Three Variations on Sleeping Beauty

These three short stories were each inspired--in very different ways--by the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. In "The Promise of Roses, " the son of a woolen mill owner sets out every morning with a shovel and a bag of salt to destroy the roses threatening to snag the fleeces of his father's sheep. In "Spinning, " a minor prince from a small European country nobody has ever heard of makes his way through the rose bushes to an ancient castle where a princess lies sleeping--only to find he's not the first prince to get there.
And in "Caught on Thorns, " a princess slumbers in the shelter of monstrous briars fed for thousands of years on the blood of the princes who died on their thorns.