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It was done. Maleficent's revenge was won. The foolish prince lay rotting; the flies had found their way already into the crevices of his wounds and were starting to make new life in them. The princess Aurora—with her wheat hair and her strawberry lips and her woodthrush voice—slept with the same soundness, and stillness, of her betrothed.
Maleficent sighed. She took a clipping of briars from the wall and some of her magic and wove them together into a mattress as safe as a coffin and as soft as the down of baby sparrow. She lay prone and settled there, surrounded by her victory. For the first time in sixteen years, she slept.
* * *
There was much to be done. Maleficent had neglected sixteen years of duty in the pursuit of vengeance.
First was the ledger of other debts to be settled. Then there were soldiers at her doorstep to be disposed of—as if there were any way to restore the princess now, the fools; new henchmen to be sourced, after the last had proven themselves transcendentally incompetent; and basic kingdomly trifles to be sorted, payments and punishments and land disputes and the like, for she was a queen and even she had subjects.
As the days closed she drew back to the tower where the princess and prince were kept, for no reason other than that it was quiet and the sight of them left her feeling accomplished. It was a trophy room, of a sorts. And there was something—Maleficent did not dwell on this—but there was something to letting down her hair down in a room of quiet company. Maleficent did not keep company, beside Diablo; she had no use for it. A sleeping girl and a corpse were her closest human objects. And the girl in particular, well. Maleficent was no mortal, but neither was she made of stone. One does not keep fine art on display simply to ignore it.
Maleficent came close to Aurora and looked appreciatively at her face. It was slack and pliable. Her mouth was downturned. Maleficent tried to imagine Aurora's eyes, which she had only glimpsed briefly as a baby and hadn't seen very well in the dark. They would be as blue as the sky just before sunset.
She dragged her fingers up the princess' throat. Smooth. She pressed two fingers beneath her jawbone and felt her pulse. Only the faintest.
"Your lightness would shame the Madonna," she said, and she meant it. If the good fey had a talent for one thing, it was resplendence. "Can you feel me, here, with my fingers tucked against the place where your heart beats, Princess Aurora? Or is your internal world as silent as you are?"
Then Maleficent smiled, remembering something.
"I heard your little guardians speak to you, in your final hours. I don't suppose Aurora was your true name."
The princess was silent, of course. Her lips were parted to let in the spring air; they would dry, eventually, if Maleficent did nothing to tend to them; likewise she would grow thin. Her chest rose and fell to a rhythm out of time. Her eyes, though the movement was at first too faint to notice, jerked from side to side.
Oh? Maleficent thought, leaning in to inspect her more closely. The girl is dreaming.
A curious thing, that good fey magic. The three louts had given her one last gift and probably hadn't even intended it. In her dreams she must be frolicking, or… Maleficent could not stretch to imagine much else. What could be buried in the heart of a sixteen-year-old girl raised by three good fairies? She'd had so little life to draw from, and what life she'd had had held so little within it.
Like all fey, the thought of a human with a wish in need of granting made Maleficent's fingers itch and burn with magic. A pity. A day longer and Maleficent could have infected the princess's mind with all sorts of worldly desires; then, at least, she might have interesting dreams.
* * *
Aurora would be waking in a hundred years. Generations for a human; for Maleficent, hardly a blink. She left for a stretch to wreak havoc among some highland peoples and returned to Prince Phillip having rotted away. He had been such a lovely, macabre piece. She'd been intending to freeze him in time and hang him on the briars.
Without him, suddenly it did not seem appropriate to keep the space as it was. Maleficent bared the room and thought hard about what sort of cage would be most appropriate. She was Aurora for the dawn, so Maleficent waved her staff and made stars on the ceiling to outshine the vault of Scrovegni. Her true name was Briar Rose, and it was decadent for Maleficent, in the natural way of fey, to be the last being awake and alive in possession of this secret; she decorated the walls with eglantine as a nod to her private knowledge. But why stop there? She could grow a whole garden on those walls, a towering green defiance of gravity. So she did, and afterward she looked upon her work and licked her lips with delight.
Maleficent, contrary to the good fairy propaganda, did not hate beauty. It was a frivolity for the child of a monarch, and a curse, in most respects, for a girl—had Stefan and Leah displayed a modicum of intelligence and fulfilled their end of the bargain, Maleficent would have blessed Aurora with something halfway useful, like a clever tongue—but like all forces of nature it demanded a requisite amount of respect. Maleficent respected it far more than the good fairies did. They shied from the beauty in decrepitude and in doing so denied half of all creation.
In the night Maleficent found herself sitting by the princess' bed, fingers combing through those golden, just-so curls. They haloed all around her scalp like the mane of a lion. Maleficent would starve the girl out a little, she decided, before freezing her again in time. For one there was an elegance to atrophy, and for two Maleficent—who thought of healthy skin as having a robust, greenish undertone—was slightly repulsed by Aurora's faint pink glow.
"I won't pretend to comprehend you, whatever sort of mind you must have," Maleficent said, "but I've had centuries enough to try and comprehend Flora, and I must assume she's passed along her obsession with all things that grow."
Aurora was quiet.
"What life might you lead when you wake, I wonder? There'll doubtful be any kingdom for you to return to. The tides of history are turning against your father; an alliance was his final hope."
Aurora's ring finger twitched. Maleficent sighed.
"I'm afraid your gifts have left you more a bauble than a person, princess Aurora. How can I hold any grudge against you?" Maleficent stood and grabbed her staff. "Whatever life you lead, there will be more to it than a cottage and a glade. That, my pet, I can promise."
* * *
For a decade Aurora's room remained half-garden, half-chapel. Then Maleficent's mood changed and she tore the whole thing down, stone by stone, and erected a fiery gallows in its stead. She'd just burned a battalion alive; apparently the issue of the princess had come to symbolize something to the surrounding lands, and some kings discovered that it made them quite popular to swear they'd "vanquish that beast on the mountain, once and for all." Maleficent was growing tired of these idiotic men and their idiotic sieges. The princess, in turn, was punished for her role in this inconvenience.
"If it weren't for your one gift, beauty rare these twits would've forgotten about you half the decade ago. They've erected sculptures. Sculptures. Of you, bumbling, hollow-brained child! To celebrate which accomplishments?"
But gallows did not befit Princess Aurora. Another ten years passed and Maleficent rearranged it into a cage so gilded that the future Versailles would have wept in jealousy at its excess. Ten more and the wind once again changed in Maleficent's sails ("Gold of sunshine in her hair, what need have you for gold everywhere else?") and she came up with something more restrained, dark wood and tomes on shelves and rings of mushrooms and cauldrons and bones made crisp and white by the sun and everything else a fairy queen might consider practical.
She traced the lines in Aurora's palms and found herself gradually intimate with every detail of her hands. Some humanfolk used palms for divination, and Maleficent thought there was a small something to it; even her unpracticed eyes could see a line split in two for life, one short for the person Aurora had been and one long for the person she will be, when she wakes at last from her magic slumber. A heart line cut short.
Good for her, Maleficent thought. She would never have to endure marriage. That was her real christening gift, in the end.
…Still, what a waste of fairy magic to make the girl a virtuosa and then never let her have her wedding song and dance.
Maleficent lifted Aurora gently from her bed and felt with fascination and delight how heavy she was in Maleficent's arms. Deadweight. Puppet's limbs. There was something so pleasant about her slack, sleeping body.
She manipulated Aurora's arms and legs until they were frozen in a curtsey.
"How did your silly little song go, girl? I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream…"
So they walked together. When Maleficent's enchantment became comfortable with the intricacies of Aurora's muscular system, they danced. Aurora bounded somnambulantly across the room and twisted and dipped and twirled. Maleficent hooked her arm around the twig's breadth of Aurora's waist and held her against the curve of her own, weedy torso.
Aurora's eyes twitched softly to and fro beneath their lids. Her lashes were full and dewey with the wetness of sleep.
"What do you dream of, princess?" Maleficent whispered. She hadn't realized the question maddened her so until this very moment. "Right now, do you dream of dancing?" She took a bright curl and wrapped it around her pale spindle of a finger. "Do you hear my voice, somewhere in the canals of your subconscious? You must—day in and out my voice is the only thing to reach your perfect ears. You must. You must dream of me."
It wouldn't be difficult. It was the sort of charm infant fairies learned when they were no bigger than buttercups and still suckling on nectar. It was the sort of charm wicked fairies loved to use for pranks: dream of God, dream of gold, dream of a cure for mortality. Dream of death and hunger and the Beast walking silently among your brothers. Make kings and priests and farmboys think themselves prophets and watch them burn their sisters on stakes in pursuit of some greater good.
But making Aurora dream of her with magic felt somehow like cheating.
She laid Aurora back down and crossed her arms over her chest, like the dead. She'd teach Aurora some of the old dances when she woke—the ones Maleficent learned when she was still living with the other fairies and they passed their time hopping around mushroom circles and asking the sun and moon for help with their enchantments. Maleficent would teach her everything, art and science and pleasure and pain, because Aurora was Maleficent's prize and she would do with her whatever she wished.
* * *
Aurora's waking stopped being an abstraction and started becoming something to plan for. Maleficent had quarters constructed for her and cycled through a hundred architectural and interior design styles before landing on something that felt vaguely acceptable. Then, as the years passed and the time stretched longer and longer, quarters became a hall, and then a floor, and then a wing.
She staged Aurora's body against every improvement to the castle and often came to tearing the whole project down when she found that, for example, a window was placed just a few inches too high, and the princess' hair did not shine as brightly and voluminously as it should have in the afternoon sun. She had the henchman responsible burned on a pyre. Another she had thrown off the cliffside when he came back with silks the wrong shade of midnight and dusty rose, and another she fed to the wolves of the valley when he had the gall—the gall—to suggest that the damask she'd selected for Aurora's curtains were too busy, and mightn't her wicked majesty consider this nice, sheer fabric instead?
Maleficent's henchmen became skittish whenever the princess' body came ambling out of her tower. As they should—Aurora would be revered when she one day walked these halls on her own. Better they learn to cower early. Aurora was more fey than human, and the influences of her good guardians would be easy enough to rectify once she was awake and able to be educated. It was a short, temporary blindness in judgment that Maleficent had not appreciated this from the very beginning.
This was not to say that the princess was the only thing that consumed Maleficent's attention. There were always humans wanting to make deals too dark for the good fairies to consider; there were always disputes to be managed and civil unrests to be squashed. But these things seemed petty, now, compared to the mission before her. She had little time to prepare for Aurora's awakening and it was critical that every detail be perfect.
Such as food: what would Aurora eat for her first meal? Maleficent had settled on braised duck and a plum eau-de-vie until she remembered that the girl once spoke to animals and probably wouldn't take kindly, at first, to the idea of eating meat.
Then there was clothing: Maleficent always looked devastating, and her henchmen couldn't be helped, but Aurora's birthday dress simply wouldn't do. It would be a warm, early spring, and she needed something loose and easy to play in. And though it was hard to detract from Aurora's enchanted beauty, there was no harm in finding a cut to accentuate her features. Something Greek? Something sweet to the skin. Something with a lace trim; green satin woven with purplish baby pearls.
Maleficent carried Aurora to the castle baths and stripped her bare. (What perfumes to use? A favorite of Maleficent's, or something more familiar to her? Oak and wildflowers, perhaps. Lightning and rain.) She took Aurora's measurements as she scrubbed her down. She was surprisingly muscular, probably for all her peasant labor. She had fair, feathery hairs on her stomach and rippling stretch marks on her hips and thighs. Had a man climbed the tower and found such a body, he'd have abandoned all pretense of chivalry and defiled it. This was another burden of her sex that Aurora was now free from, forever. She would certainly be grateful to Maleficent when she woke.
Maleficent laid Aurora's head back against the stone rim of the bath. She took the softest-tipped brushes she could magic into existence and powdered flecks of gold onto her cheeks. She uncapped a jar of waxy balm, slicked her fingers with it, and gently brushed it over Aurora's lips. They were soft and malleable. They followed Maleficent's touch eagerly, and clung a little when Maleficent pulled away, as if Aurora were kissing her fingertips.
Maleficent stared at Aurora for a long time and did not breathe.
Maleficent made a place for Aurora by the hearth and told her stories that would make her fragile heart tremble. She told ancient tales passed from fairy godmother to fairy goddaughter long before Maleficent's time. She plucked adventures from her own long life: of the times she outdid simpleton good fairies in their own games; of the kingdoms she toppled; of the parishes she turned against their priests and the priests against their parishes; of the revenges she exacted, delicious and slow, set up so perfectly that sons and son's sons were punished for their father's infractions centuries thereafter.
They slow-danced one night in the ballroom that Maleficent had made for her. She'd had everything set up as if it were a real party, practice for Aurora's birthday. Her henchmen held each other and glided across the floor nervously. Maleficent waved her staff and a trumpet called from thin air. She puppeted Aurora's body down the gilded steps, took her by the wrist, and kissed her on the back of the hand.
Aurora gasped. Her eyes fluttered for a second, and of her own accord she stumbled, down the step and into Maleficent's arms. Maleficent caught her. She held Aurora close and immediately pressed a hand to her chest, where her heart raced for a moment and then plunged again, back into a deep sleep.
* * *
Maleficent was brushing Aurora's hair when the war party came. Her first warning was the crash of a boulder into one of her towers. Then the soldiers poured in from every window, shouting and brandishing blades of iron; one even managed to slice clean into her flank before she transformed into a dragon and ate him, popping his body like a cherry between her lizardly teeth.
When it was done half her castle lay in ruin, in part from the trebuchets and in part from her own dragonfire rage.
She had time left to fix it all, she assured herself. She was the most powerful fairy on all the continent. But the issue was remembering—she'd considered so many little details in the past ninety-and-some years that they were all blurring together in her mind, pale against the shining, pulsing center of her thoughts: Aurora. Aurora. Aurora.
Where was Aurora?
In the sickly smear of blood and ash all flesh tones looked the same. Maleficent looked frantically. When her henchmen tried to help her, she drove them out and over the cliff for daring to get in her way. Useless, useless, useless beyond imagination! She looked until she found a twitching finger and a shimmer of silk beneath a pile of bodies. Maleficent pulled her out and lifted her into a bridal carry. There was her Aurora, drenched in red but still sleeping, fitfully, not a scratch upon her darling face.
Maleficent would string up every last soldier by their entrails as punishment for hiding her.
Maleficent sat upon the bottom steps that led to her throne. She looked out over the surrounding gore and was pleased by her victory. Then she looked back at Aurora, curled like a touch-me-not leaf in her arms. She wiped the blood off her gentle face. The lips followed Maleficent's hand again, clinging a little, and Maleficent felt breathless, her pulse rushing in her ears.
She leaned down and held her lips against Aurora's. It was chaste. She pulled away a second later, not even taking a moment to savor it.
Aurora's eyes opened. They were bluer than the sky just before sunset. They were bluer than the bluest hour on Earth.
They were wide with terror.