by Liz Braswell
Not like learning in the world of the Thorn Castle. Not at all. The few things the fairies bothered to teach her came as easily as singing.
As the new/real memories revealed themselves, Aurora Rose found she had a growing collection of two different versions of the same scene, the same day, the same year—both of which fought for space and dominance in her mind.
She remembered being a young teenager, bored for days on end in the middle of the woods, impatient for something to happen, trying to hunt with the foxes, climbing trees as high as she could, lying in despair at their bases, no longer loving the happy, mindless burble of her aunts as they worked together to make dinner or wash the clothes.
Its sister memory in the Thorn Castle was of young Aurora confronting her neglectful parents, who, worse than being enraged by her sight, worse than ordering her out of their presence, just didn’t care. Like she wasn’t worth getting upset about. She found empty rooms in the keep and collapsed on couches for days, wondering what would happen if she died. Would anyone notice? She became hungry and would sometimes rally to find a bit of food, and she grew very, very dirty.
She didn’t have time to succumb to these memories, to pass out. To be weak. To throw up and recover and stumble a few steps and then collapse again. Phillip had said that if she didn’t have many more spells, they would be there in a couple of hours. And he was very patient.
But she wanted to go on.
Sometimes concentrating on one lovely thing about each memory helped her remain upright. Like the foxes…she had hunted with foxes! Beautiful red-coated beasts who sometimes tangled under her feet like cats and let her scratch their throats. That had really happened. Focusing on their beauty kept her walking—shakily—and kept her stomach from reeling.
Sometimes concentrating on one enraging thing kept her going.
How could the women who had loved her and rocked her and raised her lie to her for sixteen years? How could anyone do that and still claim to love you?
They could have told her the truth—that she was a princess in hiding—and at worst it would have been a lovely game for her to play when she dressed up. At best it would have been a distracting, interesting thing to ponder on her most monotonous days.
The jolt of fury about her false childhood in the woods and her aunts’ betrayal of her trust was far stronger than her body’s weak inclination to black out or lose breakfast. It even quickened her pace some.
But after several hours even that was getting hard to keep feeling worked up about and she found herself beginning to stumble.
“I think we’d better call it a day,” Phillip suggested. “It feels like it’s getting late—maybe an hour before sundown. Let’s make camp and get an early start tomorrow.”
She nodded, too tired to disagree or to say anything to make him feel better or to apologize. She sat there like a limp rag doll while he bustled around, pushing piles of unbelievably long, unbelievably soft pine needles into springy mattresses and clearing them entirely out of one area for a small fire. When he had the tinder and a nice little pyramid structure of twigs set up he coughed politely and pointed at it.
She nodded and flicked her finger.
In a moment, a cozy bright-orange fire was flickering, the only tiny light in the whole twilit forest.
Summoning a whole cottage might have been nicer—but it would have taken a lot more time and too much out of her.
Probably. She still wasn’t sure how this all worked.
She didn’t even have to snap her fingers or blink to make two bowls of porridge appear. Phillip tried not to sigh but took his as gratefully as he could manage.
“I think I understand a little how Maleficent’s magic works,” she said after a moment, thinking about magic. “The…events are different. But the feelings are the same,” she continued slowly, trying to put it into words that made sense. “She’s working with—she worked with—what was already in my head and just…gave it new pictures. Sort of. My ‘confinement’ in the castle was based on the feeling of being trapped. With no place to go, figuratively or literally. Nothing to do but pace my cage until I died. She built an entire world around that premise to keep me asleep and under her control. But in a weird way, she was the most interesting thing that happened to me in either life.”
The direction her thoughts were taking was obviously making Phillip uncomfortable. He finished his porridge—still hungry, but not necessarily eager for more. He stretched back; despite his desire to press on, he was exhausted as well.
“Hey,” he said, suddenly sitting up, eager. “Can I see your sword? The one you summoned?”
Glad to have something she could reward his patience with, she handed it over with a smile.
The prince pulled out his own to compare.
“It’s truly amazing,” he said, running his fingers over each. “A perfect copy.”
“Funny, I never paid attention to swords before. Not even yours.”
“Well, I didn’t wear it openly when I traveled. I kept it under wraps, as it were. This is the sword of a royal prince—the son of a king. My father had it made for me when I turned sixteen. It would be dangerous to display openly.”
“Dangerous to wear a sword where you can get to it quickly?”
“I am an extremely skilled swordsman,” Phillip said gently. “But no match for a band of highwaymen. A feisty noble lad on a horse they might be willing to let pass. The son of a king is good for quite a bit of ransom.”
“Ahhh,” Aurora said, nodding. “So that’s why I didn’t see you with it when…”
She frowned, trying to bring up the memory.
“When…”
Phillip watched her uneasily.
“I never saw you with the sword,” she said flatly. “Because you kept it hidden.”
Phillip had a very unprincely, funny look on his face. Only she didn’t find it funny at all.
“You never told me you were a prince.”
“I was going to tell you,” he protested. “I was going to tell you that night, in fact….”
“That night?” she demanded. Despite her physical exhaustion she stood up, rage flushing her body straight. Her fists clenched of their own accord. “Why not, like, immediately? Just when was the right moment?”
“Rose, listen.” He stood up and took her hands. She whipped them out of his fingers. “I was traveling that day to your father’s castle. I was going to be formally introduced as a son-in-law to your parents and the rest of the court; to say hello to a bride I had never met and good-bye to a life I had barely begun to enjoy.”
“So?” she demanded. “You decided you would have one last fling with some village girl or woodsman’s daughter before being forced into a life of marriage?”
“No! Listen: I’m a prince. Outside of highborn ladies and princesses and what have you, you can’t tell anyone you’re a prince. Nobody likes you for just who you are. Girls…they want…they assume…everyone thinks they can get something if they have a prince.”
His cheeks grew pinker and he began to stutter as he tried to explain. It did not change the severe look she gave him.
“As soon as you tell a girl you’re a prince, they’re all over you,” he said desperately. “In the wrong way. They just hear prince and think riches or whatever. Especially if they get—I mean, if there’s a—look, can we leave it at that?”
“No. No, we can’t,” the princess said. “You are…you were the one person I thought I could trust. The one person from my past. My real past. The love I forgot.” Her lips began to twist, and she felt her nose seize up with incipient tears. “And it turns out you—also you, even you—lied to me! Like everyone else in my entire life. No one—no one—has ever told me the truth about anything. Not even you.”
“Well, I didn’t know who you were…really…that you were a princess….”
“Not my fault!” she snapped. “I didn’t know that, either! Don’t you dare think of blaming me or comparing us!”
P
hillip took a deep breath. He looked up and around, as if trying to gather help from the sky or the air or the trees around them.
“I’m sorry. I really am. I realize there’s no way to prove this to you now, but the day of our…of Princess Aurora and Prince Phillip’s wedding, I told my dad I wasn’t marrying the princess. I was marrying the peasant girl I met in the forest. Because everything else in your life might have been a lie, but my loving you wasn’t. Isn’t.”
She didn’t say anything. She still glared at him, trembling with rage.
“I’m going to sleep now,” she said through clenched teeth. “I’m putting both swords between us. I hope you cut your elbow.”
They lay down on their pallets, Phillip sadly and wearily, she jerkily and angrily. She covered herself with pine needles. When he started to offer her his cape, she growled: “Don’t. You. Dare.”
He sighed and wrapped himself up.
“Good night,” he whispered.
She turned herself on her side away from him. It was a long time before she finally fell asleep.
The next morning felt like just the sort of new beginning she needed.
Nothing was weird or indicative of anything magical or evil. She breathed in the clean air and listened to the breathtakingly still silence of the ancient forest. She looked up at the trees, feeling tiny and incredibly lucky and special. Small birds, hidden somewhere in the lightening not-gloom, made little echoey chirps.
She was overcome with the desire to stay.
This was nice. Here it was beautiful, and she had incredible powers. Who knew what the real world held for her when all of this was done?
“Forgive me yet?”
And then all the exhaustion and emotional stress from the day before came crashing back down on her shoulders.
Phillip was on his side, chin resting on his hand, looking at her and trying to be fetching.
Aurora Rose grunted unprincessly and wished she had covers so she could roll over and pull them aggressively over her head.
“Please?” he asked, smiling winningly. He didn’t quite bat his eyelashes.
“Let’s just get this done with,” she said, meaning find the fairies, figure out how to defeat Maleficent, defeat Maleficent, and wake up. And then deal with whatever aftermath there was. Were the two of them still engaged as prince and princess? What was she going to say to her parents? Everything made her irritable. Why couldn’t he just have stayed asleep longer and let her enjoy the peace of the forest by herself for a few minutes? The rare peace of her own deep, innermost mind.
“Aw,” he said with a pout. “What about a kiss? An ‘I’ll eventually forgive you’ kiss?”
She stared at him, one eyebrow raised like Maleficent. The rest of her face was a very unMaleficent-like mask of shock and horror.
Then she let castle Aurora, ball-arranging princess Aurora, take over, and a smooth look of cool hauteur come over her face.
“I shan’t even dignify that with a response.”
She rose as primly as she could, resisting the urge to push the pine needles back into place as if she were making her bed, Briar Rose–style.
Phillip sighed dramatically and didn’t get up, contenting himself with watching her. She kept her back to him.
Then Phillip came striding into the clearing, a string of fish over his shoulder.
“I was trying to think of some way of apologizing, but there don’t seem to be any flowers here. In fact, there’s not a lot of anything here, and I figured you’d be sick of porridge, too, and…”
He stopped, staring at the angry couple.
Aurora Rose stared at him.
Phillip-on-the-ground stared at him.
Phillip-with-the-fish dropped the fish and immediately drew his sword.
“Rose, get back,” Phillip-on-the-ground said, leaping up. “It’s another one of Maleficent’s demons.”
“He’s the demon!” Phillip-with-the-fish said, cheeks flushed with anger.
“Right,” Ground Phillip said, casually drawing his own sword. “Who was sleeping here next to Rose all night while you just happened to come walking in.”
“I got up two hours ago!” Fish Phillip said. “I couldn’t sleep because of our fight.”
“Really? Because I slept just fine,” Ground Phillip said with a knowing smile. “And somehow she did. Right through your ‘getting up’ and…What is it you were doing? Fishing? Really?”
Aurora Rose looked back and forth between them uncertainly. The fish thing was strange, despite his obvious tiring of porridge. Did princes even know how to fish?
“I like fishing,” Fish Phillip protested. “Even Roman emperors fished. To relax.”
“Ha, now you know he’s the demon,” Ground Phillip said, laughing. “I’m terrible at Latin. You know that.”
That was true.
But…was Ground Phillip acting…not like Phillip Phillip?
But then, who was Phillip? Besides a liar?
“Wait, hush,” she said, thinking hard.
They both waited with the same patient, expectant expression.
“What’s the name of your horse?” she said slowly.
“Samson,” they answered at the same time.
Ground Phillip shrugged. Fish Phillip glared.
“All right. What…” She dug deep, into memories that had only recently been uncovered. “What kind of flower did you pick and give me the day we met?”
“Jonquil,” said Ground Phillip.
“I don’t know,” Fish Phillip said, exasperated. “I don’t know the names of flowers! It was tiny and yellow and smelled pretty. Like you.”
“Nice,” Ground Phillip said, rolling his eyes. “Real poetic.”
She frowned. That seemed like a mean thing for the otherwise good-natured Phillip to say.
She tried to think logically—something she now knew was difficult in a dream. Maleficent was inside her head and able to summon an entire world out of her thoughts and memories. The evil fairy knew everything about Aurora Rose—and so, probably, did her servants.
But she didn’t know everything about Phillip.
Not the things that had happened before he met the princess.
“Tell me…tell me your most important childhood memory,” she said finally.
Fish Phillip spoke first.
“My father gave me my first sword, a wooden one, on my third birthday. I named it Cat. Because what I really wanted was a cat.”
And Ground Phillip threw his hands up.
“You could make up anything,” he said with exasperation. “I could make up anything. Rose wouldn’t know the truth. Sure, I had a sword when I was three and named it Cat. I also kissed a dairymaid when I was thirteen, next to the fire in the kitchen. I absolutely did it. But…it’s also the sort of thing any prince, any boy, could be reasonably expected to do. Is it true? Can you prove it?”
Fish Phillip frowned. Real hate began to burn in his eyes.
“I did kiss a dairymaid when I was thirteen. But it was outside, near the cows.”
“See?” Ground Phillip said.
She bit her lip. He was right. Was there any connection to Phillip in the real world she could draw on? Something they both knew somehow, she in her forest and he in his castle?
Or…in the Thorn Castle…
“Your father,” she said. “King Hubert. Tell me about him.”
Both Phillips looked surprised.
Ground Phillip shrugged again. “Pompous. Loud. Bossy.”
“Show some respect,” Fish Phillip growled. “He’s still your—my—father.”
“What did he look like? Really look like? His face,” she pressed.
“Old,” Ground Phillip quipped.
Fish Phillip raised his sword. “Enough, I said!”
“Please, use this as an excuse to attack me,” Ground Phillip spat. “Because you can’t describe him at all, you fake!” He readied his own sword.
Fish Phillip sprang forward, beating the other Phillip’s w
eapon aside with a clang that rang out disturbingly among the ancient trees. Clouds of tiny birds, high up, exploded from the leaves and flew away.
Both Phillips were fast—very fast. They were extremely skilled swordsmen, clearly trained by a master. They were perfectly matched—obviously. Neither could gain the upper hand, and each trick and tactic one came up with, the other had already thought about. Parry, spin, lunge, leap, surprise attack at the legs…It was actually quite beautiful. If it hadn’t been such a dangerous situation, she would have enjoyed watching them.
But she found herself drawing her own sword. She would not be unprepared, no matter who won.
After a few minutes the twins separated, breathing heavily. Neither had drawn blood.
“You’re well trained, demon,” said one Phillip.
“As are you, demon,” said the other, giving the first a little salute.
She didn’t even know which one was Fish Phillip and which one was Ground Phillip anymore.
They clashed again, more furiously this time. One drew blood on the other’s side; the other delivered a painful-seeming blow with the flat of his sword to the other’s head.
Aurora Rose winced with each one.
Finally, panting, they separated again.
“Here’s the thing,” said Phillip on the left, facing her. “There’s no way you can trust either of us. Maleficent’s magic is too strong and perfect.”
“And here’s the other thing,” the second Phillip said with an arch look at his twin. “Why would you trust either one of us? You’ve already seen that the real Phillip, whoever it is—me, by the way—”
“It’s me, you lying hell spawn!”
“Whatever. You’ve already seen that the real Phillip can’t be trusted anyway. I lied to you. Just like you said. Despite falling in love with you. I could just as easily lie to you again. For good reasons,” he added quickly, seeing the look on her face. “It could be for your own safety, or because it’s too dangerous for us to be together…or whatever. How well do you really know me? Would you ever be able to trust me again? Now that you know I lied to you?”