Time may have stopped; seconds or centuries may have ticked by while she remained held within the wall, but finally Aurora parts the stone—parts from it—though the cold still clings to her like a shadow.
She begins to take in her surroundings . . . and an eerie sense of recognition floods her. But it must be a coincidence. It has to be. She’s still shaken from moving through the wall illusion—and from seeing all the soldiers deformed, crushed, morphed into stone.
Across a barren field, an old castle rises up from a tangle of dying vines and rotting tree trunks. Some sort of ivy, dotted with dried purple flowers, climbs from window to window, many of them boarded up. One entire tower has collapsed in on itself, and stone rubble litters the grounds. The day—if this even is the same day—has waned; purple-pink light veins the dried grass, almost obscuring the long, narrow road that snakes to the mouth of the gate. In the distance beyond the estate, she can see that the road leads to the low, lopsided peaks of huts and even a church—though it’s all blackened and in obvious disrepair, as if the whole village was razed by a bad fire.
“What is this place?” she whispers.
Heath smiles at her, all the wariness and urgency he exuded in the Borderlands now gone from his face. “Welcome to Blackthorn,” he says. “Home of Queen Belcoeur.”
Blackthorn. So she was right, in a way. She did recognize it. The Blackthorns used to hold a great spread of land in the rocky LaMorte Territories. It’s where Queen Malfleur now rules. From there, it is said, the faerie queen can look out across the mountains to her entire kingdom, and can even see, if she squints, the gleaming cupolas of Deluce’s palace, her childhood home, in the distance.
But Aurora and Heath aren’t in the mountains. And this Blackthorn is inhabited not by Malfleur, but by her dead sister—who is not, Aurora reminds herself, dead at all, apparently. She can’t help but wonder if she’s tumbling through a dream.
Then again, she has never dreamed with her lost senses.
“You live here?” Aurora stares at the castle, distress creeping into her lungs.
“Most of us do. Our grandparents, and their parents, were Blackthorn’s staff. But now we’re more like tenants. We live here, and we work here, but we don’t really work for her. We don’t even see her. She doesn’t leave the north turret. For all we know, she subsists by eating the stray moths that find their way through her windows.”
Aurora looks at Heath. She is having a difficult time separating her confusion about him with her overwhelming curiosity—and wariness—about this place. She clears her throat, picturing whittling her words into a knife, one that can cut through the fog. “I need to get home. My sister . . . and the prince . . . and . . .”
“Home,” he repeats, as though the idea were an uncanny one.
“Deluce. The palace. Yes.”
“I’m afraid that may be a bit complicated,” Heath replies. “Come on, evening is approaching. You and I have much to discuss. Very much to discuss.”
“We do?” No one has ever had much to discuss with her, other than Isbe.
But he is already hurrying ahead at a half jog. Aurora follows, then abruptly stumbles, landing hard on her knees with a sharp cry. She has fallen countless times before, but this is different—it takes the breath out of her. Her legs feel wobbly, and one of her ankles throbs.
“Aurora!” Heath runs to her side.
She sees the object in the grass that tripped her: a glass jar, lying in the dusty earth, which looks almost blue in the ebbing light.
The jar is cool and firm in her hands . . . and full of dead fireflies.
She lets it drop back to the ground as Heath helps her up. “Here, lean on me.”
All of the lifting, the touching, the shuffling—hand to shoulder, arm to back—it’s too much. But she has no choice. Her ankle is weak. It is singing a silent song of despair. She can’t listen to it anymore, but the pain won’t go away. It’s constant. She never knew what it really was to be hurt, even a little.
She swallows, and swallows again, trying not to cry, trying not to faint. Other people, she reminds herself, live with a sense of touch. They are not consumed by it. She breathes deeply and tries to distract herself.
“What . . . what was that?” she asks.
“Part of the queen’s enchantment,” he says. “They’re everywhere, these jars. If you tried to collect them all, you’d find still more would crop up, as though naturally occurring.”
Enchantment? Another riddle. He seems full of them, like so many imprisoned insects. Isbe used to collect fireflies too, with Gil when they were kids. She’d bring them back for Aurora, to light the secret passageway between their bedrooms. Aurora used to be disturbed by the way the bugs’ bodies would glow as though aflame, and then go dormant, one by one, until she realized they were suffocating. She always wondered what it would be like to light up from the inside, like some beautiful cry of warning.
They reach a broken wooden fence, then pass through a gate and down a dirt path. The last of the sun streaks the ruined castle in shadow as Heath raps a special knock on the door.
Aurora holds her breath. They are entering the home of the Night Faerie. . . . But it’s a young boy, no more than eight or nine years old, who answers. He’s dressed in a frayed tunic twice his size. He blinks out at them, his little face smudged with dirt. “Heath!” he exclaims with a wide smile.
Heath ruffles the boy’s head. “Flea. Be good and don’t let anyone know we’re here just yet, all right?”
“Too late!” The boy grins as what looks like the rest of his family appears in the doorway—a father, mother, and two older sisters, one carrying a baby boy in her arms, the other with a rounded belly suggesting her own child will come soon. All of them have a gaunt, skeletal appearance, with deep circles beneath their eyes.
“We were expecting you to bring home a deer,” the girl holding the baby says.
“Your family?” Aurora asks him, feeling self-conscious in her now-tattered cloak, which is still likely finer than anything these peasants have ever worn.
“Not exactly,” Heath says, then turns back to them. “This is Aurora. She’s—well, I’ll explain later.”
Aurora notices the wife and husband catch eyes.
“Well, come in, of course,” the wife says quickly. “Dinner’s almost ready.”
“Actually, Greta.” Heath swipes loose hair out of his face. “I’ll have Wren bring Aurora’s dish up to the tower later. I don’t want everyone asking questions.”
The sisters stare at him. “The tower?” the older one asks.
The younger of the two has her mouth crunched quizzically to the left. “And what if we have questions?”
“Trust me,” he answers easily, “I’ve got more questions than you.” He pulls Aurora past them, through a large open hall in which a number of other peasants stop their chores to stare at her, then down a corridor and into a kitchen full of rich scents, where he grabs a bottle of something from one of the side tables. Then he leads her into a back room lit by torches. He hangs up the rope he had been carrying on his back. He helps her down a series of walkways, toward a flight of stairs.
But it’s all happening too fast, and his arm around her is both guiding her and making her dizzy at the same time. “Heath, I can’t stay here,” she manages. It feels good at least to say something firm, something definite. “I have to get back to Deluce. They need me,” she adds. The third prince will be waiting.
He turns to face her, placing a finger on her lips. “I need you.”
She’s too startled to reply, or even to understand what he means. Her lips tingle, and she tries to rub them with her sleeve to make the sensation go away.
At the top of the stairs is a tower bedroom that looks, to Aurora’s surprise and relief, much like a parlor she might have seen in the home of a Delucian baron or chevalier, except that a layer of dust covers the once-vivid red and purple brocades on the chairs and settees. A thick canopy hangs over the bed. One window has been thrown open to let in the springlike air. The fireplace is unkempt, ashes piled high. This could be any number of rooms she’s been in before, and yet it feels odd, like something is missing from the room, and the room itself knows it.
“This should do,” Heath says. “You’ll have privacy from the rest.”
“The rest?”
“We don’t have many private quarters. Some people live five or six to a room here.” He helps her into one of the chairs. “Are you comfortable?” He almost seems nervous, even though just moments ago he’d been all grin and swagger. “Here, let me see your ankle,” he says, pulling a stool up to her chair for her to place her foot on. Then he kneels before her and gingerly removes her boot, lifting the edge of her dress to reveal her ankle. He takes the bottle from the kitchen—some sort of fragrant oil—and dabs a little on his hands to rub into her bare skin.
She winces.
“It doesn’t look too bad, a minor twist,” he says. He begins to apply a poultice.
Her teeth grit together, sending pressure along her jaw to the back of her skull. She’s so tense she can hardly move. Finally she lets out a small cry.
He looks up at her in surprise. “I’m sorry, was I too rough? Are you all right? You look pale.” His hand goes to her cheek, and she reflexively jerks her head away. “Why are you afraid to let me touch you?”
“I . . .” How can she explain?
“Did I offend you in the cottage? I apologize for my rough behavior. I’m so used to defending myself, and it simply didn’t occur to me at first that you could be real.”
“It’s not that,” she says, and then sighs, trying to release the tension in her body. Trying to breathe in the pain in her ankle and breathe it out. It is just a fact; no more, no less. “It’s just that I’ve never felt like this before. I’ve never felt at all.”
“I don’t understand.”
And so she tells him, haltingly: about her christening and the tithes the fae took in exchange for their gifts. With each word, she feels a little bit braver, freer, more confident.
“What kind of parents would allow that to happen to their child?” Heath asks quietly when she finishes.
“Oh, it wasn’t anything malicious on their part,” Aurora says. “They believed the exchanges were worthwhile, or else they wouldn’t have accepted them. They wanted to improve me.”
“By allowing your senses to be robbed from you? I suppose they thought beautiful and silent makes an ideal princess.”
His words abrade her more harshly than his touch did. She opens her mouth to respond but finds she can’t. She doesn’t know what to say.
Because he’s absolutely right. And the truth of it—hearing it spoken aloud like that—is stunning.
“They wanted to protect me,” she whispers at last. That much he cannot deny.
He clears his throat. “But not all touch is painful, Aurora.” Once again he reaches toward her cheek, and this time, she tries not to cringe or move away as he traces his fingers, ever so lightly, along her jaw.
It makes her want to cry. Because he’s wrong. All touch is painful—this kind of touch even more so. It makes her feel as though she is starving, lost, alone.
“Aurora.”
She’d been looking at the ground, avoiding his eyes. But now she focuses on him, takes in the warm tone of his skin; the light, messy shading of stubble along his jaw; the unkempt sweep of hair not much darker than her own. They catch eyes. He too has been staring at her.
“Forgive me.” He clears his throat. “I shouldn’t have done that, or said any of that. I just haven’t ever met someone like you, someone from . . . out there. I didn’t—we weren’t ever sure if it was possible.”
“Possible?”
“You see,” he says, gently finishing tying the bandage, “we’ve been imprisoned in Sommeil for generations. In the past there were countless suicides, horrible infighting between those who believed in the real world and those who had already begun to forget it. Eventually, knowledge of the other world they had come from began to fade. Now my generation knows no other way of being but this.” He gestures at the room around them. “We’ve simply inherited this . . . this feeling. Of smallness. Of being trapped.”
Aurora swallows. She understands the feeling of walls closing in, of the world around her shrinking rather than expanding. Even when the council is focused on other things—which they usually are—she has always imagined their control over her like an invisible yoke. But it’s not just the council members watching her, holding her back, keeping her in. It’s the people of Deluce and their expectations of a crown princess. Maybe even too the ghosts of her dead parents, wanting her to uphold their honor.
“Many no longer believe the stories,” Heath goes on. “About the other world. Your world. But I always have. When the queen made Sommeil, she had to have created a way out.”
“The queen . . . made Sommeil?”
Heath nods.
Aurora shifts, tempted to flee despite the continued ache in her ankle. His words have unsettled her. Part of her wonders if all conversations are this confusing, if she simply isn’t used to talking normally with people, and that’s why everything out of Heath’s mouth sounds so strange. But then she thinks about what he’s saying: Belcoeur, the Night Faerie, made a world of her own. And now she rules here.
Aurora runs through her 313-book collection of faerie histories in her head. She seems to remember something about the Night Faerie tithing. . . .
“Dreams,” Heath says, just as she’s thinking it. “The queen wove Sommeil out of dreams, or so the story goes. She has complete power here. She hides out in the north turret, protected by enchantment after enchantment, while the world around us grows more desperate and more treacherous by the day. And for as long as any of us has been alive, no one has found a way to escape. And no one new has appeared. Until you. Don’t you see? You’re the proof. You’re the answer.”
“But I don’t have any answers.”
“You must, though. Maybe it will come to you. Maybe you’ll remember.”
“Surely the queen must know the way,” Aurora protests.
He shakes his head. “We’ve tried everything. She won’t die, and she won’t answer our demands. She won’t even come out of hiding. She’s protected by too much magic.”
Aurora believes him. It would probably take another faerie—a powerful one, like Malfleur—to kill Belcoeur or to break the spell keeping them all in this world. “I don’t know how I can help,” she says again, hating to disappoint him.
“Just tell me what you know,” he says quietly.
And so she does. She tells him all about Deluce: the political upheaval, the planned alliance, the murder of the two princes. The threat of Malfleur, who has, apparently, been lying for more than a century about the fate of her sister. “She has always claimed to have killed her. But could it be she took pity on her twin and simply banished her here instead, wove a spell trapping Belcoeur in a world of her own making, perhaps?” she wonders aloud. “If that’s the case, we’ll never find a way out.”
“Go on,” Heath prods. “What happened after the murders?”
She tells him about Isbe, and how she fled into the night to find her but discovered instead the abandoned summer cottage. Her chest expands with breath as she tells of the spinning wheel, golden and glimmering, as big as a forest beast, and how she woke up here in this place so unfamiliar to her. With every detail, she feels a warm honey glow rising up inside her until it seems her voice must be the brightest light in the room. “All I can guess,” Aurora finishes, “is that the spindle must have been enchanted too. Belcoeur was a weaver, correct?”
Heath nods. “It’s all she does, even now.”
“Perhaps the spinning wheel belonged to her then, before she left my world for Sommeil.”
“But if what you say is true,” Heath ponders, “then why would Malfleur banish Belcoeur here, only to leave a way into Sommeil?”
“Maybe Malfleur didn’t banish her after all. Perhaps Belcoeur . . .” Aurora pauses. “Perhaps she came here of her own free will. Perhaps she is the one who left the way in.”
“Left a way in but not a way out?”
Aurora shrugs helplessly. There’s nothing about this in any of her faerie histories. “I already told you, I don’t have any answers. I’m more lost than you are.”
He gets up and paces. “I want to get you home, Aurora. And if we do—when we do, I’m coming with you. I’ve waited all my life for this. I will never be happy here in Sommeil—I’ve always known that. I’ll never stop thinking about what it’s like out there. I am going to figure this out. And until then, I’ll make sure you’re safe here.”
There’s a rap on the door, and a petite girl around Aurora’s age pokes her head into the room.
“Oh, good. Wren, come in,” Heath says.
Wren enters with a tray of soup, a small hunk of meat, and a rough piece of bread. The girl has delicate features, a turned-up nose, and small mouth. She’s ghostly thin, her skin the color of tree bark when starlight hits it. Though her black hair is tied messily and her ears are overly pointy, she is very pretty.
“I know I can trust you to be sure Aurora is comfortable,” Heath says.
“Of course,” Wren replies, her voice soft and lulling. Her thin lips pull down to one side. “Any friend of Heath’s is a friend of mine,” she says to Aurora.
Heath leaves the room, and Aurora can almost feel the chill in his wake.
“You’re cold,” Wren says, setting down the tray. She goes to the hearth and looks for the flint box.
“Thank you.” Aurora notices her fingers fumble. “Are you all right?” she asks the girl.
“Yes. But . . . I wish . . . ,” Wren whispers. “Forgive me for saying . . . I wish you wouldn’t . . . encourage him too much.”
“Heath?”
Wren turns to face Aurora, her eyes big and dark. “No one can be happy if they are always searching. That’s what I think, anyway. If you believe you’re living in a shadow, you will never feel the light. Do you see what I mean?”
Aurora tests her ankle and stands up, wincing only a little.
“Miss! Sit back down!” Wren comes toward her.
“No, no, I’m fine.” Aurora waves her off lightly. “Let me help you. I want to help.”
She approaches her, and even though Aurora has only ever lit a fire a few times, she takes the flint box from Wren’s trembling hands. After a couple of tries, she manages to catch a spark and kneels down to place the lit tinder into the fire. However, something in the fireplace catches her eye. A glimmer.
She gasps. “Wren. Are these . . . jewels in the ashes?” she whispers, nearly dropping the tinder. She scoops up the gleaming stones—a necklace made of pearls separated by tiny rubies. “Why would someone leave these in the fireplace?”
“I’m sorry, miss. The room hasn’t been cleaned. We don’t usually put guests here. We don’t usually have guests at all.”
Inspiration flies into her. “You could trade these, sell them—you could buy food for everyone in Blackthorn!”
Wren sighs, kneeling beside her. She takes the lit tinder and lights a log. “There is no food to be bought,” she replies softly. “We rely on the hunters, like Heath, to bring back meat. We ration the grain, which struggles more to thrive every year that goes by. . . .”
She helps Aurora back to her feet, and both of them step back from the growing flames.
Wren’s light hand on her elbow sends a message through Aurora that overwhelms her with its tenderness. She looks down at the beautiful stones coated in a light layer of ash, which have left black dust in her palm. “But still,” she starts, then trails off.
Aurora would gladly hammer out all of the emeralds and sapphires in her crown to help the people of Sommeil, if she had it here. But perhaps Wren is right that the jewels would do no good. It has never occurred to Aurora to feel embarrassed by who she is. Or worse . . . ashamed. She’s lived a life of tasseled pillows and billowing gowns, while these people suffer.
She traces her fingers over the string of pearls, then slips it into the pocket of her gown as a reminder.
“I’m sorry,” Aurora says now. “I want to help you. And Heath. All of you. I wish I knew what to do.” Her voice has begun to come to her with ease, but the answers have not.
Wren looks at her curiously. “Sommeil must seem a sad place to you. But it isn’t. Not entirely. The evils here are no worse than the evils anywhere, I imagine. Why should I want to learn of another world, a vaster world, if it means regretting my whole life until now? Who wants to be made to loathe what they have? Small as it is, my life is mine.”
“But . . . there’s so much you’re missing. There’s a great wide expanse of a world to explore where I’m from,” she protests, her heart swelling with love for Deluce. Though even as she says this, a dull voice thuds through her veins . . . has she ever thought to explore her own world?
“Just promise me you won’t give Heath false hope,” Wren says, taking Aurora’s hands in her own. And Aurora has the wild desire to tap into her small palms. “You’ll only break his heart.”
A moment later, Wren lets go and moves back to the silver tray, where she lifts a lid off the soup dish. “I’ll let you eat and rest now.”
Aurora tries to taste her food, but all she can think of is the look on Wren’s face. If she ever gets home again, she is going to appreciate her world. She’s going to tell Isbe every day how much she cares. She’s never going to be ensnared by her own fears again.
But for now she’s not home, she’s here. Sommeil. She rolls the word around in her mind as she takes off her travel clothes to change into the nightgown Wren left out for her. It’s the first time she’s ever had to dress or undress herself, but she can’t stand the idea of someone else doing it for her, not now. Not when a mere breath against her skin sends her into shivers so intense she’s not sure if they’re pleasurable or sickening. Even now, as she steps into the lightweight gown, every thread whispers around and against her.
She climbs into the bed, settling into its deep embrace. She’s exhausted, but her heart burns with curiosity. Deluce needs her. Isbe needs her. The last faerie queen in her world could be marching at any moment, could even now be committing more unthinkable murders. And yet . . . what will happen if—no, when—Aurora returns? Will her voice and sense of touch immediately snuff out like a candle? She doesn’t know why these senses have returned to her—can only imagine that the faerie tithes at her christening somehow don’t hold weight here in Sommeil, that Belcoeur’s magic, evil as it may be, nullifies any other. This is a world of Belcoeur’s making, after all.
And what did Wren mean when she said Sommeil was full of beauty?
The worn softness of a pillow caresses her cheek; she is penetratingly aware of every single stitch in its fabric, a grammar of its own, a way of being she never knew before coming here. She thinks of all the everyday objects that she’s never fully known. She would like to meet them all with her hands, to feel the secret code of their physical forms, the silk, the paper, the wood, the string. Marble and grass and fallen leaves and a baby’s hair and the ears of a goat. They are all as utterly foreign to her as the unusual birdlike clock she saw in the nursery room in the cottage. And the enormous golden spinning wheel that pricked her finger and gave her the curse, or gift, of pain.
The ghost of Heath’s fingers sighs along her jaw. Will it haunt her forever when she leaves this place? She has only just learned this form of closeness, and already she fears how much she craves it, craves more—how devastated she would be never to have it again.
She extends her hand to the bedframe, touching its old, polished oak. She presses her fingers against it as though it were Isbe’s palm. I’m afraid, she taps, wishing her sister could hear her. She thinks of the words Heath said to her earlier that startled her so.
I need you, she taps.