a Faerie of Considerable Stature
(in More Ways Than One)
Claudine would not have believed the rumors had it not been for a lack of jam. She finds herself this morning quite short of the sweet preserves that normally provide her only pleasure in waking up. Her maid trembles at her bedside, holding out a wobbling silver tray with a large hunk of rye bread on it, bare as a baby’s head. Claudine backhands the tray, which flies from her maid’s grip and clatters to the floor.
“So it really is true, then,” she mutters, adjusting herself against her giant stack of pillows; her body—a mountain underneath the thick burgundy quilt—heaves with the effort.
She’s heard the story by now. News travels fast in winter, when there’s nothing else to do but gossip: Princess Aurora of Deluce was found motionless on the upper floor of an abandoned summer cottage, lying next to an enormous golden spindle. A maiden’s scream drew others to the site. The princess, presumed dead at first, was in fact sleeping far too deeply to awaken. The maiden who’d discovered her promptly fell into a similar state. Others were able to send a messenger to gallop back to the palace for help.
The council sent out six of their best men and a wagon through the rutted, frost-covered roads to rescue the young princess. As the men loaded her onto the cart, however, one of them grew weary and hardly made it out of the woods before falling to the ground in an unshakeable sleep. The others hurried on their course, wrapping the princess in thick cloaks. But on the short ride back to the palace, the remaining councilmen too succumbed.
So the tale goes. The horse driver hardly made it past the chains of the drawbridge glimmering in the morning sun before he fell asleep on his perch. The horse, confused, whinnied and tried to bolt, yanking the cart the rest of the way into the palace, where the strange contagion continued to spread.
There has been no movement since, no message, no wave of a flag from within those walls to signify life; all roads to the palace have been cordoned off.
Strange stories, Claudine thinks. Faerie curses. She’d be amazed if any of the fae still have the power they once did. These days, a faerie curse carries hardly more magic than it takes to boil a kettle. And yet, the unlikeliness of the princess finding that particular abandoned cottage . . . it reeks of faerie magic.
“A sleeping sickness . . . ,” she says now to her maid. “It reminds me of something my cousin Violette once said. At the child’s christening.”
“The child?” the maid asks timidly.
“The princess, of course,” Claudine says. “Now leave me.”
She lumbers out of her bed, humming to herself in a voice far purer than should belong to someone of her age. She waddles to the window, throwing open the sash and shutters and breathing in the harsh air. It is winter outside, and it is winter too, always, within her. Nothing can fill the void. Nothing satisfies the hunger. Nothing can take root, no matter how much sweetness she consumes.
Except something has taken root. For even now, a thick, dark-vined briar pushes its way out of the hard, frozen dirt surrounding the cottage where Aurora was found. Thorns splinter along its stems as it grows eagerly, with a hunger as powerful as Claudine’s own, stretching along the path through the royal forest, reaching the road and eventually winding toward the palace itself, thickening as it grows long, doubling, tripling, quadrupling, pressing onward, blossoming with purple-white buds, and rising, rising, rising.