Princess of the Midnight Ball (12 page)

Besides which, this Bretoner prince was getting on Rose’s nerves. His obnoxious laughter and alarming teeth were only the half of it. He peppered his conversation with clumsily suggestive remarks, and clearly thought himself quite the gallant. Rose’s sisters had all managed to flee after only a few minutes in his presence, leaving Rose to entertain Alfred on her own.

She gritted her teeth as she offered him a handkerchief, plotting the revenge she would take on her sisters for abandoning her with Prince Horseface. She told herself that the week would go by quickly enough, and then he would be sent away in disgrace like all the others. But as he bled into her clean handkerchief and complimented her tender touch, she remembered that once he was sent away, his life would likely be cut short in some mysterious accident. She should want him to succeed, but he was not remotely the dashing figure she had imagined saving her from the Midnight Balls.

“I’m an evil person,” she mumbled under her breath.

“What was that, dear, dear Rose?” Alfred wrinkled his nose at her in what she supposed was meant to be an alluring way.

“I—I—” She couldn’t think of anything. She was staring at his large, slightly bulging eyes and couldn’t seem to look away.

“I beg your pardon, Your Highnesses.” Galen Werner stepped around some potted roses and gave them a brief bow. “Prince Alfred is wanted back at the palace.”

“I am? Why?” Prince Alfred looked mystified, and Rose agreed silently: why would anyone want
him
?

“I couldn’t say, Your Highness,” Galen said. “I’m only an under-gardener.”

Alfred struck a dramatic pose, somewhat ruined by the bloody scrap of linen clutched in one hand. “I shall be but a moment, fair princess,” he whinnied.

“Very well,” was all Rose could say.

After Prince Alfred had gone, Rose sank down on a small bench with a sigh. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. Galen was still hovering nearby, looking at her with concern.

“Do you need anything, Your Highness?”

She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Why was Prince Alfred needed at the palace?”

Galen flushed. “He, well, I couldn’t say. … ”

Rose burst out laughing. “Did you just say that to get rid of him?”

“Er, yes.” Galen looked around sheepishly. “He seemed to be bothering Your Highness.”

“Oh, he was,” she agreed, giving him a grateful smile. “And my traitorous sisters abandoned me!”

“Very cruel of them.”

“Very.” She gave a little shudder. “Did you see his
teeth
?”

“He does have … very large teeth,” Galen said. “I’m sure that he has other fine features, however,” Galen added, not very convincingly.

“His teeth are probably his best feature, I’m afraid,” Rose said, still laughing. “I feel cruel saying such things, especially since we are related … but he’s so vain!”

Galen looked thoughtful. “He does remind me of a very handsome cart horse I once knew,” he said. “They had the same color hair.”

Rose laughed aloud again. It felt good to be able to laugh without coughing, but more than that, it felt good just to find something to laugh about. That morning her father had taken her aside after breakfast and begged her to let Alfred uncover their secret.

“My dear,” King Gregor had said, tears in his eyes. “I am pleading with you: let this young fool succeed. I do not know what secret you keep, or why, but it must end. Please, Rosie.” He cleared his throat. “Not the man I would have picked for you, for any of you, but rumors are racing through the Ionian courts. They’re saying that you poor girls must have had a hand in these unfortunate deaths. I don’t know if offering my kingdom is incentive enough to draw another suitor.”

Rose grieved that their curse had brought her father to this state—begging with bloodshot eyes for a foolish, horse-faced prince to win her hand—but there was nothing she could do. She could no more speak of the curse than she could prevent the enchanted sleep from overtaking Alfred that night and the nights after.

“Now, what’s made you look sad?” Galen stared down at her, anxious.

She blinked away her memories of this morning. “Nothing.” She shrugged. “Just the thought that if horrible Prince Alfred doesn’t—” She realized that she was confiding her family’s problems to one of the gardeners and stopped herself short. “It’s nothing.”

“You’re worried that Prince Alfred, horrible as he is, will come to harm, and you’ll be blamed?” Galen’s voice was gentle.

Tears pricked Rose’s eyes, her laughter gone. She nodded. “Father’s at his wit’s end.”

“You can’t tell anyone what’s going on, can you?”

She shook her head.

“Not even me? I’m not a prince,” he wheedled.

“No one,” she said with a little hiccup.

Galen took out a pair of gardening shears and went to the bush with the pink-and-scarlet roses. He neatly cut the stem of the bloom Alfred had tried to pick and peeled off the thorns before offering it to Rose.

“I shouldn’t,” she protested.

“It’s already done,” he told her. “Don’t let it go to waste.”
Their fingers touched when she took it from him, and they stayed that way for a moment, hands together, the rose cradled between them.

Rose was just thinking of something she could say, something to break the comfortable silence that she was enjoying far too much, when she heard the hothouse door open and close. She and Galen stepped apart; he gave her a little bow and slipped away.

Prince Alfred came huffing down the path, red in the face and irritable. “No one in the palace seems to have the faintest idea what that half-witted gardener was talking about,” he complained.

“Perhaps he misheard,” Rose said. She was still gazing down at the perfect flower cupped in her hand.

“And on the way back, an old man with a peg leg accosted me, trying to get me to wear some smelly herb on my lapel!” Alfred blew through his wet lips. “In Breton—”

“Perhaps
I
was the one wanted back at the palace,” Rose interrupted. “I’d best return.” Tucking the rose into the sash of her high-waisted gown, she got up and walked past the still-blathering Prince Alfred, pulling her cloak tight around her.

That was another thing about Prince Alfred that drove Rose—and everyone else—to distraction. He never stopped talking. He talked about himself. He talked about his prize- winning hounds and his prize-winning horses. He talked about Breton, and how everything there was superior to everything in Westfalin, from the weather to the pigs. By dinner, Rose was ready to stuff her handkerchief in his mouth to silence him.

She settled for not listening. In fact, she didn’t even pretend to listen. No one did. But either he didn’t notice or it didn’t bother him in the slightest. After dinner Alfred followed the sisters to their rooms, where he talked all through several games of cards. In fact, the enchantment caught him mid-sentence, and he went from babbling about his hounds (again) to snoring, with his cheek on the ace of spades in the space of a heartbeat.

“Whew!” Poppy threw down her cards. “What a nightmare! I wasn’t sure if the magic would even work on him.”

“I thought he was going to keep talking, even if he fell asleep,” Orchid said.

“Now, now,” Hyacinth chided them, “we should be more charitable.”

“I agree with Poppy,” Rose said, to everyone’s surprise. “I was ready to knock him over the head with a vase if the spell didn’t get him.” She tossed down her own cards in disgust.

Prince Alfred’s snores were particularly loud in the silence that followed Rose’s outburst. They almost harmonized with the snores coming from the two maids in the other room, and a tinkling sound, like wind chimes or bells, that seemed to be coming from outside.

“What is that noise?” Daisy looked around, puzzled. “I’ve been hearing it all day.”

“One of the gardeners put bells in the ivy outside our window,” Lilac said.

“Why?”

“Why do the gardeners do anything?” Lilac shrugged.

“We might as well go now,” said Rose. The bells couldn’t drown out all the snoring, so what good were they?

“Why are you in such a hurry?” twelve-year-old Iris wanted to know. “You’re the one who’s always moaning and complaining about the Midnight Ball.”

“Because I want this night to be over with,” Rose snapped. “I want all these nights to be over with.”

Her dislike of Prince Alfred had given her a hectic energy. She knelt on the carpet and stroked the pattern, opening the door into the world below. She took a lamp and started down, not looking back to see if her sisters followed.

Prince Alfred came and Prince Alfred went, just like all the others. Within a week of his return to Breton, he was trampled by one of his prize horses and killed.

King Gregor sent gifts for the royal family and a letter expressing his deepest regrets. The Bretoner king responded by sending the letter and gifts back, unopened, along with the Westfalin ambassador, who was no longer welcome at the royal court in Castleraugh.

“Sire! This is an outrage! A blatant slap in the face!” Lord Schilling, the prime minister, was scarlet with rage. “It’s practically a declaration of war—”

“No!” Now it was King Gregor’s turn to grow red and shout. “No more war! We swallow the insult and move on. The poor man’s grief-stricken. He lost his eldest son and he lashed out; I can understand that.”

King Gregor was in the council chamber with his ministers, talking over the snub from Breton. Rose sat in one corner,
quietly hemming handkerchiefs. One of the girls always sat in on royal councils, as their mother had done, to offer the king silent support.

“But, sire,” the prime minister protested, “my spies in Analousia say that there have been meetings between their prime minister and the Belgique ambassador. And Spanian relations are frigid at best now.” He clenched his fists and barreled on. “They are saying that these princes are not dying by accident, that these are very cleverly arranged assassinations. Your Majesty, they are pointing the blame squarely at you. Our foreign relations are in a worse state now than they were during the war! What are we to do?”

The hush that followed Schilling’s words was profound. Rose dropped her sewing, and the small ping of her needle hitting the polished wood floor was far too loud. The prime minister looked at her with hard eyes.

“We are to ignore it,” King Gregor said, voice grim. “I don’t care if we do look like fools: we will continue to smile and seek peace while they mutter and rattle their swords. It is all we can do. This country will not survive another war.”

Rose shuddered. She and her sisters knew full well what price had been paid to ensure that Westfalin would win the Analousian war. If another war came … she could not imagine what would become of their poor country then. She dared not make the bargains her mother had made. Westfalin would have to rise or fall on its own strength, and right now that strength was not great.

“Then at least rescind that ridiculous proclamation,” the
prime minister was pleading now. “No more princes will be coming. Don’t flaunt the fact that every royal house in Ionia has lost a prince because of your daughters.”

There was a collective gasp from the other councillors.

“You go too far,” King Gregor said in a low voice. “My daughters are innocent. These deaths … are terrible. …” He rubbed his mouth with one hand as though washing away a bad taste. “But how can anyone say it’s Lily’s fault when a horse in Polen throws its rider? Or little Petunia’s idea for two young hotheads to duel?”

With a sick heart, Rose noticed that her father would not even look in her direction when he said this.

Schilling chewed his mustache, clearly biting back a retort. When at last he spoke, his voice was barely under control. “Paying the discharge wages for the army nearly bankrupted us. Now relations with both our former enemies and our allies are strained to breaking point. If we are accused, directly, of having their sons killed … If the archbishop hears these rumors, rumors that we are causing these accidents from hundreds of miles away …”

There was another silence after that, for not even Schilling knew what else to say.

Rose sat, clutching her sewing in clammy hands. She felt like the floor was falling away beneath her chair and had to struggle to breathe evenly and not let her distress attract attention.

Before the silence became truly unbearable, Rose’s father simply repeated his orders for everyone to “hold firm,” and the council was dismissed.

Rose tucked her snarled thread into her sewing basket and stood up.

“Rosie?” Her father gave her a look that was equal parts hopeful and angry.

She knew what he wanted: he wanted her to tell him their secret. Or at least, to tell him it was all over with, that the sleepless nights—on everyone’s part—were done. He had talked at breakfast of sending the younger set to the old fortress in the mountains, and Rose had had to tell him that the shadowy figures in the garden would return, and that this time they might enter the palace itself. She couldn’t say any more, but the expression on her face and the faces of her sisters had been enough to convince him to let them be.