Princess of the Midnight Ball
of the
Midnight
Ball
Jessica Day George
For Jenn
Finally
Prologue
Because he had once been human, the King Under Stone sometimes found himself plagued by human emotions. He was experiencing one now, as he faced the mortal woman before him, but it took a moment for him to give it a name. After a pause he labeled it “triumph.”
“Do you understand our bargain?” The king had a voice like a steel blade breaking on stone.
“I do.” The human queen’s voice was steady. “Twelve years will I dance for you here below, and in return Westfalin shall be victorious.”
“Let us not forget the years you still owe me,” the king said. “Our first bargain is not yet fulfilled.”
“I know.” She bowed her head in weariness. There were dark circles beneath her eyes and gray in her hair though she was a young woman still.
The King Under Stone stretched out his long white hand and lifted her chin. “What a pity your daughters do not join
you at our little fetes,” he said. “Such lovely girls, I am sure. And my twelve sons are pining for companionship.” Again the feeling of triumph: the idea of these mortal girls dancing with his sons. There had always been the little problem, as his sons grew older, of where to find them brides.
Beautiful brides who could walk in the sun.
And then this mortal queen had come to
him
, begging for aid in bearing children with her fat, foolish husband. She had borne seven daughters so far, and once she had borne a dozen, Under Stone had decided that he would find a way to bring the girls below to meet their future husbands.
A look of horror spread across the queen’s face at his suggestion. “My d-daughters are s-sweet, honorable girls,” she stuttered. “And young. Too young to be married!”
“Ah, but my sons are young, and their dear mothers were all sweet, honorable women, just like yourself and your little daughters! And my princes do long for companions of their own kind.” Each of Under Stone’s sons had been born to a mortal woman, and he wanted their wives to be mortal as well. The King Under Stone brushed back a stray curl of the queen’s hair.
She drew back. “Are we finished? I must go… the children… my husband….”
“Yes, yes.” He waved a long hand. “Our bargain is made. You may go.”
She turned and hurried away. Away from the black palace on the shadowy shore. A silent figure, cloaked and hooded, rowed her across the sunless lake in a silver filagree boat and escorted her to the gate that led to the sunlight world.
The King Under Stone smiled as he watched Queen Maude hurry away. She would be back. She had to come back, every week. But that was not what made him smile. She had concealed her condition for quite some time, but as she settled into the boat it became apparent that the human queen was expecting her eighth child, precisely on schedule.
“Another precious little princess for her and her darling Gregor,” Under Stone said, the cold semblance of human feeling just barely tingeing his voice. “And another beautiful bride for one of my sons.”
Exhausted almost beyond the point of thought, Galen nevertheless kept moving forward, alone in the middle of the dusty road. In his head he sang the marching song of his old regiment, but his feet stumbled more than they marched.
Left, left, left, left, left my wife and children too! Did I do right, right, right, right, right
?
He laughed a little to himself. He was not quite nineteen years old, and he had spent most of his life on the battlefield. He had no wife or children to leave, only filthy tents, bad food, and death. Before him lay the endless road, dust, thirst, and life. Or so he hoped.
He drank the last swig of water from his canteen, hung it back on his belt, and stumbled on. The wind bit through his worn soldier’s coat; winter was coming.
All around him were fields that had lain fallow for years. In one, turnips that some hopeful family had planted had rotted in the earth with no one to harvest them. In another, the
weeds were as tall as Galen. A cow and her calf were feasting there, and Galen veered from his path, taking a step toward them. They looked abandoned, so no one would mind if he filled his canteen with milk. But when he took a second step in their direction, the cow lowed with alarm and trotted away, her calf at her heels. She had been running wild for too long to suffer being milked.
With a sigh, Galen continued on. Every so often he came across other soldiers heading home. He would share a meager meal and camp with them overnight, walking for a while the next morning in the familiar company of other exhausted fighting men in blue tunics. But Galen never stayed with these other soldiers for long, something that they found very odd. It was said that in the heat of battle strangers became brothers and the bond was not severed by death or distance. Galen had never felt that way, though. He had seen his first battle when he was seven years old, had helped his mother care for the wounded and watched her wash enemy blood out of his father’s uniform afterward. To Galen, war was a disease, something to be avoided, not something he wanted to talk about with other afflicted men over the campfire.
Sometimes women or men too old to join the fight would offer him a ride in their cart. They often wanted to know if he had met their son or husband during the war. It was rare that he had: the army was vast, and Galen’s regiment had been from the city of Isen, far from these fields and forests.
Galen told people what he could, making light of the conditions the soldiers had lived in and celebrating with them
over the end of the war. Westfalin had defeated the Analousians at last, but it was a grim victory. After twelve years at war, the country was deeply in debt to her allies, and many soldiers would not be returning home. Or, like Galen, they no longer had a home to return to.
The son of a soldier and an army laundress, Galen had been born in a cottage that looked out on the training grounds where his father marched in drills all day long. When he was six, the Analousians had attacked, and Galen’s father’s regiment had been sent to the front lines. His mother, the daughter of a soldier herself, had packed up Galen and his baby sister and joined the supply train. She had scrubbed blue tunics and darned gray socks right up until the day the lung sickness—a gift of the damp and cold—had claimed her life. Galen’s little sister, Ilsa, had also suffered from lung sickness. She had recovered, but her breath often came short, and so she had ridden on the supply wagons during the marches. She was killed when the wagon she was riding slipped off a steep mountain road in the rain and fell into the river below.
By that time Galen was twelve. He had been working with the soldiers since his eighth birthday: fetching powder and shot, reloading rifles and pistols, carrying messages from the generals to the field marshals. He could shoot a rifle or pistol, use a bayonet, peel potatoes, splint a broken leg, shine boots, wash shirts, and knit his own socks. He could also spit six feet with great accuracy, swear like the best of the sergeants, and scream insults at the Analousians in their own tongue. His father had been very proud.
Galen’s father made sergeant, and then lost his life to an Analousian bullet one morning when Galen was fifteen. Galen had buried him in the common grave dug after that battle, shouldered his father’s weapons, and marched away to the next skirmish. He didn’t know it, but just a week later, he shot the man who had killed his father, putting a bullet neatly into the same place his father had been shot—an inch to the left of the heart.
Those days were past, God be praised, and Galen hoped to never kill another man. He was headed north and east, away from Analousia and toward the heart of Westfalin. He hoped to find his mother’s family in the capital city of Bruch. With so many men lost in battle, Galen prayed that there might be a place for him at his aunt’s house, and in the family business as well. He couldn’t quite remember what his mother had said it was, but he thought that his uncle did something with trees. It seemed strange that he would find much work as a woodcutter in the heart of the city, but Galen wasn’t picky. He needed work, and food, and a place to rest his weary bones.