Once Upon a Dream (29 page)

The princess just barely brought up her own weapon in time to block her.

“You. Can’t.
Sword.
Fight,” Phillip struggled to say with a few gulps of breath.

“I KNOW THAT!”
she shrieked, almost throwing her blade away. What
could
she do? Nothing. She had no useful skills, no strength, no…

And then she stopped.

Phillip was looking at her desperately.
Meaningfully.

She couldn’t
sword
fight. He was right. He was trying to tell her something.

So what
could
she do?

The little girl waited patiently at the ready, knees bent, anticipating her next move.

She probably didn’t expect an attack from something
other than
the princess.

So…

The girl suddenly stumbled backward as a rock grew out of the ground, right under her feet, like it was heaved up by frost—but quickly, making wonderful little grinding and crunchy gravel sounds as it rose.

The girl steadied herself.

“Clever,” she said. “You—”

Aurora Rose imagined another rock.

The girl pitched forward.

Another, and another and another rock.

She concentrated on raising
all
of them, in a circle around the girl’s feet. Her opponent fell forward and backward like a rag doll shaken by an angry child.

As soon as she found her footing, the girl shot the princess a look and hissed a single word:
“Disappointing.”

Immediately, Aurora Rose sank under the weight of the meaning. The ground rushed up to embrace her again as she remembered all the people who found her utterly
disappointing
:

She closed her eyes, frowning as hard as she could, trying to force pain into her head, trying to will some little bit of spirit and anger. She tried thinking of Lady Astrid again but this time felt only sadness.

“Rose…” Phillip croaked. “You were going to end it all…thought you had lost me forever. But…
I’m here
.
Always
be here. For you. Telling you…
not
to go to sleep. To…get up.”

The princess tiredly regarded the scene: the prince tied up in the background; the girl with her tiny sword; the tall, ancient trees, growing up into forever, surrounding them. The trees, which might have had something to do with her subconscious thoughts. Her memories made solid. Twice as many as a normal person had. Twice as
useless
.

The girl raised her wooden sword.

“Rose!” Phillip sobbed.

There was a creaking sound. A very, very loud creaking sound.

The girl looked around, confused.

Time became strange: it seemed to take forever for the infinitely tall, infinitely old tree to fall. The little girl looked back and forth anxiously, trying to find the source of the sound. Then there was a skip in the connected moments, like when the girl flickered out of existence, disappearing from one place and reappearing in another.

The enormous tree was halfway down…and then mostly…and then…

It smashed solidly on top of the little girl, just brushing the princess’s feet.

Phillip cried out in anguish:
“Rose!”

The depression and somnolence drained out of her as the demon hissed and bubbled and died.

“I’m all right,” she called back shakily.

The exhaustion, pain, and weakness remained, however.

“Was that…you?”

“Yes,” she answered with a faint smile. She forced herself up, using some of the branches for balance. There was no sizzle of buried thoughts. The tree was dead. She apologized to it, to the memory it represented.

When she got close she saw that unlike the other trees in the rest of the forest, it was riddled with bird holes and had large barkless patches of black, slimy wood. Not a healthy tree to begin with.

What did it all mean?

The trunk was too immense to go around so she clambered on top. She paused there, balancing for a moment among the prickly dead pine branches, and surveyed the scene below her. It was a new perspective, seeing Phillip from above.

She filed that thought for later and carefully went down the other side.

The upper part of the little girl’s body was exposed—the tree had crushed the rest of it. Her limbs and head were turned at impossible, sickening angles, and a trickle of
red
blood leaked from the side of her mouth. Her eyelashes were long and golden, and it was hard to focus on the fact that she had just been trying to kill the prince and princess. In death, at least, she seemed almost like a normal little girl.

“Sorry?” the princess said, unsure if she meant it.

The girl’s eyes shot open. Violet irises focused on hers.

“You haven’t won, Princess,” she said with a voice that creaked. “Hear this, and let’s see how you deal with it:
your parents are dead
.

“Maleficent has just killed them.”

MANY PEOPLE WERE DYING.

As midnight approached, first one and then another and then another court noble suddenly began to start bleeding. They thrashed and gasped and choked like fish thrown out on dry land.

Fauna and Merryweather flew around, frantically trying to tend to them, staunching the wounds with clean bandages here, trying a healing spell there. Nothing worked, and sometimes all it seemed to do was prolong their agony.

Flora stayed as calm as she could in the midst of it, hovering in the air,
willing
the universe to help her as she tried to reach Rose again. She had broken off a piece of her soul and sent it into the sleeping nether realm Maleficent ruled. It was a terrible place, this inside of her adopted niece’s head, with the evil fairy running rampant in it.

The sleeper tossed and turned and moaned because of whatever had happened in there, and her pricked finger had started bleeding again.

Flora bounced through dream forests and nightmare castles, fogs of worry and large blank places of stark depression and madness. The golden sparks that represented her loosely held together consciousness barely glittered in the gloom that blanketed the world.

Only later, when she had time, would she think about her poor Briar Rose and how it was possible that none of them had seen this darkness within their adopted daughter.

Now, however, was the time to
act
.

She felt the tether tying her to the real world grow taut and thin; she couldn’t go much farther. She urgently flung out her consciousness, looking for something,
anything
, that could help. But all she could see was murky, worthless gloom and confused shadow people whose spirits were entirely enslaved to Maleficent’s spell.

There! Up ahead.

Another consciousness. Not as bewitched by the false world around it. Not entirely coherent, either, but it would have to do. It was aware of itself and seemed more than harmless—it seemed like a friend.

YOU! Help her!

The soul spun around in a tizzy, looking for the source of the communication.

FIND HER!
Flora ordered frantically.
She is
…that way
.

Golden sparkles aligned themselves in the direction of the blackest part of the world, the deepest part of Rose’s mind—the place Flora couldn’t go.

Your release…everyone’s freedom depends on it. HELP HER ESCAPE. Help her find us….

And then, like a wet stocking pulled too tightly on a clothesline, the strongest of the three fairies was pulled back, painfully and quickly, to the waking world.

“Flora!”

She opened her eyes, torn between fury and worry. Her cohorts were unlikely to have summoned her for anything that wasn’t important.

Merryweather had her by the arm and was already dragging her. Her eyes were bright; fairy tears, sparkling and sharp, coursed down her cheeks.

“It’s
them
this time!” she cried. “Oh, Flora, she got
them
!”

Not wanting to believe what she suspected, Flora let herself be led into the throne room.

There, Fauna was hysterically flitting from king to queen, who just scant minutes earlier had been peaceful and sleeping in their giant seats. Now they shivered and convulsed like rag dolls as blood poured out of their hearts.

“But
why
?” Flora cried. “She doesn’t
need
them!”

In life King Stefan was both a good king and a faintly humorous man, with his droopy mustache and calm demeanor. Now he rocked and heaved inhumanly, his long face pale, his skin ashen and waxy. The heavy state robes he wore in anticipation of the royal wedding day were thrashed into rags as he tried to escape his own death, still asleep.

And Queen Leah…her mouth twitched and pulled from side to side like a hideous puppet’s, her sad, peaceful features melting and expanding with desperation.

It had been terrible to watch the others be killed this way, but the fairies had known the king and queen since long before they had taken the throne. These humans and their daughter, whom the fairies had watched over, were the closest things to
children
they had ever had.

So they might be forgiven for missing a few tiny sounds, easily lost in the calamity of the sleeping castle but surely audible to the ears of a fairy.

The sound of stone cracking. The sound of shards falling away, tinkling like glass.

The sound of triumphant black wings stretching out of their stony prison. The cackling caw of an evil fairy’s raven, taking flight to discover what had become of his mistress.

Her power was growing and the raven was flying home.

THE THORNS HOLDING
the prince back were already turning black and crumbling away. Aurora Rose helped them along, pulling and ripping, but she didn’t really need to do much; they decayed into nothing under her touch.

“Rose!”

As soon as his arms were free, Phillip wrapped her in a tight hug. She bore it because it felt nice and she was too tired to do much else.

Then she collapsed on the ground like a young child or an old doll.

“Oh, Rose,” Phillip said, kneeling down next to her.

“I’ll never know,” she said, voice empty. “I’ll never know why they thought it was safer to send me away. I’ll never know if they missed me. I’ll never know if they really wanted a son instead. I’ll never hear them say ‘I’m sorry.’ Or ‘I love you.’ Or ‘It was the worst mistake we ever made.’ Or even ‘Someday, when you’re a queen, you’ll understand.’”

“Rose…” He stroked her cheek.

“I will never know what they
really
looked like!”
she shrieked. She was finding it hard to breathe. Her lungs moved and her chest heaved in great, sudden gasps, but it didn’t feel like any air was getting in. “How…they…
walked
…or
hugged
…or
laughed
…”

“Shhh.” Phillip took her in his arms again and held her tightly. “Shhh. Quiet. Breathe now. I know. It’s a terrible thing to lose your parents. Even ones you didn’t know.”

“
Even
ones?” she hiccupped angrily.

Phillip bit his lip and took a deep, patient breath. “Rose, my mother died. Remember? I had issues with her, but she was still my mother. She’s gone. She won’t see me married or made king, or enjoy any grandchildren I would have given her.”

“Oh.”

Suddenly, she felt stupid and even
more
miserable. What a selfish, horrible beast she was on top of everything else. It was like the only things that mattered were things that happened to
her
. Here was this—albeit somewhat
duplicitous
—prince with an entire past that was very real for him. And she didn’t even think about it.