Once Upon a Dream by Liz Braswell

window, the queen’s bed wasn’t empty; Aurora herself slept in it.
    The princess fell against the castle wall. It wasn’t like looking at a statue or a painting of herself;
it really was her.
She knew it. She knew there would be a teeny tiny freckle on the inside of the left pinky finger. She could feel the way her belly flattened out when she lay on her back. She knew her own breathing.
    Which…the other Aurora…wasn’t really doing….
    She who sleeps.
    Aurora was the one who slept.
    Though to her this world seems
    As real as the waking one.
    This…wasn’t real….
    The whole
world
wasn’t real.
    As soon as she thought it, she knew it was true.
Felt
it was true. Over there, in that complicated, ugly world,
that
was reality.
    This
was all a dream….
    Aurora felt like fainting. Just letting go. Letting whatever insanity that made up the world continue on without her.
    Maleficent looked at Aurora’s bed thoughtfully.
    “All I need to do is hold on for a little longer,” she murmured. “Until the clock chimes twelve and her sixteenth birthday is over….”
    She regarded the blond hair, the petite frame, the delicate feet, the pixie nose of the sleeper.
    “I suppose her body will have to do until I can find better,” she added with an only slightly disappointed shrug. “But I will have an entire kingdom at my disposal at that point.”
    Do not faint.
    A tiny voice, a tiny glimmer of a voice insisted annoyingly in Aurora’s mind. But it was her
own
voice, from inside her head, not a hallucination or a visit from an Outside fairy.
    Passing out would not solve anything. This was all very real. It was happening. It would not go away. She would have to deal with
thinking about
it and
processing
it and
weeping
over it—and all of the real ramifications—later.
    Right now
she had to run.
    “Your Majesty, Princess Aurora is…”
    Lianna had been hurrying up the stairs but stopped when she saw Aurora in the shadows. The two girls regarded each other.
    Then Aurora’s eyes drifted from the other girl’s face to her feet.
    Lianna had picked up the skirt of her dress to run quickly up the stairs, just as the princess had. But where Aurora had golden shoes, Lianna had…
    Trotters.
    Splayed, ugly, fleshy trotters.
    Which was why she always walked so oddly, Aurora realized. It wasn’t a foreign habit.
    She was one of Maleficent’s creatures.
    “Your Highness,” Lianna whispered, addressing the princess this time.
    Somehow
this
spurred Aurora into action. She swept past the other—
girl?
—quickly down the stairs, slamming her shoulder into her as she went.
    “TRAITOR!”
she hissed, almost like her aunt.
    Where could she go? Her first urge was her bedroom. Safe, lonely, comfortable bed.
    That was dumb.
    Her second thought was to hide
under
her bed. Like a little child. Which was also dumb.
    Her third thought was a broom closet, which—with the
entire castle
of monstrous guards and a powerful fairy queen after her—was also dumb.
    She stood for a moment, frozen, terrified. There was no place to go.
    There was only one place to go.
    Outside.
    She moved like she was diving, lunging toward the back entrance, where just days ago she had gone to meet Cael. Aurora didn’t have the time or energy to be terrified of the dark green dome of vines overhead; she just made straight across for the outer defenses of the keep. One lone old crone marked the princess’s presence with a vaguely curious raised eyebrow as she emptied a water skin over her parched plot of beans. Golden ball or not, things died without help in this world.
    The princess dashed into the nearest tower in the outer wall. Even through the heavy stones, she was sure she could start to hear movement, an alarm raised once it was realized she had fled.
    Up, up, up, she climbed the staircases she had played on as a child, free to roam the castle at will like a rat.
    Her dress kept tangling with her legs despite her nimbleness and grace; she paused just long