A Wicked Thing (6 page)

“You'll regret it, you know,” Dolores said with a knowing wave of her finger. “When you're old and gray like me, and your grandkids ask you where you were when Sleeping Beauty woke up. Tell them you missed it, and see what they say!”

“Don't worry, Dolores. I won't have grandkids. Are you finished with these?” He gestured toward the mugs on the table.

“Oh, yes, take them then, if you won't entertain an old lady's hopes.”

“Sorry, Dolores,” he said as he scooped them onto his tray. “I'm a hopeless cause.” With a nod to each of them, he headed back to the bar.

“That boy,” Dolores said, after he had gone. “If I ever see him care about anything, I'll be so shocked, it'll be the end of me.” Aurora gave another awkward nod, and Dolores turned to her husband again.

With the conversation apparently over, Aurora drifted away, wandering closer to the stage. She leaned against a wall and
closed her eyes, allowing the singer's voice to surround her. The sound was new and wistful and right, and as Aurora listened, it filled her empty stomach and soothed her throbbing head. One song melted into the next, and the next, until Aurora began to feel that she could breathe again.

“Good, isn't she?”

She opened her eyes. The boy she'd met earlier leaned against the wall beside her.

“Yes,” she said. The music still filled her, leaving her oddly confident, almost bold. “I've never heard anything like her before.”

“Yeah, Nettle's pretty new. Arrived in Petrichor maybe three weeks ago? One of those traveling performing types.”

“Nettle?”

He shrugged. “Stage name. Don't ask me why. She's bristly enough for one, but the girl knows how to sing, so no more questions asked.” He had a casual, comfortable air about him, like the whole world was his friend, and he was waiting for them to realize it. “Sorry about Dolores,” he added. “She always thinks a ‘nice young man' like me needs a friend. Seems to think I'm some kind of charity case, and ropes any pretty new girl into the cause.”

“Oh.” For some reason, the casual compliment seemed more genuine than all the voices that had ever called her beautiful. “That's okay.”

“I lied, you know,” he said. “To Dolores. I did make it to the
ceremony. But her annoyance at the idea that I didn't was just too good to miss.”

“Oh,” she said again. She could feel him watching her out of the corner of his eye.

“How about you? What did you see?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Only the crowds.” It wasn't entirely a lie. “What was it like?”

“How about I tell you over a drink? My treat.”

“Oh.” It seemed to be the only thing she was capable of saying. “No, thank you.”

“You can't come to an inn and not get a drink.” He pushed himself up from the wall with one hand. “Don't worry. I won't actually be buying it. Bartender's privilege.” When she did not move, he grabbed her hand. “Come on. We'll get you sorted out.”

He set off toward the bar, and Aurora found herself following, suddenly conscious of her unbrushed hair and dusty knees. The boy didn't seem to notice. He gestured at a wobbly stool, and she pulled herself onto it without question.

“Made a new friend, Tristan?” The girl behind the bar had a mass of brown hair and a sternly cut mouth. Her expression was somewhere between an eye roll and a sigh.

Tristan laughed. “I'm always making new friends, Trudy.”

“Don't I know it.”

“Dolores says this one skipped the ceremony yesterday. Wanted to introduce me to the only other sensible person in this city.”

Trudy glanced at the other customers and then across to the far wall. She frowned. “Don't let Nell hear you talking like that. You know how she gets.”

“It won't hurt anyone,” he said, but he stopped talking all the same.

“So what drew you in here?” Trudy said. “No offense, but you don't look like our usual clientele.”

“I came in for Nettle,” Aurora said. Her tongue tripped over the name. “I could hear her from outside. She's . . . she's really good.”

Trudy smiled, revealing crooked teeth. “Got good taste then. I was beginning to wonder, seeing you come over here with this one.” She tilted her head at Tristan, who promptly elbowed her in the side.

Aurora glanced back at Nettle, standing on the stage alone, now singing to an upbeat rhythm that made Aurora's toes twitch.

“There we go,” Tristan said, pressing a large mug into her hands. “One mug of mead.” She raised it slowly to her lips and took a sip. She was surprised to find it sweet and rich like honey. It warmed her throat, and she took a bigger gulp.

“Like it?” Tristan asked, and she nodded.

Another customer appeared at the end of the bar. “Evening, you two,” he said. “Two pints of ale, please. And one for yourselves, in celebration of the princess's return.”

“I'll take this one,” Trudy said, and she bustled off, leaving Aurora alone with Tristan again. He swung himself over the bar
and settled on the stool beside her.

“So,” he said, “that was my dear, demented cousin, Prudence Middleton. But don't tell her I called her that.”

“Demented?”

“Prudence. She thinks it sounds like the name of a shriveled-up old shrew. I think it suits her.” Aurora tilted her head, unsure if he was joking, and he laughed. “And I'm Tristan Attwater.” He stuck out a hand, and Aurora took it with tentative fingers. “So,” he said again. “You got a name, or am I going to have to make one up for you?”

Aurora looked him in the eye. Her fingertips tingled. “What would you choose?”

“Let's see.” He brushed her hair back from her face and looked at her with exaggerated care. “I dub thee . . . Mouse.”

“Mouse?”

“Were you expecting something more regal?”

She shook her head and took another sip of mead. The sweet burn down her throat made her daring. “Why Mouse?”

“You look like you're hiding away.”

He still offered her that lazy smile, but there was intensity in his eyes that hadn't been there before, a fleck of something that seemed to cut to the core of her. She stared down at the mug in her hands, but she could still feel his eyes on her. “I'm not hiding from anyone.”

“Never said it was a person.”

She gulped the mead to avoid a reply. Her heart pounded,
but it was a different sort of fear than the one she had felt in her tower. Thrilling. Nettle was still singing, and her music brushed against Aurora's skin like the heat from a flame. Here were people, treating her like she was normal, like she had no fate and no duty and no trauma around her. Someone to talk to, not protect or manipulate. It was, she thought, a first in her life. She wanted to dwell in it longer, in this freedom, where she could breathe and talk and listen and not hide everything behind expectations.

Yet Tristan was watching her closely, and his eyes seemed to see through it all, the myths and pretenses, to whatever lay curled beneath. The part of her that even Aurora could not see.

“You were going to tell me about the ceremony,” she said. “What it was like.”

“So you can paint a mental picture for your future grandkids?”

“I just want to know what I was missing.”

Tristan glanced over his shoulder, as though checking for lurking spies. “Not much,” he said in a low voice. “It was all speech, smile, curtsy, cheer, speech again. The princess didn't say anything.”

Aurora took another sip. “It must be pretty overwhelming for her,” she said.

“Facing the crowd like that?”

“Everything,” Aurora said. “They seem to expect so much from her.”

“You're saying you don't?”

“I don't know. It seems a lot to ask one person who's been asleep for a hundred years.” It was easier, somehow, to put her feelings into words when she could be anonymous, a nameless mouse instead of a lost princess. Not easy, but easier. “Do you think people really believe it? That everything will be better now she's back?”

Tristan frowned at her. “I think some of them do,” he said. “The rest of them just want to believe.” Their shoulders brushed. “People have to have something to hope for, don't they? Doesn't really matter what. It's better to believe in magic than think that we'll all be hungry and poor for the rest of our lives.”

“And you? What do you believe?”

“Me?” He ran his fingers down the handle of his tankard, considering. “I realized a long time ago that no one's ever going to help anybody. You can't just sit around and wish. But perhaps we should talk about something else. Nell'll have my head if she thinks I'm talking trouble. And trust me. You don't want to make Nell mad.”

“Who's Nell?”

“Owner of this great establishment,” he said. “She's not a bad sort. Gave me a job when I needed it, even though I'm not exactly work material. But she likes to play it safe.”

“And you don't?”

“Safe is boring, Mouse. It's for old folk with businesses to run, not people like me and you.”

“Like me and you?” She smiled. “You barely know me.”

“I know enough to know I want to know you. Does that count?”

“I'm not sure it does.”

“Well, you're new in town,” he said. “You could decide to be anybody! So I'll go with the hope you'll decide to be like me.”

“I'll consider it,” she said. She gripped her own tankard with both hands, pulling it closer to her chest. “How did you know I was new here?”

“I would remember if I'd seen you before.”

She tilted her head to look at him. Blonde strands fell over her eyes. “And you've met everyone in this city, have you?”

“Everyone worth knowing,” he said. He nudged her hand. A shiver ran across the points where their skin touched.

“Tristan Attwater!” A rather large woman with a mop of graying brown hair marched toward them. “I don't pay you to flirt, you know.”

“You don't pay me at all, Nell,” Tristan said. “But it's all part of the service.”

“Well, customers are waiting.”

He gave Aurora another smile and a shake of his head. “Duty calls. But it was nice chatting to you, little Mouse.”

“You too.” She smiled back at him, and a warm ache tugged in her stomach. “Tristan.”

Then he was gone, and Aurora turned to the stage, letting the trembling music fill all the emptiness that formed whenever
she sat still too long. She rolled the few words she had exchanged with Tristan through her mind, trying to decode the tone of his voice, the warm smile, the way he seemed to see right through her skin. Occasionally, her eyes wandered over to him as he served and cleaned and talked, seeming perfectly content with everything he did. Once, he caught her watching, and he shot her a grin.

She had no idea how much time had passed, minutes and hours of music and stolen snatches of chatter, before Nettle left the stage and the crowd began to thin. “Thank you,” Aurora said as she passed the long-empty tankard across the bar to Tristan. She felt oddly peaceful, like all of her pain and stress belonged to some other girl.

“Nettle will be here tomorrow too, you know,” Tristan said with a slight tilt of his head. “So—see you soon?”

She shouldn't. She knew she shouldn't. It wasn't safe, it wasn't allowed, and if anyone found out . . . but her heart was already beginning to pound at the thought of another night trapped in those castle walls, unable to sleep, staring at the ceiling and thinking of life happening below. The words slipped out before she could stop herself. “Yes,” she said. Her voice trembled. “I'll see you soon.”

AURORA'S DREAMS THAT NIGHT WERE FILLED WITH
smiling, contorted faces and laughing eyes. She awoke before dawn and sat by the window, watching the beginnings of the day burn across the sky.

The click of the lock announced Betsy's arrival. Relocking the door had been beyond Aurora's skill, so she listened as Betsy unwittingly relocked it herself, then shook the handle of the unyielding door. After a few pushes, the lock clicked again, and the door swung open. A small frown marred Betsy's face, and she stared down at the key in her hand, as though trying to puzzle it out. When she noticed Aurora watching her, she slipped
the key into her pocket and gave her a slightly uncertain smile. “Good morning, Princess,” she said. “The queen says you're to have breakfast with Prince Rodric. Won't that be lovely?”

Lovely
was not quite the word to describe it. Once they bumbled through the initial pleasantries, they fell into awkward silence, broken only by the scrape of knives and the crumbling of bread. Rodric looked everywhere except at Aurora. The declarations of true love had bothered her, but the silence was worse. It pressed heavily on her, as though Rodric had finally seen her true self and did not like what he'd found.

A thousand different conversation starters floated through her head, but it seemed too late to try any of them. They had been quiet for too long. She continued to pick at the food, not saying a word.

“Do you have any plans for the day?” she eventually asked, after servants had appeared to clear away the plates and crumbs. If he did not want to talk to her, at least she could give him an excuse to leave.

He shook his head. “Not beyond spending it with you. Getting to know you.”

“Oh.”

“Is there anything you would like to do?” He finally looked at her, and his voice rose hopefully. All it took were a few words on her part, and he appeared optimistic about the two of them again. Aurora could not muster the same enthusiasm. The prince seemed harmless enough, but the silence of the past half an hour
felt far more truthful than his suddenly renewed friendliness. They were strangers, and pretending otherwise seemed ridiculous.

Yet things would be easier if they got along.

“Perhaps you could show me around,” she said, staring down at her hands. “So much has changed since I slept. I would appreciate a guide.”

“Around the city?” He looked alarmed. “I'm not sure that's—”

“No,” she said quickly. “Not the city.” She could still taste the sweet shadow of mead on her lips, feel the goose bumps on her skin from Nettle's song, and see the lamps, glowing like fairies along the paths, lighting up the darkness. They were her secrets, something that could not be tainted by curses or expectations. She did not want to trample through them with Rodric and guards and her story shouted before her. “Just inside the castle.”

Rodric let out a breath. “I could do that,” he said.

He led her through the half-familiar corridors, pointing out rooms and gifts from foreign guests, naming guards and servants who bowed as they passed. He parroted every word he must have heard from his parents, walking with an official air and a straight back. Although Aurora saw glimpses of the new, an eclectic mix of foreign tastes and sigils of rearing bears, the tour gave her no sense of the castle as Rodric saw it. Not unless the castle, to him, was the dullest place in all of Alyssinia.

“Is there still a garden?” she asked, after he pointed out the gilded chairs in the dining hall. “In the center of the castle?”

“Oh, yes,” Rodric said. “It is my mother's. Would you like to see it?” She nodded. “I should have thought of it,” he said. “Girls—girls like flowers.”

And boys like fighting and mead
, she thought with a snap, but she swallowed the words. Rodric was blushing enough already. “I don't know about girls,” she said instead, “but I would like some fresh air.”

Aurora remembered the gardens so clearly, so completely, that she could almost feel the brush of grass between her toes. The castle was hollow inside, its stone walls wrapped around a patch of undergrowth and trees, as though part of the outside world had settled within it, full of lush grass and clear skies above. But when she stepped out of the archway into the sunlight, she saw only paved paths, weaving their way around neat flower beds and the occasional fruit tree.

“My mother had flowers brought here from all over the land,” Rodric said as he led her onto the path. “And she has a team of gardeners, the kingdom's best, to care for them. There aren't any flowers now, obviously. But there will be. Soon. When spring comes.”

Aurora nodded. It was lovely, truly it was, but compared to the garden she remembered, it all looked so refined, almost restrained, as though even the winter grass had been bent to the queen's will.

“Is anything the same?” she asked. It was only a garden. She knew that. Nature did not wait for anyone. But it had always seemed so ancient and eternal, a living remnant of the land stretching back to the time of Alysse, full of ancient spirits and dreams that would reach out into forever. It was the only patch of the outside world she had been allowed to visit as a child, before confinement to the castle turned into confinement in the tower. “Has everything changed?”

“I don't know,” Rodric said. “It's always been this way for me.” He stared at the barren trees. “We still live in the castle,” he said with an optimistic tilt to his voice. “And we—and you're here.”

She stepped away from him, numbness tingling in her lips and fingers.

“There are some quite old apple trees,” Rodric said, after a long, awkward pause. “Just over here. I'll show you—”

“What happened while I was gone?” The question burst out of nowhere, all of her unspoken desperation blurring into one simple thought. Rodric stopped, startled.

“I don't know. I mean—lots happened. What do you want to know?”

She knew what she wanted to ask. What had happened to make people obsess over a fairy tale? To make a prince believe a single kiss meant true love, and that a girl who knew so little could mean so much? People needed hope, Tristan had said. But he had not mentioned why. “Why do people like me so much?”
she said. “Why do they care?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask, Princess,” he said. He still would not look at her. His cheeks burned red.

“Your mother has told you not to tell me.” It was only a guess, but his eyes shifted as though searching for an escape route, and she knew it was true.

“She does not want to overwhelm you,” he said eventually. “She thinks that talking too much about the past would make it harder for you.”

“The only thing overwhelming me right now is how little I know, about anything.” She stared at him until he looked at her. “Tell me why you were so happy when I woke up,” she said. “Let me be happy too.”

“I'm not sure the past is happy, Princess.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and set off along the path. She followed him, an arm's length to the side, her hands clasped in front of her so tightly her knuckles turned white. “Things were all right, I think, as long as your parents were alive. But once they died . . . what were people supposed to do? You were the heir, but you were fast asleep. No one knew whether there should be a regent, or a temporary king, or a new line—they still hoped you would wake up within the next month, the next year. Or some people hoped. My father says other people got greedy, saw the curse as the chance to take power for themselves.”

“And if I woke up, the succession would be settled again?”

“Perhaps,” Rodric said. He kicked the ground, scraping a groove in the dust. “Greedy people don't always step back, just because they run out of excuses.”

“So that's it?” she said. “That's the reason everyone was so excited for me to wake up?”

“I don't know,” Rodric said. “I mean—I don't think so. Not anymore. Of course, it's good that you're here. Fifteen different people have been king since you fell asleep, not including your father. Fifteen, in the past eighty years. My father tries his best, but it's not easy to keep the throne secure. So with you here, and me . . . it looks promising. It's more than that, though. It's . . . I don't know how to explain it.” He stared at the ground, as though the answers hid among the stones. “I guess . . . people think that things were right when there was magic. And then there wasn't any. Except you, and you were far out of reach. And ever since you fell asleep, everything has gone wrong. Like things were right before you were cursed, and everything fell apart as soon as you pricked your finger. There used to be enough food, and now the weather is terrible almost every year, and nothing grows. People used to feel safe, and now they're terrified that someone else will claim the throne, that Vanhelm will threaten us, that Falreach will march across the mountains again . . .”

“They found a way across the mountains?” She had pored over the eastern maps herself, trying to imagine what it would be like to climb through the snow, to be utterly alone in the wilderness.
To be the first and only person to figure out a way across.

“They did. Although their last attack was many years ago.”

Many years ago, but long after the world Aurora had known, where Falreach was a foreign, faraway place that could only be reached by sailing around the mountains, not a threat powerful enough to march across them. It took such an effort to communicate with them that few people ever did. When letters did travel across the sea, they always smelled of roses and honeysuckle. According to Aurora's mother, the court of Falreach had so many nigh contradictory rules of etiquette that a child had to be born there to ever understand them properly. When ambassadors for other kingdoms visited, they said the court would ridicule them in ways so subtle that it took them years to understand the intent. “My mother was from Falreach,” Aurora said. She had always been jealous of her mother, her ability to leave her home and travel to somewhere entirely new. It seemed Alysse-like somehow.

“My mother is too.”

“She is?”

Rodric nodded. “I think—” He turned away, looking up at the bare branches of a fruit tree. “It is hard. People are still distrustful. Of Falreach, and everything to do with it, after the invasion. Everyone is stuck in the past here.” He shrugged, then stood up straighter, as though forcing himself back into brightness. “But now—now you're awake, Princess. Things will start moving again.”

“I am stuck in the past too,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Or . . . stuck here.” She looked down at her feet. Her shoes seemed too bright and soft against the solid stone path. Her parents had feared the future, every second of every day. They let its possibilities control every part of Aurora's life, and all for nothing in the end. “I miss my family,” she said. The words hung in the air, weak and useless, unable to capture even half of what she meant.

“I'm sorry,” he said, so quietly she almost did not hear him. He was still looking away. “But—but you have a new family. With me.” Another sigh, as though even he was aware of the uselessness of his words. Then a nod and a smile, even more decisive for the hesitation moments before. “You're going to tie things together. Old and new.”

“Do you believe that?”

He looked her in the eyes. “It worked, didn't it? You woke up. Why wouldn't the rest of it be true?”

Not a shred of it seemed true. What did Celestine care for other people's happiness? No, Aurora could not believe it. Those promises had been invented in the years since her curse, and they would provide comfort, it seemed, to everyone but Aurora herself.

“You're wanted in court, Princess,” Betsy said as she came into Aurora's room that afternoon. “Prince Finnegan has just arrived at the castle. He gave no notice or anything. The queen does not look happy.”

“Prince Finnegan?” Aurora put down her book. “Who is he?”

“He is the prince of Vanhelm, Princess,” Betsy said. “He hasn't been here for a couple of years at least, but now he's turned up out of the blue. It must be something to do with you.”

Vanhelm. The land of Alyssinia's ancestors, many hundreds of years ago, before the steel and smoke drove them over the sea.

“What is he like?” Aurora asked as she stood up.

“I've never spoken to him, Princess,” Betsy said. She began adjusting the pins in Aurora's hair. “I hear he's quite handsome.”

The door swung open, and the queen strode into the room. Her hair seemed even more intricate than normal, with pearls woven into the braids that covered the top of her head. She pursed her lips when she saw Aurora. “Good,” she said. “You are ready. We cannot keep the prince waiting.” The queen looked rather rattled; the extra effort she had put into appearing dignified only increased the effect.

“The prince traveled far,” Aurora said carefully as the queen steered her through the corridors. “Vanhelm is several days' journey across the sea, isn't it?”

“Yes,” the queen said. “He must have been in Alyssinia already when he heard the news.”

A hush fell over the court as Aurora and the queen walked through the brass doors. The queen settled in her throne, and gestured Aurora to a spot beside her.

Rodric entered the room through the door behind the
thrones. He smiled at Aurora, and she smiled back. Then he stopped to the left of his father's seat, a perfect reflection of Aurora's own stance.

“Enough of this waiting!” the king said. “Where is that prince?”

“I am here, Your Majesty. Just waiting for your word.”

A young man with jet-black hair marched into the room. Dashing had always seemed a description that only applied to rogues and pirates in stories, men who swung swords and romanced girls with quick words and an impossibly good heart, yet the word fit this man perfectly. Handsome, oozing confidence, with green eyes that seemed to sparkle with delight. He seemed utterly convinced of his own attractiveness.