by Liz Braswell
Not that she had seen that many, of course. In either of her childhoods.
He was as magnificent as the deer: tall, well-muscled, sleek, and healthy. He tossed his head of thick, shining brown hair like an animal’s mane. His face looked like it had been carved by an ancient sculptor whose skill had never been surpassed: strong nose, strong chin, high cheekbones whose apples were still a little soft and pink with youth. Long eyelashes. Sparkling brown eyes.
He was reaching out to the deer with one upturned hand.
Suddenly, she noticed a shining steel sword on his hip, its grip in easy reach, its blade no doubt deadly sharp.
He was going to kill the deer. He was hunting it.
“NO!”
Aurora Rose ran forward, throwing herself at the handsome, awful man.
She had rediscovered a world of beauty and nature and life and animals, and not ten minutes later, here was someone all too ready to destroy it.
“STOP IT! STOP!” she screamed.
The man looked up, alarmed.
The deer cocked its head and bounded off.
The man blinked, and his face broke into a happy grin.
“It’s you!” he cried.
Just as she was about to pummel him with her fists, he put his arms out and wrapped her in a gigantic hug.
“What?” She pushed at his arms desperately, with a growing panic. “LET GO OF ME! GO AWAY!”
“I can’t believe it’s you,” the man said again, heedless of her actions. He closed his eyes and squeezed her like a bear. She stopped fighting for a moment, suddenly wondering how she knew what a bear squeeze felt like.
“Who the hell are you?!” she finally demanded, getting ahold of herself. With one hand free, she managed to lean back and slap him across the face.
She wasn’t sure who was more surprised, him or her. She had never done anything like that in her entire life. She had never hit anyone. In any memory.
The man put her down and looked less hurt than confused, like a boy whose toy had stopped working correctly. The red marks of her fingers angrily stung his face, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He stepped back, taking in her tangled hair, her ragged dress, her bloody and pitch-covered face, the mint stalk still hanging out the side of her mouth. “You escaped? From the castle, right? Are you all right?”
“I…did escape,” she allowed.
He waited.
She continued to regard him silently.
“You don’t remember me?” He tried very hard not to sound hurt.
“I remember a lot of things,” she said. “Too many things. None of it makes sense. I don’t really remember you. Things are kind of confused.”
She hated sounding apologetic. The man had basically just assaulted her.
“Oh. Well—that’s all right,” he said brightly. “Even though I remember you—and we completely did meet, even if you don’t remember it—we were never properly introduced. So you can’t remember my name, at least, because you never knew it.”
“All right,” she said slowly. Despite her initial distrust, his glibness, his sunny smile, and—she had to admit it—his general gorgeousness were melting her fairly quickly. His speech seemed genuine and completely free of nuance, unlike if Count Brodeur had been saying the same words.
“I’m Phillip. Prince Phillip.”
He executed a beautiful bow but finished it with a boyish grin.
She found herself smiling, unable to stop.
“I am Princess Aurora,” she said with the slight curtsy of one member of royalty greeting another. “Or…possibly…Briar Rose, peasant and lady of the forest. It’s a little confusing right now.”
“No, that’s actually beginning to make sense,” Phillip said with a thoughtful nod.
“Well, I’m glad it is for somebody,” she said dryly.
“I like Rose better, I think. Aurora implies something ethereal and unattainable. Not like a beautiful, sweet-smelling flower. May I call you Rose?”
“If you like. You could also call me Henry for all it really matters,” she said, deciding to ignore the implications of “unattainable.” Also, there was the whole double meaning of “plucking a rose,” the verbal path down which Count Brodeur certainly would have gone.
“I don’t like Henry so much. Doesn’t roll off the tongue,” the prince quipped. “Aurora does, though: Aurora, Aurora, Aurora. Oh…maybe it doesn’t.”
Why, when just moments ago she had been having a crisis over her very existence, torn between two lives she seemed to have led, was she suddenly being so ridiculous? This prince was completely distracting her.
This prince whom she had caught hunting in her dreamworld.
“Why were you killing that deer?” she demanded, recovering her anger.
“Killing?” he asked, eyes wide with confusion. “I wasn’t trying to kill it. I was trying to talk to it.”
“You. Um. What?”
“You…I was trying to rescue you. In the castle.” He pointed. She looked. She felt a moment’s stinging disappointment. Here she was thinking she had wandered off into the wilds of the world, away from everyone, never to see another living human again…and there loomed the castle, just one ridge of trees away. Covered in thick black vines and floating in a murky haze of dust. A little flock of blackbirds flew by in the foreground, not giving a whit about the strangeness of the scene or the plight of the humans captured within.
“There’s some sort of force keeping me out, though,” he said, frowning.
“Thorns. They’re called thorns,” she said helpfully.
“No, besides that,” he said with a gentle smile. “I keep hacking at the vines, and they grow back thicker. Then I remembered how close you were to the animals of the forest, and I thought maybe they could help. I was trying to talk to the deer.”
“You were…trying…to talk to the deer? To get it to help rescue me?” she asked slowly, trying to make sure she understood correctly.
“Well,” the prince stammered, suddenly flushing. “I mean, it seemed like you could almost talk with the animals. They were all around you when I met you, all these wild animals—very close to you. It didn’t seem unreasonable….I don’t know…I ran out of other options.”
“Oh, oh, you were, ah…”
She was in danger of falling into hysterics. She could see that. She tried to control her laughter. She only half succeeded.
“Talking to a…no, that’s sweet.”
The prince shrugged helplessly and smiled again. She felt herself warming to him. A person—a boy—who could laugh at himself was instantly likable. Maleficent might have been many things, but self-deprecating wasn’t one of them.
“All right, Prince Phillip,” she said. “You were trying to rescue me. How did you know me? Before?”
“I didn’t know you,” the boy said with a sigh. “I loved you. We loved each other.”
“We did?” She blinked in surprise.
He looked less hurt this time than frustrated. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
She shook her head. “It’s not like that. I just told you. I have too many memories. Why don’t you tell me about us, starting from when we first met?”
“We met once upon a—” He stopped what he was saying suddenly, and shook his head. “I came upon you in a clearing deep in the woods. I was on my way to the castle. I was supposed to meet the princess I was going to marry. For the first time. Meet, I mean. Not marry for the first time. The whole thing was arranged when we were children.”
She stared at him hard. There was too much information in what he said; she had to untangle it from the beginning.
“That castle,” she finally said, pointing at the vine-covered monstrosity that was now behind them.
“Yes. That castle.”
“You were riding to that castle. There.”
“In the real world, yes,” Phillip said.
“To marry the princess of that castle.”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” She twisted a lock of hair around her finger, thinking. “Who was it?”
“It was you!” Phillip said, exasperated. “But I didn’t know it at the time. You were the princess I was supposed to marry.”
“But I wasn’t in the castle. I was in the clearing when you met me.”
“Yes, well.” Phillip pushed his thick hair off his forehead and managed to get in what seemed to be a very satisfying scratch of his scalp in the process. “As I understand it, you were sent to live out in the woods to stay safe until your sixteenth year, at which time you would come back to marry me.”
Aurora Rose examined the tendril of hair she had been playing with. Her distant, unthought-of goal had been to chew the end of it, but now she didn’t have the urge. Nothing in her life, real or dreamed, made any sense at all.
“Maybe…Maybe let’s get back to the part where we were in love.”
“I met you in a clearing deep in the woods,” Phillip said eagerly. “We fell in love. Instantly.”
“That sounds nice.”
It didn’t sound like her, exactly, but it did sound nice.
To be fair, most of her memories were still of her time in the Thorn Castle, which she had spent with the same people she had known since she was a baby. Falling in love instantly with someone you had seen grow up—and use the same privies as you—was not really possible.
“It was. Is,” he said, taking her hands in his. “You are the best thing that ever happened to me.”
She looked up into his face. His clear brown eyes moved earnestly back and forth, trying to find some trace of recognition in her face. He was far more handsome than Cael. And to be the subject of this much attention and scrutiny from someone with his physique was more than a little pleasing—even if she didn’t know who he was.
“Do you remember that song you were singing when we met?” he whispered, pushing a dirty lock of hair from her face. “The lullaby? ‘Once Upon a Dream’?”
Aurora Rose staggered back as if slapped.
She did know that song.
The lyrics cut through her memories like a hot knife.
She put a hand to her head as flashing, too-bright scenes sped before her eyes: dappled forest, the whuff of a horse, a boy, this boy, arriving out of the woods like a spirit. Large hands, but not rough. Clear brown eyes gone soft because of her. Her stomach and heart flopping as she waited to be taken into his arms….
Back in the present, the prince also had her in his arms. Which was useful, since she was about to collapse onto the ground again. It was also a little strange. She wasn’t used to being held that closely by anyone, much less someone she hardly knew. His hands on her were strong but a little alien. His arms were muscled but unfamiliar. The heat of his skin against her wasn’t unpleasant—just unexpected.
She steadied herself, pushing him gently away.
It was another odd thing to see this boy, so handsome, so…well-dressed, right there in front of her after all her visions. It really was like she had dreamed him, and like a wish that had been granted, he appeared when she awoke.
“I think I remember something,” she finally whispered.
The happiness that flashed from his smile and glinted in his eyes was blinding. She flinched, not wanting to disappoint him by telling him how little she remembered, or how getting to ride on his horse was at least equal to the part where they almost kissed.
“So you knew me when I lived with the…uh…my aunts….”
“THE FAIRIES!” he cried with joy, startling her. He picked her up by her shoulders and swung her around. “Of course! They helped me defeat the dragon! They could help us now!”
“Fairies,” she said, teetering a little as he set her down. “Right. My aunts were fairies. I understand that now.”
She put a hand to her head, just the way Aunt Flora used to when she felt exhausted or defeated by her young ward. “I don’t think I knew that then. When I lived with them.”
“You didn’t know you lived with fairies?” Phillip asked, confused. He held her at arm’s length to look her in the eye.
“No,” she said, a little put out that he didn’t believe her—and, yes, that she hadn’t known it herself. How could she not have known it? “I don’t remember them doing much in the way of magic….”
“Well, never mind that. All in the past. What we need to do now is get ourselves out of here and home to put an end to Maleficent once and for all.”
The prince gave her shoulders a friendly squeeze before finally letting her go.
The afternoon was soft, and the light was golden. Phillip was a handsome young man who seemed content just to be with her again, to now have a quest and a purpose and direction. His hair glinted in the sun like a topaz.
This was already better than the Thorn Castle or being alone and bored in the Forest Cottage.
“Wait,” she said after a moment. “There was a dragon?”
IN A FARAWAY LAND, long ago, lived a king and his fair queen. Many years had they longed for a child and, finally, their wish was granted. A daughter was born, and they called her Aurora—for she filled their lives with sunshine. Then a great holiday was proclaimed throughout the kingdom so that all of high or low estate might pay homage to the infant princess.
Good King Stefan and his queen, Leah, especially made welcome a neighboring king and lifelong friend, for on that day would they announce that Phillip, his son and heir, to Stefan’s child would be betrothed and thus unite the two kingdoms forever. And so the young prince looked, unknowing, on his infant future bride.
Also invited to this happy occasion were the good fairies: Flora, who blessed the princess with beauty and grace, and Fauna, who gave her the gift of song.
But before the third good fairy, Merryweather, could bestow her gift, the evil fairy Maleficent appeared, angry she had not been invited to the happy occasion. She, too, gave a “gift”; but it was a terrible curse: before the sun set on Aurora’s sixteenth birthday, she would prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die.
The king and queen were deeply grieved by this—but all was not lost. For the good fairy Merryweather still had her gift to give. She said:
“Sweet princess, if through this wicked witch’s trick
A spindle should your finger prick,
A ray of hope there still may be in this, the gift I give to thee:
Not in death but just in sleep
The fateful prophecy you’ll keep,
And from this slumber you shall wake
When True Love’s Kiss the spell shall break.”
King Stefan, still fearful for his daughter’s life, did then and there decree that every spinning wheel in the kingdom should on that very day be burnt. So it was done.
To further protect the king’s beloved daughter from evil mischief, the good fairies suggested that they raise Aurora in secret and safety, disguised as peasants, in the middle of the woods far away from everyone. So the king and his queen watched with heavy hearts as their most precious possession, their only child, disappeared into the night.
And so for sixteen long years, the whereabouts of the princess remained a mystery, while deep in the forest, in a woodcutter’s cottage, the good fairies carried out their well-laid plan. Living like mortals, they reared the child as their own and called her Briar Rose.
One day, many years later, Briar Rose was singing and playing with her animal friends in the woods, when a handsome young man came wandering through the forest, lost. It was Prince Phillip, on his way to marry the princess he had been betrothed to sixteen years earlier—Aurora herself.
But upon seeing the beautiful maiden, all thoughts of marrying royalty disappeared; Phillip fell madly in love with Briar Rose. And although she, too, was instantly smitten, the shy girl scampered away like the very deer she befriended. She did promise, however, to meet him again that night.
Alas for poor Briar Rose, that was also the night of her sixteenth birthday—the night she was to be returned
to the castle. Her sorrowful aunts revealed the truth of who they were, and who she was, and how she would marry the prince of the neighboring kingdom on the morrow.
At the castle, weeping and alone in her new gown and tiara, the princess Aurora fell victim to the spell cast by the evil Maleficent. She followed the evil fairy’s voice through a secret door and found an enchanted spinning wheel, the last one left in the kingdom. Compelled by Maleficent, Aurora reached out and pricked her finger on its spindle. Immediately, she fell into a deep, deathlike sleep.
The three good fairies then put everyone in the kingdom to sleep so that upon awakening, Aurora wouldn’t feel strange and alone.
Just before falling under the fairies’ spell, Phillip’s father revealed to King Stefan how his son had unfortunately fallen in love with a peasant girl and intended to marry her. The three fairies instantly realized what this meant: that Prince Phillip was Aurora’s one true love and could break the spell that held her. They raced back to their cottage in the woods, where Phillip was to meet Briar Rose.
Unfortunately, the ever-scheming Maleficent had arrived there first and grabbed the prince, throwing him into her deepest dungeon.
Using stealth and magic, the three fairies good managed to free the prince. With the help of an ensorcelled shield and sword, Phillip defeated the evil Maleficent once and for all, even after she turned herself into a sulfurous, fire-breathing dragon.
The three fairies then led the victorious prince to the chamber where Aurora slept. Upon seeing his beautiful Briar Rose, Prince Phillip knelt at her side and immediately gave her True Love’s Kiss.
Princess Aurora woke, saw the prince, and was overjoyed. The two were married the next day, to the rejoicing of all, and lived happily ever after.
“BUT THAT LAST bit didn’t happen,” Aurora Rose said thoughtfully.
“No.” Prince Phillip sighed. “But it should have.”
“So, somehow, instead of waking me up, you got sucked into my…this…” She indicated the world around her with a vague wave of her hand.
“I guess Maleficent was more powerful than anyone thought. Her soul didn’t die when I killed her…it went into hiding. Into you, somehow.”
Aurora Rose shivered. The boy next to her had no idea how correct, emotionally and metaphorically, he was.