Trigger Warning

She heard their calls rising up the stairwell.

‘This way!’

‘Up here!’

‘It feels worse this way. Come on! Quickly!’

She turned around, then, did her best to hurry upward, but her legs moved no faster than they had when she was climbing earlier that day. They caught her just as she reached the top of the steps, three men, no higher than her hips, closely followed by a young woman in travel-stained clothes, with the blackest hair the old woman had ever seen.

The young woman said, ‘Seize her,’ in a tone of casual command.

The little men took her stick. ‘She’s stronger than she looks,’ said one of them, his head still ringing from the blow she had got in with the stick, before he had taken it. They walked her back into the round tower room.

‘The fire?’ said the old woman, who had not talked to anyone who could answer her for decades. ‘Was anyone killed in the fire? Did you see the king or the queen?’

The young woman shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. The sleepers we passed were all inside, and the walls are thick. Who are you?’

Names. Names. The old woman squinted, then she shook her head. She was herself, and the name she had been born with had been eaten by time and lack of use.

‘Where is the princess?’

The old woman just stared at her.

‘And why are you awake?’

She said nothing. They spoke urgently to one another then, the little men and the queen. ‘Is she a witch? There’s a magic about her, but I do not think it’s of her making.’

‘Guard her,’ said the queen. ‘If she is a witch, that stick might be important. Keep it from her.’

‘It’s my stick,’ said the old woman. ‘I think it was my father’s. But he had no more use for it.’

The queen ignored her. She walked to the bed, pulled down the silk netting. The sleeper’s face stared blindly up at them.

‘So this is where it began,’ said one of the little men.

‘On her birthday,’ said another.

‘Well,’ said the third. ‘Somebody’s got to do the honours.’

‘I shall,’ said the queen, gently. She lowered her face to the sleeping woman’s. She touched the pink lips to her own carmine lips and she kissed the sleeping girl long and hard.

* * *

‘Did it work?’ asked a dwarf.

‘I do not know,’ said the queen. ‘But I feel for her, poor thing. Sleeping her life away.’

‘You slept for a year in the same witch-sleep,’ said the dwarf. ‘You did not starve. You did not rot.’

The figure on the bed stirred, as if she were having a bad dream from which she was fighting to wake herself.

The queen ignored her. She had noticed something on the floor beside the bed. She reached down and picked it up. ‘Now this,’ she said. ‘This smells of magic.’

‘There’s magic all through this,’ said the smallest dwarf.

‘No, this,’ said the queen. She showed him the wooden spindle, the base half wound around with yarn. ‘This smells of magic.’

‘It was here, in this room,’ said the old woman, suddenly. ‘And I was little more than a girl. I had never gone so far before, but I climbed all the steps, and I went up and up and round and round until I came to the topmost room. I saw that bed, the one you see, although there was nobody in it. There was only an old woman, sitting on the stool, spinning wool into yarn with her spindle. I had never seen a spindle before. She asked if I would like a go. She took the wool in her hand and gave me the spindle to hold. And then, she held my thumb and pressed it against the point of the spindle until blood flowed, and she touched the blooming blood to the thread. And then she said—’

A voice interrupted her. A young voice it was, a girl’s voice, but still sleep-thickened. ‘I said, now I take your sleep from you, girl, just as I take from you your ability to harm me in my sleep, for someone needs to be awake while I sleep. Your family, your friends, your world will sleep too. And then I lay down on the bed, and I slept, and they slept, and as each of them slept I stole a little of their life, a little of their dreams, and as I slept I took back my youth and my beauty and my power. I slept and I grew strong. I undid the ravages of time and I built myself a world of sleeping slaves.’

She was sitting up in the bed. She looked so beautiful, and so very young.

The queen looked at the girl, and saw what she was searching for: the same look that she had seen in her stepmother’s eyes, and she knew what manner of creature this girl was.

‘We had been led to believe,’ said the tallest dwarf, ‘that when you woke, the rest of the world would wake with you.’

‘Why ever would you think that?’ asked the golden-haired girl, all childlike and innocent (ah, but her eyes! Her eyes were so old.) ‘I like them asleep. They are more . . . biddable.’ She stopped for a moment. Then she smiled. ‘Even now they come for you. I have called them here.’

‘It’s a high tower,’ said the queen. ‘And sleeping people do not move fast. We still have a little time to talk, Your Darkness.’