There was a woman, and she was a stranger.

She ran down an alley in a dress as blue as the sky, her face twisted in horror at what she had seen. Or heard. Or felt, and that feeling rippled through the air in a tangible fume, the tang of a crowd in upheaval, driven to mania like a startled horse in a stampede. It could not be stopped, that was the worst part—it could not be stopped, this terror, and the girl ran.

The fear was familiar. It made this girl not a stranger but a mirror.

The scene blackened, changed, and a night sky unfolded, star-speckled and beautiful at first, then rocked by five shooting stars ripping fire and flame across the darkness. A woman looked up in unsuppressed horror, and then she was running, too, running across battlefields strewn with bodies, that same horror resonating on her face.

Again, familiarity bred unity. They were one and the same.

Another woman overtook a new scene, her white-knuckled fingers clasped around a pail of water, a hearth of fire burning before her. She looked down at that fire, beseeching, afraid, confused—her face did not clear as she threw the water onto the fire, snuffing it out.

All of the woman’s emotions congealed into expectation—something was coming. A shadow, a presence, a threat.

It could not be stopped.

It had happened already, or would happen already, around and around and weaving back in on itself.

“It cannot be stopped, Briar. Aurora.” Maleficent’s voice was all crooning and cackles. “These girls face the same struggles as you did. As you will. What will you do with yours, hmm? What will you do? What will you—”

Briar bolted upright, sweat-soaked and gasping, muscles wrenched to fight.

But all that tension quickly shifted inward, to self-hatred.

She’d had those dreams again.

The first few nights after breaking free of the sleeping curse, she hadn’t been surprised to still see the same images that had haunted those long, restless days. Images of places she had never been, women she had never seen, each dream choked by fear or anxiety or a looming presence she could never find, a shadow waiting, waiting, waiting on the edge. The only solace was in that sense of familiarity she had with the strangers in those dreams; they shared the same emotions, the same terrors, the same obstacles. Were these other women Maleficent had tormented?

It was not enough that the sorceress had knocked her unconscious—no, she had to plague her with the horrors of others, too.

Now, six weeks out from Phillip defeating Maleficent in her dragon form and rescuing Briar from her sleeping curse, the dreams had lessened but still splintered her sleep most nights.

The curse was broken. She was free.

But one of the cruelest realities that the curse had painted was that being free physically did not equate to being free mentally.

Briar caved forward over her knees, the dense silk bedding too tight, too heavy. That was the problem—these blankets strangled her. And this nightgown, it was too thick; and the room, it was too dark, too quiet, too—too—

Too much. All of it.

Too much, and she couldn’t breathe.

Briar froze, bent over, fighting for a single, deep breath. As though breathing would make everything better. But what else could she do?

Her chest ached, lungs trembling, and she had a disconnected, exhausted thought—could she sneak out of the castle? It had been so easy to sneak out of the woodcutter’s cottage. But then, she had only had her three aunts to avoid—no, not aunts, were they? Fairies.

Magical fairies, disguised to watch over her.

Briar kicked the blankets off and swung her legs over the side of the bed, fighting for one more breath.

Even if she did manage to get out of the castle, Frieda and Ben didn’t want to see her.

Briar stumbled from the bed and crossed the room—such a massive, cold, dark room—and felt her way to a desk by the window. One paper crinkled as she pulled it out, but it was far too dark to read. She knew it by heart, anyway, and she held it in front of her like the words would…would do something.

Materialize relief.

Bleed comfort from the ink into her arms, down across her chest.

Magic was real. She knew that now. It was real and it had upended her life, so why couldn’t it help her, why couldn’t it calm her down?

The messenger’s recorded letter from Ben had his usual tone, as though he had gone off on a stream of thought and only realized near the end that he had meant to be short and curt. From that, Briar knew, at least, that he was well, the tavernkeeper missed the business she brought in, everyone in town thought she’d run off, no one knew she had really been the missing princess the whole time—

But you lied to us, Ben had written. You could have told US. Bri—Aurora—Princess Aurora.

Don’t worry about us. You didn’t before.

Frieda hadn’t sent any message back at all. Ben hadn’t even mentioned her in his letter.

Briar slammed the paper back into her desk and staggered into the middle of the room, hands in her hair. Her braid was in tatters, and she freed it in an angry tear.

She needed to go. To get out. To—to not be in here, in this bedroom that wasn’t hers, in this castle that wasn’t hers, in this life that wasn’t hers.

Briar found the armoire by kicking it with her toe. She grimaced and yanked open the door, and even though she couldn’t see the contents, her grimace deepened.

Of the many revelations that now took up too much room in her head, she knew that she was responsible for the fabric shortages that had plagued Hausach and the surrounding villages her whole life. Spinning wheels had been banned since before she could remember, out of fear of a curse claiming the missing princess, which said that she would prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel. She was that princess. It was her fault she had felt guilty for outgrowing her old kirtles, her fault the weavers in Hausach had to run their businesses underground, her fault everyone had to use and reuse even the slightest scrap of fabric; her fault. All of it.

And now she had a full armoire of stunning, rich gowns, linens and silks and wool, and shoes by the dozens, and jeweled necklaces, rings, bracelets—more and more each day. Gifts from the king.

No, not the king. He insisted she call him Father.

Feeling in the dark, she heaved aside half the princess’s wardrobe, still flinching at the thought that her fingers would dirty things so fine—but there, at the back, wedged in despite the protests of her lady’s maids, was her old kirtle. Patched and threadbare, but hers.

Briar undressed and tugged it on and threw her hair back into a simple braid.

It did help. A little. A familiar weight, the feel of the rough wool.

If she couldn’t sneak out and talk to Frieda and Ben, what could she do?

There was only one place that felt even moderately like home in this massive castle. It was where she always ended up. Night after night. For the past six weeks.

Why even fight it?

With a resigned sigh, Briar slipped out of her room.

The halls were empty, and Briar knew now where to duck to avoid the soldiers posted at windows and doors. There were many, even with the villain Maleficent soundly defeated and the kingdom freed from the threat of her evil—but that had not settled the paranoia of the king and queen.

Father and Mother.

Briar, at least, understood their worry. It was over; she had been awoken from the sleeping curse and rescued from the tower; but every sleepless night, every crash of noise, every flash of shadow out of the corner of her eye told her that Maleficent was still here. That she would come back, swooping in with another curse, and this one would hit its mark.

Beyond Maleficent, though, other threats lingered. Austria had a tumultuous relationship with some of its neighbors, Bavaria in particular; it seemed every few years one or the other would initiate a battle that never quite evolved into a full war, squashed quickly by the emperor’s involvement. It did not do well for any of the countries that made up the Holy Roman Empire to be at each other’s throats, and so Austria and Bavaria would settle like kicked dogs, until their disagreements arose years later, and it started all over again.

As a peasant, Briar had known of this conflict only in that it dragged able-bodied fighters out of Hausach and sent back wounded ones.

Shivering, she pressed on, weaving down stone halls and through silent rooms hung with tapestries showing knights and damsels.

Her first night here, she’d stood in front of those tapestries and stared and stared.

She had never seen anything so grand in her life. She sang stories about places like this, gilded halls of kings and emperors; she didn’t belong in a place like this. A tavern bard from Hausach who had stolen a princess’s life.

Though she supposed she should be grateful for this castle. The queen had been begging the king to leave from the moment the curse lifted. The two of them had made this more provincial stronghold the seat of their household for sixteen years—to be close to Briar, she now knew, something else to feel guilty for, as the queen was open about her dislike of their more rural holdings and how she desperately missed Vienna. The king, though, had delayed and delayed, for he had taken to the country life, with hunting aplenty and none of the “pressures of the city,” he’d said.

What would life truly be like for Briar, for Aurora, when she was hauled far, far away, to Vienna? This was the farthest she had ever even been from her cottage in the woods. Vienna would hardly feel real, and there would be no foothold of familiarity there, nothing to ground herself in. Briar would disappear; only Aurora would remain.

Briar slunk off into the darkness, keeping to the shadows, hugging the walls as she wove down, down through the castle, out a side door, and into the detached kitchen building. It was still early enough that the cooks were not preparing the next day’s meals, so the room was lit only by starlight, but Briar knew this space well now. The center held a long, massive table that forever smelled of flour and spelt and yeast, with counters rimming the room, piled with baskets of dried spices and ingredients waiting for tomorrow.

That had first caused her to stop and stare, too.

Ben would be gorging himself endlessly; Frieda would be up in arms at the waste and unnecessary stash; Briar had to fight both of those impulses, because she had found that giving in to either of them only resulted in people staring worryingly at her.

There was food, piles and piles of it, waiting here, always. And at every gathering, tables spread with feasts, pastries glistening in honey and fire-roasted vegetables and whole, massive smoked roasts, meat, real meat. Briar still could not stop herself from gaping openly at the constant display of food, while everyone else in the castle passed it by as though it was of no more import than the sconces on the walls.

The cook had noticed that Briar came to the kitchen at night, and he now made sure to put out a loaf of bread by the fireplaces at the far end. Food she didn’t have to make, food she didn’t have to worry about buying, food prepared for her.

It should have felt luxurious. It should have felt indulgent and heavenly and victorious.

But she felt only the long, slow drag of guilt down her spine.

This wasn’t for her. This wasn’t her life. None of this was hers.

Briar trailed her finger along the table, guiding herself forward in the dark.

And stopped.

There was a light at the far end, by the bank of fireplaces, the flicker of a candle.

Unease sprang up from the lingering anxiety of her dream, and Briar’s fingers grasped emptily at the air, searching for a stray kitchen knife, maybe, or a rolling pin—

A shadow next to the fireplace twisted. The light flared brighter, no longer partially blocked by the figure, and in the pulse of yellow and peeling back of darkness, Briar recognized who it was.

Her anxiety turned to effervescent bubbles and floated up, up.

“Phillip,” she said on a startled exhalation.

He leaned forward in his chair and smiled at her.

He had been a stranger in the forest. Someone noble, she had guessed—it was etched into his very being—and Briar had been a girl practicing a song in what she’d thought was privacy, and they’d danced and talked and it had been light and playful and so very, very easy.

She had seen the beginnings of a future with him. The same sort that Frieda and Ben had together.

But then Briar had been drawn away from her cottage the very night Phillip had arranged to come meet her and her aunts, and the next time she’d seen him, he’d been kissing her awake in the tower. Maleficent had abducted him and locked him away in an attempt to keep from breaking the sleeping curse, but the fairies had freed him, and he had stood alone facing Maleficent while the whole of the kingdom dropped into a sleeping spell alongside her, thanks to the fairies.

Everything else had broken apart—messy, jagged shards she couldn’t even begin to piece back together. She’d lost her home and her family and her friends, her future and her dreams; he’d fought a dragon and waged a whole battle on his own—

But, impossibly, they had not lost each other.

And his smile was a mark of that promise, the same breathlessly grateful shock that came whenever they looked at each other. A hitch of amazement. How are you still here? How are you real, when everything else was so fake?

He stood, his taller frame throwing him into gilded silhouette against the candle, the slope of his long neck curving down to wide shoulders.

There was a wooden mug in his hand. Another on a little table by his chair, and a second chair positioned next to where the loaf of bread had been cut, placed out on a tray, set for two.

She closed the distance to the fireplace, lower lip catching between her teeth. “And who could you possibly be meeting here? An errant tryst with a lady’s maid?”

His dark eyes flared at her tone. That spark contrasted with the exhaustion on his face, a shadow that slipped away in her presence.

“Ah, I have been caught.” He put a hand to his chest in mock hurt. He was in a simple ivory tunic, belted over dark pants and boots. “Do not tell my betrothed. She is prone to flights of jealousy.”

“I have heard that about her. They say she’s quite unstable.”

“Hmm. I have been sending my servants down for sleeping drafts, and every night, they brought the strangest reports. Of that unstable betrothed of mine, lurking in the shadows, stealing our bread and tea. I thought, well, surely they must be mistaken. If she were going to steal anything, it would be cake at least.”

Briar’s lips cracked into a grin. She took the mug he offered and sipped from it, eyes on him over the rim.

“But I realized…” he continued, retaking his seat and claiming his own mug. She sat in the other chair, the candle burning on the low table in front of them. “That if she could steal bread and tea, then I was perfectly capable of doing the same myself.”

“Are you? I am shocked, nay, scandalized that the prince of Lorraine even knows where the kitchen is.”

He gave her a challenging leer. “Is that so surprising?”

“And he knows how to use a bread knife.”

“Ah, one of those small, swordlike things, you mean?”

“And make tea all by himself! The aristocracy will collapse!” With him, it was a joke; he had proven to be far more capable than most in the castle. But truth clung to it. Too much truth.

Phillip chuckled. His short brown hair was a little mussed, like he had been wrestling with sleep too, and the mundanity, that he’d come to meet her and hadn’t worried about the decorum of it, was enchanting.

He leaned forward. She thought he might take her hand, or reach out for her—he had the intent in his dark eyes, in his smile going limp.

But he only held on to the edge of his chair, and in the proceeding silence, her skin warmed, and her smile went limp, too.

“Hello,” he whispered.

They would be married in one week. Briar thought for a moment—one week exactly, from this very morning.

And they had hardly seen each other these past weeks, what with wedding preparations, and Briar being swept into a new life—nobility to meet and lessons on propriety that her peasant upbringing had not prepared her for. Meanwhile, Phillip was the center of everyone’s fixation, dragged to meet this or that lord or duke or king who had come to fawn over the prince who had slayed a dragon.

They had seen each other at meals, at celebratory balls, where they had danced and would talk in earshot of others.

But for the first time since the tower, since the forest, even, they were alone.

“Hello to you,” she whispered back. And then, because the candlelight created a halo of dreamlike fog, and she had not slept, not truly, in weeks, she said, “I’ve missed you.”

Phillip’s smile could have lit the room. It vanished quickly and he dragged a hand over his mouth, righting himself, but Briar latched on to it with a vicious smirk.

“Don’t be too pleased with yourself,” she said. “I miss many people at the moment. I am practically giving away my affection.”

The candlelight was indescribably dangerous, this hazy atmosphere they were creating. She would say more she shouldn’t. She would, even worse, do things she shouldn’t.

But things Briar shouldn’t, or things Aurora shouldn’t?

With him, though, she was neither, and she was both, and that was dangerous, too.

“How are you?” he asked. His brow pinched in the earnestness of his question. “My servants truly did say you’ve been down here most nights.”

“How are you, if you have to send servants down here most nights, too?”

His eyes dropped from hers. He worked the mug in his hand, rolling it between his palms, before he set it on the table.

Briar stared down at it. “You are not enjoying your well-deserved adoration?”

But she knew already. When she had seen him throughout the castle, he was being quickly ushered to the next meeting—and his movements had been stiff, overly formal. His face had been smooth with practiced cordiality. Nothing about him had been the man she knew from the forest. The prince she had watched get hauled around the castle these past weeks was the same ghost she had become to get through her duties as Aurora. Hollow and performative.

Phillip leaned his elbows on his knees. And said only, “No.”

Her eyes flared up to his. But he was looking away now, and the muscles in the sharp edge of his jaw were bunched.

She sank back in her chair. “Aren’t we a pair. You saved me from a sleeping curse only for neither of us to be able to sleep at all. Maybe that was the real curse.”

One corner of his lips lifted, not so much a smile as an acknowledgment. “If only.”

“If only?”

He scrubbed his hands over his face. “Oh, don’t mind me. My father says I’m far too morose these days. I could be a bard, belting out melancholy songs to—What’s funny?”

She was trying to hide her laugh, she really was, but he looked at her and she couldn’t help it.

“You’ve not met many bards, have you?”

Phillip cocked his head, not seeing what she was getting at. “No, I suppose not.”

“We’re hardly morose and melancholy. What good would only gloomy songs be for rousing a tavern to drink and joy?”

A look of interest fixed on Phillip, a hunter setting a mark. “We?”

Briar’s cheeks heated. She had not spoken about her life before since coming here. Only to ask for messengers to go down into Hausach, and even that had taken days of fighting with the king and qu—with her mother and father. During the short time she had spent with Phillip in the forest, neither had told the other who they truly were, or any identifying things about themselves.

She picked up a slice of bread. As she chewed, she kept her eyes anywhere but on him, the telling of this suddenly making her feel raw.

She wasn’t a bard anymore, with dreams of traveling the Holy Roman Empire, singing and learning new ballads.

She was a princess, and she was bound to Austria.

“I was part of a troupe. In Hausach.” Her chest ached. Say it quickly; say it and be done with it. “My…companions and I. We would sing, bring in coin that way. My aunts were loving, but downright shortsighted when it came to actually providing for us. Which I see now was due to their overreliance on magic up until our departure from the castle.” She made herself dust the breadcrumbs from her hands and not lick the remains, and grabbed another piece. “But once I was old enough, I began singing to help us pay our way.”

“How are you not wealthier than the king?” Phillip asked. “I remember how talented you are.”

She finished the second slice, reached for a third. He hadn’t touched a single one—there was food, sitting here, and he did not eat? Insanity. Utterly. And it was good food, too.

“Ah, yes, villagers are known to throw their spare coinage at performers, rather than, say, providing for their families.”

Phillip winced. “That came out wrong. I meant—when I first heard you, in the forest, I thought, That voice is too beautiful to be real. I cannot imagine anyone else hearing you and not immediately wanting to swear their souls to you.”

Heaven help her, but he talked really, really well.

“Oh, I am rich in souls, did I not tell you that? Coin, no, alas, but souls I have aplenty.”

He smirked. “That, I do believe. Singing was your fairy gift, was it not?”

She frowned. “My what?”

“Your fairy gift? You’ve heard the story.”

Yes. She had heard, before, when the story was of a distant, faceless princess, not her. Of how Maleficent had arrived at the princess’s christening after Flora and Fauna had bestowed blessings on her; of how Maleficent’s blessing was the curse that would come to destroy her life. And how Merryweather had tried her best to undo the worst of it, changing the curse to one of sleeping, not death.

Flora’s gift to her had been beauty. Fauna’s gift had been song. The former Briar had immediately detested, and she had to fight hard not to be upset with her aunts. Beauty she could have come by naturally. Had her parents not been insulted, that Flora had assumed their daughter might otherwise be ugly?

But until this moment, Briar had not realized that singing, too, was something else that had been manufactured in her life, something that was not truly hers. She was not a singer; she had been created to be a singer, created by the same magical forces that had manipulated everything else.

It cracked into her chest like a thunderclap on a clear night, and she sat in that chair, eyes drifting into the middle space, all her inner thoughts gone to reeling chaos.

Now Phillip did take her hand.

She cast a startled look up at him and he immediately released her.

“Forgive me—”

She snatched his hand back.

An instinctive reaction, that.

She had wanted him to touch her for…well, since the forest, since they had danced to no music, and all through the balls here, and when she had her hand on his arm at presentative events, and when he put his fingers on the small of her back to guide her through a door.

She wanted him and she was going to marry him and all of this was enormously terrifying, but the persistent spark that flickered and squirmed in the base of her stomach when she saw him was, in its own way, an anchor. He was an anchor.

Saying all that, though, was not simple, and so she sat there with her hand clasped around his in midair, her eyes locked on him, her lips parted.

So much easier to sing these sorts of feelings. But the idea of breaking into spontaneous song was too absurd, even for her.

Hellfire and damnation, she was pathetic, and at least that had not changed.

“I did not mean to upset you,” Phillip said. His shoulders were hard planes of tension, his hand extended, caught in hers but in a way that said he feared moving would make her let him go. “Your fairy gifts were a…blessing.”

“Were they?” Slowly, she brought their hands down, between them. She turned his hand palm up, and in the unsteady light of the candle, she was able to do unsteady things, like look at his hand, his calluses from wielding a sword, and trace the lines across his palms with her fingertips. “Did you have fairy blessings?”

He shuddered. It rippled up from her touch.

“Yes,” he whispered. “I—Strength was one. Honor. Bravery.”

Still more things that could have been come by naturally.

What good were fairy gifts, truly? Better to have gifts like You can poison anyone at will or All who look upon you with ill intent will vomit frogs for a month straight.

But her aunts had explained it to her after everything. Their magic was in goodness, joy, happiness, and so on. They could not give such aggressive gifts to anyone—Flora had been scandalized that she would even ask. Fauna had laughed in her uncomfortable, trying-to-keep-the-peace way. Merryweather had grumbled about how Briar was right, they should be able to make people vomit frogs, that would certainly bring her joy.

Briar kept Phillip’s palm resting in hers, her fingers moving back and forth over the lines, and her breath came in tight, quick pulls as she became aware of the heat of his skin, the contrast between the soft texture at the base of his wrist and the rough pads of his thumb.

“Do you ever think about who we might have been if our lives had been uninfluenced?” She poured the question down into his open hand. “If we had been allowed to…to be?”

“Yes,” he said instantly. She felt the corresponding brush of air and looked up, realizing he had shifted to the edge of his chair. “But I know one thing that would not have changed, magic or no.”

Briar’s eyebrows lifted. She found her throat incapable of functioning to ask what he meant.

He was very, very close to her.

And he smelled of the floral tea and a richness like mint soap and some unnameable musk that did exceptionally unfair things to her ability to breathe.

“I still would have met you,” Phillip said, eyes flashing gold in the candlelight. “That was always real.”

Now it was her turn to smile like the sun.

“Sir Knight, you need not woo me; I am yours already,” she managed.

His head tipped, a flash of interest. “Sir Knight?”

Oh. She smiled again in self-deprecation and shook her head. “It was, uh, how I referred to you in my head. After the forest. Sir Knight. It’s from a song.”

“Sir Knight,” he echoed again, as if trying it on. His smile pulsed. “I like it. It’s steps down from ‘prince,’ so it sounds like a vacation. Far less responsibility.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Knights tend to have to actually work.”

He bellowed a laugh and jerked on their tangled hands, yanking them both to their feet, and she went, giggling, feigning wrestling away, until the position put her right against his broad chest, their hands clasped against his shirt.

His words were still thick on the air, in her head: That was always real.

She kept her eyes firmly on his collarbone—which was not the best place to stare in an attempt to regain control of herself, because it was a rather nice collarbone—and remembered, remembered a brush of satin on her lips. A shock of fear, then a wave of confusion when she had opened her eyes and seen him, someone she recognized, but his face had been in such a scowl of terror that she wondered, often, if he even had kissed her awake. No one could look like that after a kiss. Like they were on the edge of a nightmare.

His hands clamped around hers, and she realized it was in an effort to hide how he was shivering.

“I would like to hear you sing that song,” he said. It came out in a rush.

Song? What song? Any song. She would sing anything he asked.

“Actually…” He whipped his head toward the kitchen windows, where the night still hung dark and impenetrable. “Come with me.”

Briar blinked up at him. “All right. Where?”

He looked at her with a roguish grin. Such an enticing, teasing, mischievous grin that it struck her speechless.

“It’s not yet midnight,” he said. “No self-respecting tavern would be closed.”

“You—you want to go to a tavern?”

“I want us to go to a tavern. Your tavern. Hausach is a twenty-minute ride away. Well, maybe longer, with both of us on Samson.”

Something broke loose in Briar’s chest. It dropped, and in its descent it sprouted wings and took flight, fluttering feverishly against her ribs.

“Yes,” she said, knowing it sounded overeager and desperate, but she was, and she couldn’t hide it. “Yes.” And then, “Can we? Won’t we be stopped? The guards—”

Phillip put his hand on her chin. Just the barest brush of his thumb there, and it rattled through her with enough force to break stone.

“You want to go to your old tavern?” he clarified.

She nodded helplessly.

“Then it will be done.” He adjusted his hold on her to encase one of her hands in his, and before she could find any words, any at all, to thank him, he was grabbing the last of the bread, handing it to her, and hauling her out of the kitchen, making fast for the stables.