Once Upon a Dream (23 page)

“All right, that makes sense,” Phillip said in a Serious Voice, arms folded and face frowny. “But what does this have to do with porridge?”

“I want porridge!”
she said, exasperated. “That’s all. I wanted a bunny before and
it
appeared, and now I want porridge. The way my aunts used to make it on cold mornings. Warm and buttery, with rich toasted acorns in it.”

“Acorns? Really? That sounds…um…I mean, it’s an interesting gastronomic choice.”

She rolled her eyes. “We lived in the middle of a
forest
, Royal Prince. It was what we had. And a real treat in the middle of winter.”

Then she proceeded to ignore him.

She closed her eyes and cupped her hands. She prayed and wished and imagined and begged.

Phillip stayed politely silent—though he did look around, sigh a little, and do all sorts of other things to obviously fret over the passage of time.

She tried to call up the feel of the wooden bowl in her hands: it warmed almost like flesh where the wood was thin and the heat of her fingers and the hot porridge mingled. She summoned the smell, a mix of dairy and things of the earth and the tall green grass and the woods. Sometimes there was even a dollop of honey on top.

She thought so hard she felt like she had to go to the privy.

Her concentration faltered for a moment when she distractedly wondered if that ever happened to Maleficent when she was performing an incantation. But after a few seconds she was back in her dream of porridge.

Time passed….

“GOOD LORD!”

The smell in her head was giving way to a real scent in her nose now, with even that faint, almost
un
tasty burnt smell the acorns sometimes gave off.

She smiled and opened her eyes.

In her hands was a cracked wooden bowl full of porridge, just like she remembered.

“Can you get me some eggs and a drumstick?” Phillip asked eagerly. “Maybe a tankard of beer to go with it?”

“Eat the porridge, greedy bird,” she said, smiling.

“Oh, all right,” he said with a sigh. “It is certainly a
lot
better than nothing. Well done and all! Shall we use our hands?”

She tried to summon two spoons. But which ones? The big wooden paddle Merryweather stirred their soup with? Or tiny teaspoons for fancy afternoons? Or…

Each one flitted up in her mind and then disappeared.

She shrugged apologetically. “I can’t concentrate. Too hungry.”

“Well, this won’t be the first time,” Phillip said, wiping his hands carefully on his cape. “Let’s dig in!”

They did, giggling. As she licked the first scoop and the warm, familiar cereal filled her mouth, so too was she—filled with a warmth and happiness that she hadn’t known in a long time.

“I NEVER REALIZED JUST
how infinitely boring the prattle of human teenagers was,” Maleficent drawled. But her voice was even thicker than irony required; she seemed slow…like a mechanical bird winding down. “I hope we don’t have to put up with much more of their
fascinating
discussion of philosophy and the nature of reality. Or the culinary delights of porridge.”

“I thought the part with the porridge was fairly interesting,” Lianna spoke up, perhaps emboldened by her mistress’s weakness. “Especially the part where she
summoned it out of the air
.”

Maleficent’s yellow eyes flicked toward her.

“Yes…that
was
interesting. And troubling. Who knew the girl had it in her?”

“You didn’t,” Lianna pointed out tonelessly. “There is much more to her than you originally thought. Considering how she has evaded all your traps—even the
particularly
clever nightmare inside the nightmare. It will be harder to kill her now that she is beginning to unlock the power of her own dreamworld.”

“I don’t need to
kill
her,” Maleficent said with a satisfied smile. “All I need to do is
delay
her. She has one hour and two minutes to figure out how to defeat me and wake up. If she is in my power when the clock strikes twelve and the next day begins…I win.

“But you’re right,” Maleficent said thoughtfully, swirling the green and red liquids in the orb of her staff. “It might be time to step up the direct assaults on her personage. I need the work of my cleverest, strongest servants!
Eregral
,
Slunder
,
Agrabrex
, to me!”

Large, slow-moving, grinning black forms congealed from the shadows in the corners of the room.

And Lianna’s opaque eyes might have shown a hint of concern.

HOURS LATER,
it was still early…and Aurora Rose was already exhausted. Despite the porridge, her feet were dragging; it was probably before noon, and they had already walked at least six miles. She tried not to complain or slow down. Neither seemed like a princessy thing to do.

Instead of burning off entirely, the morning mist had risen and thinned out and now covered the sky loosely, like thousands of baby spiders leaving trails of silk behind them. The sunlight, so bright and yellow before, was sickly gray. The air was damp and chilly.

She kept her eyes on the ground to prevent tripping. The shadows were imperceptibly fading along with the light. Some colors in the background stood out more, though, like bright little poisonous mushrooms and the quick tail of an orange salamander. But everything else became shades of black and white and gray.

Sounds grew strange. If her heel crunched dead leaves, sometimes it seemed silent; sometimes it echoed loudly off rocks and logs.

“When are we going to get there?” she asked, trying not to sound whiny. Her throat still hurt.

Phillip sighed. “Honestly, if today is
entirely event free
—no more demons or sudden ravines or that many of your, um, spells—which are completely not your fault!—then just another half a day or so, I would guess. A few hours.”

“All right.” She took a deep breath, trying to be brave and stalwart like a prince.

But it wasn’t long before the fog began to settle in earnest. At any other time, she would have been simply fascinated. The girl who was trapped in a castle had never seen anything like it, really, and the girl who was raised in the woods wasn’t afraid of anything from the natural world.

But now…there was something
creepy
about it.

They passed through thick patches of gray clouds whose colony droplets were so large she could almost make out each individual one. Water seeped out of everything like magic; she saw a bead of dew appear and pull itself together at the tip of a pine branch like a living thing. For a moment she had a glimpse of the black-and-white world reflected in it, in reverse, before it fell silently to the ground.

The fog found its way through her clothes, which became heavy and damp. And then hot and itchy and freezing and itchy as her legs and body moved beneath them.

A few times it was so hard to see that they almost stepped off the path. Phillip let out an unprincely oath as he twisted his ankle on an exposed root.

The land began to slope downhill and the fog poured down beside them, rolling like a slow-moving liquid. Tendrils shot out before the rest of the clouds, as if feeling out the way. It curled and rippled around obstacles like trees and stones.

The princess began to be genuinely frightened.

“Here,” Phillip said, stopping. “You look miserable. Take my cape—it will keep the worst of the damp off.”

She turned to argue with him. Wondered if he would think less of her if she reached for his hand.

But fog quickly filled the space between them. The prince’s body already seemed to fade and dissolve into gray. As he took off his cape and swirled it, the fog flowed along, blanketing him completely.

“…not cold at all the splurble burbly…”

His words sounded strange and distant.

“Phillip?” she called out uncertainly.

“Right here.” He sounded odd, like the words died inches from his mouth, like the mist stopped them and they fell to the ground. “Hang on, the…”

Whatever he said next was muffled.

“Phillip?”

She walked several feet to where she thought he was.

There was nothing but a wall of swirling white.

“Phillip?!”

She spun around. The fog made little trails behind her skirts and hair.

Finally, there was a muffled response, a little exasperated sounding.

“Where are you?” she demanded.

Her heart began to pound. She could
hear
it. She could hear that and the breath in her own ears and nothing else. Not even the noise of the pebbles she knocked around as she spun desperately looking for the prince.

She knew she should stay where she was. Somehow she knew that, from either growing up in the woods or some long-buried instinct that every child is born with. She should stay still like a fawn and let Phillip find
her
. If both of them moved around, they would be lost.

Harrumphhh.

There was a strange noise, like a grinding or a whuffing. Woods Aurora—
Rose
—thought it sounded a little like an angry bear. But it wasn’t quite. It wasn’t an entirely
natural
noise.

“Phillip?” she whispered. She wasn’t sure whether she should scream so he could find her, or stay silent and let whatever that noise was pass by without ever seeing her.

Silence all around.

Heavy
silence.

The silence of hiding under the stairs in a castle when everyone was looking for her—her
parents
actually looking for her, for once. All she had ever longed for was her parents wanting her, searching her out…but when suddenly it happened, she felt uncertain and had to ask
why
. Why
now
? Fear of the unknown reasons. And so she had hid, and the castle was mostly silent except for angry yells far away and the stomps of footsteps close by.

But they never saw her.

That kind of silence.

Her mind filled the empty, swirling fog with images.

Eyeless, leering, toothy smiles. The piggish bodies of Maleficent’s demon guards. The strangely black and fluid forms they took out here—which would fit in so well with the fog.

And still there was silence.

And then the
nearly
silent scrape of gravel on the path.

“Phillip?”

Nothing.

Then:
Harrrummmppph.

The princess ran.

She aimed for what she thought was deeper into the forest; it didn’t matter—it was all around her. She would feel safer under the trees. Things didn’t look for princesses, for people, under trees.

Right?

She looked behind her; white streaked with gray to mark where she had come from, like a sticky shadow.

She looked ahead. It, too, was blank white and—

Thunk.

She smashed her head into the thick and spiky branch of a dead pine. An offensive, white-hot pain exploded from her forehead. She reeled backward, hitting her back on another tree.

Her right eye was clouded; when she tentatively put up her hand to see what was wrong, it came away covered in hot, fresh blood.

Harroomph.

She bit her lip and wiped the rest of the blood out of her eye.

“Phillip!” she cried halfheartedly.

This was like nightmares she used to have when she was very little, of being pulled away from her aunts, separated from them forever.

She watched the clouds twirl and swirl in front of her.
Something
was making them move. Something was making them slide and bubble, like foam on top of a pot being boiled clean.

She saw the smile first.

The black, toothless smile, wide and wider and then impossibly wide. Two yellow eyes above it opening into existence. And long, unlikely, skinny black arms, rising up to reach around and drag her in.

She screamed. A long, piercing, terrible scream—

—that never made it past her lips. Her mouth was open, and she felt her throat working and her lungs lose their breath, but no noise came out. Utter silence, despite how hard she screamed. No one would ever hear….

The thing smiled even wider.