Once Upon a Dream Read Online Free Page A

of the world; maybe they just couldn’t grasp it.
    Still, she forced herself to pay attention when the old castle treasurer patiently demonstrated the magic of adding and subtracting amounts with tally sticks and abaci, and the castle carpenter showed her the measurement of forms with string and weights.
    When she tried to do the exact same problems on her own, however, they never made sense. The numbers swam in front of her and the little counting lines seemed to multiply of their own volition. Her ability to draw was negligible, and her squares often looked like mush.
    But Maleficent was trying so hard with her adopted niece that Aurora forced herself to keep working in secret, in private. She kept herself going by imagining the look on her aunt’s face when she finally showed how she could divide an ink flock of sheep into five equal smaller herds.
    Aurora drew a tiny ugly scribble of a sheep. Then she drew four more. She counted them. There were five. She drew two more, farther away. Now there were six.
    Aurora frowned, looking at the paper.
    Maybe seven. Eight?
    She tried it on her fingers, pretending each one was a warm white ball of wool.
    Did you count the beginning one
and
the last one, too? Or was it like pages of a book, where you didn’t count both ends?
    She spent ten more minutes trying to make the two groups of sheep add up. She was pretty sure it was around seven, but the lack of precision was giving her a headache.
    Finally, she threw herself on her bed in frustration.
    She would never be as smart and powerful and elegant as her aunt.
    Sometimes she felt that the queen was just humoring her.
    Sometimes she felt the slightest stirrings of anger at always being told what to do.
“Go take a nap.”
What was she, a child?
“Oh, you couldn’t possibly help out with these
unimaginably complex
party preparations.”
Aurora was meant to be queen someday! She could handle a party.
    Sometimes, in the secret safety of her canopied bed, in the blackest reaches of her mind, she wondered if her aunt really had the best intentions for her.
    Why couldn’t she be let in on the magical runnings of the castle? Why couldn’t she watch and maybe learn how Maleficent summoned the food, drink, and other luxuries they managed to consume despite the destruction of the world Outside?
    And how long did they have to stay cooped up in the castle anyway? When would it be safe enough to go Outside—even for a short while?
    There was a story a priest had told her once—the poor priest who somehow wound up Outside the castle when everything happened—about the first time the world was destroyed. By water, not monsters. After enduring the flood in a boat for weeks, the surviving humans had sent out a dove or a hedgehog or some other bird to see if there was dry land anywhere yet.
    Couldn’t
they
do that?
    Couldn’t they send out one of the inhuman guards? Couldn’t
they
leave to explore and come back—using some of Maleficent’s magic somehow to protect themselves?
    Had the minstrel really made it
all the way
Outside and back?
    The Exile, the only one ever forcibly sent out of the castle, had never returned…but he probably didn’t want to face the queen’s wrath. He had challenged her right to rule;
he
was a
real
king, he had said, not “some strumpet of a fairy too big for her britches.”
    It was, upon reflection, lucky for him she didn’t just obliterate him on the spot. Maleficent had a streak of temper, though she tried to shield her niece from it.
    Aurora grumpily spun over on her bed and put her pillow over her head. These were the thoughts she was most ashamed of. Ungrateful thoughts about the woman who had saved what was left of the world. Aurora had too much of her parents in her. She seemed to lack basic human gratitude for what she had.
    She wished she had magic powers.
    No, her mind quickly said, not like what her parents had received. Not even as much as Maleficent had. Just a little. Just to be able