I don’t remember, Queen Belcoeur had said in a whisper that wormed into Aurora’s chest and made it ache with cold. It was real. It had to have been. It means something, she’s sure.
Aurora slips out the Blackthorn gate, closing it with a quiet creak behind her. She doesn’t want to wake anyone. But especially not Heath. He looked so young when she’d stared down at his sleeping form a few minutes ago, lying on the rug beside the smoking orange embers that had been the small fire in his study. And faraway too, like she was looking not at him, but at a reflection of him in a body of water—wavering, rippling. She didn’t want to lie to him. Somehow this—taking his maps and notes and sneaking out while he sleeps—seemed better.
So, she thinks as she makes her way across the dewy fields, the queen is too mad to have any answers. Madness is not uncommon among the fae. Two hundred years ago, the North Faerie had been an expert chess player and a brilliant scholar of astronomy and philosophy, before her mind began to play chess with itself and left her frail, blithering, and wild-eyed. A great tragedy, considering her tithe had been logic. By the time she was murdered, she had long since lost her powers and her ability to rule, except in name.
But maybe Aurora can help Belcoeur remember why she made this place, and for whom she has been waiting all these years. For someone to free her?
Aurora has laid awake night after night thinking about the profound sadness—even fear—she heard in the queen’s voice. The way out of here is not, she senses, a logical one at all, but an emotional one.
The clue she keeps clinging to is the image of the hand-woven cottage, with the steaming teacup in the window—that, and the distinct sense Aurora had when viewing the tapestries that every scene was in some way a representation of a piece of the real world. There must be some reason behind Belcoeur’s choices. If Sommeil is a warped version of her world, then perhaps, Aurora thinks, the answer to how to get out lies in understanding the differences between the two.
For the first time, Aurora realizes that being an outsider could mean she, unlike the others here, can unravel this mystery. And besides, she knows she won’t be able to look Heath in the eyes again until she has proven herself to him.
Though the night fell rapidly, dawn now approaches with an agonizing slowness, the white lip of the horizon quivering. Aurora focuses on that pale line in the distance. Even though it’s risky, even though it means heading back alone into the Borderlands, she has decided to look for the cottage again. If Belcoeur was expecting someone to arrive there, it must be important.
If she were home, she knows, Isbe would scold her for going so far without her.
She misses arguing with Isbe.
She misses everything about Isbe.
She can hardly think, she misses her so much.
The land is barren, everything parched, trees reaching naked branches up into the sky, where one by one the stars sacrifice themselves to the coming day. Abandoned farmhouses dot her peripheral vision, rotten wood silvered in the faint glow of dawn. Aurora can’t shake the feeling that everything here shifts or blinks or wanes, just slightly, when she’s not looking directly at it.
And then she’s entering the forest, which still contains the last sigh of night, musky and chill. Aurora pulls her hood back over her head. She does not like nighttime in Sommeil. It reminds her too much of childhood, when darkness meant the end of playtime and the beginning of dreams—haunting, changeable. When she’d sometimes hear the coughing of plague victims even from her high tower room, and wake the next morning to find more of the palace staff had been carted off with the dawn. The night here is thick as a wool cloak that once belonged to her mother—it almost smells like the cloak too, and the floral perfume the queen loved to wear. It is the smell of sadness and smallness and fear.
She finds the wall—or rather, it finds her. One moment mist seems to knit the trees together; then it’s as if the fog has solidified to stone in all directions. She takes a deep breath and begins to move along the wall, wondering how she’ll find the rift, especially if the rift is always in a different place. The challenge seems nearly impossible.
And yet Heath finds his way through it every single day.
She pulls out his scrawled pages of maps and charts. But try as she might, she can’t interpret them. Restless, she refolds them and resigns herself to inching along the wall, using her hands to feel for variations. Once again she feels the essence of the stones, but their story has no beginning, middle, and end. It’s more like a song, a sequence of dark, swirling emotions on a continuous loop. It scares her, this vastness, this trappedness.
She pulls her hands away, tempted to turn around and race back to Blackthorn. But then she thinks of the disappointment in Heath’s eyes during their argument, and she knows she can’t. Someone needs to solve the mystery of this place. What if she really is the only one who can piece it together?
Besides, she can’t risk never returning home to see her sister or to meet the prince of Aubin or to unify the kingdoms against Malfleur. Her whole life is back in Deluce, and she needs to be where her life is.
She begins to sing to herself, surprised by how soothing it is to hear her own voice echoed back to her as she runs her fingers over bumps and cracks and sections of stone so smooth they seem to whisper of peace. The rose lullaby comes to her as she walks.
One night reviled,
Before break of morn,
Amid the roses wild,
All tangled in thorns,
The shadow and the child
Together were born.
The bright sun did spin,
The moon swallowed day,
When one her dear twin
Forever did slay.
As the lyrics leave her lips, something changes beneath her hands. The wall begins to soften, to give. Could she have found the rift so soon? She stops singing, and the wall is once again impenetrable. She backtracks but can’t find the spot again. She stares at the stones for a second, and then something occurs to her. She tries singing the lullaby again. And the wall bends inward, rippling like a body of water.
She sings louder, and as she does she steps forward, and forward . . . and through.
At first, the Borderlands do not appear threatening, and she wonders if Heath has overstated their dangers. The sun breaks open, lighting up a thousand shades of green in the canopy above her. Birds dart between branches, chirruping. Fresh pinecones crunch beneath her shoes.
After several steps, Aurora turns quickly—but the wall is still visible. She breathes out in relief, then gets an idea. She pulls the necklace of rubies and pearls out of her cloak pocket. One by one, she removes the jewels. She bends down and leaves one at the base of a tree. Then she moves deeper into the forest. Every ten feet or so, she lays down another, leaving a glimmering trail. As long as there’s enough light to see by, she’ll be able to trace her way back to the wall.
But by the time she comes to the end of the necklace, she has seen no variation in the woods, and no sign of the location of the cottage. She once again unfolds Heath’s maps, and stares at them in confusion. Should she go back or continue on without a trail to retrace?
She turns in a circle, surveying the area. The idea of moving in the wrong direction makes her pulse spike with nervousness. She walks a few more paces, thinking there might be a clearing ahead. Yes—just there, through the thicket . . . she picks up her pace, trying to outrace the fear that lurks just behind her, threatening to break like a wave over her head. But panic begins to seize her chest, and she’s reminded of losing her way in Deluce and stumbling upon the cottage, and then the spinning wheel that transported her here to Sommeil in the first place. She’s suddenly dizzy with the idea that it could happen again, that she may be doomed to fall through one strange version of the world into another and another and another, like a series of marred reflections, until there’s no longer any hope of finding herself.
There is no clearing; it had been a trick of the light.
The worry is a whorl of wind in her ears, a stir of leaves overhead, a shivering. She is a child again—so very afraid of the many things she cannot understand. Of the things she’ll never be able to say.
Aurora grabs on to the bark of a tree, the fear making it hard to breathe. She wants to cry. She wants to be held. She wants to be saved.
But no one is here to save her.
She takes a heaving breath. Isbe, she taps into the side of the tree, in their old language, in her truest language. I can’t do this alone.
Another wind snakes through the branches, rustling the leaves. A twig snaps.
And Aurora knows: she’s not alone.
She blinks into the brush, which stirs again.
A set of eyes emerges, several carriage lengths away. And pointed white-gray ears.
Wolf.
Her heart lurches into her throat. She can’t move. It’s not common, she knows, for wolves to stalk in broad daylight. Then again, if there’s little game, perhaps they too are starving, drawn out of their natural habits by the smell of flesh.
Aurora trembles and backs up slightly. In response, the wolf makes a jerky movement, as though about to leap from the underbrush. She freezes again, trying to recall what to do in the presence of wild predators. But all she can think of is the romance of Ulrica, abandoned as a baby in a wolf’s den, where she was raised for sixteen years before the valiant and dashing Prince Bertram discovered her and made her his wife. Ulrica could never sleep in the luxury of the palace; she would lope into the mountains, howling. One night, the prince followed his love and watched her transform into a wolf in the pale glow of the moon. He cried out in shock; then his love turned on him and sank her fangs into his neck.
Aurora looks at the wolf’s eyes. And then she turns and runs.
Sprinting through the forest, she hears the wolf tracking her, gaining on her. Her pulse is nearly deafening; her breath burns in her chest. The forest is too dense—she can’t dodge the low-hanging branches quickly enough. She swears she can feel the heat of the animal’s breath at her heels now. It’s too late, she’ll never outrun—
She trips over a tree’s roots and flies forward onto her hands and knees, a startled sob of pain bursting from her throat. Quickly she rolls to her side, ready to greet death face-to-face, when a blur of brown dives across the corner of her vision.
A young male deer in its prime.
The hart bounds high through the trees—the most graceful thing she’s ever witnessed.
And then the wolf lunges—
And the deer is struck down.
Aurora scrambles up even as the wolf bends over its writhing prey, so close to her she could almost touch it, can even feel the steam leaking from the deer’s wound.
The beautiful hart struggles, whimpering, kicking its legs as the wolf leans in to the animal, tearing at its belly. There is blood streaking its body, covering the wolf’s mouth messily, reminding her of the vivid lip color the Night Faerie wore. Tears sting Aurora’s face. She runs.
She can’t be sure how long she has been running when, out of nowhere, she reaches the cottage. She bursts inside, panting, then slams the door and falls to the floor to catch her breath.
She made it. She lost the necklace, has no idea how to get back to Blackthorn, and is still deeply shaken from watching the wolf attack the deer, moments before it would have attacked her. But somehow she made it here, to the place where Belcoeur left out tea in anticipation of someone coming—though Aurora, apparently, was not the person the queen had been expecting.
She pushes herself back to her feet again, and finds the room with the table set for tea. She touches the fluffy-looking sugar; an insect scuttles out of the bowl. She shudders and pulls away, knocking over the teacup. Scalding water flies at her, and she sucks in a breath, stumbling backward. She understands now why the palace cooks at home always forbade her from coming near their boiling pots.
Aurora’s also certain, now, that Belcoeur’s tapestries somehow depict—or even control—Sommeil. The way the image of the steam over the teacup had seemed to waver . . . it must have been the queen’s way of making sure the actual tea would remain hot.
But still, who was the tea left for—and why?
Aurora continues to wander through the cottage. Though much seems to change—the location of doors and windows—the little chair she’d noticed the first time is still in the parlor room, facing the wall as it had before. It looks like a spot someone would send a child in trouble to sit for hours as punishment, she realizes.
Curious, she approaches the chair, noticing grooves in the wall just above it. She bends down to look closer. Someone has etched words into the wood. Much of it is barely legible, caked in dust. A scattering of initials, perhaps, and code words. One entire phrase she’s able to piece together, a limerick. The secret boy—we almost kissed—he won my jewel—in a game of whist!
The words seem to ooze in and out of the wood, sometimes more prominent, then fading again. It gives Aurora a horrible feeling of uncertainty.
The secret boy? This was a childhood crush.
Her mind reels with the simplicity of it. Could the queen have been waiting all these years for a lover to come rescue her?
And the reference to the jewel: this reminds her of the necklace, and the pearl that somehow unlocked one of the enchantments on the forbidden wing at Blackthorn. Why would a piece of jewelry have been so important to the queen that it would, effectively, cut through her magic? If Belcoeur had created this whole world and everything in it, why would she have created a necklace that could do such a thing?
But Belcoeur didn’t create everything. She didn’t create Heath, or Wren, or any of the other living peasants. They were all descended from the original servants who worked for the queen. They are just as real as Aurora.
Something tingles in her chest. It’s the feeling of discovery, of things slotting together like the strands of warp and weft on a loom. Her heart races. The tingling sparks into flame. Maybe the necklace came from the real world. Maybe in that sense, the object itself is immune to the power of the queen’s dreams. The rose lullaby too comes from her world. And when she sang its lyrics, the wall opened for her.
She’s not sure what it means, but she has become certain of one thing: the key to getting out of Sommeil is not going to lie in any pattern, or any place you could mark on a map. It is going to lie in a story. A true story about Belcoeur and her secret love.
The one to whom she lost her jewel . . .
The missing bead on the necklace, Aurora guesses.
No one knows romances better than Aurora does.
Energized by this revelation, she moves back through the room toward the door with little difficulty . . . until she steps outside.
The forest is still, but Aurora has the oddest sensation that everything has rearranged itself. She thinks of her discovery: items from the real world can shatter the spell of Sommeil, can see their way through the illusions. Shouldn’t Aurora herself then be able to see clearly, to shake the cloudiness from her mind, to navigate the changing landscape? She tries to concentrate, but the velvety strangeness of the air itself continues to ebb and flow within her, infecting her thoughts. Of course it makes a peculiar sort of sense that objects might be impervious to illusions in a way that people are not. People are susceptible. She is susceptible.
She takes a deep breath, and begins singing the rose lullaby again. It seems to help. The trees don’t move. No wolves appear. She steps into the woods as confidently as she can.
After only a few repetitions, she sees a parting of the trees, and between them, a steep riverbed. A harsh, rocky cliff juts out, dropping down about thirty or forty feet into a dried-up ravine. Perhaps she can climb to the top for a better vantage point.
As she hurries toward it, she can almost hear the former waterfall in its heavy silence, a dull and constant roar. Sickly moss still clings to some of the stones, indicating the stream that once flowed freely here. Aurora can picture what it must have looked like, water tumbling over the ledge and sparkling in the sun. One of the boulders looks distinctly like a man’s face. Her heart leaps. It looks just like the one she and Isbe named for its odd shape years and years ago, in the stream that runs just past the cattle pastures beyond the palace of Deluce. Nose Rock!
She runs toward the riverbed.
This is no different from climbing the palace towers with Isbe, she tells herself as she reaches the rocks and looks for a foothold. For a moment, she could swear she hears Isbe’s voice calling out to her from far away. Hurry, Aurora! she’s saying. Before they find us! In her memory, she and Isbe are on the roof, searching for a spot to hide from angry council members. Aurora is both nervous about getting in trouble and filled with Isbe’s contagious joy.
But this isn’t a game.
Her heart beats hard in her ribs as she reaches hand over hand, beginning to climb.