Thornspell (21 page)

Sigismund was smiling now too. “Wenceslas was sure that there must have been a kiss in the mix somewhere.”

“I think there were many kisses,” Balisan observed dryly, “and considerably more than that, since he ended up taking his human form for her sake, and their children were the ones that brought the blood of the dragon into your family line. Their son,” he added softly, “was the first to be known as the Young Dragon.”

“And the sword?” asked Sigismund. “Where does Parsifal come into this?” He raised his own brows at Balisan’s look. “What?”

“You know the story well,” the dragon said. “You should be able to work it out.”

Sigismund shook his head, thinking that he was too tired to work anything out. The evening star was out and the moon rising, its crescent a little fuller than it had been the previous night. If you looked at it from a certain angle, Sigismund thought, it could almost be a question mark. He felt the ache of the flute’s last song, like an answering question in his throat.

“I think he has worked enough things out for one day.” Rue’s voice spoke from the darkened room behind them, and then she too stepped out onto the balcony, looking from one to the other. “The Parsifal story has many variants, but all have threads in common: the lady who is both loathly and fair, the presence of a sorceress and also of a woman who acts as a wise counselor. Perhaps it is my faie inheritance, but I have always understood this to mean that the knight Parsifal was loved by a dragon, who at times took human form.”

Balisan pressed his hands together and inclined his head gracefully. “You are right, Princess,” he said, “and the sword Quickthorn was her gift to him. There is much of our power in it, which means that it has a will of its own and is an ally to the one who holds it, not a servant. It did not come to Sigismund at my request, but of its own free will.”

“So you see, it is exactly like one of those old stories,” Rue said, smiling at Sigismund. “Only better, because you are in it.”

Sigismund felt his heart quicken and was almost certain that Balisan was smiling too, somewhere behind his enigmatic expression. Rue looked from one to the other through the dusk.

“You do look alike,” she said slowly. “It’s something about the shape and color of your eyes. But,” she added, speaking to Balisan, “you told me that you would not keep him long.”

Balisan’s smile reflected the moon’s curve. “He had a lot of questions, despite having worked out so many answers today. But I will leave you both now and pay my respects to the King and Queen.”

“I have told them you are here,” Rue said, “and in what form. They are expecting you.” She sank in a curtsy, answering his bow, and then came to stand beside Sigismund. She had changed her clothes, he saw, and was wearing something even richer and more formal than the dress in the belvedere. It had a velvet surcoat and cobweb sleeves, and a brocade skirt crumbed with jewels. Her hair curled and twisted down her back beneath a coronal of golden flowers.

Sigismund thought she looked very beautiful and every inch a great princess, not at all like his ragged Rue. He could smell the familiar elusive rose of her perfume and was trying not to remember kissing her in the belvedere, for that brief dizzy time when they thought they had already won against the Margravine.

Perhaps that was all the kisses had been, he thought now, just part of the excitement of thinking the spell had been lifted.

Rue rested her arms on the balustrade. “I am sorry,” she said, “for leaving you like that. But there was so much happening, such a jumble of people, and my parents—”

“You had to be with them, I know,” Sigismund said, determined to be reasonable despite the tightness in his throat. “And I don’t want you to think that you owe me anything for undoing the spell, chosen prince or not.” He kept his eyes fixed on the evening star, trying to focus on that and not her warm presence so close beside him. “The truth is that I always wanted to be the one to lift the spell, ever since Syrica first told me the story. It was my free choice,” he added, thinking about his conversation with Annie.

“So I don’t owe you anything. I do see that.” Rue’s tone was so thoughtful that it took Sigismund a moment to realize that she was laughing at him. She put her hand out and rested it on top of his. “Oh, Sigismund, don’t you see that I owe you everything? We all do. But that”—she put the fingertips of her other hand against his mouth before he could say anything—“isn’t why I love you.”

After that, neither of them said anything for quite some time. Drowning, thought Sigismund, and sank further into the deep water that was his mouth on hers, her arms twisted close around his neck and his twined beneath the fall of her hair. When he finally raised his head, Sigismund thought the moon looked considerably less like a question mark. The music from the palace below was louder now, viol and harp joining merrily with flute and horn and drifting into the night.

“We’ll be missed at the feast,” Sigismund said, but he did not step back or make any move to let her go. He caught the ghost of her smile.

“My parents will not be there yet,” she said. “They wished for private speech with Lord Balisan, and said that they would wait afterward for me to bring you to them.”

“Ah.” Sigismund let her hair run through his fingers like water. “I suppose,” he added after a moment, “that I had better call you Aurora now, since that’s your real name.”

“Aura,” said Rue. “I could never manage Aurora when I was small, so I called myself Aura instead, and the name stuck.”

“Aura then,” Sigismund murmured. “But I’ll miss Rue.”

She leaned back a little, her hands still linked behind his neck, considering this. “I think I will too, a little. But I have to learn to be Aura again now and live in the waking world.”

Sigismund nodded, recognizing the truth in this. “Aura,” he said again, letting her name hang on the night air. “It suits you.” But he knew that she would always be Rue in his heart. He paused, struck by a sudden thought. “So did Balisan know about you? Did he put the rue in that treatise on boar hunting, or was it someone else?”

The slim straight line was back between Aura’s brows. “I don’t know. I took the herb as my personal emblem when I was old enough to understand the Margravine’s curse. That’s why Syrica took rue from the gardens here to be one of my anchors in the world.” She shrugged. “But I have no reason to believe that Lord Balisan knew that, or about my limited ability to move and act within the boundaries of the spell.”

But you never really know with Balisan, thought Sigismund. He’s very good at keeping his own counsel.

Aura was right, he thought. They had been part of exactly the kind of story that Wenceslas would tell on a summer evening in the West Castle stable yard. There had been good faie and evil, a faithless friend and others who stood true, an enchanted princess and a magic sword, and a dragon that took human shape and walked amongst men. And although that story was over, the days ahead no longer seemed colorless and dull.

“Right now,” said Sigismund, sharing this thought, “I feel that the next part of our story could be even more extraordinary than the beginning.” He took a step back, slipping an arm around Aura’s waist so they stood side by side, watching the constellations flower overhead.

“But I suspect,” she said, after a time, “that the beginning is the part that the world will remember. People may even tell of it for another hundred years, the story of the Prince and the Wood.”

“They will if Wenceslas has anything to do with it.” Sigismund let his arm tighten, just for a moment. “But he’s bound to embellish the original.” He smiled, remembering the tower of mirrors. “He’ll insist that the sleeping princess is woken by a kiss.”

Aura turned and brushed her lips against his. “And you?” she murmured. “What will you insist on?”

Sigismund tilted his face to the moon, which could never, he decided, have looked anything like a question mark. “Only that they live happily ever after. That’s the ending I want.”

And they went down from the tower together, to the lights and the laughter and the friends who waited for them there.

Helen Lowe
won an inaugural Robbie Burns National Poetry Award in 2003 and was the recipient of a NZ Society of Authors/Creative New Zealand award for emerging writers. Helen has had short stories and poetry published and anthologized in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, and currently fronts a regular poetry feature for a local radio station (Plains 96.9 FM).
Thornspell
is Helen’s first novel, and she is already hard at work on her next one.

In addition to her writing life, Helen is a second-
dan
black belt in aikido and represented her university in the sport of fencing. She lives in a ninety-year-old house with a woodland garden in Christchurch, New Zealand, which she shares with her partner, Andrew, and two cats.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Helen Lowe

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lowe, Helen

Thornspell / Helen Lowe. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: In this elaboration of “Sleeping Beauty,” Prince Sigismund, having grown up in a remote castle dreaming of going on knightly quests, has had only a passing interest in the forbidden wood lying beyond the castle gates until a brief encounter with a beautiful and mysterious lady changes his life forever.

[1. Fairy tales. 2. Princes—Fiction.] I. Sleeping Beauty. English. II. Title.

PZ8.L9474Th 2008

[Fic]—dc22

2008004149

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eISBN: 978-0-375-89150-2

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