with a warmth and happiness that she hadn’t known in a long time.
“I NEVER REALIZED JUST how infinitely boring the prattle of human teenagers was,” Maleficent drawled. But her voice was even thicker than irony required; she seemed slow…like a mechanical bird winding down. “I hope we don’t have to put up with much more of their fascinating discussion of philosophy and the nature of reality. Or the culinary delights of porridge.”
“I thought the part with the porridge was fairly interesting,” Lianna spoke up, perhaps emboldened by her mistress’s weakness. “Especially the part where she summoned it out of the air.”
Maleficent’s yellow eyes flicked toward her.
“Yes…that was interesting. And troubling. Who knew the girl had it in her?”
“You didn’t,” Lianna pointed out tonelessly. “There is much more to her than you originally thought. Considering how she has evaded all your traps—even the particularly clever nightmare inside the nightmare. It will be harder to kill her now that she is beginning to unlock the power of her own dreamworld.”
“I don’t need to kill her,” Maleficent said with a satisfied smile. “All I need to do is delay her. She has one hour and two minutes to figure out how to defeat me and wake up. If she is in my power when the clock strikes twelve and the next day begins…I win.
“But you’re right,” Maleficent said thoughtfully, swirling the green and red liquids in the orb of her staff. “It might be time to step up the direct assaults on her personage. I need the work of my cleverest, strongest servants! Eregral, Slunder, Agrabrex, to me!”
Large, slow-moving, grinning black forms congealed from the shadows in the corners of the room.
And Lianna’s opaque eyes might have shown a hint of concern.
HOURS LATER, it was still early…and Aurora Rose was already exhausted. Despite the porridge, her feet were dragging; it was probably before noon, and they had already walked at least six miles. She tried not to complain or slow down. Neither seemed like a princessy thing to do.
Instead of burning off entirely, the morning mist had risen and thinned out and now covered the sky loosely, like thousands of baby spiders leaving trails of silk behind them. The sunlight, so bright and yellow before, was sickly gray. The air was damp and chilly.
She kept her eyes on the ground to prevent tripping. The shadows were imperceptibly fading along with the light. Some colors in the background stood out more, though, like bright little poisonous mushrooms and the quick tail of an orange salamander. But everything else became shades of black and white and gray.
Sounds grew strange. If her heel crunched dead leaves, sometimes it seemed silent; sometimes it echoed loudly off rocks and logs.
“When are we going to get there?” she asked, trying not to sound whiny. Her throat still hurt.
Phillip sighed. “Honestly, if today is entirely event free—no more demons or sudden ravines or that many of your, um, spells—which are completely not your fault!—then just another half a day or so, I would guess. A few hours.”
“All right.” She took a deep breath, trying to be brave and stalwart like a prince.
But it wasn’t long before the fog began to settle in earnest. At any other time, she would have been simply fascinated. The girl who was trapped in a castle had never seen anything like it, really, and the girl who was raised in the woods wasn’t afraid of anything from the natural world.
But now…there was something creepy about it.
They passed through thick patches of gray clouds whose colony droplets were so large she could almost make out each individual one. Water seeped out of everything like magic; she saw a bead of dew appear and pull itself together at the tip of a pine branch like a living thing. For a moment she had a glimpse of the black-and-white world reflected in it, in reverse, before it fell silently to the ground.
The fog found its way through her clothes, which became heavy and damp. And then hot and itchy and freezing and itchy as her legs and body moved beneath them.
A few times it was so hard to see that they almost stepped off the path. Phillip let out an unprincely oath as he twisted his ankle on an exposed root.
The land began to slope downhill and the fog poured down beside them, rolling like a slow-moving liquid. Tendrils shot out before the rest of the clouds, as if feeling out the way. It curled and rippled around