. Otherwise, it was almost unnoticeable.

“I was killing a demon,” she said. “It happens in battle sometimes.”

Phillip grinned.

“Right you are. Well, shall we?” he asked, indicating the path. She nodded and began to move forward, wishing she had summoned a belt and a sheath for her cumbersome sword. But she didn’t have a good picture of what those things looked like from
either
life—and frankly, she was a little spent from summoning the wind.

“You know,” he began casually, “even though the fog is gone, I think it’s still safer if we hold hands. You know. Just in case. Don’t want to get separated again.”

“Of course,” the princess said with a smile.

Somehow their footsteps were lighter now—despite the fog, the demon, the fear, and the blood. Somehow everything seemed easier and better.

She might not be able to remember her past correctly, and she still had to defeat Maleficent and deal with her parents…but she could summon and move things with her mind and had just killed her first demon. She could
do
it.

That was pretty great.

THE WOODS WERE
definitely changing: Aurora and Phillip could no longer see the sky at all because of the ancient tall trees that stretched far overhead. Pines and other shaggy-barked species shot a hundred feet straight up on massive trunks, some of which were as thick around as a small house. The canopies that spread out at their tops blocked out most of the sun; only a rare dappled shaft made it through. But it didn’t feel claustrophobic. The absence of light kept the underbrush low: moss on ancient fallen logs, puddles of shade flowers, mushrooms and tiny lilies. It was airy and endless like the largest cathedral ever imagined.

The prince and princess walked with light hearts, tiny figures in this primeval world, seemingly the only ones in it.

“We are now getting close to the heart of the forest—where the cottage should be,” Phillip said cheerfully. “It doesn’t
exactly
look like it does in the real world, but it’s close enough. We should get there by late tomorrow morning.”

But the more deeply they progressed, the more her memories came back.

Like suddenly being whacked in the head by a small rock, a crystalline image would explode in the insides of her mind, and she would reel for a moment:

Not only did the images come faster and longer, but each one raised a host of immediate questions and realizations that Aurora couldn’t stop.

Why was I never brave enough to travel all the way to the castle?

Holy crow, that was
my
castle!

Wait, the real one. Without the thorns…

And then the headaches would begin in earnest.

Sometimes it wasn’t a single image but a string of memories connected by a feeling or a thought. These hit her less like a rock and more like an angry bull, slamming her head and grinding her innards with its sharp hooves.

Like her studies, one of her aunts’ whims. Several months of practicing beautiful runes that became gold no matter what she drew them with: ink and quill, chalk on rock, stick in mud. No problems at all remembering and copying them. Some flurry of realization from her aunts and then a replacement: twenty-five ugly letters that stayed the same color as the ink. These were just as easy to remember as the golden ones, though, and it was all a game….

Not like learning in the world of the Thorn Castle. Not at all. The few things the fairies bothered to teach her came as easily as singing.

As the new/real memories revealed themselves, Aurora Rose found she had a growing collection of two different versions of the same scene, the same day, the same year—both of which fought for space and dominance in her mind.

She remembered being a young teenager, bored for days on end in the middle of the woods, impatient for something to happen, trying to hunt with the foxes, climbing trees as high as she could, lying in despair at their bases, no longer loving the happy, mindless burble of her aunts as they worked together to make dinner or wash the clothes.

Its sister memory in the Thorn Castle was of young Aurora confronting her neglectful parents, who, worse than being enraged by her sight, worse than ordering her out of their presence, just didn’t care. Like she wasn’t worth getting upset about. She found empty rooms in the keep and collapsed on couches for days, wondering what would happen if she died. Would anyone notice? She became hungry and would sometimes rally to find a bit of food, and she grew very, very dirty.

She didn’t have time to succumb to these memories, to pass out. To be weak. To throw up and recover and stumble a few steps and then collapse again. Phillip had said that if she didn’t have many more spells, they would be there in a couple of hours. And he was very patient.

But she
wanted
to go on.

Sometimes concentrating on one lovely thing about each memory helped her remain upright. Like the foxes…she had
hunted
with
foxes
! Beautiful red-coated beasts who sometimes tangled under her feet like cats and let her scratch their throats. That had really happened. Focusing on their beauty kept her walking—shakily—and kept her stomach from reeling.