You feel a raw pain. You are a wound that never closes.

You become plodding and slow. The kingdom you’ve lost is above you, cerulean and out of reach.

You curse the sky.

Curse the air.

Curse the girl.

And then you become the curse.

Chapter 3

Aurora hated to sleep. Every night she made excuses to stay up later and later. There were always lists to make, letters to write, endless revisions of the treaty to puzzle over. She wandered around her enormous chamber, stoking the fire and letting her candles burn down so low each wick guttered out in a pool of wax.

But there always came a point when she had to put on her smock and cap and blow out her candle. Then she huddled under her blankets and looked out her window at the stars, trying to convince herself that it was safe to close her eyes, that she would wake up in the morning.

She wasn’t going to sleep for a hundred years.

The enchantment was gone.

The curse was broken.

But most nights Aurora only fell asleep to the pink of dawn blushing on the horizon. Most days she woke up exhausted. Some days she could barely get up.

Yet when the next night came, the fear struck her anew. Falling asleep felt like falling down a deep well, one that she might never claw her way out of.

After tossing and turning for what felt like ages that evening, she got out of bed. Throwing on a heavy gold brocade robe over her smock, she padded through the silent, sleeping household to a fountain on the edge of the royal gardens.

Phillip looked up from where he was sitting, whittling a little flute in the moonlight. “Your Majesty,” he said. “I was hoping you’d come.”

The first time she’d stumbled on him during one of her evening walks, he’d told her that in Ulstead, court parties lasted all night, and he’d grown used to keeping late hours. That time, they’d skipped rocks on an ornamental pond.

“It’s the treaty keeping me up,” she told him with a sigh, although it wasn’t the whole truth. “I’m afraid that the humans and the faeries will never agree to anything. And if I force them, then what’s the use?”

“In Ulstead, the stories of faeries are even worse than those told here, and there are no Fair Folk to contradict them. The kinder tales are no longer told. The only place to even find them is in the Ulsteadian section of your royal library. The people of Perceforest are fortunate, even if they haven’t quite realized it yet.”

Aurora was surprised. “Did you believe those stories?”