Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt Page A

stick on the webs, too: thick cobwebs hung and covered the stairs, and the old woman shook her stick at them, pulling the webs apart, leaving spiders scurrying for the walls.
    The climb was long, and arduous, but eventually she reached the tower room.
    There was nothing in the room but a spindle and a stool, beside one slitted window,and a bed in the center of the round room. The bed was opulent: unfaded crimson and gold cloth was visible beneath the dusty netting that covered it and protected its sleeping occupant from the world.
    The spindle sat on the ground, beside the stool, where it had fallen seventy years before.
    The old woman pushed at the netting with her stick, and dust filled the air. She stared at the sleeperon the bed.
    The girl’s hair was the golden yellow of meadow flowers. Her lips were the pink of the roses that climbed the palace walls. She had not seen daylight in a long time, but her skin was creamy, neither pallid nor unhealthy.
    Her chest rose and fell, almost imperceptibly, in the semidarkness.
    The old woman reached down and picked up the spindle. Shesaid, aloud, “If I drove this spindlethrough your blooming heart, then you’d not be so pretty-pretty, would you? Eh? Would you?”
    She walked toward the sleeping girl in the dusty white dress. Then she lowered her hand. “No. I can’t. I wish to all the gods I could.”
    All of her senses were fading with age, but she thought she heard voices from the forest. Long ago she had seen them come, the princes and the heroes, and watched themperish, impaled upon the thorns of the roses, but it had been a long time since anyone, hero or otherwise, had reached as far as the castle.
    “Eh,” she said aloud, as she said so much aloud, for who was to hear her? “Even if they come, they’ll die screaming on the blinking thorns. There’s nothing they can do—that anyone can do. Nothing at all.”
    They felt the castle long before they saw it: feltit as a wave of sleep that pushed them away. If they walked toward it their heads fogged, their minds frayed, their spirits fell, their thoughts clouded. The moment they turned away they woke up into the world, felt brighter, saner, wiser.
    The queen and the dwarfs pushed deeper into the mental fog.
    Sometimes a dwarf would yawn and stumble. Each time the other dwarfs would take him by the armsand march him forward, struggling and muttering, until his mind returned.
    The queen stayed awake, although the forest was filled with people she knew could not be there. They walked beside her on the path. Sometimes they spoke to her.
    “Let us now discuss how diplomacy is affected by matters of natural philosophy,” said her father.
    “My sisters ruled the world,” said her stepmother, draggingher iron shoes along the forest path. They glowed a dull orange, yet none of the dry leaves burned where the shoes touched them. “The mortal folk rose up against us, they cast us down. And so we waited, in crevices, in places they do not see us. And now, they adore me. Even you, my stepdaughter. Even you adore me.”
    “You are so beautiful,” said her mother, who had died so very long ago. “Likea crimson rose fallen in the snow.”
    Sometimes wolves ran beside them, pounding dust and leaves up from the forest floor, although the passage of the wolves did not disturb the huge cobwebs that hung like veils across the path. Also, sometimes the wolves ran through the trunks of trees and off into the darkness.
    The queen liked the wolves, and was sad when one of the dwarfs began shouting, sayingthat the spiders were bigger than pigs, and the wolves vanished from her head and from the world. (It was not so. They were only spiders, of a regular size, used to spinning their webs undisturbed by time and by travelers.)
    The drawbridge across the moat was down, and they crossed it, although everything seemed to be pushing them away. They could not enter the castle, however: thick thorns filledthe gateway, and fresh growth was