Read Online Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt - Free Book Online Page B

stained yellow with beer and wine. “It is sleep, I tell you.”
    “How can sleep be a plague?” asked the smallest dwarf, who was also beardless.
    “A witch!” said the sot.
    “A bad fairy,” corrected a fat-faced man.
    “She was an enchantress, as I heard it,” interposed the pot-girl.
    “Whatever she was,” saidthe sot, “she was not invited to a birthing celebration.”
    “That’s all tosh,” said the tinker. “She would have cursed the princess whether she’d been invited to the naming-day party or not. She was one of those forest witches, driven to the margins a thousand years ago, and a bad lot. She cursed the babe at birth, such that when the girl was eighteen she would prick her finger and sleep forever.”

    The fat-faced man wiped his forehead. He was sweating, although it was not warm. “As I heard it, she was going to die, but another fairy, a good one this time, commuted her magical death sentence to one of sleep. Magical sleep,” he added.
    “So,” said the sot. “She pricked her finger on something-or-other. And she fell asleep. And the other people in the castle—the lord and the lady, the butcher,baker, milkmaid, lady-in-waiting—all of them slept, as she slept. None of them have aged a day since they closed their eyes.”
    “There were roses,” said the pot-girl. “Roses that grew up around the castle. And the forest grew thicker, until it became impassible. This was, what, a hundred years ago?”
    “Sixty. Perhaps eighty,” said a woman who had not spoken until now. “I know, because my aunt Letitiaremembered it happening,when she was a girl, and she was no more than seventy when she died of the bloody flux, and that was only five years ago come Summer’s End.”
    “… and brave men,” continued the pot-girl. “Aye, and brave women too, they say, have attempted to travel to the Forest of Acaire, to the castle at its heart, to wake the princess, and, in waking her, to wake all the sleepers, buteach and every one of those heroes ended their lives lost in the forest, murdered by bandits, or impaled upon the thorns of the rosebushes that encircle the castle—”
    “Wake her how?” asked the middle-sized dwarf, hand still clutching his rock, for he thought in essentials.
    “The usual method,” said the pot-girl, and she blushed. “Or so the tales have it.”
    “Right,” said the tallest dwarf, whowas also beardless. “So, bowl of cold water poured on the face and a cry of ‘Wakey! Wakey!’?”
    “A kiss,” said the sot. “But nobody has ever got that close. They’ve been trying for sixty years or more. They say the witch—”
    “Fairy,” said the fat man.
    “Enchantress,” corrected the pot-girl.
    “Whatever she is,” said the sot. “She’s still there. That’s what they say. If you get that close. If youmake it through the roses, she’ll be waiting for you. She’s old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death.”
    The smallest dwarf tipped his head on one side. “So, there’s a sleeping woman in a castle, and perhaps a witch or fairy there with her. Why is there also a plague?”
    “Over the last year,” said the fat-faced man. “It started a yearago, in the north, beyond the capital.I heard about it first from travelers coming from Stede, which is near the Forest of Acaire.”
    “People fell asleep in the towns,” said the pot-girl.
    “Lots of people fall asleep,” said the tallest dwarf. Dwarfs sleep rarely: twice a year at most, for several weeks at a time, but he had slept enough in his long lifetime that he did not regard sleep as anything special or unusual.
    “They fall asleepwhatever they are doing, and they do not wake up,” said the sot. “Look at us. We fled the towns to come here. We have brothers and sisters, wives and children, sleeping now in their houses or cowsheds, at their workbenches. All of us.”
    “It is moving faster and faster,” said the thin, red-haired woman who had not spoken