She knows not what the curse may be;
Therefore she weaveth steadily,
Therefore no other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson


Donna di Scalota

"Blue," Merryweather says, pushing the dress up as high as she can.

"Pink," Flora insists, throwing her own exact copy of the dress on top of Merryweather's.

Briar Rose raises her hands in front of her to get a little more space before they both tumble forward on to her. "They're both—very nice—"

"She likes the pink," Flora sniffs, snatching her dress out of mid air as Merryweather dumps it off to the side.

Briar Rose takes a couple steps back as the argument picks up and leaves her mostly forgotten for the moment. Her chamber walls are bright with every color of silk she's been able to find—purple and orange and the rare deadly green that she promised not to touch with her bare hands. That one is her favorite. She picked a room in one of the towers, just overlooking the archer's walkway. It'll be cold in the winter, with the wide window overlooking the battlements, but it's worth it for the view. Half the time she's walking around the castle, she feels like she's navigating a catacomb. Stone walls don't come naturally to her.

It's been a month since her birthday. Tonight is the coronation, at which point she'll very officially and finally take up the mantle of royal heir. On the greenwood desk of her vanity, one of the maidservants has laid out her coronet. The points of the golden thing strike her uncomfortably like the teeth of some fantastic serpent. She's not going to touch that until she absolutely has to.

Casting one look back at her former guardians, who are completely embroiled in their argument now, she hooks a leg over the window sill and jumps down onto the battlement. This is the part she likes. Walking along the crenellation, high above the earth, she can see all the hidden little things that her royal parents don't notice. The butcher feeding an apron full of leftovers to a dog. Two stable hands sharing a secret. A laundress laughing at a frivolous piece of lingerie. Talking to people is still difficult for her sometimes. This is a much easier way to understand them.

"You're not wearing shoes again," Maleficent observes.

Briar Rose glances over at the place where Maleficent has appeared. For her part, she looks stunning enough to halt an avalanche in its path. Briar Rose assumes that it's at least half her way of making a point about being Invited to the Event this time. It's also the first she's seen of Maleficent in a lady's dress since her disguise went up in flames more than a month ago.

"You're wasting time out here, highness," Maleficent says.

"Oh, not you too," she says. She slumps back against the stone, bits of mica catching at her loose hair. "Don't call me that. I can't take it from you too."

"There's no use denying the facts," Maleficent replies, brushing dust from her black mantle.

Briar Rose feels like she's been doing well up until this point, but the looming coronation and the endless tug war over the dress and the weeks of mistakes and missteps—the time she called a Duke just "sir" and almost started a civil war—and now Maleficent's blessed and damned frankness? She cracks. She starts to cry, smudging white powder from her too-tanned-to-be-fashionable cheeks as she hastily wipes away the evidence.

Maleficent makes a startled noise. "Come now," she says, "it can't be as bad as all that."

"I can't remember what order I'm supposed to enter the throne room in," Briar Rose sniffles, "and no matter which dress I pick someone is going to be mad at me, and I'm afraid I'll trip in all these skirts, and there's so many names I can't possibly remember them all—"

Quietly, Maleficent glides over and takes her in her arms. She's so tall. Briar Rose buries herself against the fairy's bosom, ignoring the buttons that push into her cheek.

"No one will call me by my name," Briar Rose whispers.

"Technically," Maleficent points out, "Aurora is your name."

"And it's—fine," Briar Rose says, "it's just—I don't feel like that person. I don't know who that person is."

For a moment, Maleficent only holds her. Then she says, "Why all of this now?"

Now? Because this feels like her very last chance to get out of it all. Because once she puts on the crown, that's the end of it. Because she doesn't feel like she's got the right to put on the crown now, when there's still so much that she hasn't even begun to grasp.

She's afraid to say it out loud. So many people have put their hopes in her, her parents and her guardians and a whole kingdom full of people she's never met, and even Maleficent, who's spent countless hours over the last month teaching Briar Rose things that even a baby ought to know, if that baby were a princess. They've stayed up deep into the nights, working by candle light and foxfire, rehearsing curtseys and long titles, pouring over family trees, breaking down law books page by excruciating page. Sometimes when the morning comes, she finds Maleficent still perched in the window sill, dog-earing pages for future lessons. It's so much work, not just for one of them. They've both worked so hard, and they barely seem to have scratched the surface.

Maleficent brushes a lock of hair behind her ear. "In the forest," she says, "you asked me something."

Briar Rose makes an uncertain sound.

"You asked me to take you away with me," Maleficent says. "You know now where I go when I leave you. If you still desire it… say the words, and I'll take you away forever. You needn't be anything but Briar Rose if you go with me."

"I couldn't," the girl says. "I'd let everyone down."

Maleficent shrugs. "I've been the villain before and I'll be the villain yet. No one needs know you went willingly."

Briar Rose laughs, a little wetly. In a way, the offer is tempting. Goblins don't care what order their silverware goes in, if they bother to use it at all.

Maleficent feels her hesitation, and pulls back. She catches Briar Rose's chin in her sharp fingers and says, "Then let me tell you what I've seen over the last month."

In her open hand, black smoke congeals to form her staff. In the glowing crystal, an image forms of Briar Rose's new bedroom, two figures seated on her opulent new bed.

That's three weeks ago. The bruise on Briar Rose's cheek is unmistakable—the memento of a clumsy attempt to scale the battlements while wearing ladies' shoes. She's telling Maleficent about the kitchen maid she's befriended, and about the chain of command that runs from the chamberlain down to the scullery.

The scene changes. The bruise is fading, and Briar Rose is unfurling her first attempt at epic tapestry, eagerly pointing out the section that she did, with the huge bristling boar.

The scene changes. It's later still, and Briar Rose is pacing her bedroom as Maleficent watches, explaining urgently the unfortunate business she'd come to discover in the household of the Marchioness. It had been a problem with a bastard child, a girl now with dismally few prospects.

"Oh," she says, looking up from the crystal, "I forgot to tell you with all the preparations going on. I found a lady who needed a handmaid for her daughter. I think she'll be a good fit there."

Maleficent opens her hand again, and the staff dissolves back into coal smoke. "That's precisely what I mean," she says.

"I'm sorry, I don't follow."

Maleficent gestures vaguely to the courtyard below them, where dozens of people are going about their work in such a small space, effortlessly interlocking pieces of clockwork. Briar Rose feels her mood sink again. Everyone has something they're good at, except her. She's got the biggest job of all and she can't even do it right. Why couldn't the world just let her be a simple fuller?

"How many of them do you know by sight?"

Briar Rose pauses to count. She isn't great with names, and a lot of the servants won't actually tell her their names, but she knows at least ten of them by their jobs, and she says so.

"As a monarch," Maleficent says, "you'll have to know who your allies and enemies are. You'll have to know how each dynasty is related to the next, where the bindings of a treaty are starting to fray, who wants what and from whom. You'll have to know politics. That is the part that people always think about when they think of monarchy."

Briar Rose slumps over the ledge, folding her arms under her chin.

"What those same people forget," Maleficent goes on, "what I forget—is that you must also know how the kingdom beneath you works. Stephen—" she still says his name like it leaves a slimy feeling in her mouth, "—nearly incurred a revolt after he had all the spinning wheels in the kingdom burned. There was a shortage of cloth in the region for years afterward, countless spinsters who had to find other work or leave the county entirely, a sharp spike in the price of imports in every direction… All because one foolish man at the top made a selfish decision with very little real benefit."

Briar Rose frowns. "He meant well."

"As queen, you must look down as well as aside, my girl," Maleficent says. "You have a strength that most royals never acquire. You see the parts of it that the rest of us… sometimes forget to see."

"Oh." Briar Rose wipes away the last of the damp powder on her cheeks. "Do you think that's enough?"

"No one ever knows what will be enough," Maleficent replies. "But I think you have the advantage."

Below them, one of the washerwomen pushes her friend into the suds. Briar Rose winces. There's an absolute uproar as everyone in the courtyard immediately picks a side.

"And of course," Maleficent says, pointedly looking at nothing in particular, "you'll have me as well."

[M]

Briar Rose stands at the doorway, dumb with nerves as a gaggle of maidservants adjust everything from her veil to her chemise. She'd caught a look at her reflection as they bustled her out her door earlier, and she's still dizzied by how she resembles her own mother now, in these clothes. Between the veil and the layers of velvet, her mother seems to be mostly clothing at any given time, with a little bit of person inside.

It's been hard getting to know her parents after all this time. From the doorway she watches the king giving his speech, pointedly glaring at Maleficent—in the front row, blocking the view with her horns—every few sentences. He's been so happy to meet his daughter, to ask her about her life, to introduce her to his friends, but he's also… hard to talk to. He has such hard opinions about everything. It's the reason why all those spinning wheels were destroyed, and also the reason why a baby girl was named heir to a kingdom in spite of the unspoken order of an entire dynasty. Although she's beginning to understand that her inheritance is at least implied to hinge on her eventual marriage, which is… worrying.

And then there's her mother, quietly seated on the throne, hands folded in her lap. She's such a quiet woman. Briar Rose thinks often of the story Zhanna told her, trying to overlay the pattern of the living woman on the sketch of the fairy tale. It's not hard to imagine her standing silently at the top of the stair as the sky blackens with the wings of vengeful birds, and that's probably the thing that uneases Briar Rose most. She still hasn't worked up the courage to ask about it. And Leah—her mother, her mother has been nothing but kind to her since she arrived.

The heralds lift their trumpets and begin a fanfare. Someone pushes against Briar Rose's back. She stumbles forward, catches herself against the backmost pew and in the breath between then and now, she catches the eye of the child seated there. It's a little boy. He looks like the child of a cook, his worn ordinary clothes mostly obscured by the fine old cloak cut down to his size. His eyes are bright, starstruck.

It occurs to her that someone will be that child's future. Someone will have to be. Wars and plagues will come, regardless of who stands at the helm, and that child will live or die by the choices of the ruler who stands there. This time, it's going to be her. It's a thought that should fill her with fear, but instead it fills her with… certainty.

If not her, then who? Maleficent is right. People at the top always forget the ones at the bottom.

Briar Rose rights herself. She pulls back her shoulders, straightening them under the weight of the long mantle, and starts forward down the carpet.

"Her royal highness," the bishop announces, "the princess Aurora."

She catches Maleficent's eye, as she makes her way up the steps. She can be Aurora too. She'll always be Briar Rose to the people who matter, but if she's lucky she has a long life still ahead of her. There's room enough in that life for both Aurora and Briar Rose.

[M]

The high ceilings of the reception hall that carried the single voice of a toast earlier become a thunder storm with a hundred human mouths chattering at once. Briar Rose winces at the sound of applause that breaks out when she enters the room. But she smiles too. From the moment the coronet touched her head, she's felt a clear sense of peace that she hasn't truly felt for more than a month. She feels as if she's been walking outside of her body all this time, braced unprotected against the turbulent weather, and she's only just now found her way back into the familiar warmth of herself.

She shakes more hands than she can count, an endless rhythm of "your majesty" and "your highness". She doesn't say much. Lots of people are eager to extend invitations to visit their households in the countryside. She tries not to get too excited at the prospect of taking a break from Avaricon for somewhere a little less urban.

In the endless rush of well wishers, she at last finds herself facing a single person. The crowd pulls back imperceptibly, until it does seem as if they are alone even in the sea of bodies. He must be someone pretty important, not to be interrupted at all in this chaos.

He sticks out his hand. "Hey," he says. "I'm Phillip."

"Hello," she says. He has a strong grip, which she belatedly tries to match. He looks delighted.

"That's quite a handshake you have there," he says. "I'm surprised you've got any energy left for it."

"No one else has really been holding on very tight," she says. "They might be afraid they'll break me."

"With calluses like yours I'm certain it would be the other way around."

Briar Rose flexes her hands, noticing her own rough spots for the first time since she left the mill. Since she stopped working with lye on a regular basis, her dry skin has softened up quite a lot, but it's true that she still carries the shape and texture of her baskets and her wood axe even now, silk dresses or no.

"Oh," Phillips says, "no, I didn't mean—there's nothing wrong with them!"

"No, I know," Briar Rose says. She looks up, and she smiles at him. "Actually, I'm glad you pointed them out. They remind me of home."

Phillip looks relieved. "I took you for a swordsman at first," he says, "but the thumb callus is wrong. Do you use a weapon?"

"Um," she says. "An axe?"

"Fantastic!" Phillip says. "I've never been much good with a battle axe myself. We should—" and at this he leans in, a hand around his mouth, "—we should practice together some time."

"Really?" Briar Rose says. For a moment she remembers her fantasy of dressing as a young man, carrying a sword, standing at Maleficent's shoulder during a royal tournament. "But—I really shouldn't exercise with a boy—"

Phillip shrugs, but the way he shrugs makes it seem as if he cares an awful lot about not caring. "I won't say anything if you don't," he assures her. Then he pulls back and holds up his hands, palms open. "No funny stuff," he says. "Promise."

"Well…"

"I just thought it would be a good way for us to get to know each other," he says. At her visible uncertainty, he goes on, "Since we're betrothed and all."

The name clicks all at once. So this is the prince assigned to be her true love before she could even speak. She gives him a second, harder once-over. He does seem nice. Kind of chagrinned too, as if the betrothal were something he hesitated to bring up.

"Are you…" she says, "excited about it?"

"Uh, sure. Sure. Are… you?"

"Sure," she says. "Sure."

They stand in silence for a long moment, examining their shoes.

"But do you think—" Phillip starts.

"What if we weren't?"

"Right," Phillip says, rushing to agree, "what if we weren't?"

"I mean, suppose we wanted something else?"

"My father would go absolutely mad."

"I don't think my parents would be very happy either, to be honest."

Phillip glances around the hall, and then in a low voice he says, "Listen, if you want to know the truth, I'm really not keen on this whole arranged marriage thing. It's so old fashioned. I want to bring Tricassae into the fourteenth century, you know?"

"I'm… not very excited about being told who I ought to love, either," Briar Rose confesses. "You seem like a very nice man, but…"

Phillip grins at her. "Say no more," he tells her.

"Suppose," says Briar Rose, "we just… weren't to actually get married?"

"Ever?" Phillip frowns a bit. "It would make inheritance a problem."

"No, no," Briar Rose says, "but, just not until we're older? I mean, once you're king, you can marry anyone you want."

"And we could stay betrothed in the mean time," Phillip finishes. "But what about you? If you're not married by the time your father dies, you're going to be in for a difficult regime."

Briar Rose sighs, rubbing her head where the coronet is digging into her scalp. "I haven't gotten that far yet. I don't know, I guess I'll work it out eventually?"

Phillip considers that for a moment. "Tell you what," he says. "If you aren't married by the time you take over the kingdom, I'll pledge you a third of my army. Let's see a civil war start with those odds."

He holds out his hand, and this time Briar Rose takes it without pause.

[M]

Maleficent spends the reception basking in the terrified and furious looks that she's getting from every mortal in the room. She sips a glass of wine while making unbroken, unblinking eye contact with the fairy Merryweather. This might be the last time for a while that she's going to be the most unquestionably feared woman in a room, so she might as well enjoy it.

When she spies the princess making her way through the crowd, looking even in the candle-smoke dimness of the hall as if the sun is shining on her alone, Maleficent's black cold heart gives a hot little start. What a commotion it would start if Maleficent were simply to take the girl in her arms and kiss her soundly, in front of all these doddering fools. But there is the long game to consider, unfortunately. It was up to Maleficent to be the politician for both of them, now.

"Pretty thing," she murmurs, as she bows to the girl.

Briar Rose turns red with delight, sinking into the curtsy she's been practicing, perfectly pink in the ears. "I'm terrified that I'm going to rip the seams the first time I have to reach for something," she admits.

"Princesses don't reach for things," Maleficent remarks, even as she thinks to herself that, had the girl been that sort of princess, things would have turned out very differently for them both. Worse, perhaps? Is she willing to concede that the world in which she lives today is indeed the best of all possible worlds?

Inside her there are a thousand maybe-futures, an endless constellation of moments that might be. Soon she'll walk with Briar Rose through the dark quiet of her private gardens. Soon, they'll visit distant mountains and clear, hot seas all in the heft of a single evening. Another night on the battlements of the castle, watching the moon rise. Another night in the fields listening to her sing.

Is she changed? Perhaps she is changed. Or perhaps she is newly faceted, a sapphire cut to reflect old light anew. She has never felt so mortal. She has never felt so alive. It is as much weakness as strength, and yet—and yet…

She reaches out and pulls the girl close, enveloping them both in the black velvet of her cloak, and she says, "Once you told me you loved me. Do you still?"

"I do!"

No hesitation. Who is this creature, who knows so few trivial things and so very many powerful secrets? How to love, how to forgive? Maleficent fears she will live all her ageless endless life out and never truly understand. Maleficent spies the musicians, who have taken up residence near the east wall, and lifts a single finger in their direction. They freeze, lutes and pipes in hand, as she turns over her palm and looks away, at the girl in her arms.

Her voice is supernaturally crisp and full in the cacophony of human sounds as she calls, "Trouvères!"

They give her nervous nods. She takes in every strange-common detail of Briar Rose's face—the blood beneath her skin, the faint sun-freckles over her collarbone, the whorl of her nose, the loose strands of hair beginning to grow dark with sweat.

"Play something for the princess," she calls to them. "Play a love song."

This must be the best of all possible worlds. Certainly, Maleficent can no longer imagine living in any other.

As the music tunes up—somewhat nervously—and then begins to spill free in earnest, Maleficent takes the girl's hand in her own.

"May I have the first dance?" she asks.

Briar Rose pulls on her, instead of answering, and they go spinning into the steps of that familiar dance—the same now as it was that first night under the spotted sky, wet feet and unfamiliar skin. How many dances lie ahead of them still? There will never be enough, and that makes them each more precious.

"Donna di Scalotta," the girl sings along, easy and familiar, "dare you leave your tower?"

And Maleficent knows how it is that fairies come to love human beings.