As he enters her pliant body he can barely wait. Such joy. She must feel it.
And she does. Her eyes fly open. She clasps him with her slender little girl arms.
And in her bird’s voice, ten years of age, she softly cries: “At last! My prince!”
Awake
THAT FIRST NIGHT she woke up, which was the night after it had just happened, Roisa had been surprised. She’d been upset. She knew something had previously gone terribly wrong—exactly like when you have a bad dream, and you wake and can’t remember what it was, only that it was awful, and the feeling is still there.
Now, of course, she was used to waking like this. She looked forward to it every night, near morning when she lay down to sleep again.
She sat up, threw back the light embroidered cover, and slipped from the bed. She slept clothed always, in the rose silk dress she had been wearing the evening It happened. Yet the silk was always fresh as if just laundered and pressed smooth by hot stones. She herself was also always fresh as if just bathed and scented, and her hair washed in the essences of flowers. She had long ago ceased to puzzle over that, though before That Night, keeping oneself so perfect had been a time-consuming daily task.
Roisa was sixteen. It had been her sixteenth birthday, the day it happened. Now she was still sixteen, but she had done and learned such a lot. She knew that the cleanness, and everything like that, was simply because of Great Magic.
By the bed was a little (magically) new-baked loaf, with apples and strawberries (magically) just picked, and a china pot of mint tea, (magically) brewed and poured.
Roisa made her nightly breakfast.
Then she left the attic room.
Outside, the narrow stairway was as it always was, dirty and cobwebbed, thick in dusts. But when the skirt of the silk dress brushed through the muck, nothing stuck to it.
She was used to that also.
As she was to the people standing about lower down, absolutely stone-still, as if playing statues in some game. There were the ladies-in-waiting first, the three who must have meant to follow her up to the attics that evening. Unlike Roisa, webs and dust had gathered on them, spoiling their gorgeous party clothes and jewelry, and carefully arranged hair. It was a shame. Roisa still felt sorry for them, if in rather a remote way.
The first time it had really shocked her. She had shouted at them, pulled at them, tried to make them move. Then worse than these, the other things—for example: the cat that had become a furry toy cat on the lowest landing, the bird that stood on the sill with its wings fanned out—never lowering them, never using them to fly off. And the young guardsman she had always liked, standing motionless, already dusty in his splendid uniform, his blue eyes wide open, not seeing her at all—
Worst of everything however, had been to find her parents, her funny pretty mother, her important grand father, sitting there like two waxworks, in the carven chairs from which they’d been watching the dancing in the Hall. The dancing from which Roisa had escaped, actually to meet secretly with the guardsman—but somehow she had missed him—and then—then, instead she had, also somehow, gone up into the attics of the palace . . .
Roisa had cried, when she woke that first night. She had felt no longer sixteen, but about six. She had put her head into the lap of her mother’s dress, clutching her mother’s body, which felt like a cold rock. Sobbing.
That was when They came.
They—the ones who told her. The ones with the magic.
• • •
When she got down to the palace hall tonight, Roisa did pause, only for a minute or so, to dust her mother.
She always did that. It seemed essential. Because of Roisa’s attention, her mother (the Queen) still looked glamorous, her hair shining, and her necklaces.
The King Roisa didn’t try to dust. She would never have dared, because, in the past, he had seldom touched her, and then only with the firmest of hands, the coolest of kisses.
Beyond the hall lay the royal gardens, into which, her dusting done, Roisa ran.
Oh—it was full moon tonight.
Once wonderful scents had drifted here from lilies, and from arbors overgrown by jasmine. A gentle breeze blew this evening, and not one of the now-scentless flowers, not one of the tall, graceful trees, stirred. Not a single leaf moved, nor even the wind-chimes hung in the branches.
By the fountain—whose jetting water had stopped in a long, faintly luminous arch, like rippled glass—the two white doves sat, as they had done now for years. The doves didn’t move. Nothing did. Not even the moon, which lived in the sky—at least, it never did when she saw it. Only the night wind, the breeze, only that ever moved.
Roisa glanced about her, by this time no longer worried over the time-frozen gardens. Not even the fish in the pool, still as golden coins, concerned her any more. There was nothing she could do about any of this.
Just then something seemed to ride straight out of the moon.
They had come back. As they always did.
With the brilliant flutter of sea-spray, thirteen white horses landed on the lawn. On the back of every one sat a slim, clever-faced lady, with flowing hair, each of a different color—and these tints ranged between apricot and copper, between jet and mahogany and flame and pewter and violet. Everything sparkled—horses, ladies—with gems, beads, fireflies—Then the thirteenth horse came trotting forward and the thirteenth rider swung from her gilded saddle, light as air. Even though, by now, she knew this person so well—better, probably, than she’d known her own mother—Roisa never quite stopped being surprised by her.
She was a Fey, of course. One of the Faery Faer, the Elder Ones.
“Awake, I see,” said the Thirteenth Fey, whose name was Carabeau (which meant something like My-friend-who-is-good-looking-and-has-her-own-household). “Up with the owl, my Roisa. Come on, let’s be off.”
So Roisa mounted the horse behind Carabeau, as she always did.
After which the thirteenth horse, and all the other twelve horses, lifted up again into the sky. They weren’t winged, these faery steeds—it was just that they could, when they or their riders wanted, run as easily through the air as over the earth.
In seconds, the great palace and its grounds became small, far off and far down. It was possible to see, all round them, the high wall of black thorns that kept out all the world. And beyond the thorn-wall, the deserted town, the deserted weedy fields and ruined cottages, from which everyone had, over the years, dejectedly gone away. For the palace was under a curse that would last a century, and everybody knew it.
• • •
Roisa laughed as the horses dived up and up. The moon was like a huge white melon, hung on a vine of milky clouds. The shadows of the horses ran below them over moonlit forests, over looking-glass lakes and gleaming, snake-winding rivers, over sleeping villages and marble cities that had also intended to stay wide awake.
“Look, do you see, Roisa?” asked Carabeau, and she pointed with her long, ringed finger at an open courtyard in one of the cities. There was torchlight there, and music, and dancing—but all stopped utterly still. Exactly like the scene in the palace they had left behind.
“Do you see the banners?” asked Carabeau. “The lights and the colored windows. Look at the girls’ rich dresses and the fine clothes of the men. Look at that little dog dancing.”
And the little dog was dancing, up on its hind legs, cute as anything. Only right now, it didn’t move.
Roisa sighed.
“What, my dear?” asked the Faery.
“I wish—” said Roisa.
“Yes? You know you can say to me or ask me anything, my love.”
“Yes, I know. I’m only—sorry I can’t ever see—what it’s really like—I miss it, Carabeau. Only a little bit. But I do.”
“Your old life, do you mean? Before you fell asleep and then woke up with
us.”
“Yes.”
“Before the Spinning Wheel and the Spindle with its pointed tip.”
“Yes. Oh—it’s marvelous to fly about like this, to see everything, and all the foreign lands—the towers and spires so high up, the splendid rooms, the mountains and seas—I remember that forest with tigers, and the procession with colored smokes and elephants—and the great gray whale in the ocean, and the lighthouse that was built before I was even born—”
“And the libraries of books,” said Carabeau softly, “the treasure-houses of diamonds, the cathedrals, and the huts.”
“Yes,” said Roisa.
She hadn’t known, before she began, that she would say any of this. She hadn’t known she felt any of it. (Nor did she think if Carabeau might be testing her, in order that she be sure of this very thing.)
“Is it because,” said Carabeau, “when you visit these sights with us, time has always stopped?”
“Yes—no—”
“Because, Roisa, one day that may change. How would that be for you, if the people moved and the clocks ticked?”
“Of course—of course I wish everything was like that—so I could see it properly alive. But . . . it isn’t only that. I want—to live inside it—not outside all the time.”
“Even if you are outside with us, who love you so well? Even with me?”
“Oh,” said Roisa.
Not long after that the horses dipped down. They galloped between scentless streamers of low cloud, that should have carried with them the smells of spices or fog or rain. They brushed the unmoving tops of trees with their glittering hoofs, and skimmed over a wild night valley.
This time they landed in the courtyard of a vast old temple. Though some of the building had come down from enormous age, still lines of carved pillars upheld a roof whose tiles, blue as eyes, remained.
In the past, they had often come down into the places of human life, and walked the horses, or walked on foot, among markets, and along busy highways, mingling with the people and the beasts who, ‘playing statues’, like everyone in the palace, and everywhere, stayed motionless as granite.
That very first night—so long ago it seemed now—Carabeau and the other twelve Feys, had explained to her. How, while Roisa and her palace slept their magical sleep, the rest of the world went on about its usual affairs. And how, when she woke up each night, it was inside a timeless zone the Faery Faer could make, and carry with them. And then, though she and they might spend all the hours of darkness traveling to the world’s four corners and back, no time at all would pass in mortal lands.
“It isn’t,” Carabeau had said, “that we stop their time—only that we move aside from the time they keep. For them, less than the splinter of a single second goes by—for us it is a night.”
“But the wind moves—” Roisa had cried.
“That wind which blows is not a wind of the world, nor subject to the laws of the earth. That wind is magical, and its own master. But the moon doesn’t move, and the sea doesn’t. The clouds don’t move at all.”
Astonished, Roisa had never really understood, which she saw now. She’d only accepted it all.
Of course she had. Thirteen Faeries had told it to her.
Only one thing. That first night she had asked if the other people in the palace—her parents—the guardsman—if they could wake up, too, as she had done. Because, as she knew, now the curse had fallen, they, like her, were meant to sleep for a hundred years.
“They won’t wake,” said Carabeau. “Not until the proper hour. Or else there would be no point to any of this.”
Tonight, they dismounted from the horses in the ancient temple courtyard. It was full of the (magically raised) perfume of myrtle bushes, which had once grown there. Faery lamps of silvery amber and catseye green hung from spider silks, or floated in the air. An orchestra of toads and night-crickets made strange, rhythmic music. Invisible servants came to wait on the thirteen Feys and Roisa, bringing a delicate feast of beautiful, unguessable foods and drinks.
They picnicked, while the temple bats, caught in that second’s splintering, hung above like an ebony garland thrown at the moon.
Roisa once more sighed. She’d tried hard not to.
Carabeau looked into her eyes. But the eyes of a Fey, even if you look in them back, can’t be seen into.
“Do you recall, Roisa, what happened that evening when you were sixteen? Then tell it over to us.”
So Roisa told Carabeau and the others what they all knew so well. They listened gravely, their chins on their hands, or their hands lightly folded on the glimmering goblets. As if they had never heard any of it before.
But this story was famous in many places.
At Roisa’s birth, twelve of the Faery kind had come to bless the child with gifts. These gifts were just the sort of thing a princess would be expected to have and to display. So, they made her Lovely, Charming, Graceful, Intelligent, Artistic, Weil-Mannered, Dutiful, Affectionate, Patient, Brave, Calm, and Modest.
But all the while they were giving her these suitable gifts, the Twelve Feys were restless, especially the two that had to give the baby the blessings of good manners and dutifulness, and the other Faery who had to make her modest.
Every so often, one or several of them would steal closer, and stare in at the cradle. The court believed they were just admiring the baby. Of course she was exceptional—she was the King’s daughter.
Eventually the Feys left the room, leaving it loud with congratulatory rejoicing. By magical means they’d called to their own Queen, the Thirteenth Fey, whose name was Carabeau.
Now this was unusual. And in the town which then thrived at the palace’s foot, people looked up astounded to see the Queen Fey ride over the sky in her emerald carriage drawn by lynxes.
When she entered the King’s Hall, courtiers and nobles stood speechless at the honor. But Carabeau looked at them with her serious wise face, and silence fell. Then she spoke.
“The princess shall be all that’s been promised you. You’ll be proud of her, and she will fulfill all your wishes. But first she shall have time for herself.”
At that a hiss had gone up, like steam from a hot stone over which has been flung some cold water.
The King frowned. His royal lips parted.
Carabeau lifted her hand and the King closed his mouth.
“The Spinning Wheel of Time shall stop,” said Carabeau, “because this child, by then sixteen years old, shall grasp the Spindle that holds the thread time is always weaving. Then she shall gain a hundred years of freedom before she becomes only your daughter, and the wife to the prince you approve for her.”
The King shouted. It wasn’t sensible, but he did.
The rest—was history.
When Roisa finished recounting this, which was all she knew, and all the Feys had told her, Carabeau nodded.
“You remember too that night, and how you went to meet the guardsman—you, always so dutiful, but not then—and somehow you missed him—as we intended, and climbed into the attics, and found me there. And when I offered you the chance of a hundred years of journeys, of adventures—of freedom—you gripped time’s Spindle, and the Time Wheel stopped.”
“I don’t remember that—I never have,” said Roisa, doubtfully. “Only—going upstairs, and perhaps finding you—But when I first woke afterward, I was frightened.”
“But now you are not. Understand, my love, for you this wasn’t a curse or doom. It was my gift, the thirteenth blessing. And anyway, at last the hundred years are at an end. This night is your final one among us. Let me tell you what has been arranged for you, when you return to the world. Tomorrow a powerful and handsome prince, even more handsome than the guardsman, will hack a way in through the thorns. He’ll climb up through the gardens, the palace, mount the attic stair, wondering at it all. He’ll find you asl
eep, as always you sleep by day. He’ll wake you up. You’ll fall in love at once, and so will he. Then everyone else will wake. The birds will fly about, the cats will purr, the earth’s own wind will make the leaves rustle, the sun and the moon will cross the sky. You will live happily till the end of your days, you and your prince, admired and loved by all. The life that, perhaps, now you long for.”
The Thirteenth Fey paused. She waited, looking at Roisa.
Roisa realized that something was expected of her. She didn’t know what it was—should she thank the Faeries excessively for all the pleasures and travels, the feasts eaten and sights seen? Or for their care of her, their kindness?
Roisa didn’t know that the Thirteenth Faery was actually waiting to see if Roisa would say to her, But I don’t really want that! For Roisa to burst out that No, no, now the choice was truly hers, really she wanted to stay among the Faery kind. Providing only they could lift the spell from those left in the palace (as she knew they could) then she would far rather become one of their own—if that were possible (and it was). Even if it lost her a princess’s crown, and all the rough romance of the human world.
But Roisa, of course, didn’t want that, did she.
She wanted precisely what she had been supposed to have, before the magic of the Spinning Wheel and the hundred years waking Sleep.
And so, when Carabeau murmured quietly, “Are you glad your century of freedom is over?” Roisa sprang up. She raised her head and her arms to the sky. She crowed (not modestly or calmly) with delight, imagining the fun, happiness, glory that was coming.
And then, startling herself, she found she was crying. Just like on that first night. Just like then.
And when she looked down again at the Feys, they seemed pale as ghosts, thin as shadows, and pearls spangled their cheeks, for the Faery People can’t cry real tears.
Then they kissed her. The last kisses of magic. The next kiss she would know would be a mortal one.
“Shall I remember—any of this?” she asked as, under the static moon, they rode the sky to her palace.