id it work?” asked a dwarf.
“I do not know,” said the queen. “But I feel for her, poor thing. Sleeping her life away.”
“You slept for a year in the same witch-sleep,” said the dwarf. “You did not starve. You did not rot.”
The figure on the bed stirred, as if she were having a bad dream from which she was fighting to wake herself.
The queen ignored her. She had noticed something on the floor beside the bed. She reached down and picked it up. “Now this,” she said. “This smells of magic.”
“There’s magic all through this,” said the smallest dwarf.
“No, this,” said the queen. She showed him the wooden spindle, the base half wound around with yarn. “This smells of magic.”
“It was here, in this room,” said the old woman, suddenly. “And I was little more than a girl. I had never gone so far before, but I climbed all the steps, and I went up and up and round and round until I came to the topmost room. I saw that bed, the one you see, although there was nobody in it. There was only an old woman, sitting on the stool, spinning wool into yarn with her spindle. I had never seen a spindle before. She asked if I would like a go. She took the wool in her hand and gave me the spindle to hold. She held my thumb and pressed it against the point of the spindle until blood flowed, and she touched the blood to the thread. And then she said –”
Another voice interrupted her. A young voice it was, a girl’s voice, but still sleep-thickened. “I said, now I take your sleep from you, girl, just as I take from you your ability to harm me in my sleep, for someone needs to be awake while I sleep. Your family, your friends, your world will sleep too. And then I lay down on the bed, and I slept, and they slept, and as each of them slept I stole a little of their life, a little of their dreams, and as I slept I took back my youth and my beauty and my power. I slept and I grew strong. I undid the ravages of time and I built myself a world of sleeping slaves.”
She was sitting up in the bed. She looked so beautiful, and so very young.
The queen looked at the girl, and saw what she was searching for: the same look that she had seen in her stepmother’s eyes, and she knew what manner of creature this girl was.
“We had been led to believe,” said the tallest dwarf, “that when you woke, the rest of the world would wake with you.”
“Why ever would you think that?” asked the golden-haired girl, all childlike and innocent (ah, but her eyes! Her eyes were so old). “I like them asleep. They are more . . . biddable.” She stopped for a moment. Then she grinned. “Even now they come for you. I have called them here.”
“It’s a high tower,” said the queen. “And sleeping people do not move fast. We still have a little time to talk, Your Darkness.”
“Who are you? Why would we talk? Why do you know to address me that way?” The girl climbed off the bed and stretched deliciously, pushing each fingertip out before running her fingertips through her golden hair. She smiled, and it was as if the sun shone into that dim room. “The little people will stop where they are, now. I do not like them. And you, girl. You will sleep too.”
“No,” said the queen.
She hefted the spindle. The yarn wrapped around it was black with age and with time.
The dwarfs stopped where they stood, and they swayed, and closed their eyes.
The queen said, “It’s always the same with your kind. You need youth and you need beauty. You used your own up so long ago, and now you find ever more complex ways of obtaining them. And you always want power.”
They were almost nose to nose, now, and the fair-haired girl seemed so much younger than the queen.
“Why don’t you just go to sleep?” asked the girl, and she smiled guilelessly, just as the queen’s stepmother had smiled when she wanted something. There was a noise on the stairs, far below them.
“I slept for a year in a glass coffin,” said the queen. “And the woman who put me there was much more powerful and dangerous than you will ever be.”
“More powerful than I am?” The girl seemed amused. “I have a million sleepers under my control. With every moment that I slept I grew in power, and the circle of dreams grows faster and faster with every passing day. I have my youth – so much youth! I have my beauty. No weapon can harm me. Nobody alive is more powerful than I am.”
She stopped and stared at the queen.
“You are not of our blood,” she said. “But you have some of the skill.” She smiled, the smile of an innocent girl who has woken on a spring morning. “Ruling the world will not be easy. Nor will maintaining order among those of the Sisterhood who have survived into this degenerate age. I will need someone to be my eyes and ears, to administer justice, to attend to things when I am otherwise engaged. I will stay at the centre of the web. You will not rule with me, but beneath me, but you will still rule, and rule continents, not just a tiny kingdom.” She reached out a hand and stroked the queen’s pale skin, which, in the dim light of that room, seemed almost as white as snow.
The queen said nothing.
“Love me,” said the girl. “All will love me, and you, who woke me, you must love me most of all.”
The queen felt something stirring in her heart. She remembered her stepmother, then. Her stepmother had liked to be adored. Learning how to be strong, to feel her own emotions and not another’s, had been hard; but once you learned the trick of it, you did not forget. And she did not wish to rule continents.
The girl smiled at her with eyes the colour of the morning sky.
The queen did not smile. She reached out her hand. “Here,” she said. “This is not mine.”
She passed the spindle to the old woman beside her. The old woman hefted it, thoughtfully. She began to unwrap the yarn from the spindle with arthritic fingers. “This was my life,” she said. “This thread was my life . . .”
“It was your life. You gave it to me,” said the sleeper, irritably. “And it has gone on much too long.”
The tip of the spindle was still sharp after so many decades.
The old woman, who had once been a princess, held the yarn tightly in her hand, and she thrust the point of the spindle into the golden-haired girl’s breast.
The girl watched as a trickle of red blood ran down her breast and stained her white dress crimson.
“No weapon can harm me,” she said, and her girlish voice was petulant. “Not any more. Look. It’s only a scratch.”