When Aurora had been a child in the forest and her only crown had been woven of honeysuckle, she’d thought that the queen of the distant castle must be happy all the time, because everyone had to listen to her and do exactly what she said. Since Aurora had come to the throne, she’d discovered just how wrong she’d been.

For one thing, now everyone seemed to want to tell her what to do.

Her late father’s advisor, a grim-faced elderly man called Lord Ortolan, liked to drone on and on about her royal obligations, which usually involved enacting his strategies for enriching the treasury.

And there were the courtiers—young men and women from noble families throughout the kingdom sent to the palace to be her companions. They took for granted luxuries and delights she’d never known. They taught her formal dances she’d never tried before, and brought in minstrels to sing songs of heroic deeds, and jugglers and acrobats to make her laugh with their antics. They gossiped about one another and speculated about Prince Phillip’s extended visit to her kingdom and whether his pretext of studying Ulsteadian folklore in the libraries of Perceforest was his real reason for remaining. It was all very pleasant, but they still wanted her to do things the way they had always been done. And Aurora wanted change.

She might have expected her godmother, Maleficent, to be sympathetic, but she wasn’t. Instead, Maleficent made endless unhelpful and pointed suggestions about how Aurora would be happier ruling her kingdom from the Moors. And while Aurora lived at the palace, Maleficent stayed away. For the first time in her life, Aurora didn’t have the comfort of Maleficent’s shadow.

It didn’t help that Aurora would be happier in the Moors. The castle was massive and drafty and damp. Wind often whistled down interior corridors. The fireplaces were fond of backing up, giving the elaborately decorated rooms a slight but constant stink of smoke. Worst of all, though, was the iron. Iron latches, iron bars on windows, and iron bands on doors. They were a reminder of the horrible things her father, King Stefan, had done and the even more horrible things he’d wanted to do. Aurora had ordered it all stripped and replaced, but that was such a large undertaking that not even a quarter of the rooms were finished.

She didn’t blame Maleficent for not wanting to visit her there, with all those memories.

But the palace was where Aurora needed to be. Not just because she wanted to know what it was like to be human, but because she had one goal as queen of Perceforest and the Moors—to lead the faeries and humans of both kingdoms into thinking of themselves as belonging to one united land. Her first step was a treaty. The only problem was that no one could agree on anything.