The queen looked at the girl, and saw what she was searching for: the same look that she had seen in her stepmother’s eyes, and she knew what manner of creature this girl was.
“We had been led to believe,” said the tallest dwarf, “that when you woke, the rest of the world would wake with you.”
“Why ever would you think that?” asked the golden-haired girl, all childlike and innocent (ah, but her eyes! Her eyes were so old). “I like them asleep. They are more . . . biddable.” She stopped for a moment. Then she grinned. “Even now they come for you. I have called them here.”
“It’s a high tower,” said the queen. “And sleeping people do not move fast. We still have a little time to talk, Your Darkness.”
“Who are you? Why would we talk? Why do you know to address me that way?” The girl climbed off the bed and stretched deliciously, pushing each fingertip out before running her fingertips through her golden hair. She smiled, and it was as if the sun shone into that dim room. “The little people will stop where they are, now. I do not like them. And you, girl. You will sleep too.”
“No,” said the queen.
She hefted the spindle. The yarn wrapped around it was black with age and with time.
The dwarfs stopped where they stood, and they swayed, and closed their eyes.
The queen said, “It’s always the same with your kind. You need youth and you need beauty. You used your own up so long ago, and now you find ever more complex ways of obtaining them. And you always want power.”
They were almost nose to nose, now, and the fair-haired girl seemed so much younger than the queen.
“Why don’t you just go to sleep?” asked the girl, and she smiled guilelessly, just as the queen’s stepmother had smiled when she wanted something. There was a noise on the stairs, far below them.
“I slept for a year in a glass coffin,” said the queen. “And the woman who put me there was much more powerful and dangerous than you will ever be.”
“More powerful than I am?” The girl seemed amused. “I have a million sleepers under my control. With every moment that I slept I grew in power, and the circle of dreams grows faster and faster with every passing day. I have my youth – so much youth! I have my beauty. No weapon can harm me. Nobody alive is more powerful than I am.”
She stopped and stared at the queen.
“You are not of our blood,” she said. “But you have some of the skill.” She smiled, the smile of an innocent girl who has woken on a spring morning. “Ruling the world will not be easy. Nor will maintaining order among those of the Sisterhood who have survived into this degenerate age. I will need someone to be my eyes and ears, to administer justice, to attend to things when I am otherwise engaged. I will stay at the centre of the web. You will not rule with me, but beneath me, but you will still rule, and rule continents, not just a tiny kingdom.” She reached out a hand and stroked the queen’s pale skin, which, in the dim light of that room, seemed almost as white as snow.
The queen said nothing.
“Love me,” said the girl. “All will love me, and you, who woke me, you must love me most of all.”
The queen felt something stirring in her heart. She remembered her stepmother, then. Her stepmother had liked to be adored. Learning how to be strong, to feel her own emotions and not another’s, had been hard; but once you learned the trick of it, you did not forget. And she did not wish to rule continents.
The girl smiled at her with eyes the colour of the morning sky.
The queen did not smile. She reached out her hand. “Here,” she said. “This is not mine.”
She passed the spindle to the old woman beside her. The old woman hefted it, thoughtfully. She began to unwrap the yarn from the spindle with arthritic fingers. “This was my life,” she said. “This thread was my life . . .”
“It was your life. You gave it to me,” said the sleeper, irritably. “And it has gone on much too long.”
The tip of the spindle was still sharp after so many decades.
The old woman, who had once been a princess, held the yarn tightly in her hand, and she thrust the point of the spindle into the golden-haired girl’s breast.
The girl watched as a trickle of red blood ran down her breast and stained her white dress crimson.
“No weapon can harm me,” she said, and her girlish voice was petulant. “Not any more. Look. It’s only a scratch.”
“It’s not a weapon,” said the queen. “It’s your own magic. And a scratch is all that was needed.”
The girl’s blood soaked into the thread that had once been wrapped about the spindle, the thread that ran from the spindle to the raw wool in the old woman’s hand.
The girl looked down at the blood staining her dress, and at the blood on the thread, and she said only, “It was just a prick of the skin, nothing more.” She seemed confused.
The noise on the stairs was getting louder. A slow, irregular shuffling, as if a hundred sleepwalkers were coming up a stone spiral staircase with their eyes closed.
The room was small, and there was nowhere to hide, and the room’s windows were two narrow slits in the stones.
The old woman, who had not slept in so many decades, said, “You took my dreams. You took my sleep. Now, that’s enough of all that.” She was a very old woman. Her fingers were gnarled, like the roots of a hawthorn bush. Her nose was long, and her eyelids drooped, but there was a look in her eyes in that moment that was the look of someone young.
She swayed, and then she staggered, and she would have fallen to the floor if the queen had not caught her first.
The queen carried the old woman to the bed, marvelling at how little she weighed, and placed her on the crimson counterpane. The old woman’s chest rose and fell.
The noise on the stairs was louder now. Then a silence, followed suddenly by a hubbub, as if a hundred people were talking at once, surprised and angry and confused.
The beautiful girl said, “But –” and now there was nothing girlish or beautiful about her. Her face fell and became less shapely. She reached down to the smallest dwarf, pulled his hand-axe from his belt. She fumbled with the axe, held it up threateningly, with hands all wrinkled and worn.
The queen drew her sword (the blade’s edge was notched and damaged from the thorns), but instead of striking, she took a step backwards.
“Listen! They are waking up,” she said. “They are all waking up. Tell me again about the youth you stole from them. Tell me again about your beauty and your power. Tell me again how clever you were, Your Darkness.”
When the people reached the tower room, they saw an old woman asleep on a bed, and they saw the queen, standing tall, and beside her, the dwarfs, who were shaking their heads, or scratching them.
They saw something else on the floor also: a tumble of bones, a hank of hair as fine and as white as fresh-spun cobwebs, a tracery of grey rags across it, and over all of it, an oily dust.
“Take care of her,” said the queen, pointing with the dark wooden spindle at the old woman on the bed. “She saved your lives.”