When Rose Wakes

by Christopher Golden

  “You think Mr. Mac will be all disappointed that you ditched Courtney?” Kylie asked, brows knitted. “Not likely. He’ll be glad you found somebody you actually wanted to talk to. It’s not like he doesn’t realize Sauer and her cheer squad are bitches.”

  Rose frowned. “Then why would he make her be my student ambassador?”

  Kylie shrugged. “I think she was one of the sophomores who, like, guided the freshmen around at the beginning of the year, so she sort of volunteered for the job. Besides, she knows all of the teachers because of her grandmother working in the office.”

  Forking a bite of manicotti into her mouth, Rose glanced over the heads of the two girls sitting across from them and saw Courtney headed her way, darting between two of the long tables.

  “Uh-oh,” she managed, before swallowing the food in her mouth.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Courtney demanded, leaning between the two girls across from Rose and Kylie.

  “Eating lunch?” Rose ventured.

  Courtney sneered. “You think you’re funny now?”

  Rose felt her cheeks flushing, but with anger rather than embarrassment. “Look, Courtney, you don’t want anything to do with me and that’s fine. I can find the rest of my classes on my own.”

  “Mr. Mac is going to think I blew you off.”

  “I’ll make it clear it was the other way around,” Rose promised.

  Courtney narrowed her eyes, then smiled in grim amazement. “Wow. Coma Girl gets her claws out.”

  Rose shrugged. “I just didn’t want to spend my lunch as a punching bag for you and your friends.”

  “Fine by me,” Courtney said. “Enjoy St. B’s. Hopefully I’ll never have to talk to you again.”

  She stormed away. The two girls across the table stared at Rose.

  “Wow,” one of them said.

  Rose shifted uneasily. She did not like the admiration she saw in their eyes any more than she did the derision of Courtney and her friends. She just wanted to be invisible today.

  “Are you always this scrappy?” Kylie asked.

  Rose gave her an apologetic look. “I actually don’t remember.”

  “Right,” Kylie said, nodding. “Coma Girl.”

  Shocked to hear the nickname from her friend, Rose shot her a hard look.

  “Hey, that genie’s out of the bottle,” Kylie said. “You’re never going to make the name go away, so you might as well own it. Make it yours. People want to call you Coma Girl, just nod and say, ‘Yeah, that’s me. Cool, aren’t I?’ Well, don’t actually say that, but wear that attitude. I mean, duh, it’s fascinating, right? Friggin’ coma and amnesia, you might as well be a superhero. People are gonna be interested, so let them.”

  “I don’t know,” Rose said.

  “Suit yourself. Just my two cents,” Kylie replied.

  “For cheerleaders, those girls aren’t very cheery.”

  Kylie arched an eyebrow, one corner of her mouth tugging upward in a lopsided smile. “Was that a joke, Miss DuBois?”

  “Not a very good one,” Rose observed.

  “No,” Kylie agreed. “But you get points for trying. And yeah, they’re cheerleaders for the football team, but they also make up about half the girls’ basketball team. They’re pretty good, too, Courtney and Ivy especially.”

  “Ivy being?”

  “Black hair, anemic-looking?”

  Rose nodded. The tall one who had made fun of her clothes.

  Kylie kept up a steady stream of chatter, segueing from gossip about teachers to her favorite bands to her take on the capricious nature of the universe. Yet she didn’t seem to be rambling just to hear her own voice. Kylie frequently paused to make eye contact and grill Rose about her thoughts on various matters, forcing her to think and engage. The girl had a voracious appetite for thought and a manic energy about her, and Rose found herself both exhausted and inspired by her company.

  She’d only eaten half her lunch when the two girls across from them picked up their trays and departed. Worried, Rose glanced around in search of a clock, concerned that the period would be ending at any moment. When she turned around again, the seat directly opposite her was occupied once more.

  “Oh, hey,” Rose said, smiling and sitting up a little straighter.

  Jared nodded as though agreeing with her. “Hey. I just dumped my tray and thought I’d say hi. So, y’know, hi.”

  Kylie laughed. “Listen to you, all mumbly and stuff.”

  “Hi, Kylie,” Jared said.

  “You two know each other?” Kylie asked. “You mean, you made more than one friend today and didn’t tell me? I’m deeply offended.”

  “We met the other day in the office, when Rose was taking her admissions test,” Jared said.

  Rose nodded. She knew that Kylie must be watching her closely—the girl was so observant—and she didn’t want to give too much away by her reaction to Jared. But he was very cute and she had been hoping all morning to run into him and wondering why she hadn’t.

  “Here I am,” Rose said. “A St. Bridget’s girl.”

  “What class did they put you in?” Jared asked.

  “I’m a sophomore.”

  Kylie smiled conspiratorially. “Oh, no! Jared, will your reputation survive you being seen sitting with us lowly sophomores?”

  Jared seemed to think this over. “I honestly don’t know.”

  Rose felt a sickly flutter in her chest, glancing from Jared to Kylie and back again, thinking for a moment that this really might be a concern. Then the two of them laughed and Jared threw up his hands.

  “Ah, to hell with my reputation,” he said.

  “What reputation?” Kylie teased.

  Jared smiled at her, but then focused on Rose, and his eyes softened. “Listen, I’ve got to catch up with Mr. Morse before my math class starts, so I’ve gotta take off. But I was wondering… I mean, there’s a party tomorrow night in Cambridge and I was thinking maybe you’d like to come.”

  Rose felt her chest tighten, her throat closing up, as though no words would ever escape her lips again. Her aunts would never agree, and yet in the short span of her life that she could remember, she had never wanted anything more.

  “It would give you a chance to meet some more people, y’know, away from school,” Jared prompted, disappointment beginning to dim the light in his eyes.

  “I…” Rose managed.

  “Would love to go,” Kylie finished for her, once again punctuating her words with a forkful of food. “Rose would love to go.”

  Rose nodded to her, and then to Jared. “I would.”

  Jared’s smile brightened, his charisma returning to full wattage. “Cool.”

  “We’ll both be there,” Kylie said.

  Jared didn’t even seem to notice—or he did, but didn’t care—that Kylie had invited herself along. He fished his cell phone out of his pocket with a glance around to make sure he wouldn’t get caught using it.

  “Give me your cell number and I’ll text you the details,” he said.

  Rose stared at him, blanking for five or six very long seconds. Then she laughed at herself, relief washing over her, as she finally remembered the number and rattled it off to him. He keyed it into his phone, flipped it shut, and then got up from the table.

  “See you tomorrow night,” he said.

  “See you,” Rose echoed.

  As she watched him walk away, Kylie leaned over and nudged her with a shoulder. When Rose looked at her, she grinned hugely.

  “You, Miss DuBois, are having one heck of a first day.”

  A veil of white blots out the sky, snow falling swift and heavy, gusts of wind making the flakes dance around Rose as she hurries across the castle grounds. The village around the castle seems to vanish and appear with the whims of the storm, but Rose does not waver. Her path is true and she follows it unerringly, her dress and hair fluttering in the wind, her boots barely leaving a trail, prints filled by the sifting snow only moments after her
passing.

  Another time the beauty of the storm would have made her jubilant. Snow this early in September could only be magical, and Rose would have been delighted to run through it, to play and laugh and twirl like a little girl. But this is not another time and though the snow glistens and a wondrous hush has fallen over the castle and the village, she cannot cherish the moment, for it is filled with fear.

  From somewhere not far off she hears a shout and she dances three steps to her left, spins widdershins three times, then lets her momentum carry her onward toward the trees. If Rose does not wish to be seen, she will not be seen… not by those her father has sent out searching for her anyway. Like the snow, she is not entirely as she seems, not entirely uninfluenced.

  Ahead, the Feywood seems a ghost of itself, spectral forest draped in a fresh blanket of white. Its beauty makes her catch her breath, but she does not allow it to slow her, forging on, slipping through the wintry snowfall as though a kind of phantom herself. But she is no phantom. She can feel her heart beating in her chest, feel the cold biting at her cheeks, taste the air slipping in and out of her with every breath. Rose is alive, but for how much longer, she cannot say.

  Desperate for answers, she glides from the thick of the storm into the lovely quiet of the Feywood. Snowflakes drift down through branches still thick with leaves only now turning brown and gold and red. Rose breathes in that silence a moment, glancing around expectantly. They know she is here. They will feel her, as they always have, perhaps not instantly but soon enough. All she can do is wait.

  Suddenly discovering her own exhaustion, she moves to a thick oak and kneels in the snow at its foot, leaning against the trunk and exhaling some of the fear and sorrow that she has kept bottled inside. Here, in the moment and this place, she is safe. She cannot say the same for her father or his kingdom or his soldiers, but she will forgive herself a few minutes of selfishness.

  The fear is still abated but her sorrow returns in mere moments. She has fought hard against the temptation toward self-pity, but she is losing that battle.

  Rose bites her lip to stave off the threat of tears, and it infuriates her. Where is fairness? Where is justice? Where is victory for the righteous and the kindhearted? Or are such things just myths?

  A flutter of wings makes her look up, but perhaps she is mistaken, for she sees nothing but the trees and the snow. Heart heavier, knowing she should never have run, old enough at sixteen to realize that there are things you cannot run away from, she wonders if the Ladies of the Wood will even come. Like her father’s soldiers, they have their part to play. The snow is evidence enough that they are otherwise occupied. Mid-September and nearly a foot has fallen, with no sign of subsiding.

  “Beautiful flower, are those tears for yourself?”

  The voice is small and hushed, yet it reaches her as though spoken just beside her ear. Grateful relief fills Rose and in that moment she feels less alone.

  “For myself,” she admits, swiping at her unfallen tears. “For my father. For his kingdom. For my teacher and his wife and sons, for the cook and his aging mother, and for so many I do not know, the ones who died out there beyond the Feywood and the ones still to die—”

  “The ones you can save.”

  Rose stiffens, the remaining moisture of her tears freezing at the corners of her eyes. The cold seems to have reached deep within her, but she knows this is no magic. This is hard truth.

  “Yes,” she agrees. Then she glances around, eyes narrowed. “Don’t talk to me from shadows, Rielle.”

  The flutter of wings again, and the spret appears, the tiny woman no bigger than a hummingbird flitting from side to side three feet in front of her, silver wings a gray blur in the storm-shadowed wood. Rielle has been her friend as long as Rose can recall. The spret remembers the sound of the infant Rose’s laughter, has watched her grow up, has been her tender comfort and her wise counsel all her life, a tiny maternal voice for a girl whose mother had died before ever beholding her daughter’s face.

  “You pick a strange night to visit the wood,” Rielle says, her violet eyes accusatory, her pretty, angular features somehow sharpening.

  Rose silently implores her, but Rielle has always made her speak her heart.

  “Can’t the Ladies of the Wood do something?” Rose asks.

  Rielle darts upward, cocking her head and listening with pricked, pointed ears. “Listen, can’t you hear? They are doing something.”

  Rose stares at her, confused. The spret flits between snowflakes, those that come too near melting before they can touch her. Rielle gazes back at her, arms crossed, wings buzzing madly.

  “I hear nothing,” Rose says.

  Rielle sighs, seems to surrender to frustration, and zips closer, alighting on Rose’s thigh. Her wings, at rest, are as delicate as snowflakes themselves.

  “Nothing, yes,” Rielle says. “That is their doing.” She throws up her arms. “They have stolen a winter’s day and unleashed it here. Your father’s enemies shiver in their bedrolls. Their fires will not burn. They have nowhere to shelter themselves. It is midday and yet they cannot see to attack. For this day, and this alone, the war holds its breath while it awaits your father’s decision.”

  Rose averts her eyes, wilting beneath Rielle’s gaze.

  “That isn’t what I meant,” she whispers.

  “You ask more?” the spret replies. “All of the Ladies’ abilities have been put into this spell, to persuade the seasons to exchange a January day for one in September. The very fact that the spell’s influence extends beyond the wood to the plain where the enemy is encamped shows the effort they have put forth. And yet you ask more.”

  Rose hears a crackling in the branches, glances up to see a tiny pink eye watching from the crook of a tree. Rielle darts off in an eyeblink. Leaves rustle and Rose hears the crack of a small branch or a thin bone. Something falls from the tree and is swallowed by the soft thickness of the new-fallen snow.

  “Rielle?” Rose asks, rising in alarm.

  The spret emerges from the shadows, from the crook of the branch, grim-eyed and heavyhearted.

  “What was that?” Rose asks.

  “The Ladies of the Wood love you, Rose. But there are sometimes others here.”

  The words chill her. Rose backs away, thinking to run back to the castle, but then she remembers why she has come and knows that there is no sanctuary to be found there.

  “Your father will not force you,” Rielle says, spinning in a gust of wind, a mournful sort of dance. “But you have only until the snow abates to choose. Will you marry this enemy prince, or will you sacrifice the lives of all those who call your father Highness to protect your own heart?”

  Rose has been torturing herself with the same question but she does not want to answer it. The enemy has spoken of a truce that will give her father his dignity and freedom, or at least the illusion of such things. If she will marry his son, Luc, the enemy will allow her father to continue to rule his kingdom until his death, at which time the two regions will unite beneath a single banner. It is, her father’s advisors have told her, a civilized conclusion to a barbaric war.

  Yet it is also defeat, and Rose does not delude herself otherwise.

  “If I marry, I may be forced to leave here,” Rose whispers, her voice almost lost in the snow. “You cannot leave the Feywood. The Ladies… they are bound here.”

  Violet eyes soften. “We will love you, near or far,” Rielle says. “We are your family, Rose.”

  “Then I should be here with you.”

  Rielle flits nearer, poking her nose with a finger. “The rest of us are limited, foolish girl. You are your mother’s daughter, but your father’s as well, and you are free to travel far and wide. You could be our eyes in this world, until the magic of the wood has faded and either freed us or killed us. Your aunts gave you such gifts at birth—charm and wit, beauty and song—but merely by virtue of his humanity, your father has given you the gift of freedom.”

  “Freedo
m I must now surrender to this prince, this stranger!” Rose cries.

  Something cries out in the wood. Rielle darts upward, spinning to and fro, searching for any sign of threat, and then slowly, suspiciously, descends.

  “You must choose, Rose,” the spret says. “No one can do it for you. All your life the Ladies have watched over you. When the Black Heart visited her curse upon you, when all the castle and village were made to sleep while she put her mark on your heart, they wove their protections into that curse, diminishing it, they wept that they could not undo it entire. They will watch over you, Rose, until the great tapestry of the world itself is unwoven, but they cannot make this decision for you, and neither can I.”

  Rose shakes, forcing herself not to weep.

  Rielle comes nearer, studies her eyes. “There is more to your fear than this prince.”

  Snow whispers, but perhaps it is more than snow, out there in the gray shadows of the midday storm. Rielle frowns and glances that way, but then focuses again on Rose.

  “I’m going to die,” Rose says.

  “Not for a long time, as your father’s kind mark it,” Rielle replies. “Not with your mother’s blood in you.”

  “Sooner,” Rose tells her, gazing at the snow between her feet. “Soon enough.”

  “Why would you—”

  “She came to me. The Black Heart.”

  “What? When?” Rielle snaps, flitting toward her and grabbing hold of the cuff of her jacket. “In the flesh?”

  Rose shakes her head. “Worse than flesh.”

  The spret releases her cuff and lets herself eddy on the wind, deep in thought. But then a branch snaps, startling them both. Rose whips around, trying to see through the snow, and there is something there, some dark figure whose presence fills her with a dread so much colder than the storm.

  “Run!” Rielle pipes in her ear.

  Rose bolts, fleeing through the trees, ducking branches and leaping fallen trees, cutting away from the natural path, seeking the shortest distance to the edge of the wood. Her face burns with fear, heart drumming, and her jacket drags at her so she sheds it and runs on. Rielle flies ahead, wings a blur, turns to peer back into the snowy woods with those violet eyes, flies ahead again, turns again, her sharp features unaccustomed to expressing fear, though Rose sees it in her.