Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was a keen autumn afternoon, and Briar Rose was ajoy with the newness of the season.

Her aunts loathed autumn. Too dark, they said, and too cold; too easy to catch your death. Rose thought that even the cold seasons had their beauties. Today the wind fluted through gaps in branches, and leaves came down in sheets, though the trees were so full from summer that their silhouettes were hardly diminished. They canopied the world with honey and hazel, and their gaps let in more of the sun, which was gentle, now, instead of hard and hot, and cabbages had begun to grow plump in the garden. The weather was fickle, but that simply meant it was full of surprises; Rose coveted a good surprise, for her life was very plain.

Sunset was only a few hours out, now, and usually Rose would have been called back to the cottage—except that today, unusually, her aunts were away.

They hadn't explained why. All Rose could tell that morning was that they seemed worried, and that they were in a rush. Flora and Merryweather didn't even bicker. Flora took both Rose's cheeks between her palms and kissed her squarely on the forehead. Then, before bumbling out the door, she said, "Now, Rose, I'm aware that this is quite—quite sudden, and really truly everything is fine, and we'll return by the end of week…"

Fauna followed, kissing Rose's left cheek, and Merryweather her right. They squeezed her hands with a desperate tightness that Rose was unaccustomed to. "There's bread enough for your dinner, dear," Fauna said, "and wood for a fire, and we've already drawn up the water for your bath, oh—"

"And we love you, Rose!" Merryweather added, puffing out her cheeks. "We'll be back before you blink! Don't you worry about us!"

"Wait! Please, Auntie Flora, where are you all going? Is it—"

The door slammed before she could finish. Rose rushed to the window, thinking she might see them off, but by then they'd already disappeared, impossibly, into the forest.

There it was, in any case: her coveted surprise. For the first time in her thirteen-and-a-half years, Rose was alone.

For the first half of the day she couldn't conceive of what to do with it. She went about her usual chores: the mill's flume needed de-leafing, and the vegetables had to be tended and sung to, and there were acorns to be inspected for their suitability for flour. She wasn't afraid—she was coming into herself as quite the little woman, and she was certain she could handle a week of solitary homesteading. This was the perfect opportunity to prove her capability, and then, when her aunts returned, she might be granted even more freedoms. Perhaps—perhaps!—they might even let her venture into the village, and allow her to make her first friend.

Bit by bit, though, her mature resolve burst into a foreign giddiness. The cottage was absent of the sisterly tension that perpetually thickened the air. Upstairs there were neither puttering footsteps nor voices coming through the wood beams; the only sounds were tree and animal. Experimentally, as she was scrubbing the kitchen, she dipped her hand in a sack of flour and rubbed the white all over her face.

She waited. No one came around to reprimand her.

Alone! (But for the birds and the squirrels, she amended, who followed her diligently while she whistled and worked.) Rose was an obedient girl—she'd argue, anyway—but even she couldn't resist the basic temptations before her: she could eat cake for dinner, she could slide down the banister instead of taking the stairs, she could be as loud and thoughtless as she liked!

She covered her arms and legs and dress with flour and announced loudly, delightfully, to no one: "I am the ghost of Briar Rose!" She clutched her chest and fell to the floor, like she figured it must be done in plays, and delivered her lines in her best impression of a spiritly moan. "My dear old aunts have forgotten me, and now I've been left here to rot… I am cursed to haunt this cottage, forever and ever and ever and ever…" She raced up and down the hall like a rabbit, getting powder over everything; she yipped like a fox; she bayed like a wolf; she indulged in all the little insanities a thirteen-year-old girl ought to when presented with the rarity of freedom. She clanged pots in the kitchen; she cupped her hands around her mouth and screamed. The birds scattered, screeching warnings to their families, and Rose laughed, wild with glee.

Then her smile faded. The glade was quiet.

She tiptoed to the window and peeked outside. Still, but for the wind eddying a pile of leaves. Silent, but for the blood in her ears. Alone—she picked at her fingernails. Her throat was a little raw, now; her skin itched from the flour, stuck with sweat.

When the warmth of afternoon crept over the glade, Rose donned her boots and basket and took to the forest, where the animals were, and where all the beauty of autumn was.

The forest was always more encouraging for the imagination than home. Today she was pretending to be an adventuress in search of a cure for her sickly companions. The scenario had come to her several nights ago, in a dream: she lived in an old house made of cobblestone in a dirty alley in the capital city—the details were fuzzy, as her imagination had only illustrations and descriptions from stories to work with—with three old widows, played, of course, by Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather. In the dream her widows were pale and coughing black blood and grew weaker by the day. Rose mourned dutifully for them, until a beautiful stranger showed up at her doorstep and told her there was a mushroom that grew in the most dangerous part of the forest which could cure any ailment.

The dream had taken a strange turn, after that: all of a sudden, she was the size of a doll and, for reasons she could not recall, she had to race a king of mice through a maze of giant toys to win his prized ball of yarn. Thankfully, Rose was a judicious editor. She cut details and embellished others. Now in her fantasy she was a girl from the provinces with an elegant Latin name like Angélique. She came to the city in search of work, as her parents had died tragically in a churchfire, but none of the cityfolk would take her, for she was too wild. As she sat crying beside the river, ready to sell her hair for food, the widows found her. They stayed her knife and kissed her hands and from then on adopted her as their own daughter. This was why "Angélique" was willing to go to such perilous lengths for them. It was a moving tale of True Love, also known as the most powerful force in the universe. Her aunts had impressed that fact upon her many times.

She imagined searching high and low for her storybook mushroom, growing exhausted, growing hopeless, running into danger at every turn. She bounded up and down felled logs and swung from branches with a carelessness that would make Fauna very uneasy. She looked across the river, toward the shadow of the mountain, where the forest darkened and the underbrush grew tangled, damp, and deep green.

Rose's aunts had many rules, but above all were the golden three: never share your name with a stranger, never eat of a stranger's food, and never cross the river into the dark woods beyond.

The most dangerous part of the forest, undoubtedly.

Rose, to her credit, was not completely reckless. She had brought with her an old knife (it would be very silly for a girl of the forest to wander outdoors without one!); a small jar of soaked oats, in case she got hungry; and a smaller bag of flint and pyrite, and some other materials for a torch. She knew her way around the forest by heart, and could navigate by stars, river, moss, and mountain. Her aunts were famous exaggerators, and so it was difficult to assess which of their warnings were legitimate and which could be safely disregarded. Rose realized this a couple of years ago, when she pricked her finger on a sewing needle and Fauna started crying. They hadn't let her go up to bed all night, for fear of some—nebulous infection taking her in her sleep, Rose assumed, though she never succeeded at prying out the details of their worry.

She muddied her boots in the swollen bank and found a place to hop across. Gray clouds rolled over her as she landed. The smell of almost-rain hung in the air and a shock of cold kissed her cheeks.

Her spine tingled. It was the closest she had ever come to this forbidden place. The stretch before her was overgrown, with wild clouds of bracken growing up to the waists of the trees; and overpoweringly green, except for one variety of wildflower, which popped out defiant and red, and had long, artistic petals, like spiders' limbs. Mist crowded between the trees' branches and clung to the bracken fronds and glittered like drops of ice. The birds were only half-calling; she could hear their chirps behind her, but in front of her was complete silence. Then there was a vague, implacable offness to it all—the smell of the air, the twist of the tree trunks, the movement of the leaves. Even the water's burble echoed differently, on this side.

Rose glanced behind her. The sun glinted off the surface of the river, which flowed from the mountain and forked into creeks a little further down. One of those creeks wound under the mill of the cottage. She could turn back around and follow it home. And what a fun adventure she'd already had, wandering so far! The mature part of her knew it would be wise to turn back…

A raven called from the dark: throaty, trilled, halting.

The gleam on his feathers was unnatural, like a wisp of white fire, the brightest point of light in the whole distance of wood. He stared out with shiny, black eyes, and tilted his head, as though to ask her a question. They stood like that for a long while: Rose's thick boots dug into the mud and the strange lushness of the forest floor, the beginnings of rain beading on the waxed layer of her cloak, and the bird as still as a statue.

"Is this your home, little creature?" she asked.

The raven puffed his chest and cawed again. Then he spread his wings, hopped from his branch, and flew deeper into the dark.

It would be wise to turn back, Rose thought again. Flora would be livid, if she knew how far Rose had gone already. She should prove to them that she can be trusted. She should prove to them that she can be careful…

But they would never trust her, Rose knew. She looked straight ahead, where there lay everything she was forbidden from touching, knowing that if she didn't take this chance, she would never have the opportunity to see it again.

The raven's wingbeats were still nearby, circling. She closed her eyes, took one step into the darkness, and followed.

Chapter Text

"How do you suppose," Rose asked, "that this part of the forest stays so green, even while the leaves are changing just a hundred meters westward?"

Her knees were dug into the ground, and her dress was muddy. Her hood had fallen in the course of her digging, revealing a handcraft crown of those elegant red flowers, petals bowed and beaten and smashed partially against her scalp. Her flax hair had darkened in the rain; her curls clung heavily to her cheeks and to her heaving shoulders and soaked the collar of her white blouse. Her fingers felt like pucks of ice.

It was very cold, here.

Mushrooms, though, were plentiful. Rose superstitiously avoided anything growing in circles, and she was smart enough not to actually touch anything of a foreign shape or color, despite the details of her fantasy. Her basket filled within the hour, and she resorted to stuffing mushrooms into every pocket on her person. She wouldn't have another opportunity to come here, she figured, and she could salt and dry the excess by the fire. Her aunts might even be impressed by her practical thinking.

The raven cawed. His voice was deeply judgmental.

"I know what an evergreen is," Rose defended, "and the oaks may be, sure, but some of these are hawthorns, and I thought that all hawthorns were—oh!" The stream of her thoughts redirected. They had plenty of acorns at the cottage, but the oaks here were different, so perhaps the acorns here tasted differently? She abandoned her basket and set to looking. Acorns, too, proved plentiful, and soon she was dripping with autumn forage, every pocket filled to brim.

"Where are the squirrels to eat the acorns?" she wondered. Everything was so overgrown; where were the deer to graze? Where were the animals in general? She hadn't seen a single one since she ventured in further, except her little raven.

She turned back to him—perhaps he'd know why the forest was so empty—but in a fit of irony, he, too, had disappeared.

She sighed at her loss of company and picked up her basket. This place was so dark that she couldn't tell if the sun had set. She'd paid close attention to the turns of the forest as she came in, though, and so she trudged—slowly, against the bracken, and for all the weight in her pockets, but confidently—in the direction of home.

The silence, in her discomfort, developed a personality of its own, and she was quick to imagine it as her friend. She asked it questions: "how long have you been here? Has this forest existed since the beginning of the world? Have you known and lost companionship, or are the Raven and I the first creatures you've met?" She pretended she could interpret its answers in the sonorant rattles of the leaves: "a long, long time"; and "yes"; and "yes" again, though it was a long and sad story that it could not bear to tell.

Then a muteness set in. She'd been trudging far longer than she expected.

Hadn't she seen that tree before, with its mangled, licheny trunk, or was it a cousin of the first?

Hadn't she just passed that school of red flowers?

There, scattered amongst the underbrush: loose mushrooms and acorns, spillover from her basket. It had to be, for there was not a living creature in this dark beside herself and her Raven.

She pivoted. Perhaps she'd been turned around; she walked as far in the opposite direction as she could, until her legs grew sore, but it was useless. The scenery repeated, over and over, the forest's magic—for this had to be magic, it could be nothing but magic—rearing all around her, ensnaring her. The air was clearer than it had been at the peak of the afternoon, yet felt dense and heavy in her lungs, like a fog; she breathed quickly and shallowly. The temperature was dropping even further, and the night started to sink into her bones.

At last, she collapsed between two tree roots and cried.

So this was the death of Briar Rose. She would freeze in her sleep, and the forest would make quick work of decomposing her. Her aunts would never find the body. They would be haunted by the mystery of her disappearance for the rest of their lives, and grieve and grieve without closure, all because a stupid thirteen-year-old girl could not listen to the rules.

She sobbed harder as she thought it all through: she would never hug them again! She'd never again help hopeless Fauna in the kitchen, nor hear another one of Flora's bedtime stories. She'd never again rough-house with Merryweather in the garden. She had a present all made up in her closet for Merryweather's birthday; it was a little book of songs she'd written in the quiet of her bedroom, careful to keep her humming voice low so she wouldn't spoil the surprise. Would Merryweather know it was for her? She had quarreled with Flora the evening before and had never found the moment to apologize. Would Flora think Rose had run away on purpose? Would she think that Rose hated her?

She cried until her sobs ran dry and her throat was sore from hiccuping. Then she stood up and walked. She couldn't tell how long she walked, nor, on the night of her certain death, did it matter. All she knew that when you were cold, you ought to keep on walking.

It was stupid luck that she stumbled on a shallow cave in the side of the mountain. At the mouth was a loose party of stout, branchy trunks, downed from a previous storm, all of which were dry at the peaks. Rose would have cried again had she any cry left in her.

She unsheathed the knife strapped to her hip and pulled her flintkit out of her inner pocket, which was waxed against the rain. She stacked the downed trunks as best as her strength would allow, to make a wind-cover. She cut up tinder, dragged suitably large splinters of wood into a pile, and placed wet rocks around her pile in a circle.

Soon her fire was lit. She hung the outer, wetter layers of her clothes on the branches behind her to dry them, and once her fingers were no longer stiff and her teeth were no longer chattering, she took out her jar of soaked oats and ate. When the jar was empty and her stomach still growled, she whittled the end of a branch into a point and used it to roast what few mushrooms she'd kept in her pockets.

She would be so, so good, she promised herself, if she ever made it home from here. She would never break another rule again. She'd never say an unkind word to her aunts, and she'd be helpful wherever she could and never complain about her chores. She would stop wanting, as she knew now where wanting would get her. She would be content with her plain little life, and she would live until she was an old maid in the cottage where she was raised, grateful that after many adventureless years she'd be allowed to die somewhere warm and familiar.

* * *

She didn't notice falling asleep, nor did she notice waking. At some point she realized that her fire was low, and that the pebbles beneath her cheek had left angry red impressions in her skin.

She got up and peeked over her wind shelter. It was still dark, but it was more like twilight than the dead of night, and the rain had subsided. Briar Rose knew instinctively that the sun had risen.

She needed to find a way home.

She looked to the trees. Little holes of light, like stars, wavered and flashed in their canopy. She circled around a bit, gauging their footholds. Dangerously thin, and slippery. She bit her lip and nodded. She found a low branch to lift herself from and ascended.

At the top, she poked her shiny face through the line of leaves. The sun hung aloft in the east, as she had guessed; gray clouds moved thither with their mist, in the direction of the city; and all the rest of the sky was blue. Then, to the west, on the side of the mountain—there was a distant castle.

She considered her options: she could gamble on the winds and stay another night in her cave, under the hope that the sky might stay clear enough to see the stars—then she could follow them at least to the river, which would lead her home. Else she could set off now and go generically sunwards. That might be a good idea, since she had no idea when the weather would change again or if she'd be lucky enough to get another spot of sunshine, and the magic of the woods might be less hostile now that it wasn't so dark.

Rose took a deep breath and let herself down. Her stomach swooped as she looked below. Oh, she was no stranger to climbing trees, but her aunts never let her get higher than a couple meters off the ground without barking, and the trees in her part of the forest didn't grow this tall; she thought of Flora's bedtime stories, of Fauna's songs, of Merryweather's games, trying to calm herself.

One foot, then another. Slowly, back in the direction she came.

Then there was a snap.

Her right arm dropped. Both of her feet slipped, and she swung out with a scream, piercing the unnatural silence of the forest. Her own scream echoed back at her… and that was all. There was not even a frightened rustle of the bushes to indicate that anything had heard her.

Alone—truly alone, more alone than she thought possible. The most alone anything or anyone could be.

She hung there, several stories off the ground, the grip strength in her left fingers waning.

A flutter.

A caw.

Rose looked up, and there he was: her raven, perched easily two branches above, looking down at her, head tilted.

Betrayal burned in her chest and throat. Just as swiftly, she felt guilty—though unusually intelligent, her bird was still just a bird. He probably hadn't abandoned her with malice. Probably he'd seen something shiny, or gotten hungry, or heard the calls of his flock and went to be with them. She had no right to blame him for her predicament. She was the stupid girl who couldn't follow instructions.

Her raven hopped down to her branch, and tapped her straining left hand lightly with his beak. Then he stared for a solid several seconds at her right… and then hopped to another branch, a little in front of her, close enough to grab if she could get the momentum.

Rose understood instantly. She swung her whole body forward and grabbed onto the branch with her right hand, just as her left lost its grip. The branch held under her weight. She exhaled, shakily. Her raven nodded, and then fluttered down and pecked at her right foot. He landed on a branch nearby. Not the one she would have chosen for a foothold, but where had her judgment gotten her up to now?

She climbed down the rest of the way under the raven's guidance, and when she finally landed, safely on her feet, she laughed. She didn't know why. It was like all the tension had bubbled under her skin and had finally broken out in the form of desperate convulsions.

She slumped against the tree. Her raven perched on her shoulder and began picking leaves and twigs from her tangled hair.

"Thank you for saving my life," she said. Her voice was raspy; she sounded like two sticks rubbing against each other, or like a river during floodrush. After a moment's silence, she ventured: "You wouldn't happen to know the way home, would you, good Raven?"

He cawed again, and she could feel the vibrations tickling down her spine. He hopped off her shoulder, took to the air, and swooped leftward. She scrambled to keep up, stumbling into bushes and tree trunks that he dodged so effortlessly.

Rose realized quickly that he was heading not southeast, but northwest—toward the castle.

It was following this raven that had gotten her lost in the first place, she remembered, and now here she was, chasing after him in the precise opposite direction of home. But a castle was better than nothing, and she was convinced, now, that the Raven was the only thing protecting her from this forest's dark magic. She ran with him, despite the hunger gnawing her stomach, despite her weak and trembling legs, and despite her fear.

* * *

For four days and three nights, Briar Rose and the Raven traveled. On the first night, she'd cried herself to sleep, but by the time the next sun had risen, a strange calm settled over her.

Her imagination found inventive ways to cope. She was a girl of the forest now, she decided, running her mud-encrusted fingers through her mud-encrusted hair. Her old life was dead, and nothing could be done to resuscitate it. Let them mourn for Briar Rose; she was a new person—she was an animal, no, she was a dryad, a moss maiden—and among the trees and empty she had no name. Her task now was to learn the twists and turns of this new place, its weather patterns and its forage. She would learn to scream and trill and chirp like a bird, or else she'd learn whatever tree-language must be buried in this overbearing silence, for nothing could truly be nothing, and she was silly to have ever thought it so. She'd sew new dresses out of bark and leaves and shadow lost travelers as a frightening—yet beautiful—apparition. She would take her blade and cut off all her hair.

She hacked off several inches in front of a puddle that very afternoon, until her violent reverie was interrupted by a dry, judgmental caw. She sheathed her blade in embarrassment. She thought: alright, perhaps Briar Rose is not dead, and I am no more a moss maiden than I am royalty; but if I turn back now the forest will surely devour me, so I'd better trudge on.

She didn't cry again, though every day was more taxing than the last: her limbs grew sorer and, though rain made clean water abundant, she grew sick of foraged seeds and fungi and craved warm bread and milk. She had her arms cut raw by a small pass of thorns and her ankle twisted by an errant tree-root.

When the forest suddenly thinned and Rose finally got to look more than a hundred paces ahead of her, she saw the castle. Her Raven croaked approvingly. This was his home, then.

* * *

Two hours hence, Rose stood beneath the castle's gates. It was just in time, too. The sun threatened to plunge beneath the horizon.

She angled herself sideways and slipped through the bars, which were as tall as spires twisted almost like vines. The building was grander up close than she could have imagined: its stone was the same raw, weather-roughed gray as the mountain; the bricks were shot through with veiny embellishments of greenish, unpolished copper, and made to look molten by the orangeish cast of sunset. A chill gripped her, deep in her marrow, and she shivered. The Raven flew overhead and dived into a tower window.

Rose walked up to the great doors, four times her height and eight times her width, adorned with swooping patterns of dragons in flight. She hesitated, and then knocked.

The doors creaked open, just wide enough for a malnourished maid of thirteen to slip through. Cobwebs stretched and snapped and fell humbly into Rose's hair as she shimmied into the opening. She inhaled and exhaled slowly. Green lanterns hung on the otherwise-bare walls. There was enough light to keep the cobbled stone starkly, headachingly shadowed; the flickering green flames gave a thick, undulating quality to all the surfaces, like Rose was walking along the bed of a disturbed body of water.

A caw echoed down the hallway. Following it led her up a spiral staircase carpeted with green velvet. The second story of the castle was more populated: oil portraits framed imposingly in unpolished copper were placed along the walls. Sickly green women in strange, dark clothing were the recurring subject. Statues of birds hung perfectly in the air, in a still-life of flight; Rose could not see the mechanism by which they were held aloft. There were other statues of animals, too, all in strange positions. A wolf sniffed at the crack below a door. A bear stood on his hind legs and reached for an emerald chandelier. Rose turned a corner, and there she saw a stone woman. She was on her knees and fat tears were frozen mid-drip from her cheeks. Her head was bowed to the floor, begging.

Rose worried her bottom lip until she tasted blood.

At last she came upon an open door. It was a room with a wide, lush bed, themed rose-pink instead of green, all made up and dusted. There was a crystal tray with a flute of water, two slices of bread, and a deep bowl of cloudy broth on a low, wood table. A clean nightgown was laid out on an ottoman, just her size. Steam curled out from another door to the left; Rose peeked aside and saw a stone bath filled with hot water.

With conviction, Rose thought: I am dead. Or I am dying, and this is my final hallucination. I have been dead ever since I broke the line of trees and saw the castle; I took a plunge over the cliffside and my body is now lying there, every bone broken, bleeding into the rocks.

Or, no, she thought—I died much earlier than that. I fell when that tree branch snapped, the first morning after my stay in the cave, and was knocked unconscious immediately. This—my whole, elaborate journey—is simply my feeble human way of trying to understand my spirit's passage into the realm beyond.

Regardless, she crossed the room in a single bound and stuffed the bread into her mouth with her dirt-covered hands. It was sourish, like a lemon, and made her tongue tingle; it was flavored with green herbs she'd never had before. It was the most delicious thing she'd ever tasted. She drank down half the broth and only paused when her stomach rebelled. She was not so used to these quantities of food, after these last, perilous few days; she clutched the leg of the bedframe tightly, willing herself not to vomit. Who knew you could be simultaneously nauseous and starved? What cruel trick of nature!

She bathed, after (now she really knew that she was dead, because the water smelled like a garden and the hunk of soap that had been left out for her felt like a silk slip against her skin), and then crawled into bed. The sheets were cool and kind, and her mind was heavy, dull, and dreamless. She sunk into a pleasant blackness, but for a single image that flashed briefly, confusingly, before her mind's eye.

A golden spindle, glinting.

Her heart began to race, but her body wouldn't move, and for a moment, Rose was terrified to fall asleep.

Chapter Text

Breakfast was at Rose's bedside table when she woke. It was a porridge of some spiced grain with apples and milk, and the whitish juice of an unknown fruit, served in a bowl and chalice carved from cloudy crystal. It was decadent beyond anything she'd ever experienced, honeyed and rich and arranged with such artistry that Rose almost felt guilty for disturbing it.

She had broken her second rule, she reflected: never eat the food of a stranger. She'd been too hungry the night before to care, but with morning came lucidity. A stranger lived here; one must, for Rose somehow doubted that her Raven, intelligent as he was, had invented a beak-and-talon method of baking bread.

(Or else the production of food was one of the castle's many magic tricks. Rose couldn't decide whether the possibility relieved or disappointed her.)

Her boots and dress were laid out on the ottoman, freshly laundered. She dressed, and then, after exploring every fascinating nook of the room—running her hands over a lacquered clay pot, admiring a glittering collection of necklaces and hairpins—she set out to find the castle's master, so that she may thank them for their hospitality.

It didn't take long. She was barely halfway down the hall a voice came creeping into her ear:

"And how did you get here?"

Rose spun around. The voice was soft and low, like a fox's purr, like a leisurely stream echoing off the bends and turns of a deep cave. A tall, horned figure—more than a head taller than herself, and Rose was the tallest person she knew—stood but a meter from her, stolidly, in the unnaturally thick shadow of the hall.

Rose fell to her knees and bowed, hands spread before her on the floor; between the castle and the odd crown, she had no doubt of this person's august station. "Please! I'm sorry for intruding."

"Delighted as I am by the image of you bowing before me, little princess, I don't believe that answers my question."

Rose lifted her head. The stranger's face was mostly obscured, but she could see their lips twisted into—well, it was a sort of smile, but it didn't seem happy.

"I live in a cottage nearby," Rose answered. "I walked here."

"You walked, did you? Across the whole wood? In the dead of night?"

"I… yes."

"And you were not afraid?"

I was, Rose thought, I was desperately afraid, but somehow I was not as afraid as I am now.

Still, with courage, she responded: "The moon was waxing to fullness, and I have lived in the woods all my life. There is nothing to fear in them but the wet and the cold." She thought it imprudent to mention the Raven, because what if he, like her, was not allowed to interact with strangers? She also felt she ought not to reveal all her secrets in the first go.

"Really? Nothing?" Now the stranger kneeled, as if to get a better look at her face, and Rose gulped; their yellow eyes shone out and cut across the undulating darkness. "Not poisonous brambles? Packs of wolves?" Their voice grew darker. They were nearly laughing. "Wicked fey?"

"I can recognize every poison that grows in these woods." Rose gulped. "And I do not fear the wolves."

"Are you mad, child? Or simply slow?"

Rose's pride burned. The stranger stood again, slowly. Rose stood with them. Then she realized just then that this king-or-queen was her very first person—and here she was, boasting of walking on foot to strange castles in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. What an impression she must be making!

"Does this all sound very strange?" Rose asked.

"Strange is not bad," the stranger said. "You may find the worst human follies are in fact quite ordinary."

With a flick of their wrists the green lanterns lit one by one down the hall, and then they stepped forward, out of the thick shadow. Rose gasped. The person—a man? For they were quite tall, but then Rose had the impression that men did not wear such elegant gowns—was sharp-faced and green-skinned, and very pale, as though they were dead. Their lips were full and red as the spidery flowers in the bracken, as red as Rose's own—a woman, then? Books always emphasized how red women's lips are—and her eyes were a little sunken and smeared with lavender pigment. She was equal parts odd and captivating, and Briar Rose could not tear her eyes away.

As Rose watched the queen, the queen watched her back. Rose had a difficult time parsing her expression; this was a novel experience, since Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather wore their hearts on their sleeves.

The queen asked, "What is your name?"

Rose hesitated. Then she clenched her skirt in her hands, and bowed her head in shame.

"I can't tell you," she said. "I'm not allowed."

"Not allowed to share your name? Why,"—the queen's voice was low and full of shock—"who could possibly hold such authority over you as to keep you from sharing your own name? It's as much a part of you as your own body."

It was the last of her aunts' most important rules: never tell a stranger your name. Names held power, they said, and by sharing your name you made yourself vulnerable to… well, they hadn't elaborated, but something nasty, Rose was sure.

…Yet she felt guilty withholding her name from someone who treated her with such hospitality. Rose was forbidden from sharing her name with strangers, yes, but this peculiar woman had kept her warm on a night where she may very well have frozen to death. Surely that counted as a gesture of friendship?

"I shall tell you my name if you first tell me yours," Rose said. This was her clever work-around. If names held power, Rose would hold this power, too. They'd be equals, then, and Rose would have nothing to fear.

The woman tilted her chin upward, as though appraising the terms of Rose's deal. Finally, she said, "Very well. I am Maleficent."

How odd; the name was almost familiar. And its meaning was… alarming, but, but—what did Rose know? Maleficent had thus far been nothing but kind. "Well, then," Rose responded, "I am Briar Rose."

For a flash, Maleficent seemed… surprised. Rose felt suddenly self-conscious of the plainness of her name. Maleficent, even with its strange meaning, was so elegant and so Latin, perfectly befitting a queen. In her presence Rose felt every centimeter a peasant. But perhaps it wasn't that Maleficent was disappointed; perhaps Maleficent, too, found Briar Rose's name unexpectedly familiar.

Before Rose could inquire further, Maleficent waved her hand. "A pleasure to meet you, Briar Rose. You must forgive me if I have more important duties to attend to than entertaining a little girl. You'd best be on your way home."

Without another word, she turned, as if to make her way back down the hall.

"Wait!" Rose called out.

Maleficent paused.

"Will I be able to visit you again?"

Maleficent was still. As still as one of her statues—Briar Rose feared suddenly that she'd made a terrible faux pas.

"Perhaps," Maleficent finally said. "Perhaps not." Rose blinked and Maleficent disappeared, a puff of fairy fire lighting green and then dimming on the stone of the empty hall.

* * *

Rose wondered if it might have been prudent to ask Maleficent for help getting home. Though the Raven was kind enough to accompany her, and she was more confident, now, that she could survive the journey, the prospect of traveling for four more days in the dark wood still filled her with dread.

Still, her full belly put her in high enough spirits to sing as she walked. She had barely noticed time pass when the bracken jungle broke into short turf and powdery heath-violet, the artificial twilight into real day, and the silence into cricket chirps and the passing songs of passerines.

The sudden reintroduction of noise overwhelmed her. She did not fall to her knees and clutch her ears, as they do in stories—but it was a near thing, and she found herself wrapping her cloak around her head like a bonnet to keep away the excess sound.

Had she traveled back for four days and then forgotten? She looked up at the sun, and saw that it had moved across the sky only about an hour's worth.

The Raven took her as far as the river and departed without so much as a squawk of goodbye. Dazed, she followed the water to the cottage. There it was, just as she'd left it, or almost so: leaves had piled up in the mill's flume and jammed the poor thing, and the vegetable garden was looking a little over-foliated, but there were the familiar stacks of heartsease blooming against the walls, and the old yellow curtains she'd sewn when she was eight or nine fluttering out the open window. Rose was half-convinced she was dreaming; she didn't slap herself, for she was a little afraid of waking up.

She called out to her aunts as she entered, but all she heard was her own echoes. Their travel cloaks were hung up by the fireplace and there was a great mess, as if they had turned every corner of the cottage inside-out searching for something.

A lump sat heavy in her throat.

Directionless, she tidied. She mopped the flour that was still dirtying the floor from several days ago. She had half the living room put away when she heard a procession of weeping approach the door.

Rose walked quietly to the window to peek at them. All three of her aunts wore despondent expressions; Fauna and Merryweather leaned on Flora's heaving shoulders, struggling to press on.

"—can't believe—can't believe how foolish—" Fauna sobbed. "To fall for such an obvious trick—!"

"We had one job. One, simple job—"

"Oh, Rosie!" Merryweather cried. She pulled a stick out from her sleeve, and waved it in the air. From its end burst blue sparkles, and suddenly there materialized a handkerchief. She took it and blew her nose with it, and then used the corners to dab each eye.

Rose stumbled back into the wall with a painful thump.

Had she seen that correctly? She was delirious, certainly; her mind was playing tricks on her. She pinched herself now, but the skin was left red and angry, and she did not wake.

The door slammed open. All at once the weeping ceased.

Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather stared at Rose as if she were a ghost. Rose took a hesitant step toward them, and something inside of her then broke; next she was sobbing so hard her little throat burned, and both parties were rushing to each other, kissing and hugging and loud and wet.

After they'd gotten enough of their hysteria out of their systems, Flora pulled Rose gently onto the sofa and laid her head down in her lap. All three of her aunts pet her hair as she explained to them what happened.

(Well, a version of what happened. Rose realized almost instantly that she couldn't tell the truth. It was bad enough that she'd crossed the river and gone into the dark forest. How angry would they be if they learned that Rose had spoken to a stranger? And given out her name? And eaten said stranger's food? It was better for her aunts' peace of mind, she told herself, if they didn't know the extent of her wrongdoing.)

"...and that's when I stumbled upon an abandoned cabin," Rose said, doing her best to invent a story that they might find believable. Her aunts were pale and wide-eyed. "I washed my clothes and used the fire to cook up some of the food I'd found in the wood, and then when the rain stopped I climbed a tree to look at the stars and navigate my way home."

Flora let out a relieved breath. She looked at Rose intently. "And that's all, Rose?"

"Yes, Flora. That's all. I'm so sorry—I'm so sorry I broke the rules, and I'm so sorry I worried you all and I'm so sorry I almost got hurt. I'll never, ever disobey you ever again."

"There, there," Flora said, and pulled her tight. She was putting on a brave front. Rose could feel her heart pounding.

They didn't let Rose out of their sight all day. She was grateful for the attention, since she'd missed them perilously, yet their scrutiny made her anxious. She had forgotten how to be around other people and was embarrassed by the vulgar habits she developed in the forest. The chatter, too, overwhelmed her; the dark had been so quiet, and beside the one conversation with Maleficent, she had grown used to hearing nothing but her own heartbeat and the wind in the trees.

The lie haunted Rose all night. She found, with horror, that she had a small talent for it. She already believed she possessed some skill as a storyteller, and she had long learned the virtue of being diplomatic—that is, saying only true things, but picking and choosing which true things to say, so as to keep the peace in a house full of bickering sisters. She liked these things—they were some of the few social skills her small world gave her any need for mastering. She was afraid she liked them too much.

But then, remembering the wand and the handkerchief, Rose thought that perhaps she was not the only liar in the family.

What did her aunts know of magic?

What did they know about the dark forest? What did they know about the castle on the mountain and its inhabitant?

She had a sense that bringing any of it up again would disturb the delicate peace that, over the following few days, had finally descended over the house. Their collective way of coping with Briar Rose's incident, as she began referring to it in her head, was to pretend it had never occurred. So Rose thought, at least, until she tried to go outside.

"I'm going out for a short walk in the glade, Flora," Rose said. "It's so stuffy indoors today; a romp in the cold will do me good."

"Heavens, no," Flora said, not even bothering to look up from her book. "You're not to go outside ever again."

In the kitchen, there was a weighty thump. Merryweather had knocked a sack of something off the shelf and was now tittering over it.

Rose paused while grabbing her cloak. Her arm was frozen bent and high, like one of the statues in Maleficent's castle. "Ever… again?"

"Not after—well. It's for your own good, Rosie."

"You can't!" Rose cried, suddenly turning. "I said I'd never do it again. I said I'd be good!"

"Oh, come now, sweetness," Flora cooed, abandoning her reading to stand and embrace her. "It has nothing to do with whether or not you're good. You're very, very good. It's just to keep you safe."

"From what?" Rose sniffed. "I've lived in these woods all my life. It's just—I took a wrong turn, it can't happen again if I don't go beyond the glade, why can't I—?"

Flora and Merryweather shared a meaningful look. It was something the sisters did often, and Rose had never felt particularly left out by it—older women were supposed to have their private wisdom, after all—but now it made her feel hopelessly deserted.

As if it were any defense, Merryweather said, "I say, ever is a bit extreme. She ought to be alright to go out once she's sixteen."

"Sixteen? That's two and a half years! You intend to keep me prisoner for an entire lifetime!"

"That's hardly a lifetime," Flora scoffed. Then, seeing Rose's panicked expression, she softened. "Alright, alright—you're to keep indoors through the winter, and I won't budge on that, but when the weather warms and the days start lengthening again we can reopen the discussion. For now you'll have to be content with your minor freedoms, Rose."

"What freedoms?" Rose muttered, and yanked herself out of Flora's grasp. She stalked up the stairs despite Flora and Merryweather's protests, and closed her bedroom door with a bit more force than necessary. She slunk to the floor and brooded; she felt in that moment, with the intensity that only a thirteen-year-old could muster, that she would have rather been free and dead in the forest than alive and prisoner here.

* * *

"Oh, Flora, can't we...? It just… it just seems a bit harsh…"

"For the love of—I won't hear another word about it, Fauna. You and I both know that good parenting sometimes amounts to tough love."

"It just feels like all that fright she experienced was punishment enough."

"It's not a punishment! It's a necessity. We were far too loose with her. Can you imagine if—well, can you imagine if you-know-who had—?"

"Shh! She's singing again."

There was little for Rose to do, holed up in the cabin. Every book she owned she had read a dozen times over, and though she loved to cook, there were only so many mealtimes in a day, and though she loved to sew, there was only so much fabric in the house for her to mangle and repurpose. Pure imagination had lost some of its luster; now and then she tried to shore up excitement for all her favorite internal worlds, and for moments at a time she could do it: she could become a pirate on the high seas, again, or a princess being kidnapped by a dragon. But if she sat for too long with imaginary danger, she'd start to shiver again, as though she were still lying in the mud in the dark forest, waiting for death.

She sang, then, day in and out, and as autumn plodded steadily into winter, she composed. Birds joined her songs in trickles. She was now quite fond of the story of Persinette and wrote three new tragedies about her, with herself playing the part of protagonist. Flora, who often dug in the garden below Rose's window, rolled her eyes, but it was torture for Fauna, who had been against the punishment from the very beginning.

Rose wasn't trying to antagonize them, exactly—but she was frustrated, and the only way she knew how to express her feelings was song.

One evening, she had a whole choir of owls lined in rows and was conducting from atop her bed with a wooden dowel. There was a lone nightjar in the back whose steady trill, though magnificent, was off the desired beat, and so she was making tweaks here and there to accommodate him… when all of a sudden the owls went into a frenzy, hooting and flying headfirst into objects, and Rose's song was cut through by a relentless tenor caw.

The Raven was perched serenely on a branch just some centimeters from her window, and he did not move even as the other birds rushed past him, out into the free air and far, far into the line of trees. Her first thought was frantic: why was he here?

A lump, then, caught in her throat, and her eyes felt heavy with the threat of tears. So he was here; why had it taken him so long?

She held her breath and fox-walked to the window—which was pointless, as even thundering footfalls could be no more suspicious to her aunts than the wild hooting which had only just died down.

She reached out her hand and scratched the Raven atop his head with the pads of her fingers. That's when she saw the shiny, black pouch tied to his body, almost the perfect color of his feathers.

Rose's stomach flipped. Something from Maleficent? Fingers trembling, she undid the knot, and the pouch fell open. She was disappointed to find no note; instead there came tumbling berries of all sizes and colors, some of varieties that Rose could not recognize: several small, round, and golden, hidden away in leafy husks; others red and ridged, with a thick stem.

The Raven pecked at the pile of berries insistently.

Rose closed her eyes and exhaled, bracing herself against the windowsill.

A gift—for her? Oh, but they were food, and she oughtn't to… but she'd already eaten Maleficent's food once, and she wasn't a stranger anymore, was she? It'd be remiss of Rose to refuse a gift. Her very first from a friend.

That was how that worked, wasn't it? The gesture went well beyond simple hospitality, surely.

Rose's heart beat loudly in her ears. Maleficent, a queen, a being of magic—her very first friend.

She popped each berry into her mouth, one-by-one, and savored their sweetness. She'd never tasted anything like them before.

* * *

Winter froze and darkened the land around her and struggled defiantly against the inevitability of spring. Her fourteenth birthday passed in front of the fireplace, curled inside a wool blanket, and Flora informed her that she wasn't allowed to step a foot outdoors until half of April had gone by.

Thus Rose passed her time, the same as she had before except that now the Raven occasionally visited, always after sunset and never when her aunts were up in the bedroom, usually bearing gifts: foreign nuts; foreign fruits, fresh and dried; foreign herbs for tea. No notes, oddly—Rose didn't dare write one of her own, since she didn't know how this friendship business worked, and she didn't want to come across as, well… Maleficent said it was okay for Rose to be strange, but Rose still felt it was best to follow Maleficent's lead. A part of Rose felt sinful, both for keeping secrets and for accepting so much from a person she barely knew, but as the weeks stretched on and the meetings continued without consequence, Rose started to delight in the tastes of the world outside. Eventually she began sending back cuttings of wildflowers, bits of bread and cake, and fruits and vegetables from her own garden, spirited quietly from the dinner table and sliced up small enough to be carried by a bird.

The Raven's greatest gift to her, though, was that he was a thoughtful listener. She had never met so intelligent an animal, and she wondered if it were a quality of all creatures native to the dark forest (though the Raven had been the only creature she'd seen), or if he was something special.

Together they developed a system for quick communication, better than judgmental squawks or frantic pecking or interpretative flight patterns. One peck meant no, two meant yes, and three meant "I don't know." A head bob plus a number of pecks was his way of communicating numerals, and with a little more elaboration they were also able to come up with basic shorthands for colors, directions, and a set of useful phrases ("I hear one of your aunts coming up the stairs," for example). Rose also developed a system for spelling, but the Raven proved illiterate in German, French, and even Latin, and moreover uninterested in the idea of the written word, so the project was quickly abandoned. They spent the following months discussing just about every topic Rose could conceive of—though she was still the primary conversational driver.

"What's the most interesting thing you've seen, Raven?" Three pecks, so she continued: "Oh, I don't suppose you can easily—well, how about I tell you things I've read about, and you can tell me whether or not you've seen them?"

And: "I don't see how something can be a sin if someone was intending to do good, though, even if their actions resulted in sinful things… but then, what if the results are very, very sinful? Murder, for example—oh, don't hate me to speak of it, I know my aunts can't stand the subject, but you won't judge me for it, will you?—that seems like it must always be evil, even if the intentions are good. But what if one finds herself in a situation where the only way to stop a worse evil is to commit a lesser evil? There must be such thing as worse and lesser evils, since murder can never be good and other things, like lying, well, they seem like sometimes they might be… And more to the point, can one say she really is intending to be good if she knows she's committing an evil act? I just can't seem to wrap my head around..."

And: "Have you ever seen a boy? I keep dreaming of princes, since they feature so heavily in my storybooks, and I, well—I have a hard time imagining, ah, the difference—" She cut herself off, embarrassed. "Anyway, all I can really tell is that they're supposed to be… taller."

The Raven pecked once. He was mocking her.

"I know how it works for animals," she whispered, crossing her arms. "But there's still variation, you know, it's one thing for wolves and another for snakes and another for birds and I just, I just want to know how it works for people."

The weather warmed. Mid-April came, and Rose was allowed outdoors, as promised. Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather still didn't let her very far out of sight. She devised some experiments to see who would be the most permissive, with uninspiring results: Flora, predictably, demanded that Rose be kept close at hand at all times, and lectured her if she tried to stray further than even ten meters; Fauna was quite a bit more understanding of a girl's need for privacy, but she was worrisome, and often dogged at Rose's feet just to relieve her own anxiety; Merryweather had a rebellious spirit and let her stray the furthest just to spite Flora, but also the quickest temper when she felt she was being taken advantage of, and Rose soon lost hope of ever getting to explore on her own again.

One afternoon Fauna called to her: "Rosie! We're running low on tinder; I don't suppose you'd like to help me find some?"

Rose darted up the stairs and threw on something fit for venturing, since she'd still been lazing about in her nightgown. She searched for her knife, because she knew that they'd likely need to chop up some of the bigger branches, and then remembered that it was still in the pocket of the dress she'd worn when she was lost in the woods.

She found it at the bottom of her clotheschest, where she'd hidden it out of sight. She dug around each pocket to search for the handle. She touched something metallic and cold, and pulled it out—and was surprised to find not a knife, but a necklace.

It was heavy, for its small size. It was a copper chain with an ovaline mineral mounted on a copper pendant. It was the color of new leafbuds streaked with veins of foam and pine, swirling like a rush of whitewater… she stroked its polished surface with wonder.

Later, at bedtime, she clasped the necklace around her neck and twirled. She didn't have a mirror in her room, for mirrors encouraged vanity, but for the first time in many months her imagination sparked alive and provided her with vivid imagery: she was a beautiful young princess in a green velvet dress and a copper tiara, extending a dainty hand to some visitors from a far-off culture. The visitors fell to their knees and kissed her palm, and she beckoned them backward, into the castle, deeper into the green-lit halls—

Her fantasy stumbled.

The castle, yes. She must have inadvertently taken this necklace from the castle; perhaps she bumped a table and it fell inside her pocket without her noticing.

She put the necklace back where she found it and went about the day with jitters.

When the Raven returned that night with his usual presents, she ignored them. Instead she dug out the necklace and tried to tie it up in his black satchel, to return it, but he pecked at her hand so violently that she had to tear it away.

"Please, Raven," she said, voice somber. "I am no thief. You must return this for me with a note of apology."

He pecked the windowsill once. Rose waited for the second… but none came.

"What do you mean, 'no'?" she cried. "Are you suggesting I keep it?"

Two pecks. She sighed.

"Raven, I appreciate your lack of interest in the nuances of human cultures, but you must understand: my aunts and I are well-to-do peasants, for certain, but we are peasants just the same. Having even one possession this fine is inherently suspect. And what need do I have for jewelry, outside of my fantasies? What would I wear it with—where would I wear it to? That's not even getting into the morality of stealing! I must return it."

The Raven considered her for a while. Then he swooped backward and looped mid-air. He landed on a branch and tilted his head. The gloss of his feathers was all that was visible in the moonlight, like a will o' wisp, just as it had been on that fateful afternoon in autumn.

"No, no, no," Rose said, whispering hoarsely. "You're a mad bird, if you think—my aunts will chain me up when I come back! You must know that! And you're especially mad if you think I'd trudge again through that dark place. One near-death experience was enough—"

He cawed. She nearly pounded her fist against the wall in frustration, mindful only at the last second of her aunts' slumber.

Suddenly, that sickly cold returned to her, like it had been lying dormant this whole time in her bones. A phantom hunger; the sense-memory of cold mud, smushed up against her cheeks as she cried for her life. The emptiness, the quiet, the loneliness. She had a crazed impulse to light the furnace and jump in just to feel some amount of heat.

At the same time, shame simmered in the hollow of her stomach. She'd had one real adventure—and she was rejecting another? No matter the promises she'd made while wandering through the mud, she was not content to grow old and die here. She wanted to meet people. She wanted to do things. She wanted to learn.

She wrestled out of her nightgown and pulled on the dress she'd hidden away. Would it be a week's trip, really? Her return had taken no more than an hour. It'd been the work of magic, of course, but she had learned recently that there was far more magic around her than she could have ever imagined. Would the Raven take her out now if he thought their journey would be a repeat of the first? Perhaps—but cowardice was a vice, and perhaps the only way to overcome it was to into her fear dead-on and leapt straightaway into its proverbial jaws.

She tucked the green-and-copper necklace safely into her breast pocket. She'd hoarded rations of crackers up in her room when she was feeling too grumpy to come down for dinner, which proved to her advantage now. She kept them in a square of cloth and tied it to her belt. She didn't have a cloak to wear—both the thick wool cloak for cold and the thin waxed cloak for rain were hanging downstairs—so she took a short blanket and wrapped it around herself. Her boots were downstairs, as well, so she made due with her house slippers.

Thus equipped, Rose climbed out her window and headed west. She did not follow the Raven, this time. She already knew the way.

Chapter Text

Rose stood before the castle. She looked up at the vault of heaven and felt a little triumph. It seemed no more than an hour's worth of celestial movement had occurred.

There was no good way to describe the feeling that came over her as soon as she slipped through the gates, other than that it was something like falling into a stagnant lake and then painlessly drowning. Her vision was starry and unfocused and there was a pressure all over her, like she was deep underwater. Her heartbeat thickened, like honey, a pulsed wetly in her ears; and her breaths became careful and slow. The supernatural cold that had been lingering within her burrowed deep into her chest and settled there. The air was heavy with the smells of brine and pine and after-rain gloom, and Rose did not find it as unpleasant as she thought she would. In fact, she felt strangely at ease.

So: this was the feeling of magic. To think, for her entire life, that so much magic had lain so close by.

"Back so soon, Briar Rose?" Maleficent's voice echoed from the shadows as soon as Rose stepped foot through the castle doors.

Immediately, Rose went to digging in her pocket. She produced the green-and-copper necklace and held it out in front of her. "Is this yours?" she asked, to the empty.

"It was," Maleficent's disembodied voice answered.

"I believe I stole it by accident when I visited, several months ago, so I came to bring it back to you."

"My, what integrity," Maleficent said. From her lips, it did not sound like a compliment. "Keep it. It was intended for you; maidens like pretty trinkets, so I thought. If it isn't to your preference, I can easily trade it for another…"

"No!" Even Rose was surprised by the strength of her emotion. "No, it's lovely. I shall keep it forever." She took back the necklace and immediately strung it around her neck, as if to prove her devotion to it. It was heavy against her breastbone, somehow both warm from her hand and cold like ice.

"Since you are here, little princess," Maleficent offered, "why not join me for dinner?"

Maleficent stepped out of the shadows, then, close at Rose's elbow, and Rose startled. She twisted her head to look up; her heart rushed again, a mixture of fear and excitement.

A dinner invitation? With her first friend?

With a queen?

"Yes," Rose said—nevermind that she'd already eaten with her aunts at the cottage, or that it was an incredibly odd hour for dinner. "I can think of nothing that would delight me more!"

Together they made their way to Maleficent's dining room, which was nothing more than a long stone table—the same stone as the walls and the mountain—and perhaps twenty or so same-stone chairs. Rose was surprised to see that, despite the lack of diners, the table was already set out extravagantly. Maleficent took her seat at the head of the table, and Rose took one of the seats nearest to Maleficent; she was unsure if it was allowed for a peasant like her to sit so close to a queen, but then she had been invited, and there was no one else…

Self-consciously, she said, "I'm sorry that you must suffer my plain appearance, your majesty; I have the impression that this is the sort of affair that demands one's best dress, but this is all I have."

Maleficent leaned her chin on her open palm and scoffed, "Plain appearance? What I refuse to suffer from you, little princess, is such comically false humility."

She didn't quite get what Maleficent meant by "false humility," but another thing intrigued her more, so she asked: "Why do you call me that? Thrice now. 'Little princess.'"

Maleficent stared at her for a long time. "Briar Rose," she asked, "do you know who I am?"

"A queen, I thought." Rose fiddled with the napkin in front of her, suddenly feeling caught-out and foolish. "Please forgive me. I'm very poorly-educated in politics, especially regarding the monarchies. I've learned all I know from my aunts and they simply despise the subject. I didn't even know we lived on the border between two kingdoms. Wait, oh! Forgive me again; am I to call you 'your majesty' or 'Maleficent'?"

"What would you prefer to call me, between the two?"

Rose answered eagerly: "Maleficent, certainly. I'm unpracticed with titles and I like the sound of it, anyway. It's a beautiful name."

Maleficent seemed pleased by the compliment, and Rose was pleased in turn. Plating began, then, as the clock struck eleven-twenty. Rose expected servants to come out from the halls (and perhaps join them for the meal? Was that why the table was so long?), and so she was surprised when there was a great popping sound, and crystal dishes began appearing, one-by-one, on the table, filled with an overwhelming variety of foods.

Rose could barely contain her excitement. She reached across the table for a large serving spoon, and then paused, sheepishly, hoping she hadn't just committed an error in politeness.

Maleficent watched her, bemused. "Eat, child. That's the entire point of dinner, is it not?"

Rose planned her plate meticulously. She wanted a bite of every single dish on offer and she needed to make sure she didn't get so full on one thing that it prevented her from enjoying another. She didn't want anything to run into each other, because that might introduce impurities to the intended flavor; she found a way to keep slices of her plate separated with long, thin crackers. The result was efficient but looked like a poorly-fashioned quilt.

Maleficent didn't serve herself until Rose finished. She, too, arranged her plate meticulously, and though her design was quite a bit more elegant than Rose's, Rose was quietly relieved that this was a quality they shared.

"Am I holding my spoon right?" Rose asked, because she thought she may as well nip that in the bud before she spent a whole dinner embarrassing herself.

"For the mores of your culture and station, you are not, but it is of no import."

"Where did the Raven get off to?"

"He's roosting."

"Will any others be joining us?"

"If there were any others, they would have joined us by now."

"Do you do this often? Invite girls up for dinner in the middle of the night?"

"Girls do not often come stumbling onto my doorstep, half-starved and covered in mud," Maleficent said. "Do you assault all your dinner hosts with series of frivolous questions?"

"Oh, I have a hundred questions for you, if you don't mind. Do you mind? Oops—I suppose that makes it a hundred and one."

"Under different life circumstances, you might have had prospects as an inquisitor," Maleficent said, but there was no venom to it.

She was teasing.

With delight, Rose thought: I'm getting teased.

"You're my first ever person, you know," Rose explained. "Beside my aunts, I mean. I live with three old women in a cottage, and I love them, but I've never met another, despite always wanting to…"

"They keep you there?" Maleficent was very curious now; she set down her spoon and leaned closer. Rose was flattered that a queen could be so interested in her life. Perhaps she wasn't as boring as she feared.

So they ate, and between bites Rose launched into her pithiest explanation of her day-to-day doings, which wasn't very pithy at all, because Rose liked to talk and her aunts had never discouraged her habit of going on long, rambling departures. "Like a prisoner!" she finished; she was waving her spoon around with dramatic flourish. Then she felt guilty. "Well, no, that's not quite fair. I live comfortably, with many privileges. They're only trying to protect me."

"Protect you from what, exactly?"

"The world, I suppose."

"It strikes me as cruel, that they should prevent you from living your little life while you still have it."

"What do you mean?"

"Well," Maleficent said slowly, giving the impression that each of her subsequent words was carefully chosen, "keeping you indoors is no guarantee of your safety. You could slip and crack your head open on the fireplace. You could cut yourself while cooking and fall victim to an infection. You could simply… fall asleep, and then never wake up."

Rose hadn't thought about it that way. A new anxiety blossomed inside of her.

"They're really not cruel," Rose insisted. "They're just very protective, and very old, as I said. It probably seems like no time at all to them, keeping a girl isolated for sixteen years."

"I am cruel, and therefore equipped to recognize cruelty in others," Maleficent rebuffed. "What do you mean, sixteen years?"

"They say I can go somewhere once I've turned sixteen."

"Somewhere? Where is somewhere?"

"I don't know. Anywhere at all."

Maleficent laughed. It was a deep, oaky sound, completely unlike Rose's aunts, who laughed like how little bells sang. She laughed so hard and long that she had to lean against the table for support.

She took a breath, looked intensely at Rose, and extended her hand. "Briar Rose," she offered, "how would you like to go somewhere now?"

* * *

The ocean was so much larger than Rose could have ever dreamed. The stories always described it as blue, but she couldn't see a hint of blue in those tumultuous, green-black waters. The full moon was bright on the half-translucent crests that roared toward her, and each time Rose was terrified that the water was going to swallow her whole; Maleficent kept her steady, though, with one hand on each of Rose's shoulders, and forced her to see each wave fold over and break itself, its prickly foam washing harmlessly over Rose's cold-reddened toes.

"It goes on forever, doesn't it?"

"It does not," Maleficent said, testily, which means Rose's assertion must have been rather foolish. "But it's all connected, so you could embark from here and circle around and around and never reach the edge of anything, if you were so inclined."

"Then it's magic," Rose confirmed, her eyes growing increasingly starry.

"It's the world. Magic is when you take the world and change it. Look there, Briar Rose."

Maleficent gestured with her staff. All of a sudden a great wave that had been rumbling toward them froze at its highest peak. Rose could make out vague shapes of seaweed floating in its dark body. Then, just as easily, Maleficent gestured again, and the wave came down. The water swirled around chaotically before the rhythm of the ocean reasserted itself.

After her demonstration, Maleficent asked, "Where to next, little princess?"

"Oh, must we go already?"

"What more is there to see?"

"Everything. We've barely begun! And I'd like to start using my hundred questions, now, if you don't mind. Why don't the waves come out and flood everything? Why is the sand smaller near the water and coarser further away? Why does the ocean smell so different from the river? Why can fish breathe underwater and humans cannot?"

"The shallows create a friction which forces the wave to collapse over itself," Maleficent answered. "The grains near the water are smaller because the water weathers them away. What you're smelling is a combination of salt, algae, fish, and blooms of floating plantlife, too small for the eye to see. The fish can breathe underwater because their bodies have a structure for it—you fish for food, do you not, Briar Rose? I'm referring to the slits on the sides of their necks."

"I would never," Rose breathed, hurt by Maleficent's careless accusation. "Why would I ever kill another living creature and then eat it? What a sickening thought!"

Maleficent seemed bewildered. "Surely you're familiar with the cycles of life? Rabbits eating grasses, foxes hunting rabbits…"

"A fox can't help it. You can't begrudge a creature for its nature."

They fell into a silence. The incoming waves were mesmerizing; Maleficent could have left Rose there for hours and Rose wouldn't have noticed. At last, though, even this miracle of nature began to lose its novelty, and she turned back to Maleficent, who had not moved even a centimeter from her rigid position.

"I know where I'd like to go next, if that's still alright," Rose said. "I want to see a bustling city alleyway. I've only ever heard descriptions of them, but they sound like the height of adventure. One with tons and tons and tons of people."

"People," Maleficent sneered. "Why would you ever want to go near people?"

Rose was flummoxed. Why wouldn't she want to go near people? She was a person. All her stories were about people. Every one of her fantasies involved meeting people. It was only her greatest dream.

"I'm a person," she pointed out, hoping to bring Maleficent around to the contradiction in her opinion.

"And for that fault, you are pardoned. Beside, you are only half-formed. There is time still to mold you into something not quite so infuriating."

"But you're a person, as well!"

"I'm a fairy," Maleficent corrected. "Unless you are asking me to take you to an alleyway bustling with fairies…"

"Oh, can you?" Rose started, but Maleficent halted her with a withering stare.

"Five minutes in Sidhe and you'll have sold your freedom away for a bite of a particularly ripe plum."

"I'm not that naïve."

The look on Maleficent's face clearly disagreed.

"Well… you don't have to like people, and I won't ask you to bring me to any if you despise them so, but I like them, and I will meet some, one day, even if I have to find a way myself."

"How can you possibly know if you like them," Maleficent pointed out, growing less patient by the second, "if you have never met a single one?"

"I—" Rose started to rebuff, but the truth was she didn't really know. She believed; she wanted; but neither of those things were knowing. It just seemed impossible to her that people could write so many stories of kind, heroic figures and not be kind and heroic themselves. All her examples of people were exactly that, anyway. Her aunts, for all their shortcomings, were fundamentally good. But then Rose thought back to Merryweather and her wand and her handkerchief, and wondered if her aunts were human after all.

"I have met many humans," Maleficent continued. "Many more than your mortal mind can comprehend; many, many more than will ever be allotted you, in your miniscule lifetime. I can tell you exactly what humans are like—would you like to know what I have seen humans do to doe-hearted, golden-faced little girls, exactly like yourself?"

Maleficent leaned down and whispered in her ear. Later, example after sickening example after vivid, depraved, gruesome example, Rose wished that she had never raised the subject at all.

"Why?" Rose whispered. By the end of it, she was trembling.

"It is the world. This is the place you are so desperate to throw yourself into."

"So my aunts were right," Rose said. She felt hollow. Images of the acts that Maleficent described spun over and over in her mind, like a whirlpool of sick.

"Of course not. It doesn't matter if the sky is nothing but storms and sparrowhawks; cage a lark, and its dying cry will be for freedom. No, what you need is… a guide."

Rose looked up. Maleficent's umbra towered over her. It stretched out and above the shape of her tall, wiry body; magic emanated from her at cold, sharp angles, encasing the two of them in a bubble separate from the surrounding darkness of night. Maleficent's darkness was different than that darkness: it was solid; it breathed; it wrapped around Briar Rose not to suffocate her, but to act as a barrier against the battering waves of horrible world beyond.

What incredible luck Rose had, to have met Maleficent before all others.

"There are creatures far more interesting to talk to than humans," Maleficent eased her, placing her needly fingers on Rose's shoulder. "How would you like to meet a dragon?"

Rose laced her fingers in Maleficent's and nodded. Green flame whirled around and consumed them. The sound of the ocean was left behind.

Chapter Text

Here's what Rose's stories taught her about dragons: they were big, lizardly, greedy, and gluttonous, apt to swallow up towers whole and steal maidens away as either servants, meals, or treasures. Dashing princes with enchanted swords were often called upon to dispel them, and it was critical that the swords specifically be enchanted, because dragon scales were as hard as diamonds and a normal sword would melt under the heat of their fiery breath, beside. Of all the creatures of the world they were particularly wicked; the Devil himself was a dragon, or so it was claimed in the Revelation.

Some of these things appeared to be true. They were indeed big, and they bore a striking resemblance to lizards. Of the rest, Rose had yet to see sufficient evidence.

They left the beach, and the coastal sand abruptly became stone beneath Rose's feet. The smells of damp, sulfur, and rust wafted around her, but that was the extent of her senses. There was nothing to see.

Maleficent gave her a polite shove on the back. When Rose stumbled blindly into a rocky wall, Maleficent sighed, and cupped one of Rose's hands with two of her own. A heavy brass handle materialized between her fingers; dangling from it was a faint green lantern.

The system of caverns—with wide halls, every turn leading to two or three more branching paths—made the cave that Rose had sheltered in so many months ago seem a pathetic scrape. The din of waterfalls echoed at every juncture; deep streams wove across the ground like living, rooting, trendriling things.

Rose walked for some minutes, not quite sure where Maleficent had in mind to lead her but too distracted by the sights and smells—and too shaken, still, from their previous conversation—to pay attention. Then she heard a low growl, echoing down the corridor like through a long, winding tube.

She froze.

Maleficent tugged her along by the collar.

Rose listened as she walked; low growls came from somewhere deeper in the cave, and as she approached its source she could make out that there were two creatures growling, not one. The sounds were guttural, with the occasional low scratching, like nails dragging over rough iron. Behind her Maleficent kneeled and cupped her hands over Rose's ears. Rose felt tingles of shock shoot up and down her spine; her head became light and loose. The growls then came into sharp focus, and she could understand them:

"—and that's when I had to fish more than a dozen spearheads from my wings—"

"Blast them all! For a single rotten scale? You should have cooked every last one of them down to cinders, old laws be damned."

Rose gasped. The sound echoed down the corridor and the growling voices went quiet. Maleficent pushed her along again, and after several more twists and turns they came upon a large, drafty room. Scales flashed off Rose's lantern; she was so startled by their proximity and size that she dropped the lantern uselessly to the floor.

She couldn't see hardly anything except the dragon's massive, ivory claws, scraping against the stone as it approached her. Rose gulped as its steamy breath washed over her face and she caught a gleam of its ghost-white teeth.

"What is it now, Maleficent? A sacrifice straight from the cradle?"

Somewhere in the dark, the other spit its words out in gruff, mollassesy baritone: "Younger than the last. Younger every time. Where do you pluck them from? The cabbage patch?"

"I'll tell you, but I doubt you'll believe it," Maleficent said, low, conspiratorial, in harsh sounds quite impossible for her delicate, humanesque throat. Whatever language she was speaking, it must be meant for dragons. "This one came to me."

"How old are you, a lenaib?" the first dragon said, changing to a tongue that was still unfamiliar to Rose, but decidedly in the realm of human.

Disinclined to answer but unsure what other option she had, Rose stammered, "Fourt—fourteen."

The second hissed in the dark: "What strange movements her lips make! A foreign delicacy on offer!"

Rose's heart beat quickly, but her mind had barely enough time to catch up with what was happening—a sacrifice? An offer? A delicacy?—before the tension melted into a series of wings scraping together in the dark. Through Maleficent's enchantment Rose could understand that this was their form of laughter.

"Listen to her breathing. She's terrified!" the one behind said.

"Here, child: touch my snout." Now the first dragon's voice went soft. Rose assented; to her shaky palm its scales were pleasantly warm, like rocks left near a fire. At the contact it huffed out a hot, satisfied breath. "It's been too long since we've seen a friendly human; we couldn't pass up the opportunity to tease you."

"Take the girl," Maleficent said. "Show her to the surface."

Before Rose could get another word in, the near dragon scooped her atop its head with one aggressive motion and went running, high-speed, down the cavern. Rose swung to the side and nearly clipped her leg against the rock wall; she finally found a grip on its horns and clung for dear life when they broke into the soft-filtering light and the dragon jumped into the air.

They did not glide high—perhaps the height of dark forest's treetops, or perhaps a dozen meters higher—but it gave Rose a view of everything that mattered, and the new perspective was so dizzying that she nearly lost her grip. Moonlight suffused over an auburn moorland. Head-sized rocks pocked creeks that cut every which way through hearty soil; the gold-green grass was brocaded with patches of terse, purple heath. Other dragons, smaller than the one she was riding, wormed all across the ground, wrestling, gnawing at each other, playing; their scales glinted molten, brown-sugar tones of a whole rainbow of colors, from blue to magenta to silty granite-gray.

After a short circle around the moor, it landed with a jostle and shook Rose gently off. She rolled onto the grass and waited until the world stopped spinning before she sat up again. Through labored breaths, she said, "That's—we were flying. I was flying."

"Humans do delight in the simplest things."

Here Maleficent emerged characteristically from the shadows with a soundless step. In the dragon's tongue, she said, "And thus you might sympathize with my interest in them."

Now that they were in the light, the dragon seemed to be assessing Rose; she squirmed under the intensity of its gaze, and couldn't help her eyes wandering down again, once or twice, to its massive teeth. It curled half her hair around its smallest talon and realization dawned over its serpentine face. "A-ha! You clever witch. This must be—"

"And you will speak no more of it," Maleficent hissed, gripping the end of her staff. "What are you waiting for, in any case, Cathassach? She's dying to see your hoard."

Rose felt grounded enough that her curiosity returned to her. Standing, she asked, "It's true that dragons have hoards, then?"

"Why not follow him and see for yourself?"

Rose did her best to follow Cathassach as he bound in big leaps across the moundy earth. The other dragons turned their heads occasionally to take a look at the ruckus, but mostly they seemed uninterested in Rose. Once they were over a hill Rose could see a creek about twice the length of her body. Cathassach curled his tail around a place on the bank and Rose leaned over to look at what he was protecting there. She saw mud, and reeds, and all colors and compositions of smooth river stones.

"You'd be hard-pressed to find a collection quite as select as mine," Cathassach bragged, and Rose was puzzled, for she could not see any treasure. Perhaps it was that she lacked fairy sight and was blind to whatever he was presenting her.

"What is it that you collect?"

"What do I collect? What do I collect? I expected better wits from a ward of Maleficent's! I collect stones, girl. Perfectly smooth stones. You won't find a scratch or groove on them."

"Oh, well," Rose said, not quite expecting that answer, but ready to roll with the tide of new experiences, "they're lovely, and you're right. I never have seen a hoard quite as select as yours."

Dragons do not preen, but if they could, Cathassach would have done so in that moment. For some time he presented each individual stone in his hoard and explained to Rose its virtues and where and how it came into his possession. As he spoke Rose grew more and more sleepy, since her bedtime had passed hours ago and the exhilaration of the outing had finally started to wear away.

"You're different than I expected," Rose said at last.

Cathassach tilted his head in a way that much reminded her of the Raven. "Does my reputation extend all the way to your kingdom?"

"I mean about dragons in general," Rose said, and then gave a summary report on what humans said about dragons, at least as far as she knew. By the end of it she was nodding off; she was laying comfily on the grass when Maleficent came and collected her up in her arms.

"It's been… a pleasure to meet you… my new friend, Cathassach," Rose murmured, eyes only half-open, but she wasn't sure if he heard it, since by the second syllable green fire was already coming up around her.

* * *

Obviously Maleficent was a wicked fairy. Rose knew her Latin; she wasn't completely stupid. It was evident the moment she learned Maleficent's name.

But obviously the world was not so easily divided into good and wicked; at least, the boundaries Rose had once drawn in her head were clearly not accurate. Maleficent was a wicked fairy… yet she had saved Rose from cold and starvation when she hadn't any reason to, and had taken Rose out to see the world simply because Rose desired it. Ravens were animals of ill omen, and yet she counted the Raven among her dearest companions. Dragons were said to be near to the Devil himself, and yet Rose could not imagine a creature sweeter than old Cathassach, who coveted little beside a smooth stone and a romp through the moors, and who had, after several long visits, apportioned some of his precious space along the creekbank for Rose to start a rock collection of her own. Humans, who Rose once considered good, were apparently capable of evils so atrocious that just their descriptions left Rose with vivid nightmares.

As certain Rose felt of all this, she felt equally certain that her aunts wouldn't understand. It wasn't their fault. They were old, and thus shaped by experiences Rose could probably not imagine. More to the point, they were set in their ways. Rose didn't think she could convince them that a wicked fairy might not really be wicked; no matter how she might try to explain Maleficent's generosity, they would surely forbid Rose from seeing her again. Why take the risk?

And she liked it, too: having a secret. Not that she disliked sharing her life with them—it was just that she shared all her life with them, and it was nice, just for once, to have something to herself.

She went about her chores whistling. She wrote new songs in her head and had to remind herself later to commit them to paper: one was about Cathassach's rocks, to help her memorize each one in his collection; another was an ode to the ocean; another to sing with the Raven the next time he came to her window; and another for Maleficent, though she felt compelled to polish that one up before she presented it. When Flora let her out in the garden her mind returned to her old fantasy about the three old widows and the mysterious stranger and the magical mushroom. It'd been many, many months since she last revisited that fantasy; now Maleficent took the place of the mysterious stranger, calling Rose wild and daring and beautiful in her mind and sending her on dangerous, exhilarating quests.

Hours later, Flora called her in from the door, and Rose looked back at her with a grin so wide that it hurt her cheeks.

* * *

"Don't you think we're jumping to conclusions?"

"Trust me, Merryweather, when you've lived as long as I have, you don't question your intuitions. I know what it means when a girl's got that look on her face."

"Oh, but she is just a girl. And she hasn't—what would it hurt, letting her have it just for a little while?"

"Her modesty, for a start!"

"Flora, Rose would never!"

"How would she know not to? We never taught her—we never thought we'd have reason—"

"This is all beside the point! What about the curse?"

"Oh, you're right, you're right—"

"Someone ought to talk to her."

"You go, Fauna. You're sensitive. You'll know what to say."

Rose was paying no mind to her aunts' chattering. She was focused on the very important task of constructing a string-and-acorn necklace on the floor of her bedroom—which could not compare, of course, to the necklace that Maleficent had gifted her, but she figured it was the gesture that counted, and she wanted, for once, to be able to give a gift instead of receive one.

There was a soft rap at her door. Fauna entered without waiting for a response, the long leafy green of her gown swooshing over the wooden floorboards.

"What have you got there?" she asked, leaning down to look at Rose's work.

"Jewelry," Rose replied, giddy and breezy.

"Would you like to go for a stroll with me, dear? It's a beautiful day."

They went out to the cliffside that overlooked the city and picnicked in a tree with low, swooping branches. They spent their time throwing bread to squirrels and whistling along with robins, and Rose was sleepily content.

"You seem happier lately," Fauna began.

"Well, I'm allowed outdoors much more now that it's summer, so I suppose all the time in the garden has been good for me. And now Flora lets me walk on my own sometimes, if I beg her enough, even if I'm not to go very far, so it's natural that I'm in high spirits."

"You've been having late nights, it seems."

"Oh, I've taken up jewelry-crafting," Rose explained, having already thought up an excuse. "And it's like I've entered a whole new era with my song-writing, too. And I don't much like sleeping at night, you know? The dark frightens me sometimes. My dreams are sweeter in the day."

"We built this cottage here because we knew it was much too far from the regular trails for anyone to stumble upon us by accident. But sometimes hunters and their boys do come out this way, especially when the moon is full enough to navigate by—you haven't happened to see any, have you?"

"I haven't seen another human in the forest," Rose said, which was technically the truth. "Why? Has a hunting party come by recently?"

"You would tell us, wouldn't you, Rosie? If you saw a boy in the forest and talked to him?"

Rose was puzzled by Fauna's insinuation. Fauna sighed and drew her knees to her chest. "It's okay, you know, if you wouldn't. You might not believe it, but when I was a girl I made some very silly decisions about boys."

"Like what?"

"Fall in love with one, for a start."

Rose couldn't mask her surprise. Somehow it had never occurred to Rose that her aunts were once young, and that they, like any other, were susceptible to flights of romance.

"What happened?" Rose asked. She had no uncle, so the ending couldn't be a good one.

"He died," Fauna said softly. Rose's heart broke, but Fauna pulled her into her arms and hushed her before any tears could run down her cheeks. "But he lived a happy life, and I had many years with him. It's not a sad story, Rose. I want you to have a story like that: where you find your true love and you get to live many happy years with him."

"But how can I, Fauna, if I stay here? There are no boys to make silly decisions about."

"When you're sixteen, Rose, the world will be yours," Fauna promised. It was the old refrain: when you're sixteen, we'll take you to the city. When you're sixteen, we'll tell you as much about politics as you'd like. When you're sixteen, when you're sixteen, when you're sixteen… "But you must wait for then, alright? Don't be tempted by hunters' boys, even if they are handsome or gentle. Your true love will come. But you have to wait."

More puzzled still, Rose threw the last of her bread at the squirrels and contemplated. Fauna must have noticed her midnight comings-and-goings and come to the wrong conclusion. She was lucky that Fauna was so understanding, but she'd have to be very careful from here on out.

The next time she went to Maleficent's she set out much later in the night, and committed to leaving much earlier than usual. She'd sent the Raven as word, like always, so when Rose arrived Maleficent was busying herself in plain view, in the kitchen, cooking up some elixir or other that looked far more complicated than any recipe Rose had ever prepared.

"I don't suppose we can go to the Northern Lights again, can we?" Rose asked—Maleficent had taken her to see them the week before.

"You liked them?" Maleficent asked. She was not looking at Rose; she was crushing bleached bones on the heel of her palm and making them into a powder.

"Beyond anything else you've shown me. That must be what Heaven looks like, don't you think? I mean, have you ever conceived of anything so beautiful?"

"What a delightful little irony," Maleficent purred, which made very little sense to Rose. "No; if you're here then I'm keeping you in, tonight. I have something else to show you."

Rose was disappointed, at first. Promptly Maleficent finished her elixir (with an explosive bloom of smoke and sparkle over her cauldron—"Witch's magic," she muttered distastefully, wiping calcic residue off her robes) and corralled Rose to the third floor, where she had never been taken before. With a flick of Maleficent's wrist she opened a stately double-door just beyond the floor's landing; beyond that was a room almost too big to be real, with a vaulted ceiling and shimmering emerald candles on black oak tables and more books on shelves than Rose had thought existed in the entire world.

"You, Briar Rose," Maleficent said, "are an exceedingly ignorant little girl."

Rose didn't know what to defend first: her intellect, or her age.

"Fourteen is hardly a little girl. In two years I'll be of marrying age," she settled on, because "ignorant" was a difficult charge to deny, even if it was very rude for Maleficent to point it out.

"All the worse," Maleficent said, "which is why I've made the lamentable decision to take responsibility for your education."

Books came flying into Maleficent's hands; with each she inspected it, and then either stacked it on one of the tables before her or sent it back flying to the shelves depending on if it pleased her. Some were in languages Rose couldn't read, but any title in Latin, German or French she could at least scan. Liber Algebræ et Almucabola. Das Buch der unbekannten Kugelbögen. Sur la mesure des figures planes et sphériques.

"Mathematics?" Rose gulped. Math was always her hardest subject, when her aunts were still teaching her the basics. "I already know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide…"

"You wanted to learn, did you not, Briar Rose?"

Rose nodded, though when she'd said that, she meant less Pythagorean tables and more the type of learning one does with her hands.

"Good." Then Maleficent held out her hand again and there was another flurry, some in scripts Rose had never seen before: elegant curls hanging beneath flat lines, words that looked almost like pictures. "You like to read, no? Well, real kingdoms are nothing like what they say in your guardians' sanitized little bedtime tales. There's a lot more to statecraft than fair princesses and the handsome princes who marry them."

Rose had to admit that, compared to other activities, she did not especially prefer reading. She was a desperately bored, desperately lonely child, and beside her aunts, storybook characters were the closest things she could make to a friend. Now that she had Maleficent and the Raven and Cathassach—now that Maleficent had spirited her away for real, now that she'd seen so many wonderful new places with her own eyes—words on a page seemed comparatively hollow.

She wanted Maleficent to think her intelligent and mature, though, and she did want to learn. Desperately, in fact. She nodded again. "Oh, I get your point completely. I can't wait to get started."

"Good," Maleficent repeated. "Good—and if you prove clever enough, we may even move on from mathematics and statecraft and get you to learning real magic."

Like a placid fish in a unhunted river, Rose was completely incapable of recognizing that the delicious morsel dangling before her was bait. She swallowed Maleficent's proverbial hook with savor—eyes wide, shining, a hundred new questions about to tumble from her lips—and Maleficent smiled.

"Good," she said a fourth time. "You are so, so good, you sweet, springtime girl. You are too good; I will teach you everything I know."

Chapter Text

"Maleficent, Maleficent: did you know that cranes swallow rocks as ballasts, to keep them on course against the wind?"

Rose was hidden away in a private nook of the library, stretched like a sunning cat on one of Maleficent's green velvet sofas, phosphorescent, almost, in the off-white of her cotton nightgown, hair held back by a knot of thick, practical string. Her cheeks were freckled and shiny from the late summer sun, even peeling a little. Maleficent was occupied with some handicraft in the seat next to her—a wooden figurine of a dragon, marked with a series of unfamiliar glyphs, imbued with magical potency—muttering incantations under her breath until, every now and then, both the glyphs and the head of her staff would glow and dim.

She leaned over in her chair. The sleeve of her robe brushed loosely against Rose's bare arm and filled it with goosebumps.

"That is a myth," she corrected, eyes narrowing critically at the text. "This book is quite old. Didn't I tell you to be cautious with the Romans? If you're interested in ornithology, I have several contemporary texts to choose from."

"Well," Rose tried again, eager to find some fact to impress her, "did you know that birds can see colors that humans cannot? How fascinating—the idea that there are colors I've never seen. I can't begin to imagine."

"As can I," Maleficent said. "See things that humans cannot, that is. I lament the limitations of your senses, Briar Rose. Some of the most spectacular views in this world exist just beyond the realm of your comprehension."

"Could you give them to me with your magic, these elevated senses?"

"A party trick!" Maleficent scoffed. "Of course I could. Do you think so little of my power? But for every deal, there is a price, and for every price unpaid, I must extract its worth twice over. You are such a glutton for the physical; I would hate to ever have to take your senses away from you."

"But you've given me plenty of other things, and I've never had to make a deal before."

Maleficent's fingers twitched—it was one of her tells, Rose had recently gleaned, that she had inadvertently hit upon a topic Maleficent did not especially want to discuss.

"Those were… gifts."

"Can't this be a gift, too?"

"It's hardly a gift if you're asking for it," Maleficent said.

Rose disagreed, but she supposed she was already pushing her luck. She switched tactics. "Alright, alright—but I'm an honest bargainer. I wouldn't break a deal with you."

"Wouldn't you, once you knew the cost?"

"There isn't anything I wouldn't give you, if you really wanted it," Rose said, earnestly. Her confession seemed to unnerve Maleficent, though Rose couldn't begin to guess why; she went suddenly hush, and her fingers tightened around her staff. She stared at Rose with a faraway expression—the same bewildering look that her aunts had whenever Rose made the mistake of sleeping in too late, or pricking her finger on a sewing needle, or deciding to take an unannounced midday nap.

"Your life, then?"

"Well, no—of course not that," Rose stammered out. "At least not—unless you mean in the sense of heroically sacrificing myself, then naturally, if you were in grave danger—"

"Then there is something that you wouldn't give me," Maleficent said, closing the door on the subject definitively.

There was much Rose didn't understand. What had the fairy sight to do with her life—and what did any of it have to do with her sleeping in too long in the morning? Everywhere she turned she seemed to smack up against a wall of her own naivety. How generous and exhausting for Maleficent, she thought, to educate a girl as ignorant as she.

After agreeing to become Maleficent's apprentice of sorts, Maleficent had written up a schedule for her. Coming up to the castle every night wouldn't do, much as Rose wanted to. She was already starting to get splitting headaches from her disastrous sleep schedule. One night was blocked out for language, mathematics, and philosophy; another was for politics, literature, and economy. A third night was blocked out, at Rose's insistence, for visits with Cathassach, during which Maleficent took the opportunity to impart upon Rose some magical streetwise: not magic proper but things like how to care for a phoenix egg, if you happen upon one; or how to avoid ensnarement by a siren's song; or what to do if you ever find yourself hungry and benighted and suspiciously nearby an old, lone May-tree. The remaining four were reserved for getting a good rest. On her off days, Rose was given assignments. Usually it was to ponder over some abstract question or dilemma related to their lessons and to report back her thoughts when she returned. She asked if she could take some of Maleficent's books home, so that she could reference the text when she came upon a mental stumbling block, but Maleficent refused, on the grounds that they oughtn't risk Rose's aunts finding them among her possessions.

("Could I keep the books hidden with an enchantment?"

"From another human, certainly. From your guardians, however…"

That confirmed one of Rose's suspicions. She wasn't yet sure how to feel about it—so she put that knowledge quietly away, and continued on as if nothing had changed.)

Now she sat in her usual spot, books splayed open on an oaken desk, or at least a desk of what she had first assumed was oak—there was an unnatural swirling pattern to its grain, reminiscent of the polished gem currently sitting heavy against her breastbone; and of the furling dark forest bracken, and the drooping red stamen of the flowers that live there; and of the curls, come to think of it, in Rose's own hair… It was the hour for politics, a subject which Rose had quickly come to despise.

"But it's unfair! Why should anyone have a right to all their father's property just because they happened to be born first? That's no achievement. If I were a mother I'd want all my children to be provided for—and if I were an eldest brother, why would I want to take everything from my siblings? Shouldn't it be my job to love and protect them?"

"There are certainly societies that take your view of it, if not, perhaps, for your exact reasons. But tell me: how would you intend to deal with the exponential subdivision of estates? Or, in the case of rulers, the possibility of a civil war?"

"Why on Earth should it result in a war? They're family. Can't they just talk it over? Of course it's unfortunate if more than one person wants to be king, but that's hardly something to kill people over."

"History evidently disagrees."

"Alright, well, even if only one brother can inherit—and I still don't understand why they have to be boys, but we'll put that aside, for now—"

"I presume your guardians did not impress upon you the socially-appropriate divisions of labor?"

Rose dug her nails into the fabric of her skirt. "You presume correctly," she said, letting a growl of frustration seep into her voice. There was a 'socially-appropriate division of labor'? How was she supposed to have known that? She's spent her entire life in the company of women! "But as I was saying, why not inherit the youngest? He'll have the tutoring and counsel of his older siblings to draw on, and since he'll still be young when his parents die, his rule would stand to last the longest. You said stability is paramount in politics, didn't you?"

"A reasonable application of the principle," Maleficent said, which had Rose glowing, in spite of her irritation. "There remains the issue that one's infant brother is very, very easy to smother in the cradle."

Abruptly, Rose stood. She was halfway across the room before she realized she had even moved; she pressed her forehead against a shelf's weathered wood and blinked away the stinging in the corner of her eyes. She considered her slippered feet and how they sunk into mossy carpet.

Minutes passed. Maleficent's presence materialized at her back like a cold, familiar cloak of empty. "I don't believe you," Rose snapped, overcome, again, with a burst of misplaced righteousness. Still, a part of her must have recognized the absurdity of her own reaction—her gaze was still fixed steadily on the floor. "Who would kill a baby? Their own brother! I don't believe you!"

"Need I remind you—"

"No! No, trust me, I wish I could forget."

"Forgive me," Maleficent murmured, "for I suppose I'd overestimated you. If you'd rather live a life furnished by fictions, then by all means, gorge yourself on them; your three guardians clearly have plenty on offer. But we may as well end our arrangement here."

"I don't want to believe it, Maleficent." She wiped some wet off her cheeks, the tears now flowing freely. "I want people to be good. I don't want them to be capable of such awful things."

"The world does not operate according to what you do and do not want to believe, Briar Rose."

"Until you teach me your magic."

"What do you mean?"

"Magic is when you take the world and change it."

Maleficent was silent. Rose turned to face her; she expected a correction, perhaps disappointment—obviously Rose had misapplied the lesson—and was not prepared for the intensity in Maleficent's eyes.

"...Maleficent?" Rose asked, all of a sudden shy. "I'm sorry—I've misunderstood you."

"You understand me perfectly," Maleficent said. She had bowed, as she often did, to meet Rose's eye; now she straightened herself, the fire in her expression at once displaced by her usual enigmatic arrogance. "Come again, back to the sofa. Sit. Let's move on to literature."

* * *

Several weeks later Rose came into the vestibule to the sound of an angelic music, reverberating mutely through the hollow chambers and thick castle walls. It was unlike anything she'd ever heard—but then that was to be expected, in the company of Maleficent: warm, plucking, glittering, the high-notes thronging and threading into the slow, resonant low-notes, circling round and round their harmonies like eager springtime rabbits.

Immediately she flattened her back against the shadows of the near wall and steeled herself. Maleficent had warned her about creatures that thrall humans with music: sirens, pipers, underworld instrumentalists who make you jig into your grave. Only after making the cross over her heart several times did she feel brave enough to walk further into the castle, cautiously, with her palms pressed tight over her ears.

Maleficent was perched casually on their sofa when Rose entered the library. She had a great bowed instrument between her legs that was taut across with strings: a harp, Rose recognized, from descriptions and illustrations. Being in the castle always felt a little like floating at the heart of a lake, but the way Maleficent played made that seem almost literal, her hands lifting and sinking like flotsam in a gentle, wavering current.

Rose bounded to her. Maleficent startled when Rose thumped onto the floor and pillowed her cheek against her knee, and the music stuttered, but she recovered elegantly, and finished out her song with a bang.

"You didn't tell me you were a musician!" Rose said. She looked up at Maleficent brightly, twirling her fingers in the skirt of Maleficent's robes.

"You really do delight in the simplest things."

"I love music, Maleficent. Love it. I don't think there's anything more beautiful in all of God's creation. I have this dream, sometimes, you know, where I'm a musician in a big concert hall, in front of a huge, clamoring crowd of people—I know I oughtn't to trust people, but let me tell the dream anyway—and I can play every instrument as well as sing—"

"Come here, then, my little fantast. I'll make you into a harpist before the evening's gone."

Maleficent pushed the harp a little ways away and invited Rose to settle fully between her knees. When Rose was situated, she took Rose's hands and gingerly positioned them beside the strings. "Careful of your nails. With the pads of your fingers, like this," she murmured, close to Rose's neck, which made the little hairs on her nape stand on end. "Relax your hands, Briar Rose. You'll injure yourself. Here, try a glissando."

Maleficent guided her fingers up and down the instrument's wiry stomach, producing a choppy scale. "Steady," she hissed. "Start with your pointer finger and pull back. Lead with your elbow, like you're an archer. Alright, now forward, with the thumb—crest upwards and come back around the middle. Yes, like that, like a figure-eight—"

Soon Maleficent was guiding her, slowly, through a song: a plucky lullaby Fauna used to sing for her, when Rose was a very little girl. She played it over and over until she could get it without guidance; afterward, she twisted around and smiled at Maleficent, and Maleficent smiled back at her, though hers was cooler, and didn't quite reach the eyes—and Rose felt suddenly like she had swallowed a hundred butterflies.

"Try this one on your own. I adapted it from a motet, a clever little piece I heard not too long ago in Navarre." Maleficent removed her hands, and Rose itched, acutely, for their lingering softness. She snapped her fingers and produced from thin air a raw-cut sheet of yellow paper, inky with some lines and dots like birds abreast on branches. She handed it to Rose, and Rose studied it closely…

"What's this?"

"It's music. Your guardians haven't taught you any of the common notations?"

Rose shook her head.

That set Maleficent off into a deluge of violent muttering—something about "those flittering morons" and "first wasting a gift, then wasting its potential." She sighed her most long-suffering sigh and pointed at a little dot on one of the lines.

"This is our middle C," Maleficent clucked, which only served to confuse Rose further.

"What's a C?"

"You have got to be kidding me." That was directed not so much at Rose, but at the preposterous state of her education. Maleficent reached over and plucked a string; and then another, one octave higher; and then another, an octave higher than that. She raised an eyebrow at Rose, as if to say: 'Well?'

"Oh! I call that my robin note."

"Your… 'robin' note?"

"Yes, and this is my starling note, see—and my chaffinch note—" So Rose sung her own scale for Maleficent. "I have my own way of writing it, too. If I may…"

Within ten or fifteen minutes Rose copied down the entire lullaby they'd played through, perfectly, including all of Maleficent's improvisations and flourishes. It was Maleficent's turn to take and inspect it, then; she nodded, and snapped her fingers. Her own sheet of paper, with the dots on lines marking notes like C and D and E, transformed to match Rose's personal notation. After an interval of experimental plucking she stilled Rose's hands and maneuvered her body to the side.

"I've changed my mind; accompany me," she said. "Why spend all our time on the harp when your throat houses the finest set of strings in all the three kingdoms?"

It was the first time Maleficent had ever complimented her so directly. Rose found her neck and cheeks going unexpectedly hot; she mumbled her thanks to the carpet.

So they played together: Rose as the melody, high, prominent, her immature coloratura as piercing as a full, white moonlight; Maleficent as the starry licks of harmony beneath. They played for perhaps one or two or three hours. In Rose's imagination, they were soaring high above a bed of cumuli, not on Cathassach's back but as dragons themselves, scales sleek and shimmery, time sloughing joyfully off of them like a stream of rainwater.

Cold fingers slithered around her throat. Rose gasped and opened her eyes. Maleficent was looking at her; the intensity in her gaze had returned: gold, wild, burning; the harp had been enchanted to continue on its own. Rose sung on, heart pounding. Maleficent's fingers tightened. She could feel the vibrations of her own singing through the pressure points in her throat. She could feel Maleficent feeling the song through her, in the folds of her joints, down the lines of her palm.

A great knock echoed through the castle. Maleficent removed her hand. The harp ceased.

"Who dares disturb me in my domain?" Maleficent bellowed, in her dragon-voice. Rose startled and hit her elbow against the nearby table. Maleficent stood, nostrils flaring, eyes with the wolfish glint of a thing at hunt; she stomped out of the library, her robes trailing like angry clouds of smoke behind her.

What had just—?

But Rose didn't have time to think it over; she scrambled after Maleficent, not so close as to get in the path of her ire but close enough to see where she was going, until two floors down Maleficent flicked a wrist behind her and slammed a heavy set of doors right in Rose's face.

Rose slunk to the floor, clutching her throbbing elbow with one hand and her throbbing nose with the other—the second of which had just started to bleed, dripping onto her nightgown—and waited for her heart to quit hammering.

She could hear voices, distantly, through the wall, like speech underwater: Maleficent's bewitching gravel and then a second voice, dry like summer brush and even deeper, somehow, which Rose hadn't thought possible.

There was a balcony above the entrance hall. Rose climbed back up the stairs, keeping her footsteps as airy as possible. She dragged her palm across the walls until she found a door, embedded into the stone, hidden by a tapestry. She opened it, just enough to slip her slight body through; she tip-toed onto the platform and strained to see: the great double-doors of the castle's entrance were open, the night beyond as black and sticky and suffocating as tar. The top of Maleficent's horns peeked into view, and Rose could hear the second voice, pleading:

"—sick. Desperately, desperately ill. I've spoken already to the other court but their hands are tied, they say, and I'd do anything, anything—"

"How did you find this place?" Maleficent growled. "How have my hawthorns not strangled you?"

Rose hugged the railing and shuffled closer. She found a place to crouch behind a thick curtain of draping green velvet; from there she could see an older human, with ashen hair and lines down their face, like her aunts, and a flat chest and broad shoulders and a once-tall stature greatly diminished by a feeble hunch.

"The legends—" the human—the man, probably a man—started, but Maleficent cut him off with a slam of her staff.

"How?!"

The human then began digging around in his cloak. Rose couldn't see what it was that he pulled out of his pocket, but she could see the way Maleficent reeled back, as if she had suddenly come face-to-face with the tip of a sword.

"You—! Out, out, before I call the ravens to come pluck out your eyes!"

The man took one panicked look at the object in his hand and chucked it over the cliffside. In an instant Maleficent's magic reared up and snagged him. Shackles of green light grabbed him by the neck and wrists and slammed him sideways, pinning him to the stone wall. There was a dreadful crack. Rose stifled a gasp. There was blood; his shoulder was bent at an impossible angle.

"Please," he begged. He sounded so hurt and pathetic that it took everything in Rose not to launch herself down there and drag him back into the dark forest, out from Maleficent's sight.

"What folly of human judgment brought you here, with that, that weapon, and made you think you'd be leaving this castle alive?"

"Please!" he cried, tears now streaming fat and wet down his sunken cheeks. "They told me it was for protection—I didn't mean—I didn't know. My granddaughter, please, I just want my little girl—"

"Out with it, then," Maleficent said, in a tone that indicated neither the tears nor the begging had much moved her.

The man took some time to regain control of his breathing. Then, through gritted teeth, he launched into a pitiful tale: his daughter, of an ill mental state since the birth of her second child, had made some kind of pact with a group he nebulously referred to as "the other court." Rose couldn't follow the details exactly. Four years after the little girl's birth, one of these courtiers had apparently come and taken her away from her family, replacing her with—some kind of monster, Rose gathered. He wanted his granddaughter back, but no matter who he went to, the answer was the same: a good fairy has no business undermining the agreements of her own.

Maleficent's reputation preceded her. She was his last resort, he said. He'd heard what she'd done for the queen; he'd heard of the gift of a daughter, and the disappearance of the princess, and realized if there was any expert in the giving and taking of children, it must be her.

"What can you give me in return?" Maleficent asked, coolly. Rose was taken aback. What horrible sort of question was that?

"Does it—ah—does it have to be a—a—a proper deal?" He spoke slowly and repetitively, through the pain. Rose's heart ached for him. She found his perseverance admirable. "There must be some loophole, a way to—a way to void the contract. Bargaining with a woman not quite in her right mind—"

"Our kind make no such distinction."

"She didn't know what she was doing!"

"Every day you wake and breathe and eat and occupy yourself with decision after decision, continuously renegotiating your fate with the world. You will find shockingly few mortals who know what they're doing, as you put it; yet, the world turns. Seasons march on. Consequences persist."

"That can't be fair!"

"To the contrary," Maleficent drawled, "it is perfectly fair."

The man descended into wracks of sobs. Maleficent stood and watched him; the angry tension in her shoulders smoothed out to the calmer slope of bored irritation. After several minutes, she cleared her throat.

"You have another grandchild. The equivalency seems straightforward."

"Absolutely not," the man said, voicing cracking in his fervency.

"You said anything."

"She's an innocent little girl!"

"Fine." Maleficent shrugged. "The mother, then. That would be poetic: if she's willing to trade away her own child, she hasn't much right to complain when you do the same to her."

"No."

"How desperate can you really be, if you've rejected both of my offers?"

"I'll do anything," he reiterated, "except betray my family."

"Why do you want your granddaughter back so badly?"

"I miss her laughter," he said miserably. "I miss carving her toy squirrels from old, rain-rotted firewood. I miss the wildflowers she used to bring back to me from the field. I miss telling her stories. I miss holding her while she falls asleep."

"Alright," Maleficent said. She approached the man's heaving form and knelt before him; he flinched and crawled backward, squashing himself as much as he could against the wall. She took his chin between her thumb and forefinger and tilted it upward. From Rose's vantage she could see his eyes shining, brave and defiant—then Maleficent began to sing:

One deal, for a child lost;

four years of love had whet the cost.

In a country grave lies a beaded string.

Deliver it to me by the girl's eighth spring.

She brought her hand to his mouth and pressed her heavy ring to his thin lips. Shakily, he kissed it. There was a swell and ebb of magic through the hall. The chill was bone-creeping. Rose shivered.

"I presume you're familiar with the object I desire?"

"If I die on my quest for it, will you have mercy on my girl?"

"The terms of the contract are firm."

The man nodded and slumped back again. Rose couldn't imagine him going on any sort of quest, let alone a life-threatening one. He was so old and frail.

Maleficent stood. Her magic released him. She gestured impatiently for him to depart.

"My shoulder," he said.

"You had the gall to bring an iron crucifix to a wicked fairy's door."

With that, he shambled out, and Maleficent shut the door behind him. She sighed and loosened her arms. The atmosphere in the entrance hall went quiet and still. Rose inched back toward the door, willing her steps and her breathing to be silent. She could probably sprint back to the library before—

"Briar Rose."

She froze.

"I am very old and very powerful; if you want to hide from me, you're going to have to try a lot harder than that."

She clutched the railing, hands trembling. She couldn't will herself to move. It's just Maleficent, she told herself. She would never—but then, with the old man—the sickening crack of his bones played over and over in her head. She took several cautious steps forward; she moved the drapery aside, just enough that half of her face peeked out from the green.

Maleficent was looking straight at her. Her eyes were calm. She extended a hand upward: an offering, across the distance.

After a moment of hesitation, Rose extended a hand in return.

With a green pop Rose was at Maleficent's side, hand in spindly hand. Her footing was tentative, and she stumbled; she braced herself against Maleficent's ribcage and buried her face in the nubby drapes of bead and embroidery that hung, ceremonially, over Maleficent's chest.

"If a human ever comes to my doorstep again, you are to hide in the furthest wing of the castle."

"Why?" Rose croaked. Nominally, she had the answer: human nature. But Maleficent's violence—the man's virtue—seemed to confirm its opposite.

Maleficent lifted a hand. Rose flinched; but all she did was bring her palm to the crown of Rose's head and smooth down her hair. "Because they wouldn't understand," she said, quietly, "if they saw you."

"What wouldn't they understand?"

"They'd try and ruin what little you have left."

"Oh," Rose said, even more puzzled. Nevertheless, the knot in her chest uncoiled, slightly, at the tenderness in Maleficent's voice. There was a battle still raging between confusion and fear, horror and sympathy; but when Maleficent led her back up to the library, she followed, pliantly, and kept her expression sweet and mild through the rest of the night, the true nature of Rose's thoughts hidden diligently away in the private corners of her own mind.

Chapter Text

For the remainder of the season Rose's lessons were held in abeyance. "My aunts get sick with worry when they see me so tired," she'd said, which was true, "and the recent late nights have made me feel especially so"—which was also true, though the cumulative implication wasn't quite. Maleficent wasn't fooled, but neither did she protest; a break in their visits was blocked out, and Rose was assigned a handful of philosophical problems to ponder in the meantime. She walked home riverways, night still clinging to the mud and chilling her toes. She went to bed and slept a near fifteen hours. She was awoken at dinnertime by a panicked pounding at her door.

That was a week ago. It was a hot day, now: a dramatic eulogy to August. The sun was round and red like a brushfire and skin-crackling; it was a sun that bit into the mouths of rivers and drank them down to mudbeds. Rose found a shady place to sprawl between a fanning oak and a Judas-tree. Fauna was somewhere nearby, throwing seeds to squirrels. She had taken one look at Rose's shadowy, ruminating expression and wisely decided to give her space.

What made a wicked fairy wicked?

The question buzzed, buzzed, buzzed like a wasp's nest in wild of her mind. It couldn't be that they were wicked all the time, or else Rose would have to accept that Maleficent's affection had all been a ruse—that underlying all their pleasant memories together had been some sinister ulterior motive. No. It must have been, then, a capacity for wickedness. The question thus arose of how and when that capacity was realized: was it instinctual, like a bird's migration? A physical need, like a hunger pang? Did certain conditions need to be met? Maleficent was so very deliberate with her words and actions. Rose could not imagine anything outside of her control.

Rose brought her hand around her throat and felt her pulse thrum.

She was a sinner, too. She could only imagine the heartbroken looks on Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather's faces if they ever found out the extent of her lies. Rose knew how gutted she felt, at least, when anyone lied to her… though the intensity of her guilt had long faded, leaving her now with a vacant, dispassionate awareness of the fact that she was doing wrong.

Did Maleficent make her that way?

No—this was her vice. Only cowards cast blame for their own wrongdoing.

Was she capable of breaking a man's body?

That man had apparently brandished some kind of weapon. Perhaps Rose was being too uncharitable—perhaps the shock of witnessing her first violence was clouding her judgment. What if he'd been on the precipice of injuring Maleficent? Or worse: killing her? Killing Rose? Even if he turned out to be virtuous, how was Maleficent to know? If humans were truly as awful as she said they were—as Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather's caution seemed to suggest—was it not intelligent to presume ill intent until otherwise proven?

Was Rose capable of injuring a man in self-defense?

In anger?

Rose pulled her knees to her chest. Her stomach twisted, as though she'd swallowed hot rocks. She dug anxious spirals into the soil, blackening the undersides of her white lunulae.

The grass rustled. She inclined her head. A wolf peered at her through a cross-stitch of Judas-tree branches. Rose blinked at him. He snarled, and then, brushing his velvety nose against a long, pink seed pod, he sneezed.

Rose rolled over and outstretched her hand for sniffing. "You don't know me yet, do you, sweet thing? Don't worry, I mean you no harm. Did you travel here from a long way away, or have I been stuffed up inside so long that I can't tell the newborns from the old pack?"

He edged closer. Finally he was near enough that Rose could place her palm flat against his snout. He sneezed again, and then licked some salt and oil off her fingers.

The wolf tucked into her side and she buried her face into his thin summer fur. Soothed by his affection, she let her mind wander to nice things, like flying with Cathassach over salt-breezy peatlands, or playing in the river Merryweather, or curling half into Maleficent's lap by the fire when the dawn was closing in and she was too sleepy to continue her studies. Rose cupped her throat in her palm again and hummed. She loved to touch; she loved to be touched. She was insatiably physical. She traced her fingertips lightly over her neck and shivered from its pleasant sensitivity.

Her stomach twisted again, but differently.

Perhaps she'd misunderstood.

When Rose finally lifted her face from the wolf's dozing flank, Fauna was a few paces away, watching. Her expression floated somewhere in the middle of wary and contemplative. Rose rolled her eyes and pat a spot next to her.

"There's no need to be hesitant, Aunt Fauna. You of all people should know that wolves don't attack humans."

Fauna hummed. She gathered up her skirts and sat. Winter or summer, her aunts always wore their same dresses—as in one dress apiece, impressively colorfast and resistant to wear. Rose realized, with a bit of unnerve, that she had never once mended them. She didn't know how Fauna could stand the heat, so swaddled in fabric; Rose had on barely a slip and was sweltering.

Fauna placed a tentative hand on the wolf's flank and pet. "The creatures of the forest are seldom so gentle with others as they are with you and I. It always does to exercise caution."

"You respect every creature's nature," Rose said. "I struggle with that, I think."

Fauna's eyes glimmered with surprise. "You know, Rosie, self-reflection is a sign of maturity."

"I like to think I've done a lot of maturing, recently."

"As long as you don't grow up too fast," Fauna said, her voice suddenly wistful. She bent to place an auntly kiss on the crown of Rose's head. Rose couldn't help but smile; for all her confused feelings about her aunts, and the fact of their being magic—fairies, they were almost certainly fairies, based on the sum of Maleficent's comments—she still missed them. She hadn't realized how distant she'd been, occupied all night and day with Maleficent's world.

"It's only a year and a half 'til I'm of marrying age, isn't it?"

"Is that what's been bothering you?"

Rose thought: that would make a convenient excuse, wouldn't it? Any other day, she'd have seized the offer; she'd have spun a story that explained not just her weeklong gloom, but also the whole of the last year, pinning all her slights and oddities on the anxiety of a girl waxing to womanhood. Instead she kept her gaze fixed thoughtfully at her dirtied nails. "Fauna," she said, "why do wolves kill other animals?"

"...It is the world, Rose," Fauna answered, frowning."They have to, to survive. It's just as other living things must subsist on plants or sunlight; every creature fills a very delicate role in the systems of life."

"Why would God make the world like that? Why not have everything subsist on sunlight and let all be well?"

"I don't think anyone's god has much of anything to do with it," Fauna said. This admission startled Rose; Fauna must've realized her error immediately, for she practically fell over herself to correct: "I didn't mean—what I mean is—oh, Rosie, you won't tell my sisters I said that, will you? You know how useless I can be with words. I mean that it's not for us to know. We can only try and make peace with it."

"Why must we make peace with it?"

"Oh, Rose," Fauna sighed. It was not a sigh of exasperation; there was affection there, fierce and grave. Still, Fauna had nothing to follow up with. They fell into a weighty silence.

Rose got the impression that Fauna didn't know any better than she.

"I suppose you might tell me—" The shade had inched east, now; Rose's wolf companion had since yawned, stretched, and ambled away. "—that the same can be said of good and evil."

"What do you mean, darling?"

"What makes some people evil and others good? Must you always be one or the other? What compels a person to hurt another? Is it simply their nature? Is that something we must also make peace with?"

"Oh." Fauna's voice went soft, deep, sad. "I don't think that's the same at all. No babe is born evil. A person who hurts another is a desperately tragic thing."

"Then why do they do it, Aunt Fauna?"

"Some are driven to it. There are places in this world that can be so cruel, Rose—nothing like our little cottage and glade. They've had evil after evil done to them, so they think that evil is the only way to survive. They've never been modeled goodness; they've never been given the right sort of love."

"But if you showed them that love, do you think—?"

"I think," Fauna said, "that True Love can accomplish anything."

* * *

It rained hard on the way to Maleficent's castle, but it was a hot rain, with the sky half-dressed in smokestack thunderclouds and half-bare with sparkling stars, and the air sticky and heady; moonlight splintered through the spray and rearranged itself into faint arcs of rainbow. Rose sighed in relief when she crossed into the dark forest and the air cooled. Her tolerance for heat had dropped precipitously, as of late, and just as last winter had persisted stubbornly into spring, this year's summer seemed reluctant to let autumn in.

It was still several days before Rose's lessons were slated to resume. The Raven hadn't been by, so Rose hadn't a means to inform Maleficent of her intent to visit; she wasn't surprised when she came up to the double doors of the castle's entrance and found them firmly locked.

She knocked, and waited.

No response came.

She circled. She'd never seen this side of the castle before; the eastern wall was perilously close to the cliffside, but it seemed to be the only way around, for the western wall was embedded directly into the mountain. She balanced, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, across a thin walkway that skimmed the tops of sharp, glinting pines. Below: a vertigo-inducing sea of leaf and wood. She remembered, almost exactly a year ago, how close she came to making those woods her grave. At the time, it had been the most terrifying and exhilarating thing she'd ever experienced.

How quaint even just one year under Maleficent's tutelage made that all seem now.

She rounded to the northside and found what she was looking for: a handsome growth of withywind, unnaturally thick and sturdy with the dark forest's magic, twining up to an open library window. She'd looked out this window many times over many evenings, to appreciate the subtle crests of greenery beyond… she secured her arms and waist with them and pulled to test their strength. Satisfied, she found a good foothold against the stone and climbed.

The library was dark when she landed. The fireplace was, of course, unlit; the candles were gone from the sconces and reading tables. Rose wrapped her arms around herself and shifted, anxiously, on her heels. She was technically an intruder, tonight. Perhaps Maleficent would not take kindly to her presence.

No, Rose immediately reprimanded herself: how could she think such a thing? No matter what Maleficent was capable of, Rose knew she was welcome; she knew Maleficent held her dear.

She wandered into the hallway. The outlines of statues stood in menacing repose. Rose hadn't given them much thought, since her first time here; now she approached a unit of them: three maids frozen in a perfect reproduction of sweeping, scrubbing, and mopping. Even without the light Rose could appreciate the sculptor's stunning attention to detail. The way the fabric of their dresses draped and clung, crumpled and pilled… the gossamer flyaways sticking out from their work-loosened buns… the concerned bunches of their brows, the wrinkles around their worried eyes…

Rose remembered the first time she saw the ocean, and how Maleficent had taken a wave at crest—alive, borne by motion, hurdling toward them both—and frozen it perfectly in time.

She turned around. She walked up the spiral staircase, away from… whatever thought was threatening to form like a bubble at the surface of her mind.

The fourth floor had no carpet, nor any statues. It was bare, like the first floor, with arched windows from waist to ceiling, letting in the breeze and turning all the masonry silver with moonlight. On the wall across there was nothing but a single door.

Rose was de facto constrained to the first through third floors of the central building—and even then, mostly to the entrance hall, dining room, kitchen, library, and the dusty-rose bedroom where she sometimes took her baths—but she supposed that Maleficent had never banned her, de jure, from exploring further. She crossed the length of hallway and twisted the nob. She was met with a ghoulish creaking—a rusty doorhinge, as it were—and a blast of cold air and cobweb. She sneezed. A spider fell, quite without ceremony, from the torn remains of her home and onto Rose's shoulder. Rose coaxed her onto her finger and stared, momentarily, at the pearly eggsac on her back, and into her black, dewdrop eyes.

A creature.

There were no living creatures in Maleficent's domain, Rose had thought, aside from herself, Maleficent, and the Raven.

"It's a pleasure to meet you," Rose whispered to the spider, before placing the little mother gingerly on the crown of her head. Thus accompanied, she stepped inside. The interior was difficult to decipher. There seemed only one light, in the very back: a faint glow, like sunbeams cast through a jar of linden-blossom honey, its source obstructed by vague, black shapes: some tall and curved, others short and boxy. She looked down and saw something reflective on the floor. She kneeled and inspected: broken mirror-glass, half-popped out of its verdigris frame. Other oddities were scattered about with it: a book bound in some strange (shudder!) leather; a white-enameled harp-bow, which was quite beautiful, even in the shadows, but emanated an energy so pitiful and aggrieved that Rose had to avert her gaze; the pelt of a seal, dusty and ragged, the sight of which pricked Rose's heart with thorns of sadness.

I can show you all that has been hidden from you, a voice said, whispering at the nook of Rose's ear, if only you have the courage to come and look.

"I… am afraid I must pass," Rose said, because Maleficent taught her that a strange voice whispering to you in the dark almost never lead anywhere good.

But there is so much secrecy about you, girl; seldom am I tasked to untangle such a thick web of lies. Some of your own making—and who could blame you? You were all but suckled on them. What other talent could you possibly have been expected to cultivate?

"That's enough," Rose said, but she was wavering a little.

Don't bother hiding from me—I see all. I reflect all. There is a yearning, inside of you; a hunger for truth. We are alike, in that way. And yet: some truths scare you. You've noticed, haven't you, what fragile fiction constitutes your life? You've been noticing for quite some time. Wouldn't you like to see, then, what you actually are?

In the corner of Rose's vision, the verdigris mirror flashed.

"I'm fine, thank you." Still, the flash had managed to catch her subconscious eye, and she glanced at it, just on reflex. Her mouth went dry; her mind became as pure and blank as a sky in drought. She shuffled closer, and she could see, just barely, the hint of a reflection: not of this room, but of another, a brighter castle, full with crowds of happy people, and Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, neither a day younger nor a day aged, flitting down from the ceiling in an ethereal shaft of light… Look now, the Mirror said. Come closer and look, lorn flesh of Leah; reach for me, fey-authored beauty; touch my surface and witness your destiny, you lost, dawn-hewn, ill-befated little girl.

The door screeched and slammed closed behind her.

Rose startled, and then, the interruption granting her a fortuitous moment of self-awareness, slammed her palm over her eyes. The mirror's whispering ceased. With her other hand she felt around until she found a sufficiently solid surface with which to haul herself upright.

This room must've been Maleficent's storage for cursed objects. Rose lamented what an exceedingly stupid predicament she'd gotten herself into. If she escaped from here—when she escaped from here, ideally with her firstborn unpledged and her soul intact—she was really going to have to work on her reckless curiosity. First thing, though, was finding the door: she felt for the cold, and followed, knowing that wherever the door was, there would also be a draft. She walked slowly, one foot sliding across the floor, one hand balled outward, careful only to touch things through the fabric of her sleeve. Finally she hit on a flat, wooden surface, and felt for the knob. She turned it, and the door swung open, and she opened her eyes.

Rose was not standing outside. She was standing in the back of the room, face-to-face with a gilded spinning wheel.

She trembled. She couldn't close her eyes; she couldn't turn away. No matter how much she screamed at them to, she couldn't get her legs to move.

Absurdly—inexplicably, incoherently—and with immense, consuming terror, Rose thought: I don't want to fall asleep.

Something clamped down around her wrist and yanked. She flew backwards, through the storage room, into the light. Maleficent's form was all around her, smoky, shapeless, halfway between thing and fairy-fire, then all at once she solidified, her poison-apple lips curled like a predator preparing to bite.

"Thoughtless, stupid, self-destructive brat," Maleficent spat out, "harebrained, simple-minded, careless, irresponsible—"

"I'm sorry!" Rose gasped, trying to twist away from Maleficent's grip. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry—I didn't mean to—"

"Oh, she's sorry, she says," Maleficent mocked. "I suppose that's the end of it, then? You're sorry, so we can skip over the consequences, is that it? Briar Rose is sorry, and so the world falls at her feet to forgive her—"

"I didn't know—" she started.

"You know nothing," Maleficent agreed.

"I didn't think—"

"Evidently."

"I won't do it again, I promise! I didn't touch anything, I didn't mess anything up, I wasn't trying to—I just, please." Rose pulled away again, feebly. "Don't…"

Maleficent released her. Rose stumbled backwards and caught herself on the railing of the arched windows. She caught one glance below and her stomach rolled. Maleficent was crowding her, the wicked fairy cold of her body drinking up all of Rose's heat. She had nowhere to put her hands. One light shove, and Rose would be toppling to her death.

Then, just as quickly, Maleficent's expression sunk into cool antipathy. Her voice dripped with contempt. "Do I intimidate you?"

Rose's throat knotted with the threat of crying. She nodded or shook her head—she could not remember which.

Maleficent leaned down and whispered very closely, very quietly, at Rose's ear. "Timidity does not suit you, Briar Rose."

Rose shivered. She knew, then, what Maleficent wanted from her; she swallowed down her tears, and, after a moment of telling hesitation, shoved Maleficent away.

Just like that: Maleficent's body went languid; her brows uncreased. The moment of tension had passed.

"So you've decided to return after all," Maleficent said, after Rose had fully regained her footing.

The implication was surprising. For all that Rose had been rattled by last month's events, she had never even considered the possibility of staying away permanently. "I said for the remainder of the season. The equinox was yesterday."

Haughtily—as if they were lounging in the library, exchanging ripostes; as if the last five or ten minutes had never occurred—Maleficent said, "And I recall your next lesson being slated for the upcoming weekend. I am exceedingly busy. If you think you can simply arrive, unannounced, whenever you please, and expect me to drop everything to attend to your education—"

"That's alright," Rose said, softly. She could barely keep the shake out of her voice—but she would pretend, and by pretending she would become, and the contents of her words, in any case, were all true. "If you have something else to attend to, go and attend to it. I know the way home. I just… wanted to see you. That's all."

Maleficent… blinked. For the first time in Rose's memory, she actually seemed a little awkward. The sudden quotidian shift in conversation was disarming; Rose felt some pleasure that her answer had clearly disarmed Maleficent, in turn. Fauna's words nestled close to Rose's heart: they've never been modeled goodness; they've never been given the right sort of love. This conversation was the beginning of her most ambitious, most important, most delicate project yet.

"Well," Maleficent said, "you have seen me."

"Are you well?"

"I am extraordinary."

"But are you happy?"

For a moment, Maleficent was quiet, as though turning the question over and inspecting it, with great suspicion, in her mind. Finally, she asked, "Are you happy, Briar Rose?"

"Right now?" Rose laughed, and was surprised by her own capacity for it; there was something to be said for sardonic mirth. "I feel as though I've just witnessed my own death omen, though I can't account for it. Maleficent, what was—" But Maleficent narrowed her eyes in a way that spelled danger, so Rose shook her head and refocused. "Happy. Am I happy? In general? I feel so many different things at any given time that I'm never quite sure how I ought to classify them. But I'm happy to be standing here with you. And I'm happy—" Rose turned, gesturing to the world outside. "—to be standing here, at the throne of this quiet beauty, safe under your watch—the consequences of my own stupid recklessness notwithstanding—and under my aunts' watch, cradled by your two opposing kinds of magic. I'm happy to have lived fourteen-and-a-half years and to still be so untouched by cruelty. I'm a little unhappy, I think, to be faced with what I cannot understand."

"What can't you understand?"

"Why must some animals kill and eat other animals to survive?" Rose asked, so overcome with intensity that she had forgotten, almost, that she was still supposed to be afraid. "Why must anything die at all? How could an infinitely powerful, infinitely loving God create an ecosystem so hingent upon pain and fear and suffering?"

"I've changed my mind," Maleficent said. She extended her hand. Rose didn't feel the need to ask where they were going; in spite of everything, without hesitation, she took it. "We will have a lesson tonight, but not about that. I believe it's time you've learned some magic."

* * *

It was light where Maleficent took her. One moment they stood in the fourth floor corridor, the night breeze skim-whistling over the treetops, their cheeks each awash with silver; the next they stood in direct sunlight, and Rose had to squint against the sudden flood of bright.

First she demanded to know how Maleficent had achieved time travel. Then she listened while Maleficent patiently—if mockingly, which Rose thought quite uncalled for—explained the roundness of the Earth, and how they were always spinning, faster than Rose could imagine, and that she couldn't tell because they were all spinning at the same time at the exact same speed, together, and that's where day and night came from, and that was why it was day and night at different times in different places all across the world.

Second, after Rose had taken five minutes to lie in the grass and process this tremendous information—and Maleficent really mocked her for that, but alright, now Rose supposed she deserved it—she took a look around. They were clearly not along the French border, now; neither did they seem to be in Maleficent's Ulsteric countryside. They were overlooking a gulch, or at least some other kind of great, terrestrial fold. Distant sea-gray mountains shot up from a carpet of forest and shimmered in the morning fog.

"It's no moorland," Maleficent sniffed, "but it'll have to do. Sit across from me. Place your palms against the soil."

Rose sat, as instructed, and looked thoughtfully at the dirt. For all the novelty of this new landscape—and of it being day, when in truth it was night—the soil just looked like soil.

"What makes this place special?" Rose asked.

"This spot, specifically? Nothing. But the sort of magic you'll take to is the sort best taught beneath the sun."

"Do you miss the moorlands, Maleficent?"

"Pay attention," Maleficent snapped, grabbing Rose's hands and forcing them flat on the dirt. "There. Do you feel it?"

Rose didn't know what it was supposed to be; she was distracted by Maleficent's cold, dry palms pressing down on her knuckles. Rose shut her eyes and concentrated. The soil was cool and damp, and the tufts of grass sprouting from it were slick with morning dew. Her palms itched where the blades pressed against them—then all of a sudden everything itched: her toes, wiggling in her still-damp shoes; the back of her neck, where her curls were brushing against the skin; a spot on her cheek, just to the left of her nose. She sneezed. The cheek itch started to move: down her face, across her shoulder, down her arm.

Rose peeked one eye open. Her spider companion found a comfortable spot on her wrist and rested there.

"Why, hello, there! It seems I've accidentally taken you on a journey. Don't worry, small thing—I'll make sure not to forget you here."

"That species is highly venomous," Maleficent warned, an unexpected edge creeping into her voice. "A single bite could kill you."

"Really? But spiders don't bite unless they're afraid of you, and she and I are already acquainted. Neither of us has anything to fear."

"Acquainted," Maleficent echoed, cynically, and Rose felt sad. For all her knowledge of abstract politics, could the concept of basic politeness really be so alien to her? "Tell me: how does one acquaint herself to a spider?"

"Well, like how you do with anyone, really. You start off by introducing yourself, like this—" Rose pulled her hand away, gently, so as not to disturb her small companion, and brought the spider to eye level. She cleared her throat exaggeratedly. "Hello, spider! My name is Briar Rose—although I suppose I oughtn't to share my name so freely. Er, how about… Angélique! Ahem: My name is Angélique. It's a pleasure to meet you!"

"And that's all?"

"Yes!" Rose said brightly. "That's all. You see, most creatures don't want to hurt each other… except carnivores, and even then I think it's more that they have to. Now that I've gone out of my way to be polite to her, she has no reason to think I mean her harm."

"And you have never been bitten? Not by anything?"

"Once or twice, while sleeping. And I've been stung by bees, of course, romping carelessly about the glade, but never once I've had the opportunity to introduce myself to the hive. It's as I said—"

"You know every poison in your woods, and you do not fear the wolves," Maleficent echoed, thoughtfully weighing each and every word. Rose knew what that tone meant: some great revelation had finally clicked in Maleficent's head. Rose smiled; it was her very first night of modeling kindness for Maleficent, and it seemed she was already making a breakthrough! It hadn't been excessively hard—had no one bothered to show Maleficent kindness before?

"And now that you have the secret, you don't have to fear them, either."

"Why would I fear the wolves? I am far more adept a killer than they."

Rose deflated; she could not suppress a shiver at the memory of the man's mangled shoulder. And the statues… and their very first meeting, when Maleficent had whispered at and cajoled and threatened her from the shadows.

What changed, between that first meeting and the second?

Was it that Rose had proven herself trustworthy by returning the necklace? But then—

"I can see that you're ruminating," Maleficent said, "and loathe as I am to interrupt you from your favorite hobby, I brought you here for a purpose. Are you interested in learning magic or not?"

Rose bowed her head, embarrassed, and went back to focusing on the soil. The texture was softer and more granular than that of her glade. Drier, too. Her spider companion skittered from her wrist onto a blade of grass. The grass itself was darker, thicker, wider, with more heft and crunch. Maleficent turned Rose's hands over and brushed soil over the sensitive pads of her fingers.

Rose squirmed.

"Describe it," Maleficent hinted.

"It's… not one thing, really. It's a bunch of very tiny, different things. Time-weathered rocks and bits of leaves and other decayed things, right? But it all acts as one. It spreads itself all over the Earth, and—and it's brown, and soft, and packs together—"

"What does it want to do?"

"It hasn't a mind. How can it want to do anything?"

"Neither does the sea, and yet its desire is clear: it wants to move. To move is its nature."

"Humans are the same."

"They are," Maleficent said. "And ravens, and dragons—and fairies. And the soil?"

Rose stared at her hands. The dirt itched inertly.

"It wants… to be still?"

Based on Maleficent's expression, that wasn't the answer. Rose's cheeks heated; she felt so stupid. But then, she thought, it wasn't fair—it was like trying to pass a test she had never been given the opportunity to study for.

Maleficent rooted around in the grass and then placed something small and round in Rose's palm: a seed pod. "What about this? What is its nature? What does it want to do?"

"That's easy. A seed wants to grow."

"Yes. And where does it want to grow?"

"In the soil?" Maleficent raised her eyebrow—close, but not quite. "...Upwards? Outwards. Into the light."

"And when?"

"Always," Rose said, "but after a long winter, especially; when the cold first breaks into spring."

Maleficent curled Rose's fingers back over the seed. Then she cupped Rose's closed fist around with each of her hands—like a secret, just for them. "Make it grow."

"How?"

"You are the season, Briar Rose," Maleficent said. "You'll walk with springtime wherever you go."

Rose looked down, again, at her bound fist, and rolled the seed against the folds of flesh inside. It was just a seed, and she was just a girl. What did Maleficent mean, that she walks with springtime? She closed her eyes and squeezed; her mind spiraled.

She opened her hand. The seed was still just a seed. No magic was imparted there.

"You have to want it."

Rose glared at her. "I do want it."

"No, you don't," Maleficent said. "Not enough to supersede reality."

How did anyone want anything hard enough to supersede reality? Rose closed her eyes again—and then opened them. Nothing changed. She looked at Maleficent and watched the hope in her eyes slowly set into disappointment.

Panic seized her. What if she hadn't the capacity for magic after all? Would Maleficent still want her then?

Please, she thought to the seed, squeezing it again—as if the tighter the point of contact, the greater her command. I'm not asking much. You want to grow, don't you? We both want the same thing. I can't have come all this way just to fail at magic—I can't just go back to my little life, after all I've seen. You understand, can't you? You'll help me, won't you?

She unfurled her fingers, like the spiral bud of a morning glory. There in her hand was a seed cracked open; from its seam she could see a hint of the tiniest germ of green.

And then there was the fire, newly lit Maleficent's eyes. Rose leaned into it; she twisted the fingers of her free hand into Maleficent's sleeve and pulled her near. Dangerous—but she'd never hurt Rose. And maybe, if Rose was virtuous enough—if her love was strong enough, her plan clever enough—Maleficent wouldn't hurt anyone else, either, ever again.

"Again," Maleficent said, running her fingers up Rose's shivering, vulnerable wrist and coming back down to cover her palm. "This time, make it blossom."

Chapter Text

Now it was as if all the puzzles of Rose's life had been broken up and scattered before her, and the pieces were, at last, beginning to take shape; all that was left was to figure out how they fit together. What had that mirror meant, calling her the "lorn flesh of Leah"—and a "fey-authored beauty"—and an "ill-befated little girl"? She was not, as she oft made a point of asserting, completely foolish: she was the subject of some strange magic or conspiracy—one that both her aunts and Maleficent had independently resolved to keep hidden from her.

Her first step was to compile the evidence. Under her mattress she stowed stacks of torn-off bits of paper, upon which she wrote, in a shorthand of her own invention, every detail of her life—every interaction with her aunts and Maleficent—that might be construed as strange. Her second step was to make a list all her possible truths:

My family is of noble status, and my aunts stole me from my them, perhaps for ransom, or no, no, they would never, they must have done it to protect me…

My parents are deeply wicked, and would have abused me terribly had my aunts not spirited me away.

I have no family; my aunts made me with their magic, and they can't bring themselves to show me to society, since I'm strange and wrong and not altogether human.

I'm not a foundling, but a changeling; that's where my magic comes from, and there's some purpose for which the elder fairies are hiding my fey heritage from me.

I have a changeling, out there, living my birthright, and I cannot leave the fey world, for the magic of a deal binds me to it, at least until I've come of age.

I have an incurable illness, almost certain to turn fatal before I'm sixteen. My aunts took me out to the woods where the air is fresh and the water is clean so I may have a simple, happy life before I die.

I'm cursed, and I have been since my infancy.

I'm hunted; there is something out there that wants to kill me, and the only thing protecting me is my ignorance.

She circled the most likely candidates and scratched out those too preposterous even for her vivid imagination. That Rose could have a changeling twin seemed startlingly likely, the more she thought of it. What else did one make of a human girl living alone with fairy guardians, forbidden to learn anything about herself or the human world beyond? But it didn't explain everything. Why did Maleficent withhold information from her, too? Was there such honor amongst fey? The questions swirled, and buzzed, and then faded, like how one grows accustomed to an ache or the itch of a scar. She ran low of ink and paper and candlewax and then she put her scraps of shorthand away.

An even more critical thread had been left unresolved.

Maleficent—brilliant Maleficent; wicked Maleficent; violent and generous, cold and inviting, unwittingly treasured after a long life spent tragically impoverished of kindness—had to be demonstrated the goodness of love.

Some days after Rose had learned to make a seed blossom, Maleficent took her to a new place in the day-part of the world, still close to the blue-gray mountains and the thick zoysiagrass and the frothy white trees. It was a once-home and garden, ravaged by burn; wildfires were another of God's creations that disquieted Rose with their existence. The inhabitants had either burned alive or escaped. Maleficent insisted that it didn't matter. This dead garden was now Rose's.

"A belated birthday gift, for your fourteenth," Maleficent said, with a sense of put-upon magnanimity. "I didn't think to give you anything when the spring came."

"Do fairies have birthdays?"

"If we do, I do not remember mine."

"Well, a life's worth celebrating, I think—particularly the life of my dearest friend! If I'm the first of spring, you can be the first of winter, so we have some happiness to look forward to even as nature starts to fall asleep," Rose said, and watched, with impish delight, as Maleficent's lips struggled to choose an expression.

Sad as it was to be surrounded with the husks of things once-living, Rose knew that ash made soil fertile, and her work would be easy; she rolled up her sleeves and starting digging for seeds. Maleficent stilled her with a tap on the forearm. She hunched down next to Rose and dug up a seed pod from its place in the soil. Then she touched the branch of a fire-stripped bush, the seed's foremother, blackening her pale green fingers with its char. Her dark robes draped all over the ashen soil and stained them even darker.

"Not all magic is made equal," Maleficent said, starting quietly, as she sometimes liked to, so she could crescendo properly to the climax of her lesson. She stood again, taking her skirts with her fists and swooping—Maleficent liked to swoop while she was lecturing, and Rose, who typically found her grandiose gestures intimidating, was starting to find them rather endearing. "There is cooperative magic, like the sort you have already demonstrated. Rain wants to fall—"

Maleficent snapped her fingers and there, after several seconds delay, fell a fat droplet of water, right on her palm. Following it was another, and then another, and then a sheet of them, pattering down from the heavy clouds above, and then they were caught, as one might expect, in the rain.

Rose clapped her hands and laughed.

"—the wind wants to blow—"

A northerly gust came and blew Rose nearly sideways, ravaging a braid of white florets that she had so carefully woven into her hair.

"—and a seed wants to grow."

Maleficent unfurled her other palm. The stolen seed within it cracked forth, violently, into a snaking length of briars, twisting all up Maleficent's arms and neck and horns an adorning her as a rich, evergreen jewelry.

"These are the easy spells: the sort an infant fairy might perform accidentally in her sleep. When they've mastered those, they'll move on to the second sort: magic which neither follows the flow of the world nor fights against it. For example—" Maleficent tapped Rose on the forehead, and Rose flinched, and sneezed, and all of a sudden felt sweeter, lighter, as though some part of her body her had untensed and let go. Bits of green sparkle fell to her shoulders and faded away. "—the gift of pleasant dreams. A dream doesn't care if it's a good dream or a bad dream; all it cares about being is a dream. Its qualities, for the sufficiently powerful spellcaster, are entirely the subject of will."

"The most difficult magic must be the sort that goes against the nature of whatever you're trying to influence, then, right?"

"I am a fairy," Maleficent said—the lack of comment being as good as a confirmation. "It would be a violation of my nature if I were to spontaneously transform into something else. Say, oh… a dragon."

Just the mental image winded Rose. "Can you," she breathed, "turn into a dragon?"

Maleficent kneeled down and tapped Rose on the chin. A serpentine smile flickered briefly across her lips. "Would you like it if I could?"

Rose's mouth was halfway open to make an enthusiastic yes when a vein of light burst and bled all across the sky. She threw her arms over her face to shield her eyes from the lightning; at that very same moment came the thunderclap, and another gust of wind blew her over, into the muddy grass. When she lifted her face again Maleficent was growing, twisting, grotesquely, into a terrifying alien shape, her neck stretching, shards of keratin tearing out of her skin—until at last a magnificent dragon was rearing its head above. Lightning cracked again and lit the creeklets streaming down Maleficent's new scales, tinged with the green opal shine of magic, pooling in the divots left by her massive claws.

Rose could not breathe, suddenly, at the scale. She didn't understand why; she had long gotten used to Cathassach. She was suddenly aware of the smallness of her own body—nearly a woman, second-tallest of all the human-shaped people she knew, but nothing compared to a dragon—and of her position: flat on her back; her dress clinging in the downpour, mapping out all the dips and convexities of the labored heaving of her stomach; the tenderness of Maleficent's dragon-belly near enough to touch.

Maleficent twirled a talon in Rose's hair and yanked her upward. Rose gasped and glared; Maleficent looked steadily at her. Rose could not believe this was Maleficent—but then a characteristic arrogance glinted in those reptile eyes, and she could be mistaken for no other.

She remembered: timidity does not suit you. She squared her shoulders and breathed in slowly, lungs to stomach, held, and then out again, through the teeth. The fluttering in her gut did not go away. For a moment she burned with hatred for her own fragility; then she inspected the feeling more closely, and realized that it wasn't quite fear.

Maleficent dropped Rose back onto the grass. She shrank again, and then she was back to her regular form, wringing the rain out from her long, thick, shapeless robes.

"Could you always—"

"Rain wants to fall—" Maleficent continued, and Rose wanted to kick mud at her. To introduce Rose to such a revelation as shapeshifting and then to breeze blithely on past it! "—downward. It is very much against the rain's nature to fall up."

She snapped her fingers again, and so it did. Puddles of water sluiced upwards. When the water found its way back into the clouds, they parted, uncovering the pale autumn sky.

Rose blinked. Her head spun.

"Then there's this," Maleficent said, and tapped Rose on the crown of her head. At first she thought nothing had happened, and then she looked down at her hands.

She had none.

Rose's body was gone.

She looked sharply back at Maleficent. As she moved, she felt her curls bob and bounce across her shoulders. Experimentally, she wiggled her fingers and toes. She crossed her legs. So her body wasn't gone, after all; she looked down at the grass again, and saw that it was pressed down, right where she was sitting. She blinked a few times, and there she was again, clothes and all, not a single thread out of place.

"How is invisibility a violation of my nature?" Rose demanded.

"Beauty demands to be witnessed."

Rose's face went fire-poker hot; she resisted the urge to bury her head into the dirt. Maleficent had not smiled with the words, nor had her eyes crinkled in that self-satisfied way they sometimes did when she was trying to needle Rose into embarrassment. She had said it as a matter of fact. (Absently, Rose dragged her fingers across her throat. Maleficent looked at her, and they had a moment of recursivity—of noticing that the other had noticed that the other had noticed—but if Maleficent felt any particular way about it, her expression did not say.)

So Maleficent was making a point that she was a very, very powerful fairy. Rose was not so powerful; it had taken her more than a week to get a sprout to blossom. Rose had not been in the habit of guessing at others' intentions, before that night, just over a season ago, with the harp and the old man and his tragic fairy deal. Now she guessed at everything. Was the display of power a cloaked threat? No—Maleficent adored her. Rose was coming to realize that she and the Raven—in spite of all of Rose's insecurities—were perhaps all that Maleficent adored. Her stomach swooped when she thought it; she felt light and glowy, like little lamps had lit inside her toes and fingertips and all her insides were replaced with fledgling down and freshly-whipped meringue. Maybe it was a threat against all that stood against them: the men with the iron crucifixes and the stomach-churning attentions that they apparently directed toward little girls; the freezing rivers and the poisonous plants and the wolves.

"That should be sufficient for tonight," Maleficent said, gathering herself, making to go. "Your task is straightforward: revivify the garden. I'll be back for you three hours hence."

"You're leaving me here alone?"

"What need have you for me? You made the sprout blossom. This is within your capabilities."

"Why need I need you? I want you. I take pleasure in your company."

"You will do this alone," Maleficent said, hesitatingly, brow bunched, eyes hard, but not in anger. Then she was gone; then Rose crawled her way back to a pleasance, where a half-burnt fence offered some privacy. She peeled off her wet dress and wrung it and hung it to dry. She looked upon all the work that was waiting for her, and her heart grew a little heavy, but it did not sink.

Alone.

She listened, breath held, to the birds. She whistled, mimicking their tune; after two or three repetitions, a hawfinch landed fat and curious on her upturned wrist.

"Hello, little creature," Rose said. The wind blew by and she shivered without her clothes, but she found, again, that she was not very cold. "Would you and your brothers like to help me look for seeds?"

* * *

Her dreams were sweet. She didn't remember much of them. There were flashes: warm, broad belly scales and her back against a cool, wet mossbed… She was embarrassed. She spent the next morning scraping oil off her cookpots and trying not to think about it.

It was a library night, shortly after, though her three hours in the garden hadn't amounted to much, and she knew she would be brought to try again later in the week. Maleficent was distracted when Rose arrived; she had a book in front of her and she was writing, in a thin, looping, sprawling hand: names and dates and numbers and tallymarks. One of the names read Leah. The words next to it were too angry and hasty to decipher.

Rose bit her lip. Foxfooted, she approached the back of the sofa. She wrapped her arms loosely around Maleficent's shoulders and leaned forward, her cheek pressing up against the beads and stones along Maleficent's becollared neck.

"You and my aunts are lying to me," Rose whispered. "The both of you, about the same thing."

Maleficent's eye twitched, so Rose knew that she heard her. She didn't react, otherwise; she licked her finger, turned the page, and kept on writing in her little book.

"Is there something wrong with me, Maleficent? Am I really human? Am I sick? Am I bound here? Is someone trying to kill me?"

…

"You know each other, don't you? You and my aunts. How did you meet them? How long ago was it? Or do all fairies know each other?"

…

"You're the reason they told me to never cross the river into the dark woods. They're terrified of you—which is perfectly reasonable, I'll grant them. Though that doesn't explain why neither of you will allow me to speak to strangers…"

…

"I suppose I can't keep you from lying to me, either," Rose sighed. "But I can handle the truth, whatever you think. I am not weak."

"You say that often. I am not weak. I am not stupid." Maleficent's eyes left her book and found their way to Rose's face. "Do you think you need to remind me? When have I ever called you stupid?"

"Thoughtless, stupid, self-destructive brat…" Rose recited, mildly incredulous. Maleficent smiled.

"You have a memory for insults."

"That was barely a fortnight past. And you're no better. Half the time I'll be minding my own business, reading my history books, and you'll glance over my shoulder and launch into a story of some king or other who'd slighted you over a century ago."

"Your behavior that night had been foolish beyond reason, but a single moment does not make an entire character," which was as close to an apology Rose thought her capable of. "I won't accept that I was the source of this… defensiveness. You've been muttering such ridiculous things about yourself since the night of our acquaintance."

"I remind others because I think I need to remind myself," Rose admitted.

"Well, tell me, Briar Rose: who was the first to make you feel so weak and so stupid?"

Rose's first thought was so ungenerous that she could not forgive herself for having it. Flora certainly hadn't been trying to damage her self-esteem. There was a collective implication, though, to all that Rose was forbidden to do: learn a mite of history or a solitary detail of her parentage; wander further than an acre from the cottage; speak to a single other living human being, without getting herself killed or abducted or despoiled…

"If you can't tell me what, at least tell me why," Rose said, circling back to her original point. Maleficent shut her book and placed it on the table beside her. Rose took her open lap as an invitation; Maleficent's eyes widened a little when Rose swung herself over the sofa and flopped backward, resting her head on Maleficent's thighs. But she didn't push Rose away.

"Humans do not suffer well the knowledge of their own fate." Maleficent didn't pet Rose's hair, like she ought to have—like she might have if she were coming off the high of something, like on the night with the harp, or when she was overtaken with ardor for the teaching of magic; instead she rested her fingers lamely at the edge of Rose's curls. "You cannot change it. I cannot change it. You gain nothing from being told."

"Will I have a miserable life, Maleficent?"

"...You said you are happy now, did you not?"

"I am many things. But being here with you makes me very, very happy, yes."

"Then you will have a very, very happy life," Maleficent said, and that was real, because Maleficent's lies were always ones of omission, and she wouldn't have said it so directly if it weren't to be true. The churning in Rose's stomach quieted. Her mind automatically shot out to look for a loophole in Maleficent's statement; she shut the door on that thought, tightly, and let her mind go pure and blank, too desperate to be comforted by the assurance to allow for any other possibility.

* * *

But Maleficent was not happy. Winter's first came, and Rose brought up to the castle as many little treasures as she could think of, as many as she could get away with without suspicion: flower pressings; a dry, day-old slice of plum-raisin cake; polished river rocks; an acorn bangle, a match of the piece she'd strung together some time ago; sprigs of clover; shimmery snail shells; and a twig sculpture of the Raven, rather abstract in design, that she affixed with clay-mud and dried daylong in the sun. She wrapped the objects in paper and some of her best cloth, which she'd hand-dyed as deep a green as she could, and tied it all off with a raw-edge strip of blue market satin, her most prized textile, gifted to her by Flora for her twelfth birthday and stored carefully away ever since. On the green cloth she embroidered sweetbriars and woodlarks and girthy old oak trees in a gold-yellow thread; on the paper she drew spider-flowers and cawing corvids and twisty hawthorns in ink.

Maleficent unwrapped her present with the same delicacy and attention that she would have directed anything. First she held the cake between her thumb and forefinger and took one long, savoring bite. Then she picked up and lingered upon every object in the collection, as if cataloging their worth. She smiled; some crinkles above her cheeks even indicated real pleasure. But there was a darkness in her eyes that felt nearly impenetrable.

"I acknowledge your offering," Maleficent said, once Rose's presentation had come to an end. "Now what are you angling for in return?"

"It's your birthday!" Rose said. "The first of winter. We'd agreed upon it. This is your present."

"Ah—recompense for your own."

"No. Had you given me nothing—were you to never give me another birthday gift for as long as I lived—it wouldn't deny me the joy of having treated you today. Must you turn everything into a transaction?"

"I am a fairy," Maleficent said.

Later that night, in the garden, Rose brought a shrub althea to leaf. Its stems were sturdy, and its jagged foliage ample—frustration made her improve more quickly. The difference was startling. She collapsed back into the grass and growled and sighed.

Her failure should not have come as a surprise, she thought. After all, she had bored Maleficent with child-gifts. Maleficent was not her aunt; of course she would not be interested in twig sculptures and acorn jewelry, much as it had delighted Rose to make them. She was ancient and hedonistic. She was of exacting standards and taste. She gave grandiosely and would comprehend nothing but the same level of effort in return.

One night Rose arranged it such that she could make Maleficent dinner. Maleficent watched as she chopped fruits and vegetables and mushrooms and nuts; stewed and seared and sautéed, braised in seed oil and blanched and boiled and browned. There were fennel bulbs and chicory and carrots and parsnips and onions and apples and three different kinds of bread. She made sauce from plums and anise and served it up with a goblet of wild cherry liqueur (stolen from her aunts' cellar, but then Rose figured no one had technically barred her from taking it). What Rose could not forage or harvest in-season she'd forced to grow; and she could do it, after several hours of straining and struggling, for the thought of surprising Maleficent with a feast had ignited her confidence and vigor threefold.

"Did you like it?" Rose asked, when Maleficent finished her plate.

Maleficent dabbed the corners of her mouth with the table's cloth and then took another sip from the goblet. "You do all the cooking in your cottage, yes?"

Rose nodded. "Nearly. Merryweather did it all when I was too young to handle fire."

Maleficent nodded back, as if this fact made sense to her. The shadow of the mystery of Maleficent's past with her aunts hung over the conversation, for a flash of a second; Rose shooed away the thought.

She pushed her plate back and pressed her cheek cutely against the table. "Isn't it a joyful thing," Rose mused, "to be fed by someone who loves you?"

Maleficent's eyes crinkled again—she was pleased, certainly, perhaps even amused—but at that very same moment she scoffed and said, "Brought to joy by a woodcutter girl's braised fennel?" and Rose's heart grew a little heavier.

Rose tried everything she could think of. She arranged a little a party with the dragons—Cathassach taking on much of the responsibility of planning—and while Maleficent enjoyed herself, neither real happiness nor an understanding of the joy of love did it seem to impart her. Under a rotted log by the river she found nightingale's bones, picked bare by scavengers—so Rose prayed over them, thanking the little creature for its life, and the Christian God for welcoming him back into the Kingdom of Heaven, and Nature for the trueness and the consistency of her cycles, though Rose's private feelings about death were growing more sacrilegious by the day. Then she kissed them, and then she cleaned them and carved them into intricate little beads. From the bone-beads she made a sort of horn-lace, which she strung up over Maleficent's head, and Maleficent said that she liked them, but the darkness remained, and her smile did not reach her eyes. And then Rose thought, with increasing frustration: perhaps physical affection is all it takes to show someone you love them, but toward the onslaught of hugs and cuddles Maleficent remained stoic; and then she thought, well, perhaps real love is shown through acts of service, but she could not think of anything a mortal fourteen-year-old might be able to do for an ancient fairy, and when she asked, all Maleficent did was laugh at the question.

All the while the garden surged. It was fully winter, now, and a hard powder of snow was starting to build on the ground. Rose did not waver. Roots plunged through frost-stiff soil; shrubs came to leaf even through the freeze. She worked until her lungs rattled and her clothes were soaked through from exertion. At the end of her working hours Maleficent would pick up her pliant, wanting body and carry her off to be bathed and fed and tucked in for a few winks in that dusty-rose bedroom. Sometimes the Raven kept her company and sometimes she worked totally alone. Night by night by night she pecked at it, and by February she was rollicking in a minor empire of green.

"Here it is, all for you," Rose said to Maleficent, when she finally deemed the project presentable. "You gave me this garden, and now I give you everything alive in it."

"You know this can't last forever," Maleficent said. Rose didn't know what she meant until she tore a leaf off right at the mouth of its tender vein; some spots were already frost-scorched and blackening. "Even when the warm comes—even in a soil so fertile—they'll be fighting each other for nutrients."

"Does it matter? They won't need nutrients. It's my magic that keeps them alive."

"For now. But how will they fare the next time your aunts decide to keep you?"

"I won't let them keep me again, no matter the punishment."

"And when you die?"

"I have never met anyone so preoccupied with the deaths of little girls."

"You have never met anyone at all," Maleficent reminded her. Rose squeezed Maleficent's hand and then let go. Maleficent was watching the landscape, still, and there was some idea stirring away behind those yellow eyes. She lifted her staff and spoke a series of quiet, mother-tongue words. Several of Rose's plants filled at the heart with a great, green light; then, abruptly, they withered and died.

Rose could not comprehend. She scratched at her arms nervously and stared, trying very hard not to cry.

"There. What remains will last," Maleficent said. She then sat in the snow. Rose followed her down. Her knees sank into the cold and felt prickly and raw. She leaned against Maleficent, though Maleficent wasn't all that much warmer, and in truth warmth had ceased to be comforting. She clawed absently at the snow in front of her until her nails stung and her fingers came up looking as red as cherries.

When Rose looked at Maleficent again she was still looking out at the garden, no longer surveying it but simply looking, like one does at the moon or a sunset, a thing you've seen a hundred times but that still occasionally arrests you with the simple enduringness of its beauty. Finally some pride eked out of Rose's chest and poked its head above all her other complicated emotions. Maleficent's eyes were again alight, and though Rose didn't understand its meaning, she was beginning to understand its shape. Maleficent was most satisfied when exerting her influence over another.

Rose fell back into the snow and suddenly laughed. Some errant tears fell down her cheek and froze in the shell of her ear. Maleficent startled. She twisted to look at her—brows bunched, to make it clear that she found Rose's mood swings equal parts confusing and ridiculous—and Rose thought, good, because she'd worked hard to make a sight of the garden but she really hungered for Maleficent's eyes on her. She opened herself: she stretched her arms above her head and then let them go slack; she relaxed her chest with a long exhale and loosened her thighs. She imagined Maleficent's hands in her hair and on her soft belly, but Maleficent did not take the invitation to touch her. Rose was disappointed; Rose was, in private, relieved; Rose was young—she didn't know what she wanted.

"I am happy," she declared.

Maleficent hummed low in response. She was not happy, but she was something close to it. Rose hummed back, sweeter, and then elaborated it into a tune of celebration for this minor victory of love.

Chapter Text

On the eve of Rose's sixteenth birthday, Maleficent took her atop a short, palomino mountain, where they overlooked a vale of woody shrub and amber long-grass and kettles of crooning vultures, varieties with which Rose was not yet familiar. This was a rarity for Rose, for by those days Maleficent had taken her most everywhere: if there was a mountain, she and Maleficent had climbed it; if there was a wilderness, they had trekked across it; if there was an herb of magical import, they had foraged for it; and so forth, so that Rose, who was still a child by the barest of margins, felt herself as worldly as any woman, never mind the fact that she had yet to meet another mortal soul.

"—and what sort of components do you use to bind a weather spell?" Maleficent cast her voice so that in the still, thin air, her words were more a feeling than a sound. Rose shivered at how they crept slowly up the nape of her neck and into her ear.

"Feathers, beaks, scales, and claws, since they're hardy, and you can use them to stabilize anything, not just spells for weather—but not hair or fur or horns and hooves, which are built from the same sort of material but differently. Oh, but Maleficent, you've been avoiding the question all night: what are we doing tomorrow?"

"Demonstrate," Maleficent said, ignoring her. Rose rolled her eyes at the same time that she rolled up her sleeves. She took a deep breath and let the cold of magic seep into her bones. The world wavered at its edges—half-seconds slowed to seconds—her imagination spurred: she and Maleficent were eagles up in their eyrie, and all the world below belonged to them. She willed this, flexing her toes and imagining them talons. She watched steadily: nothing… nothing… and then—

A gray-and-yellow flycatcher, darting across the dark crown of a far-off tree.

Green blurred from Rose's fingertips. All at once the bird was in Rose's hand and struggling, loudly, violently, for his life. Rose tried to be quick. She plucked three of his feathers, two coming away sticky, red—then he was free, jagging back into the world below, leaving a warm, frightened feeling in the cup of Rose's palm.

"I hate doing that," Rose said, frowning. "They're not mine to take."

"All the world is yours to take," Maleficent said, but with the dispassion of one who knew Rose was beyond convincing. "They'll grow back, in any case."

"Still."

"Call down the rain," Maleficent said. From a satiny pack tied at her hip Rose took out her other components: switchgrass, sun-whitened grayling bones, doe's tears. She didn't like using the bones or the tears—she did not like moving with the powers of death or sadness—but this was Maleficent's magic, and it was old death, at least, that Rose was tasked to work with, repurposed with the appropriate honor and prayer; no matter the impetus, no matter Maleficent's urging, Rose would not kill.

She got down on her knees and Maleficent did not follow her; Maleficent watched like a shadow overhead as Rose prepared her workspace. A crystal mortar went between Rose's knees. She dropped the feathers and tears and switchgrass into the dish and crushed them together with a crystal pestle. She was past the need for flint; she touched the mixture gently with her right index finger, and held the bones between the thumb and index of the left, and began to sing her incantations.

The spell took shape. The mixture ignited and then evaporated totally into the air; the bones became like wet clay in her fingers. She twisted them 'round her knuckles, into the shape of rings, and then she sung higher, and a drop of water plunked down on her nose from the sky.

She looked up and watched the dark clouds gather. Now she dropped her voice low. The plinking doubled and tripled. Sporadic droplets thickened to a steady spray. Something was building—and building—starting in her throat and spreading, behind her face and eyes, tingling—

She sneezed violently. The bones turned to dust between her fingers and the pestle flew. She opened her eyes and blinked. The rain had stopped; in its place now fell a gentle, downy snow.

"I said rain," Maleficent needled, so Rose let a powdery handful collect in her fist and then threw it roughly in the direction of Maleficent's face. Then she stood up and sighed. "At least I'll always have this," Rose said; she made a little twisting motion in the air, and up sprouted a dwarf tree, ripe already with grafts of out-of-season fruits.

"You're complacent," Maleficent said, in a tone that might've been harsh to any ear but Rose's. Still, she plucked two apples from Rose's tree, and still, she took a long, relishing taste. She offered the other to Rose, and Rose took it; she ate, and it was sweeter than honey and crisper than dew at dawn. She thought of the Eden story, and, distracted, she bit into her cheek; with a squeak of pain she spit apple pulp and blood into the snow.

Maleficent took her by the chin and wiped off some of the blood-spit that had dribbled there. Rose smiled crooked, with red, probably, between the teeth—then she took off down the mountain path, inviting Maleficent to chase her.

Maleficent didn't, of course; she wouldn't lower herself to such childish games as this. But Rose laughed and laughed and ran anyway, as this was her very last night of being a child, and some part of her felt—though no one had told her this in as many words—that this would be the last time she could ever do something this silly or stupid ever again. When she reached the bowl of the underlying cirque she was just about ready to vomit from exertion. She threw herself down, toward a bed of ferns, but Maleficent was quicker: in a blink Rose was wrapped in cold green flame and then in a set of lanky, beclothed arms. Maleficent brought her down gently, so that Rose was lying with her head in Maleficent's lap, and made her drink water between bouts of heaves and coughing. Slowly Rose's breath came back to her, and then they were just sitting there, Rose's face beat red and her pulse thrumming but in a nice way, with Maleficent's arms limp around her shoulders.

Rose thought: I am the bird—captivated. But she wasn't trying to escape. She'd had dream after dream of lying like this, cheek squashed against Maleficent's thighs, arms tangling into arms: twisting away, overwhelmed; twisted toward, seeking something, mouth to skin, touching. She liked to be held; she wanted to be the warm, frightened feeling in Maleficent's palm.

Tomorrow I'll be a woman, she wanted to say.

"So, what are our plans?" she asked again, instead. "My aunts always try and surprise me with something, so I just want to account for, you know, whether I should gorge myself on cake or be sparing—"

"Gorge yourself," Maleficent replied. "A sixteenth birthday only comes once, after all." She said it breezily, but she didn't look breezy at all. Her expression reminded Rose of a great stormcloud marching in from the horizon. The immensity of it made it almost impossible to meet Maleficent's eye.

* * *

A couple of months ago, in the dead of winter, when the nights were at their coldest and the sap was at its lowest, Rose had asked, "Fauna, what is true love?"

"Rosie, you already know!" Merryweather had cut in, before Fauna'd really even gotten a chance to consider the question. "It's the most powerful force in the universe!"

"But what is it?"

This really had Merryweather stumped. Rose had a splitting axe in hand; she brought it down over her head and cracked the log in front of her into two clean halves. Fauna was a few paces away, stacking logs for seasoning. Merryweather, who wasn't helping but who deserved the rest, since she would be cooking dinner that night, sat by and thought—and thought—and thought—and then, before she could think herself into frustration, Rose clarified:

"I just mean—is it any love that's true, or is it this big, grand, singular event, like a soulmate, like you've got exactly one True Love and it's the perfect love that was meant for you?"

Immediately, Merryweather responded, "Why, it's your one, perfect True Love, of course," while at the exact same time Fauna said, "Oh, it would be any love that's true," and then the sisters looked at each other, the neither of them speaking. It was quiet enough in that wood that one could drop a sewing needle and hear the impact; it stayed that way for a good thirty or forty-five seconds, 'til the conversation moved awkwardly on.

That night, Rose did what she always did when she had a question that her aunts couldn't answer satisfactorily—and sometimes, even when they could:

"Maleficent, what is true love?"

They were in the library, and they were sitting close but not touching—Rose always took stock of whether or not they were touching. Maleficent stilled at the question; she stilled so perfectly and for so long that Rose started fidgeting twice as much to compensate.

"Something you're unlikely to ever experience," Maleficent settled on, which Rose felt was perhaps the most insulting answer she could have chosen. Her cheeks burned. She didn't cry or stomp her feet, since that would have been childish, but she still felt the need to defend herself, so she said, "I know that I—I have many faults, I'm certain, but surely I'm not so unlovable that—"

"It has nothing to do with how lovable or unlovable you might be. How do you expect to find true love when you have never ventured to meet another person?"

"I've met you," Rose countered.

"That invites a question," Maleficent said, voice growing dark. "Am I your true love?"

It didn't seem so absurd a possibility. She was young, yes, and Maleficent was ancient—but the issue with this wasn't apparent to Rose, who was, by now, aware of the marriage habits of royalty, and in any case she would not stay young forever. There was a manner of love between them, which Rose admitted to freely, and frequently, with ardor; Maleficent danced around it in words but was clear enough with it in action. It was different from the love that Rose had with Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather. It was perhaps different from all the love in the world. It felt like it could be. Rose wouldn't know; she hadn't the experience to draw from.

The morning of her sixteenth birthday, Rose woke to a dissonance of a butcherbird's shrieks and a dotterel's harping and the sensual musk of wood-violet blooming up from below her window. She couldn't remember her dreams, but that they had been generically pleasant—nevertheless her bedding was all athrow, and she woke half-off the mattress, with her blood rushing to her head, and her skin mucky and cold with congealed sweat. Her heart beat like a rabbit's and she felt too nauseous for breakfast and was in desperate need of a bath. As she lay there in her stickiness she thought, with no real impetus, of that dead-of-winter conversation: Maleficent's face had gone totally bloodless, and the idea, for whatever reason, had seemed to infuriate her. But she hadn't said, "no, Briar Rose, I do not love you." She hadn't said, "no, Briar Rose, my love for you is not true."

Fairies only ever lied by implication.

Flora knocked at the door. Rose rolled out of bed and felt around for a clean dress and bodice, and so her day began.

There was no hint of "when you're sixteen, the world will be yours." Her aunts seemed nervous, but in an excitable sort of way, chittering in low tones between themselves with that special giddy secrecy only found amongst sisters; when they sent Rose off, after bath and breakfast, to go berry-picking—never mind that there was a whole mound of freshed-picked berries on the kitchen counter, waiting to get turned to preserves—Rose didn't fight them. She grabbed her brown shawl and basket and breezed on out the door.

She took to the forest as if it were the very first time she'd ever been there. In a way, it was; as she parted through some ribbands of vine, she thought, Today I am touching you as a woman; I will never touch you as a child again. As she watched the spider mothers weave their great silk houses, she thought, a little ridiculously, I am like you, now—and perhaps, someday soon, I will have little eggs of my own to carry on my back. She shuddered; the thought did not please her. The morning's nausea returned. She took a deep breath. The grass was soft to her heels, and turfy and lucent and green but for where the shadows stained it, made it blue.

She picked around the cottage until there were no more berries to be found, and then she bent toward the river, and then she walked along it, with her bare feet in the shallows. The dark forest lay to the left of her; the bracken and the spider-flowers wavered in the breeze; her green-and-copper necklace pulsed coolly against her sternum. These were the day and night halves of her home, she thought. She'd been terrified of this place, once upon a time: in her little girl stories she had turned the dark forest into her Hades and the river into her Styx. So many of those stories had started as dreams. An old dream came to her, suddenly, a long-lorn childhood memory: she was swaddled, not yet old enough to walk, and a creature was towering over her: long and thin, like a spindle; bent crooked, hawthorny, nearly human, taking on only the vaguest outline in a broad hall lined with dark—it was her death, and it spoke to her softly, like it was cooing at a baby. All of a sudden the water became too cold between Rose's toes, and she jumped; all of a sudden she fell in on herself, and walked toward the sun-dappled half of the wood like a small, frightened animal.

So far, it had not been a very good birthday.

She straightened her back. She wandered—she looked around at everything and tried to remember, because it felt, crazily, like she was being made to say goodbye.

There, those big, gnarling roots: she'd tripped on them when she was newly toddling, and it gave her her first-ever sprained ankle. She remembered crying and crying, and Flora flying into a right tizzy, and Fauna trying, in vain, to calm both of them down. And there, in that clearing! That's where Flora taught her how to forage; she wouldn't let Rose pick up a basket until she could identify every single poison that grew in their wide, wide forest. A little further: those two trees and their low-swooping branches had once been Rose's stage. This wasn't long after she learned how to read and write; she wrote up a ghastly little play for Merryweather, a whole four-pager, and memorized it and performed it all by herself. Rose remembered flubbing a critical line right at the story's climax, and growing so hot with frustration and embarrassment that she threw herself right at the ground and sobbed. Merryweather clapped for her anyway, and told her it was the best play she'd ever seen.

Rose remembered all the games she used to play, and marveled to think that her aunts once let her wander so freely. There was the stump that had once been her pirate ship, though her "plundering" had involved a lot less theft than a real pirate and lot more collecting acorns for the squirrels. That tall oak, with its eminently climbable branches, was her tower, for when she was reenacting Persinette… beneath that willow, when she was a little older, curtained with petals, was where she'd hide away and throw herself against the trunk and pretend a handsome prince was kissing her…

Eventually, of course, princes stopped holding her attention.

Her death stared at her, the spectre of an outline at the center of her vision. There was something unnervingly familiar about its shape. She closed her eyes; she didn't want to see it. She opened them again. She whistled high and then low and then hooed quietly into the spring air. The pollen danced. An owl came down noiselessly and perched on her outstretched forearm. He'd been a member of her choir, once upon a time. She hummed a few notes, so he could find the key.

"I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream," she sang. "I know you, that gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam…"

She spun with her owl, but in her mind's eye, it was death that she was dancing with. The hall of dark became the castle—not Maleficent's castle, but the mirror's castle, with the smiling crowds, and Flora and Fauna and Merryweather, and their ethereal shaft of light. As she spun, the squirrels followed at her heels; swifts went between her legs; nightingales twirled 'round her head; and where she set foot, clover grew, and trees came to fruit when she touched them.

"Yet I know it's true, that visions are seldom all they seem. But if I know you, I know what you'll do. You'll—"

"—love me at once, the way you did once, upon a—"

What happened next was nearly too quick to account for.

There'd been a hand on her shoulder, and a voice in her ear—lower, even, than Maleficent's, not rich and honeyed but bright, young, and clear. Briar Rose had screamed, and the animals, then, had scattered. Then some seconds blanked by—and then she was halfway across the clearing, back to a tree, wild-eyed, and there was a boy, tied up in briars, forced to his knees. His eyes were round and wide; his mouth was still set to the shape of the song's next syllable. He blinked, and she blinked back at him. He looked down, assessed his predicament, and sighed. Sheepishly, he said, "I suppose that's what I get for startling a fairy."

"I'm not a fairy," Rose said, without thinking.

"Aren't you? What manner of creature are you, then?"

"No creature," Rose said. "I'm a human."

"A human! Well, so am I." He bowed as best he could, given his bindings. "But I've never met a human who can do this. Are you sure you're not a fairy?"

No, Rose thought—and was startled, privately, by her admission. Instead of answering, though, she asked: "What are you doing, all the way out here?"

"'Shirking my duties,' my father would say. And you? Do you live out here?"

"Why would I tell a stranger something like that?"

"A stranger! Why, I'm no stranger. We've met before."

"...We have?"

"You said it yourself—once upon a dream."

Rose had no pattern for how to interact with a person like this: depthless in his conversation yet nevertheless charming, unintimidated against all reason and unconcerned with propriety or status. She had no pattern for how to interact with a person, period, and yet here he was: her first human, presented to her on the noon of her sixteenth birthday, the very day upon which she was permitted, at least in theory, to step beyond the shallows of childhood and let herself awash in the tides of the World. In her mind warning bells were ringing: she thought of all the things that Maleficent said civilized boys did to young maids, when they caught them well and alone. But Rose was confident that she was the more powerful of the two of them; should he try anything suspicious it would take half a thought to close these briars around his throat. The alarm bells rung louder, at the violence that had so easily taken space in her imagination. She shifted between her feet. The breeze ruffled coolly at her skirt.

The other thing was that this boy was distractingly beautiful.

That was Rose's excuse for how easily her guard was softened. She let the briars fall. He stumbled out from them with all the naturalness of a baby deer newly parted from his mother. From his face he brushed away his gold-limned, cedarwood hair; when the dappled sun fell upon his cheek real gold flecks seemed to sparkle where freckles might otherwise have been. He looked up at her beneath dark fanning lashes and in his eyes she saw all the embry warmth of a hearth and all the tawny beauty of autumn. There was a playful quirk to his pink lips: a sort of noble ruffianism. Now he didn't seem entirely human to Rose, except for that the gold in his hair was the very same as the gold in hers.

"You've a lovely voice," Rose said, at a loss for how to otherwise continue the conversation.

He brightened. He liked to be flattered. "Please; it's nothing next to yours!"

Rose's cheeks went hot. It was nothing she hadn't heard before; why did it feel different, then, coming from a perfect stranger? "I must contradict you."

"Well, either way I oughtn't to take credit for it. When I was a baby—" he started, and then seemed to think better of it, though Rose would have given near anything to hear the end of that sentence. He laughed, suddenly, at absolutely nothing, and spun 'round on his leathern heels. His red cape swooshed around him. "My God," he exclaimed, "where's Samson? I must've gotten carried away." Then he whistled a high, clear whistle that echoed deep into the woods. Rose took a step back; she was not prepared to contend with two human men. But then came a clopping sound, and through the bushes popped the head of a very irritated-looking horse.

"This is Samson, my best friend," the boy said seriously. "Samson, this is the human girl I've just met in the woods." Samson bowed his head to her, and Rose curtseyed back. She took some berries from her basket and let Samson eat them, and was pleased by how comfortably he fed from her palm.

The tone of the interaction changed a little, then. Rose relaxed. Anyone whose best friend was a horse couldn't be too bad, the fact of his wearing leather beside; she could see that Samson was both easy-natured and well cared-for. An unexpected camaraderie sprung between them. For the first time in her life, Rose realized, she was interacting with someone as an equal. All at once a hundred questions sprung to burst from her lips.

"Where do you come from?" Rose asked.

"Oh, a long ways away from here, in the neighboring kingdom. It's more than a week of travel."

"What do you do there?"

"I—" He stopped abruptly. He didn't seem to like the question. "I'll be inheriting my father's work," he said. So he had his own secrets; that made he and Rose more the same.

"Why've you come here?"

"To attend a wedding," he said, distaste thick on his tongue.

"You don't like weddings?" she asked.

"Not this one," he said.

"And why not?"

"You're rather keen on questions, aren't you?"

It was an accusation Rose was well accustomed to. She had no defense for it. She shrugged lightly. "I shall become less keen on questions as soon as you become less keen on answers. And you're the first human I've ever met, so my curiosity is perfectly natural."

"The first human—!" This shook him. He searched her face for some hint of comedy; she thought his amazement rather comical, in fact, but she kept her expression stern and solemn, so that he could tell she was telling the truth. "That can't be possible. Haven't you any parents?"

"I was a foundling child."

"So someone must have found you!"

"Oh, yes," Rose said. "I was found by fairies."

He laughed again—he laughed a lot. He seemed happy, in spite of his incredulity, and in spite of a line of questioning that was evidently displeasurable to him. His happiness seemed effortless; it required no birthday presents nor dinner parties nor great acts of magic to keep it aflame. Rose wanted to study him like a spell.

"Well that explains it all, doesn't it? I should be relieved to know that you're a seelie fosterling, and not some sort of a witch—but yes, the wedding! You're familiar with weddings, then?"

"Only from books," Rose said. "You might educate me on the specifics."

So he sighed dramatically and started recounting his tale. Some details he kept off—for the privacy, Rose presumed, of the prospective bride and groom—but by the end she understood that a wedding would be happening in the city tonight, one of grave political import, and that the groom had not consented to the union. This situation impassioned him greatly, for he believed that a marriage pact should be made only willingly, and then ideally only on the basis of true love.

"That's horrible!" Rose agreed; forced marriages weren't uncommon, by Maleficent's teachings, particularly amongst the political classes, but Rose was nevertheless shaken by it, for the ways of the world still seemed very cruel and unfair to her, and she refused to ennumb herself to them. Instantly she made herself party to this boy's grief. "I take it the marriage was long arranged?"

"Yes. Since birth."

"How does the bride feel about it?"

"I don't know. I've never met her."

"Are you a friend of the groom's?"

The boy paused. For all his charm he didn't seem to be very good at lying. "We're rather intimate, you could say," he settled on. Rose thought it amusingly fairylike, that he should be so concerned with the phrasing of half-truths.

Then, for a second, Rose thought she had found the missing piece of the puzzle, and her heart sank ever deeper. "It's you he would rather be marrying, isn't it?"

But the boy only looked at her oddly. "What a thought," he said, not intending to be rude—it seemed a thought that had genuinely never occurred to him before. "No, that's not it—but where would the children come from, in a marriage like that?"

"I suppose that's the most important thing," Rose said, her own bitterness surprising her.

"I'm Phillip," the boy said at last, having apparently determined the conversation sufficiently advanced toward friendship—and Rose hoped it was a false name, or else he was hopelessly naïve. "And you are—?"

"Angélique," Rose answered, because naïve was one thing she was not. "Tell me more about your friend and your far-off kingdom, then, Phillip."

So he hooked his arm around her elbow, and she startled, but he paid no mind to it, and dragged her with him, and for an hour or two they walked together like that, making idle conversation in the wood.

* * *

When Rose reapproached the cabin there were hot sparks of blue and pink magic puffing out the chimney and up into the sky. She only faltered a little when she saw it, and she wondered what her reaction might have been, in a world where magic had thus far been kept away from her—or if her untrained eye would have noticed it at all.

The magic stopped, however, when her footfalls—deliberately heavy as she made them, though this might have been the perfect moment to catch her aunts out naturally for their fairyhood, and in truth she couldn't articulate why she hadn't taken the opportunity—sounded nearer. She opened the door, expectedly, to a birthday party. But where she had expected a stout loaf of honeyed wheatcake she saw instead a quadruple-tiered cake with all its dyes and frosting, the product of more sugar than a quartet of peasants like themselves should have been able to afford in three or four years of aggressive proffering at the market. She didn't expect the dress: satin, the perfect blue of Merryweather's eyes, with lace and silk organza trim and pearly embroidery: roses nestled 'mid twirls of thick, springy vines. It was hundred times more glorious and delicate than anything Rose could make, given all the satin and lace and organza in the world, and a thousand times moreso than anything she could credit to Flora, Fauna, or Merryweather, at least when they were sewing by hand. It was a dress fit for a princess-bride.

"Surprise!" her aunts shouted, jumping out from behind the stairwell. Rose didn't know what overcame her. She had really intended to play the part of the good niece, at least for the duration of her little party—if she could keep her feelings in check just until the night came, then she could go off to Maleficent, and that would somehow, in some way, make everything better. But near-instantly she was assaulted by the implications. Before she had to a chance to really even process them, some great despair tore wide and raw inside of her, and she slunk to the floor, and cried.

Her aunts flew to her. The questions began: Did you see something? Did you see someone? Are you frightened? Are you injured? It wasn't that lying would be difficult, here: she could say a hunter had come by and shot a doe in the woods, and her gentle heart could not bear the sight of it, and that would have easily been the end. But her throat closed around itself and her speech failed her. She sobbed and sobbed and she could not stop.

"—don't sound like tears of joy, Flora," Merryweather was saying.

It was only when her wracking softened that Fauna came to her and put her gentle arms around Rose's shoulders. That calmed her, a little, and Fauna, voice soft as an ember glow, asked her: "What happened, Rosie?"

"I saw a boy in the woods—" Rose began, thinking it perhaps best to tell some sort of half-truth. As soon as the word boy left her lips her aunts gasped in tandem, and Rose realized, quickly, with all the production she'd just put on, what their assumption would likely be. She held up her hands quick, to assuage them. "I am not hurt," she said, though the rawness in her voice contradicted her. "I am not hurt. I hurt him, if anything—"

"Did he put his hands on you, Rose?" Merryweather was already up and ready to fight. Rose curled in on herself, instinctively; the heat of a man's touch lingered on her neck and the bend of her elbow and across her palms and fingers, where he had touched her, though with a purely friendly intent; though she hadn't let him do anything to her that she hadn't wanted him to, Rose felt all of a sudden shamed by it. What little pride and happiness she had from her first human conversation flickered and died away.

"My virtue is unmarred," Rose rushed to assure them. "But it is my sixteenth birthday, Merryweather, the very day of my entrance to marriageability, and the boy told me there would be a wedding in the city, tonight, and there is a secret about me—for years, I have known this, though I was always afraid to let on—and that dress—"

"—is a wedding dress," Flora finished, voice low and deeply unhappy. The fireplace crackled. The candles on Rose's cake dripped wax upon on the frosting. The air was quiet and solemn. "Oh, my child—you are not the dreamy little girl you once were."

There was no joy in the validation. Fauna squeezed her tighter. Rose couldn't help but take comfort from that, in spite of all. And rush, they did, to comfort her, Merryweather saying:

"You are a princess, Rose. Don't you see what a joy that is? You can have anything your heart desires!"

And Fauna saying: "You've always loved surprises, Rosie. You've always gone on about wanting to see the world."

And Merryweather saying, again: "A princess, like the girls in your stories! Doesn't that sound nice, Rose? Now you'll get to go off a have your own adventure."

"But not this adventure," Rose said, helplessly. "I wanted an adventure but not like this."

An unresolved question still lingered. Her death-spectre still hung like a gallowed woman in the heart of her vision. It was not her aunts from whom Rose sought her answers.

"An hour," she said, standing. "Just—an hour in my room, alone, please? Entirely undisturbed. To calm down and think. To say goodbye to everything."

So Flora said, "Of course, dear," and Rose was not sure if it made her calmer or angrier that Flora actually seemed to understand. She stalked darkly up the stairs and did not slam her door when she closed it, though the temptation had run hot in her. She did not linger upon all her objects and their memories, though she sorely wished to. She was and would always be an exceedingly sentimental girl.

Instead she took a chair and jammed it underneath her doorknob. That would buy her some time, if they decided to come check on her early. All the spell components she had stuffed away in her pillows and drawers she shoved haphazardly into her pockets, along with all her unsent letters and songs and scraps of shorthand that might damn her. She threw off her shawl, because she knew she would not need it. Then she climbed quietly down the window and ran.

* * *

When her legs tired and she felt there was sufficient dark forest between herself and the cottage, she slowed to a walk. And on the way up she saw the statue of a lark, weighing down a curly bough of hawthorn, with the head shattered; and with a conspicuous porphyry about its severed neck, so that there seemed to be a jut of bone. She wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed, though not for temperature. It was quiet in a way she had never totally become used to. She thought about the butterflies, and the silent flapping of their fine, frosty wings. She though of finch song. She thought of the bees' buzzing and the striped tulips that stood straight and proud beneath her bedroom window. She remembered how she would never be a child again.

It was jarring when she cleared the line of trees and saw the height of day above her: full and saturated, with stiff meringue cloud peaks stark against the sky's blue. This was the first time she had ever visited Maleficent in the afternoon. The castle did not look so silvery or ethereal without its moonlight, nor so molten without its setting sun. It was drab stone, though still imposing; it was like a patch of necrosis in the flourish.

Rose climbed.

Maleficent was at the door already when Rose pushed through the gates. She did not come to her; she waited at the stoop with a stony expression, and watched Rose finish her ascent. She did not move until Rose threw herself at her. Her arms came around Rose, then, and kept her steady when Rose buried her face in the bead-studded breastplate of Maleficent's robes. Maleficent touched her and touched her: her hands were so soft and sweet and painfully delicate in stroking Rose's hair. Rose did not try and hide her sobbing. She bared herself willingly now.

"You came to me," Maleficent said, sounding strangely distant. "Of your own volition, you came to me."

"Why do you sound so surprised?" Rose hiccuped. "For years, I've been coming to you—very much of my own volition."

"But it's tonight that matters," Maleficent said.

Maleficent held her for a long time, until the sun was close to setting. Then she drew Rose into the castle, and shut the doors behind them, and they were alone in the dark.

Chapter Text

The day slipped off of Briar Rose like the last evaporating dribbles of a hot bath, baring her to the everwinter that hung about the castle like a stenchy perfume. Still—even in the dark of the castle—Rose could tell that the sun had not yet sunk beneath the horizon. Distantly a pair of wolves bayed at the spark of twilight and yet Rose knew that that last lick of orange was still peeking out somewhere, just along the edge of the sky.

Maleficent kept hold of her longer and tighter than expected. It was a familiar affection, but its tightness bared new topographies: in any other mood, the knife jut of Maleficent hips against Rose's stomach and the ever-slight suggestion of breasts would have left Rose haunted. As it was she was too preoccupied by her recent horrors; she said, "Maleficent, there's to be a wedding, tonight, in the city—" but Maleficent hushed her, her umbra twisting like hands 'round Rose's neck and swallowing the words that threatened to tumble needlessly from her tired, sob-raw throat.

"The time for talking is over," Maleficent said.

Then Maleficent laced one wordless set of fingers between Rose's and led her up the stairs.

Rose's death-spectre was gone. Or rather—it had taken shape completely, stepping out from the shadow of her imagination and into the world of flesh and stone. Her fingers and palm prickled. On the way up they passed statues and a scrubbing-woman's gossamer flyaway snapped and fell to the carpet. Rose tried to tear out of Maleficent's grip but Maleficent did not yield to her.

They stopped before a familiar door on the fourth floor. It swung open and Maleficent dragged Rose inside, and then the door closed and locked behind them.

The time for talking was over. Still, in a very small voice, Rose ventured to ask, "Maleficent, why are we up here?"

Maleficent did not answer.

"Maleficent, what's going on?"

In the back of the room the gilded spinning wheel turned, threadless, without handler.

Maleficent let go of Rose's hand and Rose took an involuntary step forward. For the first time she considered the absurdity of her position. She rolled old words around on her tongue and felt their shape and the weight of them: I am a fairy.

Rose stepped forward again, and then again, and again, helpless, fixed, and—now a burn was rising in her throat, and reality was, despite every defense she had raised against it, beginning to make itself known to her—terrified.

Years ago Rose had pledged she'd give Maleficent anything, if she really wanted it, and Maleficent had gestured toward her life.

"Maleficent," Rose said, "if you could have anything from me now, what would you ask for?"

Maleficent did not answer.

"Maleficent," she said, "are you happy?"

Maleficent did not answer.

"Maleficent," she said, voice rising to a crack, "do you love me?"

Through the whole march Maleficent remained a wall at her back. Rose tried to twist around but her body wouldn't let her; her breaths shallowed; her stomach churned; her forehead clammed with sweat.

She stepped forward, and it felt as though someone were forcing her head underwater and holding it there.

She stepped forward like she was the ocean, and it was her nature to move.

She stepped forward, a breath, now, from the spinning wheel, and time slowed to a pace geological, and she felt an eon between each heartbeat. She thrashed inside her body and understood the plight of the statues. Maleficent raised a hand behind her and Rose's hand went up like a mirror. She thrashed like she was trying to break upward through the skin of a nightmare. She thrashed, squeezing her body like a seed in her palm. She screamed into a nothingness. She thrashed, and something cracked, and germinated—

—and Rose's own magic sparkled in the air.

Rose stumbled backwards. Briars ripped through the floor and crushed the spinning wheel to pieces. That Maleficent had disappeared hardly registered to her; she ran toward the door and threw all the force of her briars against it. It, too, splintered away, and then she was out, breathing deep, again, the open night air.

The sun sunk completely, and Rose sank to her knees with it.

Whatever it was, it was over. Rose was not ashamed of crying, but she'd cried so much already that no more tears would come. She rolled onto her back and looked out at the vesper sky. Wintry dots peeked out from their waxiness and waved at her; Briar Rose lay there with a dry face and watched Venus brighten.

* * *

Briar Rose had no home to return to. She retired to the dusty rose bedroom without dinner and, though it was barely past dusk, forced herself to sleep.

When the sun came, it came silently, the only noise the wet slap of dewey oak and hawthorn as the wind rucketed by. Rose couldn't think of anything so disquieting as the absence of birdsong on an early spring morning. For the second day in a row her sheets were dim and dampened and her ringlets heavy with sweat. She didn't want to wake but neither could she justify lying there. She got up and made her bed and brushed out her curls. She was surprised—and felt quickly foolish for it—to find that no bath had been run for her, and that no breakfast had been laid out on her bedside table.

She climbed down to the foyer sticky, angry, and lightheaded from hunger, barefoot and still in a nightgown. At the stroke of yesterday's sunset something had sharpened. Rose felt as if she'd spent the last sixteen years treading the surface of sleep; now she was fully awake and the world was discomfitingly vivid for it. She walked from the foyer to the kitchen and back up the stairs to the library, looking for Maleficent. She wanted an argument; she would demand answers, as her new adulthood entitled her, and she would not relent, as she did when she was a girl, to half-truths. Then, with all resolved, the two of them could fall together again, and Rose could lie with her head in Maleficent's lap, and Maleficent could tell her what to do about this unseemly marriage.

But Maleficent was in none of her familiar places, and there was nothing to indicate where she had gone.

Perhaps Maleficent was in the western wing, into which Rose had never ventured…

And then Rose remembered the last time she went snooping around the castle, and how she'd nearly gotten herself killed.

Rose kicked a loose stone down the hallway and watched it bounce on the runner's short velveteen nap until it hit a statue's knee. Rose approached the statue and kneeled before her and took her snapped flyaway between her fingers, which was still lying on the carpet. The cleaning-woman's face was streaked with laughter lines, worn deep by years of sun. Her eyes were tight and alarmed and her mouth was half-way open. The statue beside her had her palms up and pressed tight against her ears, as if there was something she was trying very hard not to listen to.

Rose touched the first statue's cheek and traced her thumb down the curve of a wrinkle.

In a hush voice—as if that would stop Maleficent from hearing her—Rose asked, "What did she do to you?"

These women looked so much like Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather. Her aunts must think her dead by now—or sleeping. Rose still couldn't tell if it was death or sleep that she had evaded; both hung about the spindle so thickly that she couldn't disentangle them. Her aunts must have guessed, by now, where Rose had gone. Years of Rose's odd behavior were surely clicking into devastating context.

They wouldn't have forced her to marry, she realized, if she'd put her foot down about it.

And even if they would have—how could anyone force Rose into anything now? She could escape easily, with her magic, and subsist anywhere… unless her aunts were to employ their own magic against her.

But they wouldn't.

Would they?

They would never. Rose was certain of it.

But she had been so certain of so many things. Old words kept bobbing to the surface of her mind, bitterer, now, in their new frame of reference. Little princess, do you know who I am?

"My reaper," Rose answered, three years too late.

Then she said, "my true love," just to see what it tasted like. After all, Maleficent had released Rose from her curse at the end.

Mere seconds from the end.

Lord and Mary above, Rose was so sick of crying.

Clearer-headed, though, than she felt the night previous, Rose decided that she ought to let her aunts know that she was alive. She returned to the bedroom for her day-clothes, looked into the mirror of the vanity and took in her appearance: a woman, brow glinty with the sweat of stress, eyes rubbed-red and puffy, frowning deeply, but very awake. Very alive.

She went down the stairs with a statue's sort of heaviness, her pattened footfalls the loudest thing in three dozen or more kilometers. She opened the front doors and looked long down the path of the mountain, evergreens crowning by the cliffside. She took a step forward, and found that she could not move.

It probably said something sad, and a little alarming, that her first thought was simply, ugh, not again.

Rose craned her head around, looking for Maleficent, for it could be no one else holding her there—but Maleficent was still nowhere, and the air was thin of the umbra of her magic, which perhaps didn't matter, since she was a fairy of great power and could surely mask herself against Rose's senses if she pleased.

Rose pushed against the threshold again. She leaned her body weight completely against it and the air was as solid as a wall. She stepped back several paces and took a deep breath. She went at it running, and then bounced backwards, as if she'd been grabbed by the collar and yanked down.

"Maleficent!" she called out, accusatory, though she knew she'd receive no answer.

The taste of all of Maleficent's little presents—the sweet berries, cakes, pies, and herb-crusted loaves—came up like bile at the root of Rose's tongue.

* * *

For four days, Maleficent didn't show herself. Rose kept fed by magicking fruits and vegetables up through open windows, and through trial and error she learned how to work the complicated series of pumps and levers that made water travel through the pipes—a trick Maleficent had said came from the Romans. In terms of her entertainment, Rose found that nothing could hold her. Books could distract for perhaps three pages before their words started the blur into unfocused squiggles; music, her usual succor, could only remind her of Maleficent's harp, and the spindly set of fingers that had once wrapped around her throat. She tried to indulge in one of her little girl games—pretending to be Persinette, or the orphan Angélique, or a ghost, or a pirate—but half-way through her first line of dialogue she was struck by how silly it would all sound to an observer—no matter that there was no one there—and she shrank, hot-faced, to mumbling.

Alone.

Her aunts were probably making funeral arrangements for her right now. Rose picked at her fingernails. It was a habit she'd never found the discipline to kick.

On that fourth day, just as the sun bowed down before the evening, there was a ruffling at the window of Rose's bedroom, and a caw.

The Raven perched on her windowsill. Rotely, Rose untied the black pouch from his body; he pecked something at her and she turned her face coolly away. Her fingers trembled as she unwrapped her package. A note.

Dinner.

That was all it said. Dinner.

"Ridiculous," Rose muttered, but she got up anyway and went downstairs.

The dining table was laid out excessively when she arrived, and filled the room with feasting smells—an unfair tactic against Rose's now-keener senses. Maleficent sat at the head and was already serving her own portion. Rose took her usual seat beside her and lay her hands limply on either side of her empty plate. Her mouth watered, but she didn't move to serve herself.

"Eat," Maleficent said, not even lifting her head.

Rose took great pleasure in refusing her.

"Barely escaped from the jaws of fate and now you sit here, willingly starving yourself."

"Escaped isn't the word I would have chosen," Rose said, teeth grinding, "nor willingly."

"You could refuse my dinner for a hundred years and not yet come unbound to me."

Rose knew this, yet the reality of it was no less frustrating. "I ate Merryweather's food every day, 'til I was old enough to see over the fire—how is it that I am bound to you over her?"

"Are you in Merryweather's domain?" Maleficent paused to take a bite of something that smelled woody and buttery and caramel-rich, and Rose's stomach, which for the past several days had known mostly apples and celery stalks, grumbled. "Fairy's food is beside the point, though you've eaten enough of it to shackle yourself thirty lifetimes over—you've already given yourself to me, unconditionally."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I give you this garden," Maleficent echoed, "and everything alive in it."

Rose blinked—comprehendingly, but incredulous. Bound forever by the exact wording of a fourteen-year-old's ill-considered birthday gift?

"Were you not alive and in the garden, Briar Rose?"

"I didn't mean that literally!"

"I'm a fairy."

"You're a nightmare!"

"What would you know of nightmares? I took them away from you nearly two years ago."

"In preparation, I must assume, for pipering me into an endless sleep!"

"And would that have been so bad, really?" Maleficent murmured. "You'd dream forever. Any adventure you can think of and it would be yours."

"Why am I here, Maleficent?" Rose cried. "I mean that in every way I can mean it. You knew who I was, and where you could find me—why take such pains to seduce me? Why am I sitting here, awake and alive, when you had me in the very grasp of your curse? And if you won't answer my questions, can't you at least do me the courtesy of letting me leave?"

Maleficent did not answer.

This argument could have gone on for the rest of the night and the whole day after and still have not found itself at a loss for subject. That was the way between them, and Rose was on guard against being comforted by it. For this and all the other obvious reasons, she should have felt relief when a man's shout came careening down the bends of the castle halls to interrupt them, accompanied by the sound of hoofbeats—

"Reveal yourself, foul creature! Show me where you're keeping her!"

—but instead all Rose felt was irritation.

"Don't," Rose hissed, even as Maleficent shouted: "Who dares trespass into my lair?"

Poor Phillip crashed into the wall with a cry of pain, as Maleficent's dragon-voice startled poorer Samson into a frenzy. Rose got up to help them, but Maleficent stopped her with a hand on her shoulder—then Rose got protectively between her and Phillip, arms crossed. Maleficent raised an incredulous eyebrow at her.

"Aurora! Thank the stars," Phillip called out, lisping a little from what sounded like a broken tooth, "you're alright!"

Maleficent snapped her fingers and two sets of shackles formed around Phillip's hands and feet, even as Rose yelled at her to stop. Then a puff of flame came up, and both Phillip and Samson were blinked away.

"Now," Maleficent said, "where were we? I believe I was reprimanding you for refusing your dinner."

"What's wrong with you?!"

"Quit your tittering. The boy is in the dungeon, and quite uninjured."

"Let him go, Maleficent! He's innocent!"

"He had a sword at his hip, enchanted to always strike true. Unless your feelings on killing have suddenly changed?"

"He was just trying to rescue me."

Maleficent rolled her eyes. "He was promised a bride. I taught you better than this little girl's naïvety."

Rose must have taken on the qualities of an autumn moorland, for in one moment her mood was keen and bright—or brighter, at least, than she had been in days—and in the next it was like a gale descended, knocking everything sideways. How desperately she had prayed for Maleficent's return, those four lonely days left wandering about the castle! Now Rose couldn't stand to be another second with her. She turned tail with a click of her tongue, and Maleficent called out for her: "Where do you think you're going?"

"To the dungeon! To give my apologies to your prisoner!"

Against character, Maleficent let her.

Rose didn't know where the dungeon was, but it didn't take much guesswork. She wandered until she found a descending stairwell; when she landed at the bottom was no mystery where Phillip went. Samson groaned and snorted in some dank corner, and Phillip was trying to comfort him—from the distance of his cell—with soft humming and empty reassurances.

"Phillip?" Rose called. It was an unnatural, velvety dark, and cold, and the air was thick and wet-smelling; Rose was long used to these things, but she could only imagine how they might frighten Phillip.

"Aurora? Oh, Aurora! I'm shamed. It was my duty to save you, and I—"

"Be easy, Phillip. I'm in no danger."

"But—"

"As I said, be easy." Rose knelt beside him and took his hands through the bars, which startled him—she had a keener night vision than he. She tucked that knowledge away. "Are you hurt?"

"A broken tooth and some bruises. I'm more worried for Samson."

"I'll help him first, then." So she did, and was relieved to find that he was not badly hurt, either—just scared. She shushed and soothed him and tended to some scrapes on his ankle and a scuffed ear.

"Are you a healer?" Philip asked.

"No." Why would Maleficent bother teaching her that sort of magic? "Just a woodcutter girl. I've patched up plenty of wayward animals."

"Just a woodcutter girl." Phillip laughed, like they were telling private jokes. "You tricked me, you know, on that wonderful afternoon. Oh, I cannot fault you! But to think, all that time, that you were my betrothed—"

"I didn't know."

"How could you have? Like a fool, I hid myself from you."

"No. I mean I didn't know that I was the princess."

Phillip seemed to find this news astonishing. "So you didn't lie!"

"I often do," Rose said, "but about that, no, I didn't lie." Rose turned back to examine Phillip's shackles. They were nothing remarkable. "I could let you out, but I can't promise Maleficent wouldn't just chain you up again."

"How is it that you're free?"

"I'm not." Rose smiled wryly. "I can't go beyond the castle walls. But if you're asking how it is that I'm awake, that's a more complicated question."

"Is it a question? You bewitched the witch."

"Excuse me?"

"She fell in love with you as easily as anyone would. I could see it in the way she stood beside you—as if I were a threat to you!" Though his words were damning, he seemed completely unbothered by it. "After all, how could anyone not? You are the princess Aurora. Gentle, intelligent, beguiling—now that I've seen it, I can't imagine it any other way."

"A confident assessment from someone who hardly knows me."

"But I know your heart," Phillip insisted. "So what's to be done?"

Phillip's presence certainly complicated matters. If it were Rose alone she'd simply wait Maleficent out; the curse was now thwarted, and Rose had no reason to believe that Maleficent would harm her further. Beside, Rose figured bitterly, being imprisoned was something that she was already quite accustomed to. But she could not be sure their captor would privilege Phillip with the same gentle hand.

"First, tell me everything that you know about me. Spare no detail, no matter how slight."

"Well, you're Aurora, the lost princess," Phillip said, like he wasn't sure where to begin.

"Lost princess? What does that mean?"

So Phillip told her everything he knew: the day of her christening, and how he was, against his toddling protests, forced to attend it, and how ridiculous he thought it was that this baby would one day be his wife. He recounted her blessings—beauty and song, he remembered, the same gifts as he was given. Then Maleficent came and drenched the hall in fire, and Phillip hid his face in his mother's breast and cried. It was only afterward that the adults explained how Maleficent had cursed tiny Aurora, and that she had to be spirited away for her safety, and that even this much knowledge was a secret kept to family, so he must never tell another living soul.

"Why did she do it?"

"Because she's evil?" Phillip blinked. To him, the question was the definition of absurd.

"No one knew where I went?"

"I'm sure your parents knew something. You said you were raised by fairies—it was the three who took you, wasn't it? Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather. I remember them from when I was little. On my fourth birthday Fauna brought me a heeler pup, for companionship—that old girl's with God, now, but she lived a handsome fourteen years." The grimness of his situation didn't prevent him from smiling at the memory. "I always thought it strange that they disappeared when you did, but then elderly folk always seem to be disappearing, when you're a boy…"

"What did Maleficent say, exactly, when she cursed me? That I would die on my sixteenth birthday and that was all?"

"I don't remember," Phillip admitted. "I was only five years old. But then a few days ago the fairies arrived to the castle all rattled, saying you'd been taken. Then they explained to me that the princess and the girl in the woods were the very same, and that an endless sleep would befall you, if I could not break it with true love's kiss, for Merryweather had used her christening gift to soften Maleficent's curse."

"Thank you, Phillip, genuinely," Rose stood and curtsied to him, since it seemed like the thing to do.

"Where are you going?"

"To bargain your freedom."

"And yours?"

"That's… more complicated."

"I won't leave without you, Aurora. I see what you're doing—you're selfless to a fault! I could never return home knowing that you were still trapped here. I'd sooner drown myself in the river for shame."

He could not save her—he was not powerful enough, and in any case his idea of salvation was just as much a cage as Maleficent's. How could she explain this to him? Was there any point in trying to make him understand?

"I will bargain your freedom," Rose reiterated, "and I will do my best regarding mine. But Phillip: whatever fate awaits me, be kind to yourself, and know you couldn't have helped it. You are just a man, and Maleficent is a very powerful fairy."

* * *

Maleficent did not look well. There was a pallor to her that Rose had been too incensed to notice at dinner, and there were loose, bruisy circles under her eyes.

It had been a relief to find her in one of her usual spots in the library, writing in her little log book, and not disappeared again, but now Rose just stood awkwardly at the threshold. What could she say? She wanted to scream, cry, and pound her fists against Maleficent's breast, and perhaps that would get her some sympathy, but not much else would come of it. She'd come to bargain, but she had nothing to give.

"I want to make a deal with you."

"For what?" Maleficent didn't turn around but she at least stopped writing. Rose was growing tired of this little dance; couldn't Maleficent just look her in the eye?

"Phillip's freedom, Maleficent. What else?"

"Not your own? An hour ago that was your chief concern."

"That was before a very stupid boy came and got himself bastilled for me."

"What reason could you possibly have for caring?"

"I care for all living things," Rose said, "including you, though I cannot begin to describe how thoroughly you're testing that principle. You haven't said no—you would've said no immediately if you thought there was nothing I could offer you. Make it easy on me and tell me what it is."

"There is nothing you can offer me," Maleficent said.

Fairies could not lie. Rose stopped cold.

Maleficent sighed and set down her book. Rose took this as permission to circle around the sofa and perch by Maleficent's side. Rose looked at her, and Maleficent, at last, looked back. There was an overwhelming hunger in her eyes. For a moment Rose stumbled over the thought that it was directed toward her—but it couldn't be. It was deeper-set than that. Maleficent's gaze was unfocused. Exhaustion wore her skin in thin lines.

Rose peeked at the little book. Maleficent's hand was still nigh-unreadable to her. She could make out Leah, along with the words daughter and christening, since she was looking for them. She asked, "Why did you even go?"

"Those were the terms of the deal."

"Which was—?"

"Leah was barren."

Rose hummed. There was a point in her life where this information would have shaken her. Now she felt silly for not having guessed at it earlier. "And an invitation to the christening was all you asked for in return? What was the equivalency?"

"A political favor for a political favor."

"A daughter—"

"A marriage," Maleficent corrected, "for Leah was cursed with infertility—not by my hand, I must add, though I am under no obligation to defend myself to you. And she was beautiful and desperate to avoid the nunnery, and Stefan was young and arrogant of his own virility—and now everyone reaps the fruits of their short-sightedness. Another petty drama on the stage of human royals. I bore myself with the retelling."

"How was an invitation to a christening a favor on par with a dynasty-salvaging marriage?"

"What does any of this matter? You are here, and I am stuck dealing with the consequence of you."

"What consequence? I refuse to marry Phillip. My parents have never met me. You could keep me here forever and I'd have no means to escape you. You've won completely."

"You live, the product of a deal broken," Maleficent said, "and when a deal is broken, anything given must be extracted twice over. It is metaphysical. It cannot be re-termed. You will die or you will sleep so long and so deep that there will hardly be a difference. That is the path set out for you."

"So let me sleep and kiss me, then! Mary above, why couldn't we have just done it that way in the first place?"

"Have you really deluded yourself into thinking my kiss would wake you?"

Rose felt slapped. She had no time to lick her wounds, however; she hadn't realized death-or-sleep was still an option.

"If a deal cannot be re-termed, how was Merryweather able to turn death to sleep in the first place?"

"A christening gift is a special sort of magic, and yours have all been spent."

"Is this truly beyond your power? Take the world and change it! What destiny does not bend to you? Surely there must be a way!" Rose was thinking quickly now. "We could fake my death, how about? Or my falling asleep. Make a big production of it. Let a whole cavalcade of princes come and have their kisses do nothing. Then as far as my parents are concerned it'll all be the same."

"This is fruitless."

"Or—or! You could make them forget me entirely! What use am I to them, then? Make the whole kingdom forget, while you're at it. What lost princess? It'll be like the deal never happened at all—or—"

"Briar Rose," Maleficent said, "you'll tire yourself."

"—or—or, they want a marriage? Fine! Give them a marriage! Marry me to the worst prospect you can think of; force my parents into an alliance that politically strangles them. How's that for punishment twice over? I take no joy in their suffering but I want to live, Maleficent."

"You'd marry a stranger? Was that not the very condition you came here to have me fix?"

"Would I rather live than die?" Rose laughed incredulously. "Marry me yourself, then. What's mercy to me is horror to them; I can only imagine how angry they'd be."

"Fine."

"Or you could—what?"

"You have your deal." Maleficent ground her teeth. "Kneel and allow me to seal it before my higher faculties return to me."

Rose was dizzy. She'd been spinning thread from a place of manic desperation. She had not expected—

"Kneel, Rose."

Rose did. The look in Maleficent's eyes was impatient bordering on furious. She took Rose's chin between her thumb and forefinger and tilted it upward. Her skin was cool and dry and the ring on her knuckle dug painfully into Rose's jawline.

"Take your mother's debt on."

"All her debt? But Maleficent, I don't even know what that'd entail—and would this make me truly free, or just enpropertied to you differently?"

"Say it, now, with conviction."

Rose's heart pounded. "I take my mother's debt on." She was not happy with this, but she was starting to see that she had no choice.

"You betrothe yourself to me, and in ten years I will come to collect you. Do you understand?"

"Ten years?"

"I have no interest in a sixteen-year-old wife."

Then she brought her ring to Rose's lips and Rose brushed against it chastely. Maleficent's umbra reared around her, like the night landing on a hot summer day. It rendered every form softer, such that Rose sighed into it, for the world had become a touch too sharp. Maleficent pulled away, and the deal was sealed.

"Go," Maleficent said.

Shaking, Rose went. The door slammed behind her and there was a flash of green beneath the frame and she knew Maleficent was gone. She made her way to the dungeon so she could take Phillip back to his kingdom, and she could tell her aunts what she'd done.

Chapter Text

Rose, Phillip, and Samson trudged down the flight of the mountain, Phillip and Samson no worse off than a bad tooth and a few scratches and Rose looking as fresh as the day she was born, except for some stress lines underneath her eyes. Phillip's step was as light going out as it had been coming in. Maleficent hadn't given Phillip his sword back, but this seemed not to bother him in the slightest; all Rose knew of princes was what she's read in storybooks and learnt from Maleficent's lessons, so she expected Phillip to be angry at having his glory stolen, but by the easy slope of his shoulders she could tell that he felt relieved.

Good enough, she thought. If he was happy then that was one less thing for her to worry about. Instead of minding him she spent her steps committing the exact words of her deal to memory. You betrothe yourself to me, and in ten years I will come to collect you, following, of course, I take my mother's debt on. She mouthed the words over and over and then made up a tune to pair them with and even taught herself to say them backwards, for good measure. She knew how important exact words were. She'd have no choice but to tell her aunts everything once she got to the castle and she knew that this would be amongst the first questions they'd ask.

"Careful, princess," Phillip said. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him reaching automatically for a weapon he no longer had. "Stay behind me as we approach the bottom; we come upon a dangerous place."

Just as he said it she was hit with the bittersweet musk of moss and dripping bracken. She looked up at her familiar dark forest—when had they come so close to it? She had been lost in her memorizing—and found it not so familiar. Briars as thick around as her arm were snarling out from the underbrush and strangling all the oaks and hawthorns. A hack-edged hole almost the size of a horse and rider pinpricked the great, snarling wall. Rose looked more closely and could see the briars twisting, slowly, around the edge of its wound.

Now for the first time Phillip seemed sorry to have lost his sword. Rose could likely fit through what remained of the hole, but Phillip and Samson were too broad-shouldered. He paused on the path for a long moment and surveyed his surroundings. Rose couldn't piece together what he was looking for. Finally something caught his eye; he walked a few paces toward the cliffside and picked up two rocks: one jagged and one smooth. He sat on the ground and began sharpening the jagged rock against the other.

"Phillip…"

"Worry not, Aurora! I will take any pains necessary to bring you home."

"I have a knife," she said. "And anyway, we needn't either. Look—" She gestured toward the wall of briars and did a trick with her fingers. Even dinnerless and more than a little distracted, the magic took nothing; the briars parted for her like a pair of curtains in a gusty window.

"Witch," he breathed, dropping both of his rocks, more in awe than accusation. Then he corrected himself: "Fairy."

"Shall we, then? I'm hungry and I'm tired of raw fruits and vegetables. I want something warm. It's an hour from here to the cottage and I imagine half a night's walk to the city from there."

"An hour? Aurora, we'll reach the cottage in four days if we're lucky."

"Stop calling me that."

"Calling you what?"

"Aurora. I've never known myself by that name. I'd rather not start now, and I doubt I'd remember to answer to it even if I did."

"What would you prefer? Angélique?"

"Of course not. That's not my name, either. I call myself Briar Rose." Perhaps it was not wise to share her name so freely, but with each passing minute she found it harder and harder to consider Phillip a threat, and after such an ordeal she felt that they could call each other friends—and she didn't think she could stand to hear her princess name for even a second longer.

"Briar Rose, then."

"It'll be an hour." She touched the green-and-copper necklace still hanging cold against her breast. "You stay behind me. Hold my hand and don't let go of it for anything. As long as I'm here, I promise that nothing will hurt you."

* * *

Phillip was beside himself when they emerged from the thorn-choked forest and came upon the river. Sunset bobbed on the surface of the water. He squinted his eyes exaggeratedly and examined the position of the sun: sure enough, it had moved only an hour's worth of distance. Then he looked at Rose. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. For the first time it was like he was really seeing her.

She wasn't sure why this was his moment of clarity—compared to what Maleficent could do, parting the briars was a pittance, and the necklace wasn't even of her own construction—but she supposed that from his perspective, it appeared as though she'd just manipulated time itself.

She squeezed his hand once and dropped it. He seemed reluctant to let go. She led him across the river and then down the flank of one of its creeklets, toward the cottage. If Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather weren't still there, at least her oven would be. She craved warm bread with plum jam and honey. She marched home, squashing breba figs into the cracked soles of her pattens. A filigrane bitterling rubbed its fins against the surface of the water before darting beneath a mat of crowfoot and toward the sandy bed. The birds followed her: a robin with eyes like black beads and a face like a splash of blood. An ash-gorgetted sparrow. They swooped across her shoulders and chittered like they had been wondering after her all this time.

"Say, Aurora—Briar Rose, I mean—what was it like growing up out in the wilderness all on your own?"

"I wasn't on my own. I had Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather with me."

"But you had to do so much yourself, didn't you? Did you chop your own wood? Grow your own vegetables? Prepare your own dinners?"

"Once I was old enough to. Merryweather did it all when I was a baby."

"Did you make your own clothes?"

"Yes—but even princesses do that. Surely your mother and sisters sew?"

"Did you make the dress you're wearing right now?"

"No."

"So Merryweather made it for you?"

"No," Rose said, "Maleficent did."

Rose wasn't much up for talking; she was too hungry and her feelings were still too tender. Phillip talked like he was making a sport of it. He pointed out every bird and bush and commented upon whether or not that particular species was familiar to him. He asked her wide-eyed questions about the minutiae of peasant life. Soon enough her curt, muttering answers caught him on to her fragile mood; he took, instead, to whistling. The birds swooped in to join him and he seemed not the slightest bit perturbed by it. Every note was on key.

"What did Merryweather give you?" she asked suddenly.

"Unwavering courage," he answered. A smile crept up on her, quite unexpectedly. It was her first smile since turning sixteen.

The sky and cottage windows were both dark when they reached home. She pushed the door open and creaked into the stillness. She lit the lantern that they kept by the door and found her cake and wedding dress both gone; when she went up to her bedroom, it seemed that every one of her personal effects, including the furniture, had been removed.

Disturbed, she came back down to the kitchen, where Phillip was crouching to squint at the cookware.

"Are you hungry, Phillip?"

He paused to scratch his chin. "Your parents are waiting for us. Last I saw him, your father was practically blue with worry," he said. It wasn't a no.

"They'll be expecting us to take a four-and-a-half-day journey back, four of which we just cut short—and that's if they're assuming your rescue plan went off without a hitch. I think we can set aside time for dinner. Will you hand me my flours? I have oat and acorn left over from autumn."

Based on everything Maleficent had told Rose about princes, she didn't expect him to take orders well, especially from a woman. He was a constant surprise to her in this way. While she set out her implements he hauled the bags dutifully over. He clasped his hands politely behind his back and stood with his shoulders broadened, as if awaiting his next command.

"Now fetch me some water."

"You've a well nearby?"

"The river will do. We'll strain and boil it."

So he went and so they did. He asked her questions that she found increasingly silly, like why they called it cheesecloth ("Because one strains cheese with it, Phillip, why else?") and how they were going to get the bread into the hot oven without burning themselves.

"Surely you've been in a kitchen before."

"The kitchen never much interested me. I prefer to be outdoors whenever possible." He rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. "But your life interests me very much, Briar Rose. I'd like to know how you bake bread."

"Then come here. I'll measure out enough for two half-loaves and we can knead them side by side."

* * *

When they set out again it was well dark. Phillip led the way this time, since he had come from the city and Rose had never been. Though she had been everywhere with Maleficent—across oceans, flown so far east that if they'd gone any east-er, they may as well have gone west instead—she had never walked outside the forest by her own two feet. She had never seen other people on her trips with Maleficent, either; they'd always stuck to untamped soils, mountains too harsh and too high for anyone to have bothered settling them.

It was disorienting how quickly the forest gave way: one moment they were completely embowered and then next there was nothing but tracts of soil where, six months on, she could expect long stalks of oat to be popping through. She had seen farmland from over the cliffside, but it felt bigger now with her feet on the ground. She was reminded of when she was thirteen-and-a-half years old and Maleficent first showed her the ocean. If Phillip told her these fields went on forever, some part of her could believe him.

At some point the fields became woods again, and then just as disorientingly the woods became a city, the soft decidatica startling into hard lumps of stone. All around Rose was the smell of damp, smoke and sour: rained-on manure in tenement-front gardens, smoldering fireplaces and stagnant water troughs. It was strangely warm. Though it was beyond late a window was still lit behind curtains, through which Rose could see the feathered silhouettes of a woman and her thrashing baby. A dog barked somewhere high and Rose's attention turned toward the sound. She sucked in a breath to whistle for it, but Phillip stayed her with a gesture. She exhaled silently. This was his world and it would be best to follow his cues

Was it strange that all she could think when she came upon her parents' castle was that it was not so imposing as Maleficent's? She supposed she couldn't see it properly in the dark, but still. It was masoned from the same stone as Maleficent's, like how she and Phillip had the same virtuosity, and like how the grain of Maleficent's hawthorns and the weave of Rose's hair ended in the same curl. She, Phillip, and Samson froze together when the castle doors opened and the light spilled out onto their feet. Phillip instinctively reached for her hand and she pulled, just as instinctively, away. Merryweather was latched around her middle and sobbing Rose's collar wet faster than she could blink the fairy dust out of her eyes.

"Rose," Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather cried. Flora took custody of her right arm and Fauna her left. She laughed. She could not help herself. Here she was, now a grown woman and several years a witch, emerging shaken but victorious from the deadly curse that had haunted her since infancy; then all of a sudden her guardians had her, and she felt like a chastened thirteen-year-old again, coming home to a cottage caked with flour and fearing no worse fate than three dull months stuck up in her room.

"Everything's alright," Rose soothed. "See? There's not a scratch on me." She would not say, I'm sorry I ran away, because in truth she wasn't sorry. She hadn't wanted to go with them, even though she was very happy to see them now.

In the threshold three more figures stood, two men and a woman. She could not make out their faces well, being backlit, and could not tell which of the two men was her father, but the woman's identity was clear enough. She extended a hand for taking. Rose gently extracted her from her weeping aunts' arms and for the first time in her life went to embrace her mother.

* * *

"How?" was the first thing out of her mother's mouth. "To go to Maleficent's castle and back is a nine day journey, yet here you both are."

Guards had come to round them up—her and Phillip, her parents and Phillip's father, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather all—and cloistered them in a small room with a thick chain lock on the door, a round table and maps with markings on every wall. Everyone in the room was looking at Rose, but particularly Queen Leah, whose blue eyes were almost the shade of Rose's, though not as bright; whose skin was flecked with freckles the way Rose's was, though without Rose's bronziness; whose hair was the same shade as Rose's but not quite as shiny, and whose look pierced so keenly that Rose felt she was up on the mountain again, squirming beneath Maleficent's appraisal.

"'Twas none of my doing, your Majesty; Aurora used her magic to get us home faster," Phillip said. He turned to Rose earnestly. "Do you mind if I call you 'Aurora' when I speak of you to them? They don't know you by your other name."

"Magic?" King Stefan's jaw went slack.

"Imagine my surprise when I came expecting a damsel and found a fairyling instead! Flora and the rest seem to have taught her a trick or two."

She watched her parents closely. Her mother's eyes narrowed at the same moment that her father's relaxed. Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather exchanged furtive glances. Her father's movements were slow and tired; her mother had the practiced alertness of one accustomed to keeping odd hours. Her aunts, who had at some point changed out their peasant gowns for gossamer wings and swooping, glittery dresses, looked as though sleep was a foreign concept to them.

Stefan asked what was, in his mind, the most pressing question: "So that wicked thing is slain?"

That'd be easiest, Rose thought. If she could find some way to send word, she might solicit Maleficent's cooperation; if they pretended Phillip had stuck her with that magic sword of his, it would be easy enough for Maleficent to imply—without ever lying outright—that she had somehow risen gloriously from the ashes. Phillip could have his glory, Maleficent a bolster to her reputation, and Rose some time to think. Unfortunately, Phillip's integrity proved resilient under even the most tempting of circumstances. "There was no need for slaying. Aurora spoke with the fairy while I was captive; as she tells it, she bargained for both our freedom."

"Bargained?" It was now Leah's turn to go slack-jawed. Rose could see her mind working: how could Rose have bargained anything if she was trapped in an enchanted sleep? What had Maleficent been doing with her these last four days? "What did you promise in return?"

"My hand, mother." All of them craned to look at Rose's hands, which were folded—intact—at her lap. She clarified: "In marriage."

Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather's faces turned pale. She had expected everyone to be angry with her, but she did not expect the way Leah struck out and grabbed her by the wrist, yanked her forward and hissed, with a sudden burning: "Are you stupid?"

"It was that or death!" Rose cried out. At least she had the wherewithal to not rear her startled briars up around a queen, especially with guards just out the door. "Or sleep forever, which may as well be death. What was I supposed to do? It was the only offer she accepted!"

"This marriage is the only reason you exist, Aurora. You've somehow landed upon the only outcome worse than dying."

And what a slap that was. Fauna coaxed Leah's grip open and took Rose's hand into her own. Rose did not want to be comforted in front of these strangers, but she would not deny Fauna, who had stopped crying some minutes ago but who was clearly still feeling precarious.

"What groom has she chosen for you?" Her father's voice was much softer. "Let's hear the full story before we jump to the very worst conclusion, Leah. It may not be all we feared."

"You misunderstand. I promised my hand to her. In ten years. On my twenty-sixth birthday."

"Well, there! The church would never recognize such a union, and there'd be no risk of offspring. Isn't that a relief? Our domain shall not pass into Maleficent's hands."

"If a return to the succession crisis is your idea of relief, perhaps," Leah intoned. "No, the path ahead is clear. We're going to kill her."

A wave of nausea crested in Rose's throat. Kill her? Kill her? But no—of course she meant Maleficent. This understanding did not make the nausea subside.

"I cannot recommend this course of action, your Majesty," Flora said gravely. "Maleficent's power far surpasses our own. The chance of success is slim, and good men will die in the attempt."

"Good men like my son?" demanded Hubert, who had been quiet up to now.

"That was different!" Merryweather said. "True Love—"

So the parents squabbled, and Rose, though she knew her politics generally, wasn't familiar with the context, and so she struggled to follow half of what was said. At least Phillip seemed as overwhelmed by it all as Rose did; she did not get the impression he was typically invited to meetings like these. They went in circles, firing off possibilities only for Leah to strike each one down.

"Divorce—or annulment—"

"For the fey there's no such thing."

"Excommunication—"

"Does nothing at all to resolve the issue of succession, Stefan."

"Polygamy—"

"An offense against the dignity of marriage, and thus excommunication with a few extra steps?"

"But done under clear threat of grave fear or force, and with one marriage that's impossible to consummate, so I think—I would pray—that, if we explained the situation, His Holiness, in all his wisdom—"

"What exactly do you plan to say when you're standing before him? That we feared Maleficent even above God!?"

"'Thou shalt not kill,' Leah."

"This is no murder. We are hunting a beast."

"Damn it all. I still don't think—perhaps Aurora and Phillip could legitimize a bastard."

"There are stronger claimants at our heel. We can't afford the vulnerability."

They compared the tenets of papal and fey law; they speculated endlessly on what Maleficent's true motives—surely sinister!—might be. A figure of 50,000 livres tournois was bandied about and Rose caught on that this was to be her dowry. This was the sorest point for King Hubert. "Surely in this repugnant 'union,' no dowry could be offered," he sputtered, and then went red in the face when Leah and Stefan ignored him. Finally Flora asked her:

"What were the exact words of your deal, Rose? Do you remember them? Perhaps there's some loophole…"

She didn't want a loophole. Why on earth would she? She had everything she could have asked for: she was awake, alive, and free to walk about on her own two feet; she would not have to marry Phillip, who, though she had quickly warmed to him as a friend, she had no desire for as a husband; in ten years Maleficent would come to collect her. Nevertheless she dutifully recited what she'd memorized. Leah's brow scrunched. She told Rose to repeat it again, and Rose did. She made Rose repeat it three more times and she wrote it down on a scrap of paper and then had Rose read it back to confirm. Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather were wearing odd expressions, too. Something was the matter. Rose didn't know what.

Stefan placed a hand gently on the crown of Rose's head. She jumped half out of her skin and he retracted it, looking wounded; oh, she had not meant to insult her father! "Must we resolve this now? We're all exhausted, Aurora and Phillip most of all. She's had a terrible fright. This deal doesn't come due for another decade; I think we can afford to hold off on any serious decisions at least until she's settled."

"A decade's less time than you think," Leah said, "but you're right. It's late. And there's a party to prepare for. As far as the people are concerned, we mustn't let on that anything's wrong."