Five Magic Spindles: A Collection of Sleeping Beauty Stories

by Rachel Kovaciny

  Tanza wrapped a shaking hand around his fingers. They were solid, warm, and living. If this man was dead, then she was too.

  She cast away his hand and felt a fool for believing in ghosts. This man had never been a corpse. He was a rival thief who’d reached this tomb before her and decided to mess with her head. That must be why the chambers were empty.

  She stood up, crossed her arms, and demanded, “Where’d you put the body?”

  He tilted his head. “Excuse me?”

  “That preservation slab must have held a real body. Where’d you put it?”

  “There never was a body. Just me.”

  “I’m not an idiot. This is a tomb. I might be a thief, but at least I don’t steal bodies.”

  “I didn’t steal—”

  “Or did you just hide it away for a sick joke?”

  “Why would I steal a body?”

  Tanza remembered that the tomb had been surrounded by annet thorns. A wall like that would have taken at least fifty years to grow and had been unbroken before she’d sliced away the thorns. Tombs couldn’t be breached from below or above. How could he be a rival thief?

  “But . . .” she stammered. “You can’t be a ghost.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I thought we’d established that.”

  A swath of golden hair fell over his right eye. He ducked his head, lifted his hand, and swept the hair aside with two fingers. Tanza recognized the motion. She’d seen those exact movements in a hundred history presentations and chronovids. The nervous quirk had been imitated by dozens of actors and satirists, but no one could do it perfectly. Except for this man, with that hair, that hand, and that face.

  She stumbled back. “You’re Prince Auren.”

  He tensed. “Is that a problem?”

  “No,” Tanza said. “Except you’ve been dead for a hundred years.”

  Prince Auren looked as if he’d taken a blast from his tomb’s stunner. “What do you mean, ‘dead’?”

  Prince Auren’s capture and assassination at rebel hands had been the first step in toppling Arateph’s monarchy. Soon afterward every member of the nobility had been killed, and the People’s House had ruled the planet until first contact was made with the alien Coalition. The prince was a relic of a lost regime, and his name should have faded into the dust of history.

  But Prince Auren was greater than history. He was legend. The rebels had never produced his body, and that sliver of doubt had sparked the planet’s imagination. Some said the prince had escaped and would mount an army of supporters to reclaim his throne. Some said he’d gone into hiding with no memory of his royal past. Tanza had liked the legends, but she always knew that Prince Auren had died by rebel attack or old age, and that no one would find anything except his remains.

  Which she had just found.

  Walking around and looking just like the man from the chronovids.

  That preservation field was actually a stasis bed, technology meant to keep him asleep, unaging . . . and alive.

  While Auren stood in stunned silence, Tanza stumbled through a summary of the history he’d missed. By the time she finished, Auren looked ill and as pale as the robes he wore. “I’ve been missing,” he choked. “Presumed dead. For a century.”

  “If it helps, I’m as surprised as you are.”

  He stood tall and imposing in his desperation even as his hands shook. “You’re lying,” he said at last. “They wouldn’t abandon me.”

  “I can prove it,” Tanza said. She reached into her pack, pulled out her program scanner—his eyes went wide at the unfamiliar technology—and activated the main screen with its time and date stamp.

  Auren read the display, and his face twisted in confusion. “I’ve gone backward in time?”

  Tanza looked at the numbers and realized her mistake. “It’s the new calendar.” She adjusted the settings. “That’s the tephan date.”

  His face went slack. “A hundred years,” he gasped.

  “The centennial was two weeks ago.”

  His eyes flashed. “You adjusted the display. You could have put any number on there.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Why would I do that? What possible gain could come from it? You saw me—I was stealing your things. I thought you were dead because this tomb is more than a hundred years old.”

  He wouldn’t believe her until she showed him the annet thorns outside; then he wandered back to the chamber, looking more like a corpse than ever. He leaned his elbows against a stack of crates and looked ready to collapse. “My entire world is dead, and only a tomb robber knows I’m alive.”

  “In my defense,” Tanza said from the chamber’s doorway, “you should be a corpse. How does a long-lost prince wind up in stasis in a tomb?”

  He met her eyes. “I’m not sure I should tell you.”

  Tanza glanced around. “Who else are you going to tell?”

  He considered, brushed the hair from his eyes, and sighed. “Oh, what’s the worst that could happen?”

  As he looked around the room, his gaze caught on the spindle Tanza had tossed into the far corner. His face flashed shock, then horror, then sorrow, as he moved uneasily toward it. He touched it with one finger as though it were a frightened animal, and when it didn’t bite, he grabbed it in one hand and ran a finger along the curves of the handle.

  When he faced Tanza, his gaze was turned so far inward that she had no fear he might use the spindle against her. He spoke in a distant manner: “The rebels attacked one of the summer palaces. I was the only royal in residence. They agreed to spare the servants if they could have the crown prince.”

  “You let them capture you?”

  He nodded, eyes on the spindle.

  “That was stupid.”

  His gaze met hers, strong and sharp as sunlight. “It was right,” he said, and then his gaze turned inward again. “They held me for three days before deciding to kill me.” He held up the spindle. “With this.” He rubbed beneath the right side of his rib cage. “My organs were shredded. I . . . don’t recommend it.”

  “How did you survive?”

  He let out a deep breath and sank onto a pile of boxes. “They didn’t think I deserved a quick death. They sustained the pulse for only about fifteen seconds.”

  Long enough to give him injuries beyond mortal endurance but too brief to bring immediate death. He would have lingered in unimaginable agony as his life drained away. Tanza felt grateful that the tomb’s stunner had already emptied her stomach. History had made it clear that such a spindle strike brought the most painful death possible.

  She pushed away her feelings of disgust and horror and focused on the facts. “The pulse was barely too brief to kill you,” she said. “You should have died within the hour.”

  Auren explained, “Lord Rimath—the head of the local House—had secretly planned a rescue. His men reached me just in time and took me from the palace.”

  “That doesn’t explain the tomb.”

  “Lord Rimath had suspected I’d be injured. He couldn’t take me to a House or a hospital—the rebels would look for me there. But House Rimath had just built a brand-new tomb nearby. No one would look for me in a tomb, and no building could have better security, so his men brought in a healing bed and medical supplies from a local hospital. Everything was ready before my rescue started. They had me here within minutes.” Auren gave Tanza a faint, sad smile. “I only learned this in flashes, you understand. I was rather busy . . . dying . . . at the time. Lord Rimath made certain I understood before the healing bed activated, and after that . . . I woke up here.”

  Tanza considered the story, but one piece wouldn’t fall into place. “A healing bed shouldn’t have kept you in stasis,” Tanza said. “Not if it healed your wounds.”

  Auren replied, “Most healing beds have a stasis setting.”

  “Why was it activated? And why did no one come back for you?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  Tanza’s mind seized the challenge. She pa
ced, thinking. “This is a tomb with state-of-the-art security. You must have lumiscopes.”

  “The lumiscopic feed would be sent to a guardhouse.”

  Tanza shook her head. “The guardhouse is long gone, but all security recorders have internal memory as extra back-up.”

  She raced across the hallway and climbed atop Auren’s empty healing bed. She found a small lens in the ceiling just left of the bed and used a stolen scalpel to pry away a large, paper-thin panel of aurolith. Behind it she found a large, black box.

  Tanza pulled the recorder from the hidden brackets, set it on the floor, and smiled at the maker’s mark. “A Berimac. Your Lord Rimath spared no expense.” She pulled a panel off the side of the recorder. “That’s good news for us.”

  She aimed the lumiscope’s lens at the blank aurolith wall, and a black-and-white chronovid appeared, showing Tanza taking the instrument from its hiding place. “Not only do we have chronovid,” she explained to Auren, who stood in the doorway in a state of vague bafflement. “We have a chronovid projector.”

  Auren stepped into the room, eyes riveted to the image but focused on the date stamp, not the chronovid itself. “A whole century,” he said. “The recorder couldn’t store so much data.”

  Tanza said, “The interior security recorders are motion-activated. They only log when moving people are in the tomb.”

  She fiddled with some buttons, and the date stamp changed to a few days after Auren’s disappearance. The chronovid showed an unconscious Auren on the healing bed, blood-stained clothes piled nearby. Now that Tanza knew Auren wasn’t dead, it was easy to see that his robe was a hospital gown, not burial clothes.

  She sped through the imagery, watching people come and go with medical equipment and sober expressions. When the record ended, Tanza reversed the chronovid to the last time a waking person had been in the room.

  In the image, a bald man scanned Auren with unfamiliar instruments and adjusted the healing bed’s settings. “Stasis functional,” he called out the door, his refined accent similar to Auren’s.

  A short woman with dark curls peered through the doorway. “You’re certain he can’t come with us?”

  “Too fragile. Stasis is safer until he has someone to supervise the healing.”

  “Someone should stay.”

  “The new orders override this duty,” the man said. “Hundreds will die if they don’t get help. Auren would want us to go.”

  The real-life Auren spoke to the screen. “I might, Hanet, if I knew where you were going.”

  “If the worst happens,” the man said, oblivious to his future viewers, “Kenni’s coming to restock in two days. She’ll know what to do.”

  Tanza asked, “Who’s Kenni?”

  Auren said, “Lord Rimath’s daughter. Lady Ikennir.”

  The name sparked a faint memory from historical research, and Tanza looked at the date stamp. Her hand flew to her mouth. Her veins turned to ice. “No,” she gasped. “They’re going to Alogath.”

  Oblivious to the meaning, the woman in the chronovid planned a route to Alogath. Auren’s head snapped toward Tanza’s face. “What happens in Alogath?”

  Tanza couldn’t look at him. To Auren, Alogath was merely a suburb of the capital, not a symbol of the bloodiest day in tephan history. Not every schoolchild’s first lesson in the brutalities of warfare.

  “I shouldn’t tell you,” Tanza said. “You don’t need to know. Not right away.”

  “Tell me, thief,” Auren demanded, every ounce of his royal authority in the words. Tanza met his eyes and his face softened. “Please,” he begged. “It can’t be worse than what I’m imagining.”

  “It is,” Tanza said.

  She turned off the projector and locked her gaze on the colored veins in the aurolith wall. “Lord Dassin betrayed the king. He helped the rebels lure dozens of the king’s supporters to Alogath under false pretenses. It looks as if he drew in your doctors with a story about some kind of disaster. No one knew that the rebels were anywhere near the capital, and no one knew that Lord Dassin had joined them. Alogath became a slaughterhouse.”

  Images from historical chronovid logs flashed through her mind—people shot down in waves, nailed to the sides of houses, sliced to pieces bit by bit. Tanza had little sympathy for the decadent, corrupt nobility, but no one deserved Alogath.

  To spare herself and Auren the details, she rushed to the end. “Alogath was the beginning of the end for the monarchy. After that day it became the rebels’ preferred execution center. Nearly everyone of noble blood died there.”

  Lady Ikennir’s death had been infamously gruesome, and now Tanza knew why: Her father had taken Prince Auren from the rebels. Of course they would torture her.

  Auren definitely didn’t need to know that.

  She finished: “By the end of the month, the king and queen were dead and the People’s House came into power.”

  Auren said, “With Lord Dassin in a comfortable position, no doubt.”

  Tanza shook her head. “When Lord Dassin saw the brutality at Alogath, he threw himself from his House’s highest parapet.”

  “I see.” Auren stared at the wall. “Everyone dead?”

  “Very nearly,” Tanza said. “Anyone who survived went so deep into hiding that they were never found again.”

  “Everyone,” he breathed. “Everyone I ever knew.” He glanced at the healing bed. “Everyone who knew about me.”

  “Mystery solved,” Tanza said, with a note of mournful irony.

  Auren didn’t speak for a long time.

  Chapter 3

  TANZA’S MED SCANNER SHOWED Auren to be in complete health and thus capable of leaving the tomb . . . once he found something other than hospital clothes to wear. Tanza rummaged in the hovercar and found a set of Keffer’s clothing crumpled in a storage nook. For once, Tanza was grateful for Keffer’s haphazard organizational skills. The wide blue shirt and boxy gray pants were a far cry from palace finery, but they were clean, so she brought them inside the tomb.

  While Auren dressed, Tanza wandered in the woods behind the tomb. A light breeze rattled the leaves, and drift bugs floated by on their ribbons of colored silk, but the peace did nothing to calm Tanza’s mind.

  She’d wanted a tomb, with some precious metals and valuable antiques and salvageable tech parts. What was she supposed to do with a long-lost prince of legend? As a child, Tanza had loved those legends—it was hard for a child of the charity houses not to be enthralled by the glittering luxury of Prince Auren’s world or the romanticism of the lumiscope dramas that imagined his escape from the rebels—but now she was an adult, and the reality was far from picturesque. Prince Auren was no hero; he was a royal from a decadent ruling house that had drained its people dry and driven them to revolution. Now Tanza—even less of a hero—was obligated to introduce him to a new century.

  This discovery would rock Arateph, and Tanza wanted no part in the media mayhem that would follow. People would want to know about the woman who found Prince Auren. Though Tanza called herself an amateur historian, the title wouldn’t fool the Coalition media or the police.

  She didn’t want a prison cell.

  She wanted to fly far away from this mess. Instead, she hopped into the hovercar and brought it near the tomb’s entrance, then stepped out and leaned against the vehicle with her head in her hands.

  “What am I going to do with him?” she moaned.

  Auren emerged from among the annet thorns. Keffer’s clothing hung strangely on his slightly shorter, leaner, and differently angled tephan frame. “What are my options?” he asked.

  Tanza lifted her head. “Not much,” she replied, deftly hiding her own distress behind a cool mask. “You have no surviving family, no assets. I should take you to the nearest government office.”

  His face paled. “No,” he insisted. “Not that.”

  Tanza shook her head. “The Coalition replaced the rebel government,” she assured him. “The Coalition is human-run; they don’t
know anything about the old monarchy or the revolution.”

  “They might consider a tephan prince a threat to their rule.”

  “The Coalition has twenty-seven planets. A resurrected prince might appeal to a few crazy independence groups like Cornerstone, but it won’t threaten the Coalition government.”

  Auren’s face took on that stunned, faraway expression again. “Ruled by aliens in a different star system. Our rockets had barely reached our third moon.”

  Tanza smiled sympathetically. “The humans brought a lot of changes.”

  “I can’t put myself at the mercy of unknown aliens.” He met Tanza’s eyes. “Please don’t tell them of me.”

  His desperation stole Tanza’s breath. Tears of sympathy threatened to flow; instead, she laughed and said, “Honestly, I don’t want to go anywhere near the government. But what else can we do?”

  Auren said, “You could take me to Alogath.”

  Tanza’s limbs stiffened. “What?”

  Auren said, “I want to go to Alogath. Everyone I ever knew died there. I need to honor them, even if I’m a hundred years too late.”

  “And you trust a tomb robber to take you there?”

  Auren gave her an appraising glance. “I spent my life surrounded by security. I understand threat assessment. You won’t harm me.”

  His confidence unnerved Tanza, but he was right. She shrugged and said, “I’m a thief with standards. I won’t hurt you.”

  His expression eased. “I can’t say as much for the rest of Arateph. Will you help me?”

  Tanza cradled her chin and considered. “I could. I keep a place in Alogath—I grew up there, and rent’s cheap in a place with so many ghosts.” She glanced at the hovercar. “But my . . . employer . . . wants to meet me in Lorantz. I’ll have to check in—drop you off somewhere first, of course—and take you to Alogath after that.”

  Auren’s eyebrows rose, but he said, “I understand.”

  The words had a note of finality, like a judge’s decision or a king’s decree. Tanza stood stunned. She hadn’t expected assent. She’d expected hesitation, a distrust of the criminal and her associates. At the very least she’d expected questions. She’d given Prince Auren less than half a plan.