enough to rip the train off. She felt a twinge of sorrow for the women who sewed the cloth and the old women who wove it. But her legs were now free, and she could take the steps several at a time.
She doubled her speed past the floors with barracks. Not all the human guards had gone to the ball; people still had to patrol, despite the safety of the thorny barrier. They looked up at her from benches where they were sharpening their swords or polishing their helms. Perhaps they were not as surprised as guards might have been in other castles, in other times, with princesses who stayed nicely in their rooms and chapels and gardens.
Aurora paused at the top of her tower and looked around wildly. Her goal was the barbican: the main entrance to the castle with the portcullis and drawbridge. It was the point that stuck out farthest from the keep and leaned farthest into the vines.
But the passage to it from where she had emerged was a terribly exposed length to run. The tall crenellations on the right of the stone walk were meant to protect guards from invading forces. There was nothing on the left but a low wall; who would attack a castle from within?
In the courtyard below, a half-dozen misshapen figures tumbled together out of the castle, armed with bows and slings. They had a perfect view of her.
“There she is!”
One pointed an arm that terminated in a single terrifying hooklike claw.
Aurora ducked and ran.
Maleficent appeared at an arched window in a castle tower, fury informing her every gesture.
“Guards, seize the princess!”
she cried. “She means to do herself harm!”
But at the same time, she raised her staff and began to mutter an incantation.
The princess willed her feet to move faster. She narrowed her vision to the path before her, the ancient rocks that slipped by on either side of her. The barbican was once a place of extreme security, with murder holes for dropping boiling oil on the heads of invaders, but had been more or less abandoned since the world had ended. The giant gate was sealed in place; there was no cause to raise it, ever. The platform on top was now just used as a private escape for castle teens and drunken servants. Aurora hadn’t expected to find anyone there.
To her dismay, the shiny helms of guards began to pop out of the narrow entrance to the stairs like moles.
“Your Highness!” one called, immediately leaping to grab her.
Up here the vines were distressingly close. They laced together just a man’s height above her head before bending over and shooting straight down a hundred feet, where their thick trunks made a living wall just outside the castle’s stone ones. The moat was gone, the water sucked up by their greedy, unlikely growth.
The foul dust of their aging and shifting lay brownly over everything. It smelled unwholesome.
Aurora looked around wildly, unable to believe she was about to do what she was about to do.
A guard lunged for her.
She leapt.
Aurora fell harder than she thought she would—and landed on a thick branch. She coughed and gasped, the breath knocked out of her. Her ribs were bruised and her stomach hurt. But that was all.
Now that she was within the tangled world of the plants, it would be a piece of cake: climbing down from one closely entwined vine to another.
The guards continued to shout from somewhere above her.
“My lady!”
“After her!”
“Queen Maleficent, what do we do?”
With a grin she wasn’t sure why she had, Aurora began her descent.
And then the vines began to move.
Not the oldest, thickest trunks; small whippets of young vines, curlicued like a cucumber’s tendrils. They shot around her legs and arms and pulled.
“NO!”
Aurora cried out, frustrated with the world. She shook and pulled and kicked. The greenery snapped away as easily as bean sprouts.
The princess was taken aback by her own ferocity and its accomplishments. She really hadn’t expected it to be so easy.
A little less cocky but more