“You don’t have to do this.”
“I can’t choose.”
“You can choose! You like me, don’t you?”
“Maria, of all the—”
“Hush. I’m going to ask you one final question, okay? And it’s not ladylike of me, but I don’t care.” She swallowed the lump in her throat and felt the sting of her wound. “It’s the most important question you’re ever going to answer, Heath, so give me a real answer. Give me the truth.” Their pulses had matched at some point in the last moments. She felt his heartbeat through and with her own. He shared her terror.
“Okay, Heath.” Her vision blurred as more blood spilled into her collar. “I’m terrified. But I guess… just… do you love me?”
His right hand shook. His left, wrapped around the knife, strained. “I do.”
“And God knows I love you.”
He moaned and buried his face against the back of her head. Was he weeping? His hands shook now like castanets. His knife beat against her throat, marking it with tiny, tiny slits. She stood very still, barely hanging onto consciousness.
“I love you,” Maria whimpered. “I just need you to know that before… okay? I love you. So much.”
Her legs buckled and as Maria’s consciousness vanished, she felt Heath catch her. He lowered her onto the pavement. Merciful blackness covered the pain. The golden hum that had lured her into the bookcase seized her body and shook her violently. She had no control over the convulsions or the tears or the sobs wracking her body. She saw him, as through a mist, reach for The Spindle and take back up the page she had marked. Then something at once soft and searching and possessive touched her lips. The merciful blackness threshed out the gold.
She stilled.
Hush now, my princess, she thought someone said. I love you, sweet girl. I can choose.
Maria, weary with living and filled with the favorite voice, let herself sleep.
VI.
Epilogue
Later, Maria awakened. How much later, she could not say. Had she slept a hundred years or did she awake in an instant? She did not know, but she lay against Heath’s still-warm body, curled up on the wooden floor of the library in Peles Castle.
He was dead, and Maria knew this. For though the spoken truth of love is stronger than magic and the kiss of such a love stronger than death, Heath had saved her at a cost. He had finished the spell and witched them here, and spent his life for her sake.
“Heath. Heath, wake up. Please wake up.” But Maria did not shake him. To disrupt him as he slept there, with a faint smile on his pale features, seemed wrong. She laid her head on his chest and worked her fingers into his. This corpse was not Heath. Not the Heath she knew. Unable to laugh, to smile, to ruffle her hair. Not the essence of the man she loved. That part had fled someplace holier than she was able follow herself, yet.
“I love you, darling,” she whispered, and passed her fingers over his dear face.
“He is dead, you know,” a constricted, triumphant voice purred.
Maria jumped and raised her head. Carlotta—the tour guide—pushed away from the library window and sauntered toward Maria. The gypsy wore khakis and a dark red shirt and smiled a python’s smile at Maria.
“You did this to him,” Maria growled.
“Of course.”
Carlotta—now the thing came clear to Maria—had poisoned his heart, the home of that great, pulsing love, with her golden magic and killed him. Maria clung harder to Heath’s hand and enormous, feverish tears spilled over her cheeks.
“You pitiful child,” Carlotta hissed. “You whimpering, weak, disgusting child. You thought love would win. Love will never win. Love is a lie.”
Maria kissed Heath’s hands, his lips, his forehead. She struggled to her feet. Her throat, still bleeding from the dozens of small cuts, ached.
“You never had the chance to know,” Maria spat. “Love? What have you ever known of it? You are nothing but rage and jealousy and selfishness. You are nothing but pain and throbbing darkness. That is the essence of you, witch.”
With a savage cry, Carlotta darted toward Maria and grabbed her by the throat. And as she did so, an ordinary modern interruption occurred: an interruption which, like some inconveniences may, saved Maria’s life; a tour group crossed into the library just as Carlotta laid hands on Maria: a portly assembly of British men and women, a shocked Romanian group-leader. He stared for a minute at Carlotta.
“Nelu!” she laughed hysterically, coming off Maria and hiding her hands.
“What is it you are doing, Carlotta?” His disbelieving brown eyes roamed from Maria to Carlotta, to the body lying in the center of the rug.
“It is not what you think, Nelu.”
“It is looking exactly like what I am thinking.” Nelu stepped forward and grabbed Carlotta’s upper arm. “If you are excusing me, ladies and gentlemens, we will be leaving you.”
Maria managed to live. Her heart, fed by Heath’s extraordinary love, could not lose courage. She hated herself sometimes for the ability to go on, when all she wanted was to return to that world-between-worlds when there had been nothing but warm blackness and Heath’s voice running through.
Sometimes when she thought no one was watching, at night or under her umbrella on a rainy street, or in the back of a taxi cab, Maria let herself weep. And when she wept, her mind played over and over one particular memory of Heath.
“What might have been is tantalizing.” His grip tightened on her fingers. “But what is… what you have and what you’ve lived and the life you’ve made. That’s reality.”
What might have been was tantalizing. What could have happened had she and Heath remained in the world of her birthright? Maybe he would be living. Maybe they would be married with a child of their own. Maybe—then Maria would breathe in the memory and breathe out the grief.
And if she could stand to do so, if she was home and the memory of Heath did not hurt as it sometimes did, Maria would walk to her bookshelf and take down from a secret place The Spindle. Thirty-three pages in, pockmarked by her own tears and the tears of how many other souls who had known love and separation, lived the page. The page of a communication spell. And if she felt especially alone and especially brave in that lonesomeness, Maria would recite the spell she knew well enough to need no reading light, and send a message to her mother and father. She fancied they received the messages and were comforted by them and that, though they could not respond for lack of a spell book, they thrived. Together. For perhaps, in time, love had bloomed again between them, stronger than any living death. That was, at any rate, what the history books suggested.
So, long after the murder at Peles had been forgotten by most, Maria Wied taught herself to smile again. And with every smile, an emboldening thought built her courage, stone upon stone, a palace for their love:
I love you, sweet boy. I can choose.
Historical Note
King Carol I of Romania (rule: 15th March, 1881 – 10 October, 1914) and his wife, the Princess Elisabeth of Wied are real figures of Romanian history: a royal couple infamously mismatched in temperament and habit. Twice I have had the thrilling experience of visiting Peles Castle, their summer palace. Both times I found myself fascinated by this soldierly king and his dreamy, artistically-inclined wife. Who were they in their private lives, and what made them so? Originally I wanted to set a retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” at Peles, but as I began to research this mysterious, estranged couple, a different and clearer path emerged: a refashioning of the classic fairytale, “The Sleeping Beauty.”
For the Princess Maria of Romania was a real person. King Carol and Queen Elisabeth’s only child, Maria was born in September of 1870. By all accounts a beautiful and precocious child, Maria died in April, 1874 at the age of three from scarlet fever. A sad but common enough tale for Victorian children. Nothing strange here—until I began to read about the princess’s burial. By the queen’s request, the princess was buried in an adult size coffin
. The little princess’s body was enclosed in several other caskets of decreasing size. Over her tombstone the queen had engraved the verse from Luke 8:53:
“Weep not, for she is not dead, but sleepeth.”
Did the queen accept her death or was she obsessed with keeping her—almost alive? Detail after detail built for me no escape: I had to retell Maria’s story in a way which made the most of these historic facts which seemed to come together so perfectly for me. I confess to growing attached to the king and queen over the course of writing this story. Never well-suited to each other, the princess’s death drove the couple farther apart:
“Elizabeth’s nerves are so shaken that the greatest care is necessary. I must confess to you that I am often anxious myself, and am much depressed by pain, sorrow, and apprehension. I get but very little sleep at night, and have repeatedly heard my poor Elizabeth cry out in her dreams: ‘Dead, dead!’. This cry of pain is each time a fresh stab in my wounded heart.”
–Carol 5th May 1874 in a letter to his father, Prince Karl Anton of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen
Despite the gap between their affections, Carol and Elisabeth did love one another and by the time of the king’s death in 1914, had reconciled and become good friends and companions. This couple and the sad fate of their daughter deeply affected me as I wrote this story. The pleasant part of fictionalizing an account of history is the fact that you can sometimes try to heal those wounds with more speed.
I have obviously taken liberties with this portion of Romanian history. Maria’s cousin Ferdinand and the Lady Elena are historical figures but Carlotta, Ioan, Cristian, and Heath are characters drawn up for the sake of a good story. The beautiful Romani people have a long and complex history and I trust I do not offend anyone by casting the most powerful character in this story as one of them. Carlotta is, perhaps, the most intricate and compelling character in the cast of She But Sleepeth. As an aside, the descriptions of her home are based off an evening I spent with a generous Romani couple, when my friends and I were welcomed with the finest brand of hospitality into their mansion to share supper.
Romania is a staggeringly beautiful nation with a history at times tumultuous and noble. I know I have done an inadequate job of translating that beauty and turbulence into story form, but I hope I have at least planted within my readers a seed of affection for a country which has become so dear to me as to feel like a second home. Peles Castle and its inhabitants have taught me much: to love deeply, to speak clearly, and to never release hope. May you, too, take these things to heart and may your wandering footsteps one day bring you to Sinaia yourself. Then you, too, can be lost in the grandeur which is Peles Castle.
-R.H.
About Rachel Heffington
Rachel Heffington lives in the dazzling state of Virginia where she enjoys a wide array of pursuits apart from her writing. Among her favorite activities are traveling, recipe development, food blogging, watercolor painting, and building a local creative community. She is a hybrid author, having previously independently published two novels, freelanced for a magazine, and had a fairytale novella published by Rooglewood Press in the Five Glass Slippers anthology.
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Other books by Rachel Heffington
The Windy Side of Care (in Five Glass Slippers)
Alisandra is determined to have her rights. She knows that she is the king’s secretly dispossessed daughter, the true heir to the throne. Prince Auguste is an imposter, and if she plays her cards right, Alis will prove it to the world! That is, if charming Auguste doesn’t succeed in winning her heart before she gets her chance…
Anon, Sir, Anon
The 12:55 out of Darlington brought more than Orville Farnham’s niece; murder was passenger. In coming to Whistlecreig, Genevieve Langley expected to find an ailing uncle in need of gentle care. In reality, her charge is a cantankerous Shakespearean actor with a penchant for fencing and an affinity for placing impossible bets. When a body shows up in a field near Whistlecreig Manor and Vivi is the only one to recognize the victim, she is unceremoniously baptized into the art of crime-solving: a field in which first impressions are seldom lasting and personal interest knocks at the front door. Set against the russet backdrop of a Northamptonshire fog, Anon, Sir, Anon cuts a cozy path to a chilling crime.
Fly Away Home
1952 New York City: Callie Harper is a woman set to make it big in the world of journalism. Liberated from all but her buried and troubled past, Callie craves glamour and the satisfaction she knows it will bring. When one of America’s most celebrated journalists, Wade Barnett, calls on Callie to help him with a revolutionary project, Callie finds herself co-pilot to a Christian man whose life and ideas of true greatness run noisily counter to hers on every point.
Rumpled
J. Grace Pennington
I.
Once Upon a Time…
If her father hadn’t gone out at that particular moment on that particular day to unload that particular load of grain, Amanda might have remained nothing more than “the miller’s daughter” to the end of her days. He wasn’t in the habit of being prompt to unload shipments. If anything he usually put it off as long as possible, which usually wasn’t until the gears ground to a stop and the motorized monotone told him the mill was empty.
That particular day was an exception. Amanda remembered ever after the moment when her father stopped gazing at the array of gears and belts, wiped the steam-flour paste from his forehead, and headed out the door to bring in more wheat.
She just kept on cranking the generator, not bothering to smear the paste from her own skin.
“Fifty. Seven. Percent. Power. Generated.” The AI didn’t know how to string words together to properly form a sentence, so it just said one word at a time. Amanda could practically hear the period between each one.
Fifty-seven percent. It would take about fifteen minutes to get to a hundred, then she could take a break. Her arms would welcome the respite. It would give her time to work on her new dress. A few stitches here and there. Trying not to cover the relative finery in flour dust. She probably wouldn’t be able to finish the dress fully for another few weeks, but there was no rush. And it would be worth it. She needed something better than calico frocks to go with her mother’s necklace. She smiled at the cold of the pearls against her chest. A new dress would allow her to wear it outside her clothes instead of under them, if nowhere else than to the town socials held every other Saturday evening.
Why wasn’t he back with a bag of wheat by now? He’d had plenty of time to go out, hoist one onto his shoulder, tug it back in, and dump it into the mill. There were only a few hours left of daylight, and they were still shy a few pounds of their quota.
Maybe he’d gotten distracted. She sighed.
“Sixty. Eight. Percent. Power. Generated.”
“I know,” she called over the clanking of the mill. She had gotten good at calculating the correlation between a turn of the crank and the percentage of power.
Her father popped his head back in. “Mandy, come out for a moment.”
She could barely hear his voice over the din, but she read his lips.
“I’m not finished,” she mouthed back.
“Come anyway. I want you to meet someone.”
She groaned. Not again.
There were two possibilities. Either this was yet another disinterested young man her father was intent on convincing of the beauty of a dusty, sweaty, poor miller’s daughter, or it was some businessman from the big city or a neighboring state or federation he thought might be the one who would finally employ her somewhere far away from the the mill, and the field, and the small town.
How many non-suitors and non-employers did her father have to waylay before he realized the truth and accepted it, like she had?
Prying her fingers from the generator, she trudged out the door of the mill, praying her face didn’t look
as grimy as it felt.
“Eighty. Two. Percent. Power. Generated,” the voice called after her.
The sunlight assaulted her eyes and she squinted. Which, of course, would make her look even more attractive and intelligent. Again, it didn’t matter, she chided herself. Likely her father’s new conquest was only some poor neighboring farmer, and on the off chance that he saw whatever beauty her father so blatantly bragged about, she would merely be trading a life of running mill generators for one of managing the latest irrigation technology. Excellent.
Her eyes became accustomed to the sun as she walked and she blinked towards the road, trying to stem the rising tide of curiosity beneath her bodice.
She saw the horse’s chestnut legs first and knew this was no poor farmer. Those were the shining, chiseled legs of a finely-cared-for thoroughbred, not some nag who weathered storms, pulled a plow, and rolled about in the mud.
It wasn’t the only horse, either. There was a whole forest of horse legs behind it, all equally fine and well-bred. As her gaze traveled up the horse’s body to its rider, her face flushed under the flour paste.
She recognized him from the newspaper. He was certainly in it often enough, between gossip of his exploits with the most eligible heiresses in his state, to the news surrounding his oh-so-surprising election after his father’s death, to speculation regarding the cessation of his once generous donations to the advancement of technology. High-functioning AI was his passion, the columnists always claimed. Not that she ever read or cared about such things.
In his hand was one of their course, chipped cups. Filled with water, no doubt. It was miles from their mill to anywhere else, and this man, like any mortal, must become thirsty at some point.
She had been staring too long. Flushing, she averted her eyes and tuned her father’s prattling back in.
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