Chapter Ten

Now

FEBRUARY 7

MOST FAIRY TALES ARE TOLD in threes.

Three parts: beginning, middle, and end.

Three suitors, three wishes, three nights. Three sisters.

A princess waiting to be awakened by a kiss before the end of three full moons.

Old Liam Donovan began to sketch, his dark pencil swishing across the page in a soothing motion. He liked the sound of it: one of the few things that kept his mind and hand steady.

Most people didn’t know that the first tales of Sleeping Beauty, the original versions of the story, were violent and strange. He drew an ear.

A maiden, taken in her sleep, only to awaken after birthing twins, who, desperate and hungry, sucked the poisonous flax from her fingertips and saved her life. A king tormented by her memory—the unconscious lover who haunted him still—muttering “Talia sun and moon” in his sleep.

Liam knew there was something important in all this, but he couldn’t name it, couldn’t quite organize the instinct into coherence. A television chattered on in another room, like a lost person, mumbling.

He drew. Who was he drawing? The young prince, the one who killed the king, not realizing the king was his true father? Or the girl, waking up alone and dazed, helpless, her fate forever changed by a night she couldn’t remember?

He put down the pencil to stretch his hand. Peeled back the metallic lilac wrapping on a chocolate egg. Easter candy, though it was only February. The crocuses had not yet poked up through the soil.

He had a memory—they came to him this way now, fluidly, in the middle of thoughts, interrupting his daily activity, placeless, sometimes formless, distracting. They left him disoriented. An Easter egg hunt. Dublin. The woman with the lovely eyes and teacherly skirt clapping along as he and his university friends performed a skit . . . some old Irish drinking songs, too. The egg hunt had been a tradition at UCD. She was a Polish American girl, traveling on fellowship. She wore a crown of flowers.

“I’m Diane,” she’d said.

“Diana, the huntress,” he’d replied. The goddess who became trapped in a tree. No. That was Daphne. Diana was Apollo’s twin, not his lover. The virgin who ran after deer under a full moon.

The goddess of birth, who swore never to marry.

Diane had made him forget all about Sarah, his first heartbreak, and the proposal she had rejected.

The ring she’d given back to him—a pale sapphire, like her eyes had been.

He sketched.

There was something else. The princess in the woods. The forest of high brambles that surrounded her sleeping form. The king who couldn’t forget her. Her long, beautiful hair.

Sarah. The first cut was always the deepest. He was the king who still couldn’t forget, the king who muttered her name in his sleep: Talia, sun and moon. The king who wanted to save her. Had wanted to make things right.

But the real world was much like the world of early fairy tales—full of violence and strangeness, accidents and lost chances.

He shaded in the dark eyes.

It was late. He must go to bed. Or it was early, he wasn’t sure, winter sunlight streaking through the curtain, but he was tired, in need of a nap. He stood up at his desk, lightheaded. It was possible he would fall. He wanted to cry for help, but to whom would he call out? And where would he be taken? Where was he, even now—what kingdom had he entered? He didn’t belong here: a scattered old man with wrinkled hands. A deposed king. Words and names—he used to know so many of them.

He looked at the notebook before him and didn’t understand what he had drawn, or why.

The face of a wolf, shadowed and fierce, stared back at him.