The Princess Awaked
Tara Avery
She woke as a swimmer might break the surface after too deep a dive, gasping for breath, heart pounding. Even the brief darkness between blinks allowed the dream to return in snatches; images without context. A wall of thorns without roses to make them palatable; ravens shrieking; big-eyed fairies with blessings and curses and lies upon their lips. Her right index finger ached with remembered pain, though when she glanced at it the flesh was smooth and rosy and flawless.
She felt as though she’d been asleep for a hundred years. Perhaps more.
She thought she remembered her name: Rory or Rosie or Talia. She thought she remembered the feel of harp strings or the sound of a flute. She thought she remembered the steps to a complicated set no one could dance as well as she.
She could not remember the faces of her parents.
When she pushed herself to her elbows, she did not recognize the room she’d been asleep in. Everything seemed too white and sterile and bland, though she could not remember why she expected silks and tapestries and a blazing fire in a huge stone hearth. She shook her head and a man glanced up from a sheaf of papers. At first he said nothing, though his lips moved and his eyebrows formed questions.
“Forgive me,” she said even though she was not accustomed to speaking first, not accustomed to such rude silence. Her voice was thin and rough with sleep. “Are you a prince?”
“Am I a prince?”
She frowned. It seemed so unlikely. There was nothing princely in his carriage: his shoulders too rounded; his eyes watery behind thick spectacles. A prince, she thought, would never have forced her to speak first, and certainly would never have parroted back her question without pausing to give answer to it.
The man who could not be a prince asked a question of his own, “What do you remember?”
“Beauty and grace. Singing and dancing and playing. Cheeks of carnation and lips of coral. I remember Mopsey the spaniel, who liked to chase her tail, but I do not remember the faces of my parents. I think they were kind. Do you not think that odd? To not remember the faces of one’s parents?”
The man brazenly touched her face, her forehead. He stared long and hard into her eyes, until she was the one to lower her gaze. He glanced once again at his papers, and at his own wrist, and then he gathered his things and left her.
She had neglected to mention one of the things she remembered, for she had not told the man about wit. Using every ounce of it now, of her intelligence and cleverness, she slipped from the white room, through the white hall, past the sleeping dragons and the gates of iron thorns.
She slipped out of the dream and into the nightmare.
#
She lost her way almost immediately. Too late she realized her wit had not prepared her. She had expected the world outside to resemble the one she so vaguely remembered, but she was wrong, too wrong. No Mopsey with wagging tail greeted her here; no servants told her where to walk; no parents smiled benevolently upon her, as though she could do no wrong.
Instead, she stepped out into a wide path, only to be confronted by a monster shrieking as it swerved around her. Putting her hands to her face, she waited until the pained, painful cry had faded. The wide path was unsafe; this much she now knew with certainty. With as much strength as her sleep-weakened legs could muster, she dashed away, toward the familiarity of woods and the faint sound of trickling water.
But even the garden was an abomination, crowded with people who, instead of showing obeisance and respect, called out strange things she could make no sense of, except to know the words were not kind. At her feet, piles of refuse; in her nostrils, the stench of filth and decay. Paralyzed by this display, this tragic disruption of natural beauty, she could walk no further. An insolent fellow whistled as he passed her, and reached out to touch her hair, but she flinched away from him, and this movement gave her the momentum required to run.
Nothing was as she remembered it. Everywhere metal and glass and noise. Everywhere shouting and cruelty. She lost count of the bodies she passed in the street, huddled in blankets for warmth, begging her for coins though she had nothing to give. She lost count of the faces that turned away from her, choosing ignorance over assistance. She ran until she was exhausted. She ran until her feet bled. She ran until she realized she could not outrun the horrors of this world. The curses upon it were too horrible; the dark magic too potent. Whatever gifts belonged to good fairies, they were long gone, drowned in a sea of smoke and waste and the stink of human bodies, human frailty.
They found her much later, staring with wide, horrified eyes through a glass window at a magic box showing only terror, death, a grotesque masque of suffering. She could hardly believe the images were truthful, yet she knew they were, she knew it in her bones. She hardly heard their approach, hardly registered the impertinent hands on her shoulders, her arms, her wrists. None of it mattered. None of it mattered at all, not in a world such as this was.
When at last they pulled her away from the distressing visions, she realized her cheeks were wet with tears. She had not felt them. “Why?” she asked no one in particular. They did not answer. No one answered.
#
“You mustn’t do that again,” said the man behind the desk, frowning behind his shiny glasses, hiding behind his white coat. “It’s not safe. You must believe I will do all in my power to help you. It may take some time, but I will break this spell.”
“No,” she replied, her cheeks dry, her eyes clear. “No. I do not want you to break any spell. I do not want you to undo any curse. I want to sleep for at least another hundred years.” She paused, remembering, shuddering. “Do you not understand? I do not want to wake at all.”
Then, in her white room down the white hall, past the sleeping dragons and the walls of iron thorns, she slept. She slept and did not dream of waking.