A Wicked Thing Read online

  “Pardon me,” Aurora said. Her voice sounded far off. Even those two polite, meaningless little words exhausted her. “But I don’t know who you are.”

  The woman started, a slight frown forming between her eyebrows, as though surprised that Aurora had spoken. She stretched her lips into a thin smile, but the king beamed. “I am King John the Third, ruler of Alyssinia for the past ten years, and this is my wife.” He gestured vaguely at the woman, who bobbed her head.

  “You may call me Iris.”

  Aurora nodded. Her hair tickled her cheek.

  “My daughter, Isabelle, is the young thing hiding over there,” the king continued. “Isabelle?”

  “Don’t be shy, dear,” a woman said. “Greet the princess.” She pushed a small brown-haired girl forward. The girl blushed. She looked eight or nine years old. When she curtsied, her whole body shook. “And of course you’ve met our son, Rodric.”

  Rodric bowed, his hair flopping about his face.

  “Well,” the king said. “Now that we’re all acquainted, I think we had better make the announcement, don’t you?”

  The queen looked Aurora up and down, taking in her dust-covered feet and the blood spotted across her hand. “I am sure the people will forgive you, my dear, if you are a little less than pristine. Just this once. You have come rather a long way to join us.”

  “Oh, I think she looks lovely,” the king said with a grin. “Quite quaint. Come along then, come along. Sir Stefan,” he said to a man beside him. “Please send out the heralds. A little extra pomp and circumstance, if you please. It is hardly a normal day.”

  The man bowed stiffly and set off down the corridor. The king followed him, and then the queen, snatching Aurora’s hand again as she passed. Aurora stumbled forward, trying to keep up with the woman’s hurried pace. The courtiers fell into step behind, and the whispering began again, a surging rush that pressed against the inside of Aurora’s skull and shoved her thoughts aside. The queen held her hand so tightly that it throbbed.

  “Say nothing,” the queen said in her ear as they turned onto another corridor and headed down some sweeping stairs. “You only need to smile. We will take care of the rest.”

  The rest of what? Aurora wondered, but she could not challenge this severe, elegant stranger. Each footstep echoed in her head, driving in the thought that her parents were dead, dead, and a century had passed.

  They reached a large set of doors with standing bears carved into the wood. The hallway felt familiar, an echo of the last time she had seen it before her tower door had been locked, but every difference jumped out, breaking up the picture into a hundred jarring fragments. The bright red of the banners, like blood running down the walls. The guards, dressed in red too, staring at her with disbelieving eyes. The sharp trill of trumpets, muffled and distorted by the door.

  The queen pressed Aurora’s hand against Rodric’s arm, squeezing until the fabric bunched beneath her fingers. Then she nodded, once, her eyes shifting to her son. “Well done,” she said softly. “You will make us proud.” She paused, as though she wished to say something else, but then she simply nodded again and followed her husband through the doors.

  Aurora and Rodric waited on the threshold. Through the gap between the doors, Aurora could see flashes of color, hundreds of people, all surging together.

  “They have been waiting since morning,” Rodric said quietly. “The optimistic ones. I was certain I would have to go out and disappoint them. . . .”

  Instead, he was bringing the prize. Aurora wanted to release his arm, to step away, but her hand would not move.

  A herald’s voice rose over the crowd, so loud and clear that even Aurora could make out the words. “Presenting, for the first time, the Princess Aurora!”

  Hands pushed open the doors. Rodric stepped forward, and Aurora stumbled with him, her feet still tangling in her impractical skirts. All dressed up for a celebration, a century ago.

  The roar of the crowd hit her, knocking the breath from her lungs.

  They stepped onto a dais, with stone steps leading down to a square below. Everything else was hidden behind the mass of people, filling every space, crammed together into spots of jostling, bustling color, blurring before Aurora’s eyes. And the noise they made . . . the screaming, cheering delight, chanting her name, chanting for Rodric, celebrating like their savior had just stepped out of the mist.

  She still had blood on her finger. How improper, she thought vaguely. She burrowed it deeper into Rodric’s sleeve, clutching the material so tightly that her hand ached.

  The queen stood to the side, staring at Aurora expectantly. Slowly, carefully, Aurora sank into another curtsy. The roar grew. Hidden behind a wall of blonde hair, Aurora screwed up her eyes, fighting back the panic that clutched her chest, the scream that scratched the back of her throat. Everyone I know is dead, she thought. And yet these strangers act as though they love me.

  She held the curtsy for a long moment, her knees shuddering under the skirts. One. Two. Three. Then she released her grimace and stood up straight, pulling her face back into something neutral, if not a smile.

  The king was speaking now, his voice booming over the crowd. Words about hope. A new era. How proud he was of his son. Aurora could barely listen. It was important, she knew, to understand what was going on, but she could only stare at the sea of faces, the hundreds and thousands of strangers watching her, like she was something from their dreams.

  And then Rodric was bowing, and the crowd was cheering, and the guards were steering them back into the castle. Aurora concentrated on each step, on keeping her knees steady, on avoiding the treacherous, ill-chosen hem.

  The door thudded behind them. The queen hurried to Aurora’s side. “I think that went well,” she said.

  “And that’s just the beginning!” the king said, half to Aurora, and half to the courtiers who still milled around them. “We will prepare a big celebration for you. An engagement presentation, a ball of some kind, and the wedding, of course . . .”

  “I don’t—” The words were no louder than a breath. Every muscle inside her ached in protest, but the feeling was dull, faraway. The pain of another girl, in another time. She could not drag it into a coherent thought, so she let the protest melt on the air, unspoken.

  “In the meantime,” he continued, as though he had not heard, “I’ll organize a dinner for our two young lovebirds. Food. Candles. Conversation. Would you like that, Rodric?”

  “Yes,” Rodric said. “Thank you.”

  “Excellent, excellent.” The king clapped his hands together. “Come along then, son. We have many things to speak about.”

  Rodric kissed Aurora’s hand. Foreign lips among speckles of blood. Their eyes met. His cheeks were pink. Aurora curtsied without a word.

  The prince bowed. His footsteps clattered down the corridor as he and the king walked away.

  “Ruth, please find a room for the princess,” the queen said. “In the east wing, if you would. Third floor. And find her a maid—someone we can trust. Or at least, someone no one else will.”

  The maid curtsied.

  “I have a room,” Aurora said. Even that tiny protest took enormous effort, and as she spoke the words, she wondered why, out of all things, that was what she chose to say. She had spent her whole life in that tower, dreaming of the day she would be allowed to leave. But her spotless, ageless bedroom was her only remaining connection to the past. It was the only thing left that was hers.

  The queen would not allow her even that small concession. “Oh, you don’t want to stay in that dusty old tower,” she said, and she turned and looked at Aurora. Really looked at her, into her eyes. Her smile was so thin that her lips vanished into her cheeks. “Allow us to take care of you. We are so happy to have you here.”

  Aurora looked at her feet. Heavy silks ballooned around her, so she took up three times as much space as the other women of court. The small group of nobles watched her expectantly. Waiting for her to speak. T
he silence pressed in. “Thank you,” she said. She could think of nothing else to say.

  The nobles continued to watch her. Two women, with matching purple feathers skewered into the knots of their hair, leaned together, covering their mouths with their hands.

  “She does not seem quite bright,” one of the women murmured. The other giggled and smacked her with her fan.

  The queen smiled. “Carina, Alexandra,” she said. The woman who had whispered stood up straighter, her gloved hand falling to smooth her skirts. “You are no longer needed. I am sure the princess will call upon you if she requires any of your ample wisdom.”

  The women flushed. They curtsied to the queen, and then hurried away. Nobody spoke after that.

  When the maid returned, she was followed by a girl with huge eyes and bushy brown hair. She looked about fourteen.

  “This is Betsy,” the first maid said. “Her mother has worked in the castle for years. She is young, but hardworking. I think she will be a good fit for the princess.” Betsy kept her eyes on the floor, her knees half-bent in a perpetual curtsy, but even her skin seemed to glow with pride at the praise.

  “Very well,” the queen said. “And you have a room prepared?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Then we will go now.” She turned to the nobles who lingered around them, some still watching Aurora with fascination, others plucking at their sleeves and staring absentmindedly at the walls, as though they had tired of the proceedings. “Thank you for joining us for this occasion,” the queen said. “If the women return to our suite, I believe the maids will have laid out lunch. I will join you as soon as I can.”

  The watching women curtsied, almost as one, and the queen swept Aurora away.

  “Insufferable,” the queen murmured. “But we do what must be done.”

  Once again, Aurora was led through the winding corridors of the castle, past paintings in gilt frames, of forests and queens and conquering heroes. Small tables covered in flowers waited around every corner, filling the hallways with a dying sweetness. Guards and maids bowed and curtsied as they passed, but the queen did not pause.

  Eventually, they emerged from a staircase onto a corridor that was empty except for a few paintings and a single door, midway between the stairs and the point where the corridor turned. An ornate silver lock rested below the handle. The door was slightly ajar.

  “Here we are,” the older maid said. “All ready for the princess.”

  The room was large and square, with all the clinical tidiness of a space kept ready for any temporary guest. A four-poster bed filled one corner, and a couple of soft chairs sat around a low table in the center. Logs had been placed in the small fireplace, but the tongs and shovel and extra wood were missing. A few lonely books slumped on an otherwise empty shelf, and a plain-faced clock ticked out the seconds on the wall. The windows had been thrown open, but the fresh air did little to mask the musty smell of disuse.

  “It will do,” the queen said. No one asked Aurora’s opinion. “Betsy, make sure that Aurora is refreshed before her dinner with my son. Ruth and I will find something suitable for her to wear.”

  Aurora gripped the sides of her skirt. She had been wearing the same dress for over a hundred years. Part of her itched to tear it off, to throw the heavy skirts away, but the fabric was familiar against her skin, her legs protected by layers upon layers of silk.

  “Your dresses will be too old-fashioned for comfort now,” the queen added, “even if the moths have left them. And you will not want to linger in the past.” She rested a hand on Aurora’s shoulder. “The best way to deal with change,” she said in a lower voice, “is to embrace it. Forget what you knew before. Your place is with us, Aurora.”

  Ruth and the queen left, Betsy filled an iron bathtub with hot water, and Aurora sank into it, letting it scald her skin red. Betsy washed the dust from Aurora’s hair, her fingers gentle against the tangles, and began to chatter, quietly at first, but then louder and with more confidence, about Aurora, about how honored she was to work for her. Aurora did not take in a word. She stared at the unburned wood in the fireplace, not really seeing it at all.

  “Would you please leave me?” she said softly, once her hair had been towel-dried and she sat in a robe. “I want a moment to myself.”

  Betsy bit her lip, but she curtsied without protest. “Of course, Princess.”

  With the maid gone, Aurora waited for the hollowness inside her chest to turn into tears. The pressure grew, bursting against her ribs, and Aurora sank into one of the chairs, but she did not cry. None of it felt real enough for her to cry.

  I am here, she told herself. I am here, and I cannot go back.

  The fireplace stared blankly back at her. The clock ticked on the wall. But Aurora did not cry.

  THREE

  Once upon a time, when wishes still came true, Alyssinia was ruled by a beloved king and his gentle wife.

  Aurora’s parents stared up from the page. In the picture, her father’s beard was too thick, her mother too tall, but there they stood, the idea of them, carefully painted and within her reach. She ran her finger down the image, tracing the bumps and flow of the paint.

  Aurora had found the book on the otherwise sparse bookshelf. The Tale of Sleeping Beauty. Its corners were battered, the leaf somewhat worn, as though it had been read again and again by the castle’s visitors through the years. Each page was accompanied by an illustration, painted copies of the tapestries she had seen on her tower walls only a few hours before. And the words . . . Aurora swallowed them with feverish speed, running her eyes back and forth over the sentences as though they would fade if left unseen.

  The kingdom flourished, but the king and queen suffered a great sorrow. They desperately longed for a child. They hoped, and they wished, and they dreamed, but they grew older, and they remained alone. Then, one day, when they had almost ceased to hope, they had a beautiful baby girl. They named her Aurora.

  All in the kingdom rejoiced for three days and three nights, and the king and queen threw a feast in the baby girl’s honor, inviting all the neighboring princes, friends, and even the common folk to celebrate with them. However, there was one creature they did not invite: the witch Celestine, a cold and powerful woman who lived in a tower deep in the forest, and the only being that the people of Alyssinia had to fear.

  Aurora’s history books spoke of several powerful witches through the centuries, but none had ever been as terrible as Celestine. When she thought she had been slighted, when she believed that someone had cheated her, or simply when she thought the kingdom’s joy had grown too great, she would attack. She destroyed crops and sent plagues that killed people with no apparent cause or cure. She bewitched men into committing horrific deeds and tricked foreign allies into claiming some insult that had never occurred. Some even said she had drained Alyssinia’s magic away, so that no one could enjoy power but she. But the naïve and the desperate would still go to her tower, begging for solutions to their problems. She would offer them all their hearts desired, for unthinkable costs, and then laugh as she twisted their dreams into living horrors—exactly what they asked for, but broken in ways they had never thought to forbid.

  Celestine saw herself as a queen in her own right. Her exclusion from the celebration of Aurora’s birth had been the worst kind of slight.

  Filled with rage at being ignored, the witch appeared suddenly in the middle of the banquet and, before anyone could stop her, gathered baby Aurora in her arms. With a needle, she stabbed Aurora’s tiny fingertip and placed a curse upon her. Sometime before the princess’s eighteenth birthday, she would prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall into a terrible sleep.

  “But I am not heartless,” Celestine said, “and it would be a wicked thing to allow such beauty to go to waste. My gift to this child is true love. She will sleep only until she tastes the kiss of her beloved, and then she shall awaken, as fresh and as beautiful as before.”

  In all the years that the
curse had chased her, Aurora had never heard anyone speak of “true love” as its cure. It sounded like a wild fantasy, a romantic little detail thrown in over the decades, when the reality of the curse had faded away.

  Surely people did not really believe it.

  The king and queen burned every spinning wheel they found in the kingdom and launched a desperate search for Celestine, but the witch was nowhere to be found. And so Princess Aurora grew up, spending her days in a tower in the castle, hiding from the world, locked away from those who would harm her. But curses cannot be broken so easily. On the night before her eighteenth birthday, Aurora was enchanted by Celestine. She pricked her finger on a forgotten spinning wheel and slipped into the deepest sleep.

  The king and queen tried everything to awaken their daughter. Every spell in the land was cast upon her. Every man was sent to hunt for the witch. Every prince from every kingdom came to try to awaken her with a kiss, but the Sleeping Beauty slumbered on.

  Aurora tried to picture them, countless strangers, coming into her tower and kissing her while she slept. Princes and nobles, people she had never spoken to, men now old or dead, all bowing before her, pressing their lips to hers, expecting her to gasp in delight and open her eyes again.

  An itch crawled under her skin, like something foreign, something unwanted, had nestled inside her.

  As the years trickled past, the kingdom of Alyssinia fell into ruin. When the good king and queen died, the line leading back to the great King Edward himself ended. Lords and kingdoms fought over the throne. War came to the land for the first time in centuries. The people suffered, and all the magic in the kingdom melted away, except in that one room, where that one girl slept peacefully on.

  And one day, not too long from now, a handsome prince, the chosen future leader of our people, will kiss the princess and awaken her and all the magic that the world forgot. He and the princess will marry and return peace and prosperity to the land.

  And we will all live happily ever after.