Except… it hadn’t been.
Thorn had slept, immobile, not needing to eat or pee, her uterus slumbering uncramped, but she’d been aware the whole time. Not enough to count the passage of minutes, to track the days and nights. But she’d been awake, screaming inside her skull until it felt like she’d clawed the fragments of bone from the inside to lodge painfully in her brain.
She desperately wanted to ask how long it had been, but she restrained the question. Somehow it felt like giving Jada a victory she hadn’t won. Also, she wasn’t sure she could speak coherently.
“Come down to the kitchen,” Jada said. “There’s things to put away and I’m hungry for supper.”
Thorn changed clothes, as if she could shed the experience of unsleep as easily, relieved in some unnameable measure to find the sealing wax with its core of treasure still in her pocket. She transferred it to her clean gown, taking a quick, sweet taste of the special, happy moment of the prince receiving the belt buckle from his father. The sunlight in that scene looked more real than her own, which seemed sideways, as if she couldn’t quite believe in it after staring into the darkness behind her eyelids for so long. She stood there a long moment, blinking and squinting.
“Aren’t you going to inquire about my trip?” Jada asked.
“How was your trip?” The words came out automatically, sounding as she always had, and not like some corpse resurrected from the grave.
“Profitable,” Jada replied, eyeing her, seeming not quite sure how to assimilate her behavior. “I brought supplies, along with a number of treasures for you to determine provenance for. The last group sold very well.”
“That’s nice.” Thorn was unable to care.
“Did you dream at all?” Jada asked suddenly enough, with a whiff of suspicion that alerted Thorn to a subject of significance, even through the strange warp of her thoughts.
“No,” she answered honestly. She didn’t think that had been dreaming. “You know I haven’t dreamed since I was a little girl. I grew out of it, as you said I would.”
Jada visibly relaxed. “Excellent. I didn’t want my enchantment to cause your brain to revert to that childish state.”
Years passed in a boundaryless blur after that. Sometimes Thorn lived her same life at the cottage, doing chores and tending the garden and animals, and sometimes she lay frozen in the half-awake state Jada forced on her with increasing regularity. Jada jauntily packed up the objects Thorn had researched with her psychometric sorcery, along with the detailed history and provenance Thorn had penned for each. Then Jada put Thorn to sleep, coolly threatening to enchant her where she stood, leaving Thorn in a crumpled heap if she wouldn’t cooperate by lying on her bed. Thorn always capitulated, immobilized like the faded butterfly trapped in amber, the cottage sleeping around her, while her mind beat futilely against the stasis.
Every time Thorn awakened from the Sleep of Ages, she felt a little more attenuated, less able to discern her waking life from the one where she hung suspended, not truly asleep and yet unable to wake. Time passed, the seasons changed, her body matured, but Thorn felt increasingly unmoored from reality. So much so that she became uncertain of what was real and what wasn’t. If not for her connection to the prince’s gem, the fixed memories of the outside world that never changed, she might have dissolved even more.
Jada said that Thorn slept just like Nessie and the chickens and, like them, awoke again without being aware of having beenasleep. But Thorn had been aware, hadn’t she? Jada seemed to think that Thorn should be rested when she returned, refreshed and ready to see to the neglected household. But Thorn felt as exhausted as if she’d been awake for days or weeks on end, sometimes seeing things that weren’t there, her ears ringing and mind swimming.
The only way Thorn could think of to fasten herself to reality again besides the little jewel, which only held a few fragments of the same core memories of the prince—she avoided all the others—was her journal. Jada had gotten careless with the materials Thorn needed to write up the provenances and didn’t keep track of how much paper and ink Thorn used—nor the “mistakes” Thorn made, which required her to use a fresh sheet and discard the old one.
It had occurred to Thorn that she could track the passage of time by the moon. She wasn’t sure exactly how the moon’s phases corresponded to each day, but she started paying attention and making sketches. The discarded sheets were now covered in drawings of the moon from every clear night Thorn had been able to glimpse it, and even from the daytime when it crossed the tree-rimmed circle of blue sky above, a transparently pale version of its nighttime self. It turned out the moon rose and set about a full hour’s difference every day, which had been a surprise to Thorn. She began noting those times, as well as recording her thoughts and impressions compared to what Jada told her, secreting the pages in a metal box beneath floorboards of her little room.
And if those sheets also contained sketches of her prince’s face, no one would ever know but her.
The first time Thorn checked the moon phase after awaking from the enchanted sleep, she felt keen disappointment in her results, certain she’d done her calculations incorrectly. According to her charts, Jada had been gone for over two weeks. That couldn’t be right. It had never been more than three days before.
But the next time and the next, Thorn got similar results and she began to wonder, particularly after the brain fog wore off, if she really might be sleeping for that long.
Finally, it occurred to Thorn to ask Jada how old she was, thinking that might give her a clue about the passage of time. Jada cast her a puzzled frown. “Oh, it must be nineteen years now since you were born. Who keeps track?”
Nineteen years. And Thorn had started her menses at twelve years, she remembered that much. She’d first tried escaping the briar-rose wards a year later. So, six years had passed with Thorn put into the waking sleep that eroded her life. She supposed those pages and pages of the moon coming and going, waxing and waning, gave proof of that. Still to be sure, she waited awhile—several full moons—to pose another question.
She asked Jada how long her trip had been, knowing from her constant friend the moon that it had been nearly three weeks.
“Oh, five days this time,” Jada answered breezily. “Why do you ask?”
The eerily calm rage that filled Thorn made her blood run cold, but also felt like an anchor to reality, crystallizing an outline of something true inside the shifting mists of confusion. Jada was lying to her, and with a smile on her face. At least Thorn knew it now. She wasn’t losing her mind, only time.
“No reason,” Thorn answered diffidently, pretending to concentrate on delicate pastry dough she’d painstakingly rolled to a nearly translucent wafer thinness. “It’s strange to lose track of time like I have.”
“Be glad of it,” Jada advised from her chair at the kitchen table, where she sat with her feet up, a cup of tea at her elbow, and the fresh iced scones Thorn had just brought out of the oven. “There are many people in the world who would give anything for a deep, dreamless sleep where they never age.”
Dreamless?Thorn glanced up in her startlement at that. Didn’t everyone grow out of dreaming as she had? She openedher mouth to ask, but quickly thought better of it. Jada had fortunately returned her attention to her book, not noticing Thorn’s reaction to the slip.You now know for certain that Jada has lied to you on more than one thing,Thorn reminded herself.What if she has lied to you about many things? Or about everything?
In her distress, she bore down too hard and tore a hole in her pastry. With a sigh, she balled it up again, added a bit of water, and began rolling it out with care. She had several sheets already under a dampened tea towel, waiting to be assembled into the multilayered shell around the fresh fish Jada had brought from the city. With some cream from Nessie and capers dried from the garden and revivified in some wine, the dish promised to be tasty. Not that Thorn cared. Everything tasted bitter to Thorn these days in her sour unhappiness. Her life was slipping away like water draining into sand and meanwhile the world spun on. She saw and felt thousands of lives through the artifacts she touched, everyone awake and alive in ways she never would be.
Six years had elapsed and Thorn had learned nothing more on breaking wards or the Sleep of Ages. Thorn needed more information, more tools, and to get them she had to be awake.
