The princess walked slowly back to her room.
The hall was wide, empty, and inviting, but she didn’t feel like twirling this time. She felt useless and desultory.
“YOUR HIGHNESS.”
A hand clawed her shoulder from behind.
Aurora spun around—but it was just the old minstrel. His face was pale, and his long, narrow nose was pinched beyond its usual extreme. He seemed more degenerate and wild than ever; his clothes were torn in a dozen different places, and there were scratches near his eyes that made it look like he was crying blood.
“You are unwell, Master Tommins,” Aurora said gently. She couldn’t smell anything about him—not even the home-brewed moonshine some of the peasants had begun to amuse themselves by distilling. But he was so far gone that sometimes not having a dram drove him to fits.
“It’s out there. It is! There is an Outside!”
He looked behind himself wildly and then grabbed her hands and pressed his own around them. “Your Highness, I escaped!”
“Unhand me, you are sick,” Aurora repeated, only a little alarmed at his behavior. She was more concerned about his health—and what would happen if anyone caught him touching her in such a manner.
Familiar and ominously irregular footsteps came toward them. The sound drove the minstrel to hysteria. Aurora reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Perhaps you should have a little lie-down….”
But it was too late. Shuffling around the corner were two of Maleficent’s private guards: oily black-and-gray monsters who moved ponderously along, barely upright. They looked like they had been put together wrong.
The minstrel’s eyes widened in naked terror when he saw them, but he didn’t take his attention off the princess.
“Your Highness…”
“Come away from her, singing human,” the more pig-like creature snuffled loudly. “Maleficent commands you sleep it off and leave her heir alone.”
“You are the key!” the minstrel whispered, throwing himself at the princess so his lips touched her ear. She tried not to pull away. “You! It’s all still out there!”
“MINSTREL!” said the other guard, the one with the comb of a cock and the yellow eyes of a demon.
They each put a horrible clawed hand on the poor man’s shoulders. They swung him aloft like he was no more than a speck of dust.
“Your Highness!” the minstrel cried.
The monstrous guards laughed.
“Sing for us, and we might not hurt you too much on the way to the dungeon!”
“Please be easy on him,” Aurora urged. “He is having a fit of some kind. He needs a doctor, not a beating….”
“SING!” the second one commanded, ignoring her. Neither monster bothered to bow as they walked away. “SING!”
The minstrel tried his best, tears running down his bloody face, borne aloft on the shoulders of nightmares.
“Douce—douce dame jolie…”
Aurora watched him go with sadness and horror.
And maybe, just maybe, a tiny spark of something too hideous to admit. Relief that the afternoon had become more interesting.
After they were out of sight, all that remained was the quickly fading song, streaming through the hall like smoke.
“Pour dieu ne pensés mie
Que nulle ait signorie
Seur moy fors vous seulement….”
Aurora noticed her hands were still clasped where the minstrel had held them. When she pulled them apart, she found he had pressed something there for her to hold.
She held it up in wonder.
It was a single brilliant blue feather.
WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT IT, Aurora used her thumbnail to crease the spine, to see if it felt like a real feather. It did. She twirled it between her fingers thoughtfully.
There were still pigeons, of course—quite a flock of them in the courtyards now (which peasants occasionally trapped for dinner, not always trusting magical food). They didn’t have feathers like this.
There were some chickens and ducks left, but even the prettiest, most iridescent-winged drakes didn’t sport a blue of this purity.
There were a few descendants of foreign birds from the jungles kept safe in golden cages, but the blue ones were very light, like the tiny flowers in ancient tapestries. Not like this.
She held the feather before her as she—much more thoughtfully—made her way to her room.
Aurora lived in a prettily decorated suite on the second floor of the castle. All the surviving royalty and lesser nobles lived in the main keep, as well as those foreign dignitaries trapped in the kingdom when the world outside finally collapsed. The…lesser survivors, the peasants and servants, lived in a hastily erected shantytown in one of the larger courtyards of the bailey.
If Aurora didn’t look too hard at the thick vines covering her window and there was a good strong lantern glowing, she could pretend it was a completely normal royal princess’s bedroom. There was a frothy and beribboned pink canopy bed on a raised dais, a wardrobe with gilt moldings in which hung a stunning number of beautiful gowns, a vanity with a pitcher and basin of beaten silver, a tiny couch with silk pillows, and a lovely little table by the fireplace with long, elegant legs.
There was also a bookcase full of books that hadn’t worked properly since the world had ended.
Most were missing great patches of text and illustrations. Many were simply blank. The words that remained were often in languages that weren’t even real. An effect, Maleficent had explained, of the world-destroying evil magics that King Stefan and Queen Leah had unleashed. They had literally broken the land and the minds and inventions of men. The queen’s powers were not great enough to restore everything fully—they were barely enough to keep the remaining population alive.
And so the books remained mostly blank, and cloth had to be woven from thread summoned by magic. Spinning wheels hadn’t functioned the way they were supposed to in half a decade.
Right then, Aurora’s bed looked especially inviting—the servants had made it up all plump and pretty. And she did love dancing, and she was going to be up late that night.
There was also the little matter that when she wasn’t twirling, her favorite thing was lying down and dreaming the hours away. Her bed was always her favorite place to be; she could spend the entire day in the dark under its covers. Eventually night would come and sometimes things were more interesting at night…as much as anything was ever interesting in the castle at the end of the world.
And when the nights weren’t particularly interesting, well, at least she had passed another of the endless days away.
She gave in, collapsing on her back onto the fat mattress full of feathers. She twirled the blue feather in her fingers. She had never seen the minstrel in any of the outer courtyards or baileys. He tended to stick to shadows, internal rooms, secluded areas—like a burglar or a cat. Bright light hurt his addict’s eyes, and he was more uncomfortable than most looking up at the giant vines that blocked the sky.
Perhaps that’s what he meant by being “outside.” Not…Outside.
Poor crazy, drunken fool.
She sighed and reached up over her head to grab one of the broken books, one with an easily memorable design on its cover, and started to place the feather between its heavy, insane pages.