The Sleeper and the Beauty of Dreams

T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge

Toadling, a human foundling stolen by evil sprites, has guarded the nameless castle for 200 years, while civilizations rose and fell around her. Hidden behind an impenetrable thorntree wall and a blighted desert, the keep once governed a pastoral kingdom. But through the centuries, Toadling has secured the fortress, and ensured the old stories were soon forgotten. All for one reason: to assure the sleeper within never wakes.

This is my third T. Kingfisher novella, and each retells existing stories from new perspectives. Here, Kingfisher retells “Sleeping Beauty” as a dark fantasy, in which the princess and the fairy who cursed her dwell in a dysfunctional symbiosis. Except that the story which everyone tells has grown distorted by retelling, and there’s a deeper violence sleeping in the tower. But the fairy Toadling has never told her story.

Into the myth rides Halim, an itinerant Muslim knight without a war to fight. Uninterested in tourneys and too amiable for mercenary work, he seeks another avenue to make his name. So he approaches the fabled castle, pursuing the “fair maiden” supposedly immune to time. Instead, Halim finds Toadling, a half-fairy hybrid who, after centuries of isolation, is eager to confess her secrets. Assuming anyone will believe her.

“Sleeping Beauty” has evolved over centuries. Early forms exist in Italian and Catalan folktales, though the version we know comes mainly from Germany by way of France. The story’s development has taken some weird turns, but all share one characteristic: until the later Twentieth Century, the eponymous princess has no autonomy. She’s merely the passive, often nameless battleground between patriarchy and a dark netherworld.

Kingfisher reinvents the princess as Fayette, too young to understand her own unfettered power. But there’s a second princess, Toadling, a human who learned magic while growing up in fairyland. Toadling came to Fayette’s christening with one simple gift—and promptly fumbled it, trapping herself and Fayette inside the king’s castle. Thus begins a battle for power that threatens to become apocalyptic if they slip out of balance.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Mass-media critic Jude Doyle sees, in many stories of feral adolescent girls, a shared fear of our sweet child becoming a woman. There’s something here. But where conventional stories conflate this fear with sexual maturity, Kingfisher finds something else. Catholic theology and the “age of accountability” lingers in the background. As Princess Fayette becomes old enough to answer for her choices, we wonder whether she really has free will.

Doyle dedicates an entire chapter to the changeling myth. The sweet babbling infant learns to walk and talk, and suddenly, the poor harried mother becomes terrified of what she’s created. This being, once part of me, has become willful, greedy, possibly destructive. Why, this must be a monster from a dark netherworld, not a human child anymore! Toadling and Fayette become diametrical forms of this internal conflict, the good and bad daughters, ego and id.

The story unfolds forward and backward. Toadling knows she out to keep Halim away from the sleeping princess in the tower, to fulfill the enchantment that keeps her safe. But after centuries of loneliness, she permits Halim to carve his way through the titular thorn hedge. As he works, she tells her story, which contradicts the centuries of legend that have accrued to her. Halim must decide who he believes.

Kingfisher writes with a plainspoken style that’s become common in genre fantasy lately. Not for her either C.S. Lewis’ playful voice nor Tolkien’s stern epic storytelling. Toadling, her viewpoint character, is definitely a supernatural being who has survived two centuries alone with an onerous responsibility. But she’s also a young woman, stuck for centuries in her early twenties, desperate for someone to talk to.

On one level, we could read this as a grim, grown-up fairy tale. It’s short enough to read in one dedicated evening, builds to a taut double climax, and pays off with a firm resolution. Kingfisher’s characters are sober without being ponderous, and her revision of a well-loved fairy tale takes risks without veering into silliness. Kingfisher hits Sleeping Beauty’s beats without ever feeling beholden to the old story.

But there’s another level. Toadling tries different tactics to control the other, darker princess, but her internal abilities aren’t enough. Only when she trusts another person with the secrets she’s been carrying, will she finally reconcile the conflict between the good and bad daughters. Only then can she walk away from the thorn hedge she built around her childhood home, and venture out into the world.