Night is a gasp, and then over.
Opening her eyes, Aurora needs no gauzy sway of a curtain to signal the wind’s presence. The unseen forces of the world all have bodies, she understands now. Phantoms fill the air.
A soft moan comes from her throat. The pain in her ankle has subsided into a distant throb. Yet the bed, the sheets, the weight of the blanket over her, the tickle of fresh breeze across her brow—these gather into a complex melody that makes her want.
More and more every day.
She’s not even sure what she wants, but she knows that obedience, grace, kindness . . . these no longer form the only standards by which she can live. Not with this new, lush thing borne inside her: desire . . . for touch, for the breath that inflates her chest, for her voice, for life—the feeling of it.
She sits up, letting memory slowly sift back into her like flour through a sieve. She had tried to keep track of the days at first, but Sommeil has a way of blurring things together; time seems to glide by almost invisibly, like a skitter bug across a lake. How long has she been gone?
Sleepily, she lists the facts to herself: Deluce needs her. She must return, marry a prince, and protect her kingdom, though these things have begun to seem like mere strands of a book she once read. The one that stands out the most is this: she has to get back to Isbe. Which means somehow finding a way out of this place.
Aurora’s stomach stirs. She flips back the covers and dresses quickly, with ever-increasing confidence. Even hunger has a different—and greater—impact here. In Deluce, she’d often go hours forgetting to eat, especially when caught up in a good book. But here she feels the pang and immediately begins to imagine the juice of a fresh peach, the smooth spread of butter on warm pastries, even though she knows they don’t have such luxuries. In Deluce, servants brought breakfast to her room, and Isbe always joined her before they started their day. But everything is different in Sommeil. She eats with the others—her rank doesn’t matter. And her sister isn’t here.
Isbe ran away, a voice reminds Aurora as she slips on her boots. She was content to live without you. She loved you, but she pitied you. She has once again kicked the wasps’ nest of thoughts that always lies just to the side of her path. Her heart races as she tries to ignore her doubts.
She glances out the window. From the tower, Aurora can see all the way across the desiccated fields surrounding Blackthorn, butting up against a thick, dry forest. There’s no sign of the stone wall from here, the one that protects the estate from the Borderlands; the one she and Heath, unbelievably, passed through together.
Below her, there are already peasants up early, moving about near a run-down barn. And in the distance, a figure approaches the woods alone.
Heath. Going off to hunt once again. In the Borderlands. Over the past few days, she has watched him return home dragging the bodies of whole harts and wild boar with arrows aslant in their chests, sacks filled with bloody pheasant and duck parts, and once, a net of fish, some still writhing. And she has watched too, as Wren greets him each time with something more than gratitude in her posture, in her smile.
You’ll only break his heart, Wren had said to her on that first day.
Many nights he goes straight to his chambers without eating dinner, hunched over a lantern, making notes to himself. At first she was impressed that he could read and write, though only rudimentarily. And then she became curious. He explained that he was keeping a hunting log because game has grown increasingly scarce.
With everything she learns about Sommeil, Aurora has only become more concerned for its fate, has come to realize that escape may be necessary not just for her, or for Heath, but for all of them.
But in the meantime, she has been trying to help however she can. Here there’s no complex hierarchy of household staff to run the palace and maintain its grounds and outbuildings. Instead, chores are assigned based on family, with many peasants who don’t appear to have any role at all. Greta and her family man the kitchens along with several others, and though Aurora has no experience, she’s made herself useful there—hanging herbs to dry, grinding grain into powder to make flour, scrubbing vegetables from the gardens until her hands, usually prized for their daintiness, have grown ragged and chapped. This may be a world wrought from dreaming, but for Aurora it has provided her first taste of real work and real life—life the way the masses live it, both here and, she can only assume, at home.
She doesn’t bother to pin up her hair. She grabs a piece of vellum that she’d asked Wren to procure yesterday and flings open her bedroom door, runs down the stairs and out onto the grounds, making her way after Heath. She inhales the morning dew as she calls out to him repeatedly, but he doesn’t turn around.
Aurora’s beginning to fear her voice has somehow been imagined this whole time, both by her and by others, when finally he hears her and turns.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks, sweeping hair out of his eyes. She’s noticed how often he does that around her, and she wonders, fleetingly, if she makes him nervous.
She tries to catch her breath. “I thought I could come with you today. Help take notes for you. I’m a very skilled writer and I have excellent penmanship. I—”
“Aurora, it isn’t safe. You need to go back.”
“But I want to be of use. Every day I’ve been biding my time, wandering alone, and I haven’t gotten any closer to an answer.” Her limited contributions leave plenty of time to roam the castle, looking for evidence, for a sign, for a way out—as though she might simply stumble upon a lost key to a hidden door. Maybe, she has thought irrationally, she’d find another spinning wheel.
But she has not. And her own sense of urgency has already begun to wane. Isbe comes to her as a sharp pang of need but then fades from her mind again. Sommeil itself has this effect on her. There’s a poignancy to every breath here, and it distracts her, reminds her of early mornings when she was eleven or twelve, just discovering the tomes of epic romance in the library. How she’d take her latest treasure down to the kitchens, where she’d sit in a window to read while the warm scent of baking biscuits drifted and curled around her, steaming the pane.
Sommeil gives her that exact feeling: those brief hours when you are holding an unread story in your hands and don’t yet know how it will end. You would be content if the biscuits never rose and were never consumed, the irises in the garden never bloomed and faded, the rain hovered but never fell. The not-yet-ness tastes sweeter than the thing you’re waiting for.
“I thought I could help you. At least I could get out of the estate and—”
“And get yourself killed in the Borderlands?” Heath sighs, his arm muscles flexing as if by instinct. “I can see you are beginning to feel what this place does to people. That restlessness. Half sweet, half deadly. You don’t need to get lost, or be lured by an Impression, to go mad here. Sometimes it happens all on its own.”
“But you’ve been ignoring me—avoiding me, even,” she adds, realizing that it’s true. “We agreed to help each other find a way out of Sommeil. I thought—”
“I made you no promises.”
“But you did,” she insists, feeling baffled and dismayed by the way he won’t even look in her eyes.
“I said I would protect you, and that’s what I’m trying to do right now. As for a way out . . . I had hoped you might have answers, but you don’t. In the meantime, Blackthorn needs me.” His hands clench and unclench.
“But the game dwindles,” she counters. “You can’t just turn back to your life, knowing one day the food may run out completely!” The heat of their argument is warming her cheeks.
“What do you know about hunger? You grew up a sheltered, spoiled princess!”
The accusation stings, even though it shouldn’t. Her royal upbringing shouldn’t be an insult. “I didn’t choose my own parents.”
“No, but they chose everything for you,” he snaps.
“What does that mean?”
“It means now that I’ve thought more about the corruption of your world—the way human senses are bartered out of vanity—I’m less convinced I want anything to do with it.”
Aurora’s jaw drops. He can’t mean that. He is just lashing out because of his disappointment. His disappointment in her.
Shame roils in her gut. She draws in a breath, trying not to stare at Heath’s mouth, trying not to imagine, as she has done every night in her bed, him touching her face tenderly again, the way he did on the first night.
“Fine,” she says. “You can stay here and hunt until there’s not a single deer left in the forest. I’m going to find my own way home.” She marches off, an unfamiliar emotion sparking and raging in her throat: anger.
Back inside the castle, she finds her way to the study where she has seen Heath retire to make his notes. He doesn’t think she knows what it’s really like to be one of them. Well, why should she? No one’s told her; no one’s given her a chance to understand.
Pushing her way into the small space, she sees piles of empty, dirty cups, indicating he has stayed up late many nights, working and thinking. At the desk beneath the window lies a stack of pages. She sits down to rifle through them. Except they aren’t notes, really. They are more like charts and graphs with all sorts of scrawled labels. Depictions, she realizes slowly, of the Borderlands. He’s been keeping track of its patterns, how it changes. He must think that by decoding how their world operates, he will find a secret loophole, and with it, an exit. But how many years has he spent on this project, with no success?
Aurora touches the pages. It strikes her that perhaps Heath is missing the point: what if there simply is no exit? The prick of the spinning wheel’s flying bobbin sent her here, or so she has gathered. It’s possible the spinning wheel has some significance, but does it really represent a pattern, or is it just a disconnected clue? Why, in a world built from the power of dreaming, would anything follow logic?
She drops the vellum and leaves his study. Everyone has warned her repeatedly to stay away from the north turret. It’s dangerous to get too close to the queen’s quarters, they say. But what good has cowering done them—or anyone, for that matter?
She moves through parlor room after parlor room, trying to avoid those peasants who don’t work—the ones who huddle in corners with dark looks. They unsettle her. Hunger seems to have hardened in them like tree sap; she can almost see a bitterness crystalizing in the whites of their eyes, the way frost solidifies over a leaf in winter. She has the sense that if she stares too long, she too will succumb, and freeze.
She clenches her stomach and forges past them.
The must and mildew of the back halls fill her lungs as she makes her way toward the forbidden wing. Finally, after several twists and turns, she reaches the locked door at the end of the long and narrow north hall.
Aurora balls up her fists and bangs on the door.
She bangs and bangs, but nothing happens. The harder she pounds on the echoing wood, the more her frustration mounts. How dare Heath accuse her of being sheltered and spoiled, when she’s done nothing but try to help?
If she’s honest with herself, the insult has wounded her for a deeper reason. She is not only an outsider to him, but someone with qualities he doesn’t admire: wealth, privilege, innocence. Qualities she’d thought made her special. He believes that her father and mother were self-serving, cynical, greedy. That they allowed her to be deprived of touch and voice for their own benefit instead of for hers.
But that’s not true. It can’t be. Can it? Even as she wonders about these things, her past begins to unfold before her in a new light, and it makes her feel sick. Maybe Heath is right. She thinks of the way her mother treated Isbe, as though she was not a family member at all.
Maybe her parents were cruel.
She sinks to the floor beside the locked door and pulls out the necklace she’s been carrying around—the one she found in the hearth on her first night. A bead is missing.
Why is the bead missing, and why does this detail bother her so?
She has the sudden, desperate conviction that if she can fix this necklace, she can still save some final piece of her childhood.
But it’s all so disgustingly obvious, isn’t it? Aurora has been a pawn. She has been used. She has meant nothing to anyone, except as a figurehead.
She thought, like Ombeline, that she wanted to be freed from stone, that she wanted to speak, and to feel. But now she’s afraid of all the bad things she might feel—is already feeling. Of all the things she might say. She can hurt people now, and be hurt by them, in all new ways.
But what really hurts is seeing that her life until now was a lie. The only one who even cared about Aurora—not as a princess, but as a person—was Isbe.
She fumbles with the jewels in her hand. A tear streaks her face. She wipes it away, and another pearl comes loose from the strand. The pearl rolls away from her and under the locked door.
Slowly, the door opens.
Aurora scrambles back to her feet and then, with caution, she glances around her, before approaching the doorway. Almost despite herself, she walks through it.
She enters an enormous, windowless hall lined with cobwebs . . . and, she squints to see, beautiful, plentiful tapestries. There are so many they overlap on the walls. Some are coated in a thick layer of dust; others seem freshly hung. The Night Faerie’s work. She shivers.
But no one is in here, so how did the door open on its own?
Aurora can hear the tiny rattle of the rolling pearl, though she can’t see it in the dim-lit room. Her footsteps click faintly, as though the sound has come from a distance. The air is dense and stifling, and the weak light from the open door behind her only serves to highlight the dust motes in the air, making it even harder to see.
Though she’s been exposed to plenty of artwork before, Aurora is awed as she moves closer to the tapestries. They are especially elaborate, each depicting a landscape with immaculate detail, and she pauses, taking them in individually in the near darkness of the room. There’s something about each that she recognizes. They must be based on the queen’s memories from the real world.
It occurs to her that all of Sommeil has been constructed out of the queen’s memories of the real world—warped, dreamlike versions of real things. Blackthorn. The royal forest. She wonders what other pieces of her world have a double here.
She has the sensation of moving through water—a murky, reedy lake—as she walks farther into the room. She comes to a portrayal, this one newer, less dusty, of the cottage in the Borderlands. And within the window, a table set with tea, still steaming. The image, eerily familiar, sends a chill through her. It’s as though the silk itself wavers, like steam. As though Belcoeur purposely wove the steam over the tea so it would still be hot when Aurora arrived . . . like she knew someone was coming.
Aurora had forgotten about the rattling sound, until now. Abruptly, it stops.
She turns.
At the far end of the hall, someone has bent down to pick up the pearl. Someone with long, disheveled white hair . . . and a large crown. The old woman—the queen, Aurora realizes with a quick intake of breath—continues turning the bead over in her fingers with apparent consternation, like she’s trying to recall something. Then the queen looks up.
Aurora freezes, terrified. Her instinct is to run, but she can only stare. The woman was obviously once beautiful, but now old. Thick makeup streaks her face with a jesterlike horror, as though applied by a child’s hand. Her crown looks overlarge and jagged on her petite head. This is not the fearsome Night Faerie Aurora has always imagined, the one with enough strength—and evil—to rival Malfleur’s.
She doesn’t know why everyone here says it’s so difficult to get to the queen, and she doesn’t know why the locked door came unlocked, but here she is. She draws in a breath. This is it. This is her chance.
“Belcoeur,” she says, trying frantically to gather her courage, to channel Isbe’s bravery. “Why—why did you create Sommeil?” She stands taller. “Your people are suffering. You—you must release us.”
“Are the cherry tarts ready?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The tarts!” the queen hisses. “Bloodred. They must be red as blood. For the visitor. Someone is coming. Someone is coming.” Her hands shake. Then her clear green eyes lock on to Aurora’s. “Who are you?” she demands with renewed clarity. “Why are you here?”
“There was a spinning wheel,” Aurora stutters.
“But I don’t know you. You’re not the one I’m waiting for.” She shakes her head. “Everything is wrong.”
Aurora clears her throat. “Just tell me how to get back to the other world, the one you came from. The one we came from.”
The queen shakes her head again. “I don’t know how to make it right. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
“Surely you can help. You have greater power than any other living faerie.”
The queen stares back at her again, trembling now. “I’m trapped too.” Her voice, raspy and low, is unnerving.
“But that doesn’t make sense. You made this place. Why?”
There’s a pause.
The queen continues to stare at her in grief, a look that drives through Aurora’s chest like one of the deadly sharp icicles that hang from the Delucian gates in winter.
“I don’t remember.” The queen’s hoarse voice crawls into Aurora’s ears, making her shiver.
A series of shouts cause Aurora to turn. Through the open door there’s a light bobbing.
“Aurora?” It’s Wren’s voice. Relief floods her. “What are you doing here?” Wren asks urgently as she bursts through the door to the north hall carrying a lantern.
“I was just—” Aurora turns around, but Belcoeur has vanished.
She blinks rapidly. Not only is the queen gone, but there is no other exit to the room. She looks around. Despite the dust hanging in the air and the dimness, diminished only a little by the lantern, Aurora sees that the walls are completely bare. All of the tapestries have disappeared. She swallows hard, her head swimming through the murk of the room and the conversation she just had. Could she have imagined it all?
No. No. Belcoeur was here.
“There you are. You shouldn’t be near the north turret; it’s not safe,” Wren says, taking Aurora by the elbow. “The queen’s enchantments are particularly strong here. Many have gone in search of her and never returned. I’ve told you already, the rooms become a maze with no end and no center.”
“I . . . I saw her. I saw the queen,” Aurora says. “A pearl rolled under the door and unlocked it somehow, and . . .” She trails off, no longer trusting her own impression of what happened.
Wren wrinkles her pretty brow as she leads her out of the empty hall. “Heath was so worried when you were missing at dinner, and we realized no one had seen you all day,” she says quietly as they wind their way back through the castle. Through the large windows in the east parlor, Aurora sees that night has fallen. But it felt like she’d been in the tapestry room for minutes, not hours.
“Heath said . . . he said you two had an argument earlier,” Wren goes on. “His moods can sometimes be stormy,” Wren says apologetically. “We’ve never had an outsider before. None of us knows quite what to believe. Many of the others fear—”
“What do they fear?”
“That you are not real. If not an Impression, then some other creation of the queen’s. A trick, an illusion, an enchantment.”
“That I’m not real,” Aurora marvels.
Wren squeezes Aurora’s hand. The quick pulse reminds Aurora of Isbe and sends a lump straight to her throat. “But don’t worry. Heath believes you, and I believe you too.”
She delivers Aurora to her room.
“Thank you, Wren,” Aurora says, still clutching her hand. But despite the young woman’s kindness, Aurora has never felt more alone.