Palace of Mirrors (20 page)

Harper squeezes my hand, as if he understands how hard it is for me to say that.

“
I
didn’t arrest anybody!” Desmia protests. “I didn’t put anyone in that dungeon!”

“Well, then, you had your people do it,” I say, and there’s an ugly, bitter twist to my tone. “That’s how your kind of royalty works.”

Desmia blinks. Is she blinking back tears?
How strange,
I think.

“I didn’t even know they were there,” she protests in a strangled voice. “Until—” She breaks off and glances toward Ella.

“You thought it was safe to tell me,” Ella says encouragingly.

“Until I found the secret stairs and started hiding there, eavesdropping on my advisers,” Desmia finishes. She stares down at the floor, as if it’s now her turn to be ashamed to meet our eyes.

“So, then,” I say cautiously, since Desmia suddenly seems so fragile again, “did you ask anybody about those girls? Anybody you trusted?” I’m thinking about Nanny and Sir Stephen, how many questions I asked them, how much I always trusted them. The lump is back in my throat.
What good was it to trust them if all their answers were false?
I wonder. But I can’t bear to think about that right now. I focus on Desmia again. “What did the people you trusted say?”

“There isn’t anybody I trust,” Desmia says. She lifts her head, peering almost fiercely at Ella and Harper and me. “There wasn’t.”

“Nobody?” Harper asks in a choked voice. He’s looking at me, and I know he’s thinking about how I came to him in the night and whispered my secrets to him in a cowshed. Despite everything that’s gone wrong since then, I’m not sorry that I shared what I thought was the truth.

Desmia winces.

“If you knew the people in this palace, you’d understand,” she says ruefully. “Lord Throckmorton, Lord Suprien, Lord Tyfolieu . . .” Her face twists more with each name she recites.

“Not the nicest of people,” Ella agrees. “I’ve barely been here a week, and already I’ve taken a hearty dislike to pretty much everyone but Desmia.” She smiles at the other girl, but the grimness in her eyes cancels out the cheering effect. “They are definitely the type who’d lock girls in a dungeon for no good reason.”

I shake my head, still baffled.

“But there’s got to be
some
reason,” I say. “Some explanation. That’s a lot of effort to go to, to hunt down and imprison all those girls.” Just thinking about the girls in the dungeon makes me want to faint again. My memory is so vivid and nightmarish: the sludge flowing beneath my feet, the stench threatening to overwhelm me, the eager faces pressed against the bars, all the girls calling out, “I’m the true princess!” “No, I am!” But I fight down the faintness and force myself to think coolly and logically. Just like Sir Stephen trained me.
Look for the facts,
I remind myself.
“How many girls are there?” I ask, pretending a calm I don’t feel. “Ten? Fifteen?”

“Eleven,” Desmia says.

Eleven. That means that I bring the number of girls claiming Desmia’s throne to an even dozen. Or an unlucky thirteen, if you count Desmia herself as having no more claim than the rest of us.

“Have you talked to them?” I ask Desmia.

“
I
did,” Ella says. “They all tell very similar stories: They were hidden away because of the danger, but educated so they’d be ready to take the throne when the danger passed. I don’t know Sualan geography terribly well, but it sounds like they were all raised in remote villages, scattered throughout the kingdom, and everyone in their villages was under the impression they were just ordinary girls.”

Childishly, I want to scream out,
No! It can’t be! That’s
my
story! Mine alone!
But I bite down hard, holding the words back. I press my lips together with agonizing force.

Harper squeezes my hand again.

Ella tilts her head to the side, thoughtfully.

“Of course, that’s a lot of effort to go to, to hide all those girls, to educate them, to concoct cover stories. . . . Did the people who hid all of them away know about the other girls in hiding? Did your Sir Stephen know Sir Roget, who hid Lucia in Gondervail? Or Sir Alderon who hid Fidelia in Tsurit?”

I shrug, because I am still gritting my teeth as tightly as I can. I’m afraid of what I might say if I let myself open my mouth.
My story!
I still want to scream.
Only mine! I am unique! I am special! I am the one and only true princess!

“And,” Ella continues, “I’m thinking that there must be at least two competing sides here, that the people who hid the girls in the first place probably aren’t the same ones who put them in the dungeon. . . .”

It seems that Desmia and Harper and I are just going to let Ella, this Fridesian, figure everything out. We Sualans are just lumps, just blobs. Useless. We can’t think for ourselves. We don’t want to. We’re too afraid of where such thoughts lead.

Then Desmia whispers, “I think I know why the girls were brought to the castle. To the dungeons.”

We all turn to her, and she wilts a little under the attention. She takes a step back.

“Why?” Ella asks gently.

“To control me,” Desmia whispers. She is twisting her hands again. I think about differences: Harper is holding my hand so steadily, but Desmia has no hand to hold but her own. She brings both hands up to her face and covers her mouth—it looks like she’s trying as hard as I am to hold back her words. They break out anyway.

“Lord Throckmorton, Lord Suprien, Lord Tyfolieu,” she says, spitting out the names as she drops her hands to her chin. “My advisers . . . they don’t talk about the
‘pretender to the throne’ so much anymore. Or about how they want to keep me safe. They talk about how, really, one girl is pretty much the same as another, and really, no one outside the castle’s ever seen me except at a distance of hundreds of feet, and at that I’m always covered by a veil. And how, really, except for them, the only people
in
the castle who’ve seen me up close are servants, and servants are so easily dismissed, their testimony so easily discredited. . . .”

Desmia is whispering again, her voice barely sounding at all. But the other three of us are so silent, we hear every word.

Harper’s jaw drops.

“These guys,” he says incredulously. “They’ve
told
you they want to replace you?”

“Not in so many words,” Desmia says.

“You have to understand,” Ella explains. “These Sualan officials, they’re not the types where you could hand them a rose and ask what color it is and they’d say, ‘It’s red.’ They’d say”—she puts on a tone of supercilious pomposity—“‘That tint is one of great distinction, one of the fine shades found only in our great land—we’re sure that blossoms in Fridesia are so far inferior that we’d have to shield our eyes from a horror such as viewing what passes for beauty in
your
land. And since you are our enemies, you should find symbolism in the fact that this bloom has the same hue as the blood shed on the battlefield by all who
choose to oppose us, all who, inevitably, lose. . . .’”

Desmia giggles.

“You’re making them sound too nice,” she says. “Too humble.”

I close my eyes weakly, thinking about how I could have been captured so easily at Nanny’s hut, or at Sir Stephen’s if we’d followed the trail of hoofprints. Or how if Harper and I had managed to escape from the castle tower that first day, we would have run straight to the palace officials, probably to these very lords. Then those men might have thrown me in the dungeon with the other girls. Or, if Desmia’s theory is correct, the lords just might have replaced Desmia with me right away. And I would have happily gone along with that plan. How long would it have taken me to understand what those men were really like?

A long time,
a tiny voice in my head tells me.
You would have just thought that you’d gotten what you wanted. What you deserved.

“Wait a minute,” I challenge Desmia. “You were judging the music competition. People saw you then. You’ve met with the Fridesian peace delegation.”

“Nobody cares about the Fridesians,” Desmia says. She shoots an apologetic glance at Ella. “Sorry,” she whispers. Then she turns back to me. “And at the music competition I was in the shadows. Nobody looked at me but you. What I did that day . . .” She looks down, then looks back up with blazing eyes. “I surprised myself. It felt like I
was almost . . . fighting back. When you came to me and told me you were the true princess, I couldn’t let you be locked in the dungeon with all the other girls. I couldn’t let Lord Throckmorton have his victory of capturing all twelve girls—from what I overheard, I think there are just twelve of you.”

I wince at that—
No,
I want to correct her,
there’s only one of me
—but I let it go.

“Because I think when he has all twelve,” Desmia continues, “I think then he’ll feel safe setting all his plans in motion. Maybe then he won’t care if he just kills us all.”

I notice how Desmia says “us,” grouping herself with the girls in the dungeon, too. I forgive her.

“So I locked you away in the tower, keeping you safe,” she says. “But I didn’t know what else to do, because I didn’t think you’d believe anything I told you. And there was just one of me, and two of you, and you can’t know what it’s like, always living in terror, feeling so powerless. . . .”

“I do,” Ella says softly. She reaches over and gives Desmia’s hand a squeeze.

“But—but—,” Harper breaks in, trying to get his ideas out so quickly that he actually sputters. “You’re the
princess!
You’re the one wearing the crown! Can’t you do whatever you want to with the girls in the dungeon? With those lords who want to control you?”

“‘Royals must be firm and decisive in their words and
actions,’” I quote. “As it says in
A Royal’s Guide to Dealing with Subordinates.
‘The royal who hesitates to wield his power entices his lessers to wield it against him.’”

Desmia snorts, an ugly sound.

“Don’t you see?” she asks. “I have no power. I’m just a figurehead. An endangered one. How did you put it?” She narrows her eyes at me. “I’m just a doll that waves.”

We are staring each other down. I break the gaze first, shifting my stare to the stone wall.

“But the true princess is the supreme ruler of Suala,” I say in a ragged voice. “A single word from her can stay an execution or stop a battle. Or . . . start one. From the loftiest palace official to the lowliest shepherdess, everyone in the kingdom is subject to her judgment, her jurisdiction, her rule. She
is
Suala!” I’m not sure if I’m quoting now, or if these are words embedded in my soul so long ago I might as well be stripping off my own flesh, laying it in front of Desmia as a sacrifice. The true princess should be able to inspire that sort of devotion.

“I’m nobody,” Desmia counters. “Nothing. A pawn.”

Ella looks sadly from Desmia to me.

“It’s that way in Fridesia, too,” she says gently. “Princesses are more commodity than ruler. I have never heard of any kingdom where a princess gets to use her power.”

Somehow this seems cruelest of all—that the position I’ve risked my life for is worth nothing. I turn and bury my face in Desmia’s pillows—the soft, deceptive pillows,
the empty trappings of power. I sob, and it seems that the others can do nothing but listen.

Then someone is gripping my shoulders, shaking me.

“Okay, okay, Eelsy, stop it!” Harper begs. “Don’t you think I’ve already heard enough crying to last me a lifetime?”

I’m shocked enough that I stop sobbing for a moment. The next sob that comes out half turns into a giggle.

Harper shoves at my shoulder, forcing me to turn over and look at him.

“I knew you for fourteen years before I knew you were a princess—supposedly a princess—and I never thought you were the type to just give up,” he says roughly. “You were never afraid to climb the tallest trees in the woods. You were never afraid to put your hand into a full bucket of night crawlers. You were never afraid to swim in the pond, even though you were a sight coming out, covered in leeches. So why are you afraid of some uppity guys with stupid fancy names?”

“Because, because . . .” I sniff. It is hard to completely turn off sobs so quickly.

Harper pokes me in the shoulder.

“So maybe you’re not a princess,” he says. He turns and points at Desmia. “And maybe you’re not a princess with any power.” He turns his gaze on Ella. “And you say you’re not a princess either.” He claps his hands on his own chest. “And God knows, I’m nothing but the son of
a dead soldier, who was nothing but cannon fodder. And I don’t have anything to defend any of you with except a harp. But—but—don’t you see? There are four of us, and no one else knows that Cecilia and I are here. And no one knows that any of us know anything. And no one knows that you”—he’s spun around to point at Ella again—“are on our side. And we know that Sir Stephen and Nanny and my own mother are here in Cortona, and they’d help us too, if we could get word to them. So I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am not just going to roll over and play dead until the time comes that they actually kill us!”

“I wasn’t playing dead,” I say stiffly. “I was crying.”

“Baby,” Harper jeers.

“I am not!” I protest. I scramble up and actually shove Harper, to get him back for all his trying to push me around. “Just because I actually have feelings—I should be allowed—”

“You had days and days and days in the tower to get over yourself,” Harper says. “So you’re not a princess. So what? Aren’t you done yet with all that caterwauling?”

“I—I—”

Desmia steps between us.

“‘
Our
side’?” she quotes numbly. “You said ‘our side’? Like we’re all in this together? On the same team?”

“Well, yeah,” Harper says, squinting at her. “Aren’t we?”

“You mean, because you’re scared of Lord Throckmorton and his cohorts?” Desmia asks. “As in ‘The enemy of my
enemy is my friend’? And then if—this is crazy!—if we succeeded in vanquishing him,
she’d
still want the crown?” She is pointing at me, her eyes narrowed to accusing slits.