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.