Princess of the Silver Woods (Twelve Dancing Princesses) (32 page)

“You’re a good boy,” Hyacinth said.

They reached the gate at last, and the others were waiting. As soon as he saw Oliver, Heinrich opened the silver-and-pearl gate to reveal a golden staircase. Lily and Rose stayed back, and so did Petunia, but the others began disappearing up the shining stair.

Oliver took off both cloaks and helped Petunia into hers. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek, and then Heinrich was telling her to hurry.

“I don’t think so,” said a voice, and there was the sound of a pistol cocking.

Oliver turned, one arm still around Petunia, and found Prince Grigori only a few paces away. He was holding a pistol and smiling. Behind him stood Olga, her face blotchy from crying.

“Petunia stays with me,” he said. “The rest of you must go back to the palace.”

Violet, on the lowest stair, called out. “I have a husband waiting for me!”

“Your husband is waiting for you back there,” Grigori said, jerking his head toward the Palace Under Stone. “When your children are grown they will break the king free of this prison and we will rule Ionia together!”

Poppy snorted. “I’m sure Rionin will be delighted to share his throne,” she muttered.

Petunia couldn’t take it anymore. “When will you stop?” She stepped forward, anger clear in every line of her body. “When will any of you stop?”

And on the last word, she threw her red cloak at Grigori. It went over his head and down over his upper body, covering the pistol. He struggled and fired a shot. The bullet tore through the velvet and went wild past Oliver’s shoulder.

“Run,” Oliver said.

But they never reached the stair. Crumpled on the black soil just inside the gate was Rose, her hands clutched to her left side. Heinrich knelt over her, and Lily held her head.

“Not Rose,” Petunia whispered, and her lower lip began to tremble.

“One less to plague me,” Prince Grigori said, freeing himself of the cloak.

Oliver didn’t hesitate. He drew his own pistol, aiming for the Russakan prince’s heart. But before he could fire, someone else did. The bullet found its mark and Grigori fell without a sound. Screaming, Olga threw herself on the fallen prince.

Oliver wheeled and saw Lily lower one of Heinrich’s pistols. Petunia knelt on Rose’s other side, sobbing in great gulps. Over the sound of her weeping, Oliver could hear booted feet stomping up the path toward them.

He met Heinrich’s gaze.

“Take them up the stairs,” Oliver ordered in a voice that was suddenly not his own. It was Karl’s and Johan’s, and even his father’s half-remembered bark. “Carry Pet if you have to.”

“But Rose—” Petunia began.

“More power for the spell if I stay,” Rose murmured.

“She’s right,” Oliver said. “Give the signal, Heinrich. We have to start now.”

Lily and Petunia kissed Rose as Heinrich pulled them away. When Petunia’s foot was on the bottom stair, Heinrich tookout a pistol and fired two quick shots in the air. Oliver knelt by Rose and raised her up to lean against his chest.

“You know what to do?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I helped Galen in his studies.”

Oliver began pulling things out of his pockets: a wand of silver, a bag of black soil mixed with powdered diamonds, an intricate knot of unbleached wool. He laid the knot on Rose’s lap and scattered the soil and diamond dust around them both. Then he helped her take a silver knitting needle out of her bodice. It was red and sticky.

“I never meant to leave Galen behind, anyway,” she whispered. “Not when he came back for me. He always comes back for me.” She gripped the bloody needle, looking like a sorceress from a story, all terrible beauty.

He took out a long silver branch of his own and held it up like a sword. He was ready.

The dark princes rounded the corner of the path and headed for Oliver and Rose, their faces twisted with rage, but it didn’t matter. There was a strange tug in Oliver’s chest, and then he heard a voice that boomed over the sound of the princes’ shouts, over the wails from Olga as she crouched over Grigori’s body, over the sound of Rose’s quiet tears.

The voice was that of the good frau, and yet it could not be the good frau, for it was so loud that it made Oliver’s ears hurt, and so beautiful that it brought tears to his eyes. It was old and young and beyond time itself. He loved the voice, and feared it too.

The voice went on and on for an age, and all the while Oliver forced himself to think, as he had been told, of a wall of silver without door or break, a wall that ran around the Kingdom Under Stone. He had no magic of his own, but Walter Vogel had told him it wouldn’t matter: the strength of his spirit, his conviction, would be enough.

Oliver thought so hard about this wall, and held so tightly to Rose, that when the wood began to burn he never noticed. His eyes were shut anyway, and the pulling in his chest was so strong that when hands began to drag him backward through the gate, he only held tighter to Rose. They must not be separated. Together they would let the good frau draw all the strength she needed from them, and then the silver wall would have no seam.

The voice stopped, and Oliver fell into darkness.

Cloaked

Petunia only paused long enough at the top of the stair to see that her sisters and Heinrich were safe. Then she picked up her skirts and started back down.

“Petunia, no!” Pansy wailed.

“Wait,” Heinrich said, and she heard his boots hit the first step. “Take this.”

She looked back and he was holding out a pistol. She grabbed it and then flew down the stairs, leaving it to him to stop the others from following. She was not going to leave Oliver and Rose to die.

At the bottom of the stairs a great voice suddenly overtook her. She staggered to Rose and Oliver, who were in the gateway. She stood behind them, bracing her upper arm against the side of the gate as Telinros came howling toward them.

She shot him.

His body jerked and then tumbled to the ground, nearly
tripping Blathen who was right behind. Petunia aimed for Blathen next.

“Mine!” Poppy said from behind her.

Petunia leaped aside as Poppy leveled her pistol and shot Blathen through the heart. “Bastard,” she muttered as his body crumpled atop Telinros’s. She exchanged a fierce smile with Petunia.

And then there was the king. The King Under Stone stepped toward them, his face taut with rage.

“Come with me now and your punishments shall be lessened. Unlike your sisters’.”

“No,” Petunia said. She leveled the pistol at him, but her heart quailed. Heinrich didn’t know that the grand duchess had called her son Alexei. If his bullets were marked, they would be marked only with the name Rionin.

“Ha!” Poppy fired her pistol, but the king swiveled, bending backward in a way no human could have done. The bullet struck Derivos, and he dropped with a scream, clutching his side.

“I am not so easy to kill as my brothers,” the king purred.

“That’s what you think,” Poppy snarled, and cocked her pistol again.

“Alexei,” Petunia said, suddenly.

The king’s gaze snapped to her. “What did you say?”

Petunia reached up to her elaborate coiffure. After Olga had left she had nestled several silver needles into it. All had been etched with the name
Alexei Rionin Under Stone
. She handed
one behind her to Poppy, then rolled the others between her fingers.

“Alexei,” Petunia said again. “Catch!” And she tossed the needles like darts.

They struck him in the chest, not hard enough to wound, but he hissed and swatted at them. While he was distracted Poppy shoved the last needle down the barrel of her pistol and then took her shot. A black flower blossomed on the white breast of the King Under Stone’s shirt. He looked up at the sisters with horror.

His scream tore at their ears.

“Ha!” Poppy shouted again. There were tears on her cheeks.

Rionin’s scream went on as he crumpled in a hideous, boneless way. When Petunia tore her attention from the king, she saw the remaining princes slinking away, hands to their ears, as the voice of the spell grew. Petunia and Poppy shot at them, but their shots went wild, as though the air were warping inward toward the palace. Petunia thought with horror that Rose and Oliver might be trapped half-inside and half-outside the new wall when the spell finished.

“Go,” she shouted to Poppy. “I’ll help Rose and Oliver.”

“But I can’t let you—”

“Yes, you can,” Petunia said. “Christian is waiting.”

Poppy grimaced, but then she turned and ran up the stairs.

Petunia went to the pair slumped between the gateposts. They were so caught up in the spell that Petunia doubted either of them knew she was there. But as she leaned down to
get a grip under Oliver’s arms, Rose’s voice brought her up short.

“Galen. He always came back for us, Pet,” Rose said. Her eyes pleaded with Petunia as she continued to hold her wand steady in front of her.

Looking up, Petunia saw that Kestilan had turned back and was coming toward her, straining against the onslaught of the voice. There was a black dagger in his hand.

“Mother, please protect us,” she whispered.

Then Petunia reached into the bodice of her gown for her matches. She lit one and dropped it back into the box. The matches flared and she tossed the tiny ball of flames into the woods at her right.

The silver wood went up in a great sheet of blue-white flame. Kestilan and the tattered remnants of the court of the King Under Stone fled back to the lake. Petunia grabbed Oliver under the arms and dragged him to the foot of the golden stair, grateful that he was holding so tight to Rose.

The heat from the fire was intense. Petunia drew her cloak around her, gathering what little protection she could. Then she took a deep breath and plunged into the smoke and flames, looking for any sign of Galen or Bishop Schelker or Walter Vogel and the crone.

There was nothing, nothing but silver trees burning white and blue. She reached the shore and saw that the court had taken all the boats. They were well on their way back to the palace, and Petunia was alone. She swayed and nearly went to her knees at the edge of the lake. But the oppressive heat from
the burning wood drove her on. She ran along the shore, calling out for Galen and Bishop Schelker.

When she found them, she hardly knew what it was she had found.

In a sudden clearing in the wood were four figures made of light, and for a moment she thought they were just more burning trees. But this light was green, as green as new grass or tulip leaves or the glass of her father’s hothouses. It rose up like four shining columns in the clearing. She stopped, gasping for breath, and through the intense glow she could make out the dear familiar face of Galen, and beyond him Bishop Schelker, Walter Vogel, and a tall, beautiful woman who was speaking the endless words of the spell.

“The
crone
?”

The words burst out before she could stop them. Galen and Oliver had told her of the toothless old woman, but the face she could see through the green was wrenchingly beautiful. Long, dark hair fell on either side of the serene features, and a crown rested on her brow.

“My queen,” said a familiar voice, and Petunia looked and saw that through the green, Walter was also young, and handsome, standing straight on two strong legs.

“Your queen?”

The heat forced her farther into the clearing, until she stood in the cool protection of the four columns of green light. Galen and the bishop smiled at her, though their faces were otherwise rigid with the intensity of the spell.

“One of the greatest queens Westfalin has ever known,”
Walter said. “Beautiful, brilliant, and just. When Ranulf, her husband, was killed by Wolfram von Aue, she learned magic that she might bind him in this prison. And I learned it, too, so that I might help her.”

“Then she was … Oh!” Petunia put a hand to her mouth in awe.

“Ethelia,” Walter said. “Blessed Ethelia, they called her. And I was her knight.”

Petunia did not know what to say. The grizzled old gardener who had shown her bird’s nests when she was a child had been the knight protector of a queen? And one of the great wizards who had bound the King Under Stone?

“Pet, you have to go,” said Galen, his voice strained.

“Come with me,” she begged.

“I can’t, not alone.”

Queen Ethelia’s voice was rising, and the figures in the columns of green light were stretching and wavering with the force of it.

“Go, Petunia,” said Walter. “Go and save the others.”

“Get Rose out of here,” Galen said.

Petunia whirled and ran, racing along the shore until she reached the path. The flames rose ever higher, and the smoke choked her. She ran down the path, pulling the hood of her cloak up over her hair as sparks and burning leaves rained down.

Just before she reached the gate, a tree fell across the path.

The blue-white flames were staining her vision, and the heat made her cloak feel like it was made of lead. Beyond the fallen
log she could see Oliver and Rose, huddled at the very foot of the stair. She turned, seeing nothing but flames and more trees falling as the fire tore away their roots.