She looked dead, and it threw him.
Everything else had been as he’d anticipated—more or less. The forest, undisturbed for a hundred years, had been thick with a green twilight almost as dark as night, but that, of course, was part of the legend. The thorn bushes were more daunting than he’d expected, with spines like daggers—a foot long, lethal and razor-edged. And their roses, so pale they were translucent, had an odd smell, more like rotting flesh than flowers. In the scant light of the forest they looked like patches of slime, snail trails against the leaves.
And although he’d thought the forest would be silent—sleeping—it wasn’t. It rustled around him, behind him, as he passed through, with flickers of movement he couldn’t quite see.
But the castle itself was entirely silent. The almost-airless silence of a place where no one had woken for several times his lifetime.
But although he didn’t dare sheathe his sword, and although his breath came thin and shallow all the way through the deserted rooms and the long silent corridors, nothing actually happened, and, unhindered, he climbed stair after stair up to the top floor, then around and around the winding staircase to the little, dim landing with the one door standing ajar.
This high up, above the forest and the enormous, magical thorn bushes, a bar of dust-choked sunlight had fallen through a narrow window to lie on the stone floor, pointing the way to the sleeping princess, the enchanted beauty he’d dreamed about for as long as he could remember.
And now he was standing here, looking at her, and she looked dead.
Her dress was furred with mould, a grey fluff that made the folds of fabric look as if they joined seamlessly to the floor she lay on. Her hair, spilled around her head, and her skin were a greyish colour, too, covered with a scum of dust. Dust had gathered in the hollows of her shut eyes, and a drift of spider webs stretched from one shoulder, one ear, the tip of a slipper. Fat black bodies waited, motionless, in the corners of the webs, and he suppressed a shudder. The spiders—and the insects—had not been bound by the spell, then.
He took a step forward, and his foot crunched on something. All his nerves jumped. Looking down, he found the small skeleton—of a mouse, he supposed—lying crushed on the dust-dulled floor.
He moved forward again, stepping carefully, his boots leaving footprints on the floor, disturbing the dust so that it flew up in little clouds, making him cough. In the silent room, the sound was too loud, and he clamped his hand over his mouth.
Close up, he could at least see that she was breathing. But somehow that didn’t help. All it did was give the impression that something else was at work, some arcane force that kept her body animated even while she—the person, the beautiful sixteen-year-old who had fallen asleep—was gone. For a moment he saw her as a shell, rotted, carved out from the inside like a hollow tree. When he kissed her would her eyes, her mouth, open on emptiness, on a gust of graveyard air?
His hand clenched on his sword hilt, then slipped, wet with sweat. He forced himself to breathe in, then out, slowly, through his teeth.
Then before he could think about it, before he could completely lose his nerve, he went down on one knee and bent to touch his lips to hers.
Her eyes shot open. Dust puffed up around them, making her blink, but they were real, normal eyes, the colour of the sky at midsummer. Eyes he’d dreamed of…
Then her breath stopped.
Her mouth opened on a soundless gasp. Her eyes widened, the endless blue shot with terror like lightning. Panic cracked through him. This was wrong—this wasn’t meant to happen.
He grabbed at her, thinking to pull her up into a position where she could breathe easier, thinking maybe she was in shock and needed shaking to make her breathe—
Under his hands, he felt her crumble. The dust-greyed draperies fell into
nothing but dust, and her flesh—for a moment solid, warm beneath his
fingers—went too. The feel of her collapsed, melting through his hands. His
fingers closed on disintegrating fabric—and, underneath it, bone.
He was holding a skeleton.
But not looking at one. As the bones slid from his slackening grasp, as all the substance of her body fell apart and slid to join the dust on the floor, she—the living girl he’d seen when he entered the room—sat up, pushing away a dust-free drift of shining thistledown hair, and looked down at herself, at her dress, her hands.
“I—” she said, her voice creaky with disuse. “You—woke me?”
He couldn’t speak. He heard himself make a noise that, if he could have pulled enough air into his lungs, might have been a scream. A skeleton. He’d felt her die, felt her body degrade between his fingers. And yet he could still see her, looking at—talking to—him.She blinked, then her eyes fixed on his face. After a moment she frowned, as if it was difficult for her to focus, then looked down at herself again.
She froze—all of her, eyes, face, hands arrested in the act of flexing their fingers. He followed her gaze and saw, around her, the drifts of dissolving cloth, the glimpse here and there of pale bone.She came to her feet in a rush, arms wrapped around herself, fingers whitening as they tightened, and turned to look down at the floor where she’d lain. At the grotesque jumble of the thing that had, a hundred years ago—half a minute ago—been her.“What is it?” she said, her voice quivering as if it would disintegrate like her body. “What’s happened?”
She reached towards him, her hand shaking, and before he could think, almost without meaning to, he jerked away.
Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t you dare,” she said. “You came here.” Her hand reached his arm, came to rest on it…and went straight through.
The cold clutch in his stomach, the instinctive shudder, was immediately eclipsed by what he saw on her face. Shock, then such grief and horror that he felt it catch him, strike pain not his own through his body.
“No,” she said. “Oh no, no, no, no, no.” And she put her hands up to her face as if to shut out him and the room and the whole world.
This is not what I dreamed of. The thought came unbidden—ignoble—but he couldn’t fight it back. He’d imagined this forever, since the story had reached his kingdom, since, as a child, he’d dreamed her face. And now he’d come here, he’d kissed her, he’d saved her…and she was crying. And a ghost.
“How long?” she said through her fingers, her voice not only creaky but muffled.
He hadn’t been expecting her to ask questions. “What?” he said.
She dragged her hands down from her face. “How long? How long have I slept?” Her hands stilled, pressed against the pale skin of her cheeks—after all, she wasn’t crying—and her gaze froze. “Did they—are they all gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know? You came through the castle—you must have seen!”
“I wasn’t exploring,” he said, stung. “I came straight up. To save you.”
But she wasn’t listening. “Did they—did they die before me? Or did they sleep, too? Are they—” She looked down at herself again, spreading her apparently solid hands. “I died. You woke me and I died. I’m a ghost. It makes no sense. The spell was changed—it was supposed to keep me from dying. The fairies—”
Her gaze shifted again, went past him, and jerked to a halt at the base of the far wall. “Oh,” she said, a sound of such desolation that he forgot what he’d dreamed of, forgot what he’d expected her to be, and put his hands out in an ineffectual gesture at comfort.
She took three quick steps to the wall, in a swish of non-existent silk, a whisper of perfume from roses that must have died before she did, and went to her knees, her hair slipping forwards to cover her face, not bothering to brush it back.
“Oh,” she said again, a sound like a sob. “The fairies. They stayed, and they died too.”
Like dried flowers, perfect still in their colour and shape, the fairies—two of them—lay in a swirl and eddy of gathered dust. Tiny naked limbs, as smooth as the inside of a seashell, half concealed in crumpled gossamer.
“Don’t touch them,” she said, even though he hadn’t moved. Her hand went up
to her face, and came away wet. She hadn’t cried over her own fate, or from fear
for her family, and here she was weeping over the fairies whose spells had been
meant to save her, whose spells had failed.
As well trust a dandelion clock as a fairy’s word. They knew that well in his
country. But no one had warned her. She’d trusted their spell would save her,
and even now she was wasting tears over them.
“So why aren’t they ghosts, too?” he asked.
The pale hair slid back as she looked up at him. Her eyes were damp, and again unexpected, unwelcome pain clutched at him.
“They’re fairies. They have no souls. When they die that’s it.” She swallowed. “They must have waited to watch over me, to make sure the spell had worked, and the sleep caught them too. It’s—oh, they shouldn’t have stayed.”
She started to get to her feet, then checked, frowning at him. “How long?” she asked for—he realised—the fourth time. “How long has it been?”
“A hundred years.”
“A hundred…” She let the words trail away, then ran her fingers up into the silver-blonde hair, screwing her eyes shut. “Very well.” The creakiness of disuse had gone from her voice. It was clear—“a voice like singing bells”—but held so strictly in control it had an edge to it like broken glass. “The second spell didn’t counter the first. It delayed it, that was all. So I slept, and when the spell broke I died. But—” she opened her eyes so she could frown at him, “—why am I not old? Did I look like this before you woke me—was I still young?”
He nodded.
She screwed her eyes shut again. “Then why? If it kept me that age, why did I die when it broke? If I wasn’t old why did I die—?”
“I—I suppose you’d passed your allotted time.”
She looked at him. “What?”
“Your allotted time. Philosophers—well, some philosophers—think every being has a—a pre-ordained life span.” He felt on home ground here, back in his study with his tutors, a place where laws worked one way only, where you did something knowing the result, where things were predictable and behaved how you wanted them. “No matter what you do, what spells you employ, you can’t live beyond it. I think maybe the spell, it let you contravene that law, but only while it was still active. The minute it broke the law came back into play, and you—you died, not from any physical cause, but because—”
“Because it’s the law?”
He stumbled, thrown by the interruption, and by that broken-glass note in her voice. “I—yes. Well, that’s my theory—”
“How very metaphysical of you. You couldn’t have worked it out before you woke me?”
He didn’t answer. He could have worked that out, but he hadn’t even considered it. He’d simply thought the magic would prove stronger than any normal human laws. But he couldn’t say that. He should have known better. It had been stupid. He’d been stupid.
“I’m sorry,” she said. He looked up, taken off guard, and met her eyes.
“I’m very angry,” she said, looking at him steadily, still frowning a little, but this time the frown was not directed at him. “You know, we didn’t trust in just the fairies’ spell to save me. My parents had me trained. I studied meditation, breathing techniques, how to resist dark magic, how to break spells, how to fight. The witch—when she cast the spell I fought it. And I—I thought I stayed awake. I thought I—” She stopped, looking away as if she could no longer bear to see him watching her. “I was dreaming. I dreamed I destroyed the spellstone. I dreamed I killed the witch. I—” Her voice cracked. “I dreamed I saved everybody. And then I woke and it wasn’t true. I just slept, like a weakling, like a failure, waiting to be woken—waiting to be kissed. And then I-I—” She broke off again, and her lip whitened as she bit it.
“And then I killed you,” he said.
Her eyes came back up to his. “Then you woke me. And I died. It was all for nothing. The spell—all it did was trap the fairies too. Sixteen years of training, and I couldn’t use it. You woke me, but too late for me to live. It’s all useless. It’s all for nothing.”
She took a breath. “So I’m very angry. But it’s not your fault, and I’m sorry.”
She smiled at him for the first time. A little, controlled smile that scarcely moved her lips, but that did move up into her eyes, lighting them so it was like staring up into the blazing blue of a midsummer sky, feeling the heat of the sun seep into your skin, your body.
Again, the pain lanced through him. But this time it was different. This time it wasn’t the pain of pity, of an impotent desire to comfort, but the pain of loss. He’d dreamed of her forever, and now he was here, he’d woken her…and she was a ghost.
A sixteen-year-old ghost, confused, and angry because she thought she’d failed, and probably angrier because she was confused. This was nothing like what he’d dreamed, what he’d wanted, but at least he was still alive.“If the fairies slept,” he said, “won’t that mean everyone in the castle slept, too?”
“I suppose so… But you said you saw no one?”
“Well, I didn’t look. It was deadly quiet—”
Her face stiffened, her eyes flooding with pain and fear. “If they’re dead…” she said. “If they’re all dead—”
He spoke loudly, across her, wanting to stop the rising panic. “They’ll be ghosts, too.”
“They’ll—” She stopped. Hope swept like a wash of colour through her face, brightening her cheeks, her eyes, till it was as if the sunlight had found her, only her, and lit her from head to toe. “My parents,” she said. “My sister. Oh. Oh, do you think—?”
For the first time since entering the forest, certainly for the first time since waking her, he felt like a hero. “I don’t see why not. It’s the same spell.”
She went to the door, gathering her skirts up in a whisper of silk. In the doorway, she turned, hesitating. “Will you come with me?”
Well, he hadn’t managed to save her. And he wasn’t going to be able to save her, either—all he was going to do was go away again. But this, at least… She wanted company, and that he could give her.
“Of course.”
Halfway down the narrow staircase, she said, “What is your name?”
“Benedict.” He watched her, moving as if she were solid, as if she were putting her non-existent weight on each step. Except the dust stayed unstirred around each small, slippered foot, and where the folds of her dress brushed the wall it made no sound on the stones, no sound beyond that ever-present silky whisper.
Her hair caught the sunlight as they passed a window and flared silver, dazzling. Her cheek turned towards him, smooth, perfect. “I’m Laura—oh, but you know that?”
“No. The tales never told your name. Just the princess, the sleeping beauty—”
“The sleeping beauty?” She turned to look up at him, her lips quirking into a smile—almost a laugh. “Are you making that up?”
“No, of course not.”
“The sleeping beauty. That’s the most over-dramatic—”
She broke off. They’d reached the bottom of the staircase and, for the first time, he heard noise—a sound that could be voices.
Laura ran. Her skirts bunched in one hand, the thistledown hair a disappearing glimmer in the dimness of the long corridor. He saw her other hand, a pale blur, go up to push the double doors at the end of the corridor.
They swung open…on light, colour and noise, an outcry of voices, faces suddenly turning towards them.
An older woman reached the doorway just as he came up behind the princess. Her coiled, shining hair was silver-blonde, thistledown spun into satin. Around her feet the dust lay undisturbed.
Her face lit, blazing relief and joy so strong it felt as if it touched him too.
“Laura,” she said. “Oh Laura—you’re all right.” There were tears in her eyes, glinting with tiny trapped scraps of light. She put out her hands.
Laura dropped her skirts to trail on the floor. She said something, although he couldn’t hear what it was. Then she stepped forward, and she was in her mother’s arms, the silver head on her mother’s shoulder, sobbing as if she’d never stop.
* * * *
He stood just outside the light, half hidden in the shadows of the corridor, watching her. She’d gone from her mother’s arms to those of her father—a slight, bearded man—then begun to cry again when she turned from him to face a younger girl, so like her they were clearly sisters. Then others: family, courtiers, members of the royal household.
Under their feet, disregarded and forgotten, bones lay amongst the rushes on the floor. They were all dead, all ghosts.
But not to each other. He saw them touch, hug, saw Laura swept up, laughing, into the arms of another, taller, bearded man.
The day was waning. Outside, in the forest, amongst the thorn bushes, shadows gathered as the daylight died. But in the castle, somehow, the sunlight lingered, lighting the ghosts in a slowly growing brilliance.
They weren’t going to remain here. This castle would not become a haunted end to the legend. If he stayed, even if she wanted him to—which of course she wouldn’t—it would only be to watch the sunlight pour through them, dissolve them, take them away… Except no, he knew perfectly well it wasn’t sunlight.
And he would be left here, in the dark and the silence. He should leave now, really, while daylight still lit the forest. While he need not find out what rustled in the trees, or whether the roses would—as he suspected—glow in the dark.
But he couldn’t. Not while she was still here, shining silver amongst the gold of the light. Not while he could watch her face, all the shock and fear washed out of it, bright, laughing, perfect.
She turned in the midst of the crowd, dazzling like a firework, her hair
throwing sparks of silver, and caught him watching her.
She came towards him, like frost on cobwebs, mist at sunrise, spring water seen
through crystal—
“You’ve gone so dark,” she said. “I can hardly see you. I think we—it’s as if everything around us is fading. Listen—”
“To me, you’re getting brighter. It—it’s starting to hurt to look at you.”
Through the haze and the dazzle, he thought he saw her smile. “Then stop looking?”
“I don’t want to.” He watched her smile blink out. “Laura… I think any minute you’ll be gone completely.”
“I think so too. Listen—”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This went so wrong. If someone had saved you sooner—”
She put a hand up between them and, very faint, he felt the cool touch on his lips. “It doesn’t matter. Listen. I think…I think everything is going to be all right for us now. For me. Different, but…”
“Yes. Laura—”
She smiled again, and this time he almost did shut his eyes, it was so bright, like the midday sun, like the heart of a candle flame.
“Listen,” she said, for—he realised—the fourth time. “Please remember, you did save me. And I—oh, without the spell I’d have been an old woman even before you were born. But I—” He could hardly see her now, but he heard her swallow, felt, more than saw, that she was biting her lip. “I think I could have loved you,” she said. “If things had been different. If you’d been born earlier. If you’d come sooner.”
She leaned forward—he couldn’t stop his eyes shutting against the brightness—and for a tiny, fleeting moment he felt her lips touch his. Cool, gentle, a brand he’d feel until he died…
And she was gone. He opened his eyes onto leaf-dim twilight, onto emptiness, and onto dust lying, undisturbed, untouched, all over the castle floor.