The Sleeper and the Spindle

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.