He opened the wooden case. Inside was a length of vine with two large roses attached, both flowers the deep black of spilled ink. The outside of each petal shone like polished leather, while the insides had the thick dull nap of velvet. At the end of each petal was a spike like the stinger on the tip of a scorpion’s tail.

“Ah,” said Aurora. “I can see how those might be a little alarming.”

“A little?” Lord Ortolan choked on the words. “This must be your godmother’s doing, but what does she intend?”

“She means no harm to anyone in Perceforest,” Aurora said, stroking one of the black petals. It was extraordinarily soft, aside from the stinger, and very beautiful. Just like her godmother.

“Your Majesty, how can we know?” Lord Ortolan insisted.

“She’s being helpful,” Aurora said with a fond smile, “which means it will be much harder to convince her to stop.”

Chapter 4

When Maleficent had placed a crown on Aurora’s head, she hadn’t thought she was putting Aurora in danger. Making her queen of two kingdoms had seemed like a perfect plan. After all, Aurora had wanted to live in the Moors, and she was already the heir to Perceforest. She was a human the faeries loved, and humans would be predisposed to love her, too.

Maleficent believed she would make a wonderful queen.

And she was wonderful.

But the job turned out to be terrible. In the Moors, the only expectation of Queen Aurora was that she guard them from outside threats. But in Perceforest, danger came from all sides—and so did obligations; when her people didn’t want to trick her or cheat her or steal her throne, they wanted her to solve all their problems.

And since Maleficent was the one who had put Aurora in that position, she’d decided to help her—in small ways. Nothing too obvious.

A few seeds planted along the borders. Potions cooked up to guard Aurora against poison. The occasional criminal waking in the royal prisons, begging to confess. Lightning storms drawn from the clouds when it seemed as though Perceforest’s farmlands had gone too long without rain.

And if people looked up in fear when thunder crashed around Aurora, well, perhaps that was no bad thing, either. It was a good reminder that if the humans ever thought to move against her, there would be no one to hold Maleficent back.

But in her travels through Perceforest, she discovered something she hadn’t expected.

The nature of humans.

Maleficent had known a few of them, of course, but, well, a vanishing few. She hadn’t really understood how desperate their lives could be. She hadn’t seen them digging in the dirt for shriveled vegetables, their faces lined and their bodies bent. She hadn’t seen hungry children, or young lovers torn apart by greed, and she hadn’t seen the cruelty neighbors inflicted on one another.