“Let us now discuss how diplomacy is affected by matters of natural philosophy,” said her father.
“My sisters ruled the world,” said her stepmother, dragging her iron shoes along the forest path. They glowed a dull orange, yet none of the dry leaves burned where the shoes touched them. “The mortal folk rose up against us, they cast us down. And so we waited, in crevices, in places they do not see us. And now, they adore me. Even you, my stepdaughter. Even you adore me.”
“You are so beautiful,” said her mother, who had died so very long ago. “Like a crimson rose in the fallen snow.”
ometimes wolves ran beside them, pounding dust and leaves up from the forest floor, although the passage of the wolves did not disturb the huge cobwebs that hung like veils across the path. Also, sometimes the wolves ran through the trunks of trees and off into the darkness.
The queen liked the wolves, and was sad when one of the dwarfs began shouting, saying that the spiders were bigger than pigs, and the wolves vanished from her head and from the world. (It was not so. They were only spiders, of a regular size, used to spinning their webs undisturbed by time and by travellers.)
he drawbridge across the moat was down, and they crossed it, although everything seemed to be pushing them away. They could not enter the castle, however: thick thorns filled the gateway, and fresh growth was covered with roses.
The queen saw the remains of men in the thorns: skeletons in armour and skeletons unarmoured. Some of the skeletons were high on the sides of the castle, and the queen wondered if they had climbed up, seeking an entry, and died there, or if they had died on the ground, and been carried upwards as the roses grew.
She came to no conclusions. Either way was possible.
And then her world was warm and comfortable, and she became certain that closing her eyes for only a handful of moments would not be harmful. Who would mind?
“Help me,” croaked the queen.
The dwarf with the brown beard pulled a thorn from the rose bush nearest to him, and jabbed it hard into the queen’s thumb, and pulled it out again. A drop of deep blood dripped on to the flagstones of the gateway.
“Ow!” said the queen. And then, “Thank you!”
hey stared at the thick barrier of thorns, the dwarfs and the queen. She reached out and picked a rose from the thorn-creeper nearest her, and bound it into her hair.
“We could tunnel our way in,” said the dwarfs. “Go under the moat and into the foundations and up. Only take us a couple of days.”
The queen pondered. Her thumb hurt, and she was pleased her thumb hurt. She said, “This began here eighty or so years ago. It began slowly. It only spread recently. It is spreading faster and faster. We do not know if the sleepers can ever wake. We do not know anything, save that we may not actually have another two days.”
She eyed the dense tangle of thorns, living and dead, decades of dried, dead plants, their thorns as sharp in death as ever they were when alive. She walked along the wall until she reached a skeleton, and she pulled the rotted cloth from its shoulders, and felt it as she did so. It was dry, yes. It would make good kindling.
“Who has the tinder box?” she asked.
The old thorns burned so hot and so fast. In fifteen minutes orange flames snaked upwards: they seemed, for a moment, to engulf the building, and then they were gone, leaving just blackened stone. The remaining thorns, those strong enough to have withstood the heat, were easily cut through by the queen’s sword, and were hauled away and tossed into the moat.
The four travellers went into the castle.
he old woman peered out of the slitted window at the flames below her. Smoke drifted in through the window, but neither the flames nor the roses reached the highest tower. She knew that the castle was being attacked, and she would have hidden in the tower room, had there been anywhere to hide, had the sleeper not been on the bed.
She swore, and began, laboriously, to walk down the steps, one at a time. She intended to make it down as far as the castle’s battlements, from where she could reach the far side of the building, the cellars. She could hide there. She knew the building better than anybody. She was slow, but she was cunning, and she could wait. Oh, she could wait.
She heard their calls rising up the stairwell.
“This way!”
“Up here!”
“It feels worse this way. Come on! Quickly!”
She turned around, then, did her best to hurry upwards, but her legs moved no faster than they had when she was climbing earlier that day. They caught her just as she reached the top of the steps: three men, no higher than her hips, closely followed by a young woman in travel-stained clothes, with the blackest hair the old woman had ever seen.
The young woman said, “Seize her,” in a tone of casual command.
The little men took her stick. “She’s stronger than she looks,” said one of them, his head still ringing from the blow she had got in with the stick, before he had taken it. They walked her back into the round tower room.
“The fire?” said the old woman, who had not talked to anyone who could answer her for six decades. “Was anyone killed in the fire? Did you see the king or the queen?”
The young woman shrugged. “I don’t think so. The sleepers we passed were all inside, and the walls are thick. Who are you?”
Names. Names. The old woman squinted, then she shook her head. She was herself, and the name she had been born with had been eaten by time and lack of use.
“Where is the princess?”
The old woman just stared at her.
“And why are you awake?”
She said nothing. They spoke urgently to one another then, the little men and the queen. “Is she a witch? There’s a magic about her, but I do not think it’s of her making.”
“Guard her,” said the queen. “If she is a witch, that stick might be important. Keep it from her.”
“It’s my stick,” said the old woman. “I think it was my father’s. But he had no more use for it.”
The queen ignored her. She walked to the bed, pulled down the silk netting. The sleeper’s face stared blindly up at them.
“So this is where it began,” said one of the little men.
“On her birthday,” said another.
“Well,” said the third. “Somebody’s got to do the honours.”
“I shall,” said the queen, gently. She lowered her face to the sleeping woman’s. She touched the pink lips to her own carmine lips and she kissed the sleeping girl long and hard.