Aurora woke on the library floor with a book open beside her cheek. She did not remember sitting down. The candle had burned two fingers lower. That was the third episode this week. She was a daughter of the Seelie Court, and she had been dropping into sudden sleep since she was small. Her mother called it grace. Her father called it a gift wrapped in thorns. Aurora called it a countdown. Somewhere ahead of her was a sleep she would not wake from, unless she found someone whose kiss would stay when staying cost them something. She had not found him yet. She did not know how long she had. She pulled the book upright. It was the household record of her curse, copied out in her aunt's cramped hand. Her family had never let her read it. She had taken it from the archive that morning. The page under her cheek was smudged where she had drooled on the ink. She read the smudged line twice. Spindle. The word sat there, small and specific. She read the paragraph around it. The curse would not take her fully until she pricked her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel. Until then, the fainting spells were only warnings. After the spindle, the sleep would be deep, but not death. Deep, but harmless. Waiting for a kiss. Aurora sat back on her heels. For years she had believed each faint might be the last. She had run through her life like someone running out of a burning house. The book said she was not burning. She was only smoking. Then she read the next line and her hands went cold. Misread the terms, and the terms bite sooner. The curse listened. If she believed the wrong thing about it, it moved. A knock hit the library door. Rapunzel stepped in without waiting, hair trailing behind her like spilled milk. Aurora had written to the tower a month ago and gotten no answer. Now here she was, thinner, quieter, a small crease between her brows. "The flowers stopped singing," Rapunzel said. "I came down to look for the reason. I heard you fell again." "I read my curse," Aurora said. She turned the book so Rapunzel could see. "A spindle. That's the trigger. Before that, I'm safe." Rapunzel read the page. Her finger stopped on the second line. "And this one." "I know." "Then don't decide yet what it means." Aurora closed the book. She had come in believing her death lived in every faint. She was leaving with a door and a key and a warning not to name either wrong. She had time. She had a shape for the thing. She also had a rule she could break by accident. She stood up. Her knees held. "I need to stay away from spinning wheels," she said, "and I need to find him before someone puts one in front of me."

Aurora carried the book back to her rooms and sat with it for an hour. The walls of the castle felt too close. Every corner held a shape she now had to name correctly. A footstool was not a spindle. A loom was not a spindle. She kept testing the words in her head until the words stopped meaning anything. She needed air. She told no one. She wrapped a plain cloak over her shoulders and slipped out the side gate before her mother's ladies could ask where she was going. The path down to the forest was soft with old leaves. Her boots made almost no sound. For the first time in days her chest opened up. She walked until she found the well. It sat in a clearing, its stone rim hidden under a bloom of roses and vines. Petals had fallen into the water. Aurora leaned on the rim and looked at her own face floating there, pale and tired. She dropped a pebble in to break it. "You should not stand so close to the edge." She turned. A boy stood in the tree line. He was near her age, thin, dressed in a dark coat stitched with pale thorn patterns. His hair was black. His eyes were a cold blue that did not match the warm light in the clearing. He did not step closer. "I know how to stand by a well," Aurora said. "I meant no offense." He looked at the water, then at her. Something moved behind his face and settled. "You're Seelie." "You can tell?" "I can tell." He did not say what he was. He looked away as if the question hurt. She should have been afraid. A stranger in the woods, alone with her, knowing what she was. Instead her shoulders dropped. He had not asked her name. He had not asked about the curse. He was the first person in weeks who was not watching her for signs of falling. "I came out to breathe," she said. "The castle listens too closely." "I know that castle," he said. "Not yours. One like it." They talked a while. About small things. The petals. A tower he had seen once, wrapped in vines, that grew flowers up its stone. She laughed twice. He did not laugh, but he watched her when she did. When the light shifted she stepped back from the rim. "I have to go home." He nodded. "Then go." She took three steps and turned. "Will you be here again?" He waited a beat too long. "Maybe." Aurora walked back up the path lighter than she had come down. She had gone out for air and brought back a face. She did not know his name. She did not know he knew hers already, or what he had chosen not to do. She only knew she wanted to see him again, and that the wanting was new.