Briar Rose 37
She is seated beside the king at the high table in the great hall. He looks like her father, yet is not her father. There is something heavy weighing on her head which makes her want to lie down under the table and go to sleep. She touches it: a crown. A great span of time seems to have passed since her awakening, which she cannot at the moment remember. Or, more likely, she is still asleep and dreaming, this merely another of the old crone's wicked entertainments. The room is full of banqueters and servants but they are not moving or speaking. Perhaps they have been turned to stone. Two naked children, who may be hers, are playing in the dirty rushes under the trestle tables, their rosy bottoms bobbing like apples in a rub of dirty water, the only things moving in the hall. She would like to give them both a good spanking, or else go play with them (she could be the dragon), but she is too tired to move. Happily ever after, the king says. It's never quite like you imagine it. She nods. A mistake. The weight of her crown carries her head all the way into her plate of food. She has, literally, to lift her head with both hands and put it upright on her shoulders again. Time disfigures everything, he sighs and belches, scratching his hairy belly. But at least we have our memories. We do? An ancient humpbacked creature shuffles in from the kitchen and gives her a cloth with which to wipe the gravy from her face. One of the old crone's petticoats, by the smell of it. Of course we do. Don't you remember the musical parade at our wedding feast, this crowned and bearded stranger asks, the flutes and trumpets, the kettledrums, the tambourines? No . . . The dancing girls? She flies into a sudden rage and wheels round to dig her nails into his face, her crown toppling. She claws deep red grooves through his cheeks. He does not resist. You are not the one! she screams. His beard, catching the rivulets of blood, seems to whiten as though a century were passing. Sometimes, he says, gazing at her tenderly as if indeed he might know her or have known her once upon a time, I feel the reason I never escaped the briars was that, in the end, I loved them, or at least I needed them. Let's say, he adds with a curling smile, licking at the blood at the corners of his lips, they grew on me . . .