Princess of the Silver Woods (Twelve Dancing Princesses) (16 page)

“I—I’m not—” he finally managed.

“Of course not,” his mother said drily. She bent over and kissed his forehead on her way out of the room. “I’m just glad that Simon’s injury keeps him from following you.”

Assassin

That night, for the first time since Rionin had declared he would marry Lily, Petunia dreamed she was back in the Palace Under Stone. She didn’t know why they weren’t returning there every night, but knowing Rionin, it was probably just another way to toy with them.

In this dream she was not in the ballroom, however, but in a room that contained furniture made from worn ebony, upholstered with faded violet silk. It was a bedroom, but not one she had been in before. Before, when she and her sisters had been trapped there overnight, they had all slept in one long room furnished with six narrow beds.

She looked around, almost idly, glad that she wasn’t being forced to dance in her dreams, or being pestered by the princes and court of the Kingdom Under Stone. The dressing table had an onyx box of face powder and a set of silver-backed brushes, the silver tarnished black. She fiddled with one of
the brushes, wondering whose room it was. One of the strange court ladies? It didn’t seem much used.

“Do you like it?”

Petunia dropped the brush with a clatter and wheeled around, nearly falling over the stool as well. Kestilan stood in the doorway, his face so blank that if she hadn’t recognized his voice, Petunia wouldn’t have known who had spoken.

“It’s the same as every other room here,” she said, desperately seeking for her composure. “Black, purple, blue, silver, black, purple, blue, silver. An entire palace of bruises and darkness and nothingness, night after night, always the same.”

Kestilan looked at her, one eyebrow just slightly arched. “Why would my father have wanted to be reminded of what he had lost?”

“What he had lost?” She gave him a baffled look. “What
had
he lost?”

“The sun,” Kestilan said.

There was silence for a moment.

Then Kestilan went on, “Even I, who have never seen it, feel diminished when you come to us, reeking of upper world as you do, clad in colors that hurt our eyes with envy.”

Petunia blinked. Rose had once accused the princes of being fools, but they weren’t, she had later said. They had played at being dull because their father had wanted no rivals, and he saw his sons as easily replaced as well. What Kestilan had said made terrible sense. Gold, brocade, bright colors all belonged to the sun, to flowers and things that could not be
replicated here below, where even the trees were made of silver and bore no fruit.

“I don’t remember everything being so tatty,” Petunia said, and now she was covering up the sudden pang of sympathy she had just felt for the late and previously unlamented King Under Stone. She fingered the silver inlay on the edge of the dressing table. It was tarnished, and there was a bit missing at the corner.

“My brother’s power is not as great as our father’s,” Kestilan said. “But that is easily remedied.”

“Is it?” She tried not to look too interested, but rubbed her fingers on her skirt as though the table had dirtied them.

“Yes,” Kestilan said with the same rather studied indifference that Petunia was trying for. “He will give Jonquil and some of your other sisters to members of the court, since we are lessened in numbers. That will elevate the courtiers, and bring more power to Rionin when we dance.”

“If we let you,” Petunia said.

Kestilan laughed. “I have always loved how you all pretend to have any choice in the matter.” He came toward her, and she did her best not to back away. He was tall, as tall as Prince Grigori, and he loomed over her, making her bend back over the dressing table a little. She put her hands behind her. “As if you were not born for this very purpose,” he hissed in her ear. “To marry us, and bear our sons.”

Petunia struck Kestilan across the face as hard as she could with the grimy silver hairbrush. When he howled and
grabbed his cheek, she skipped around him and out the door of the room, though she did not know where she was going. She ran down the hall with him in pursuit, dark blood—darker than human blood—coming from his nose.

“This will be our room, Petunia,” he shouted after her. “When we are wed.”

Petunia ignored him, running even faster as ahead she saw the front hall of the palace. The front doors were open wide, and she ran out and down the steps to the black lake. There was no way across: the water of the lake burned the skin and the boats were gone. Across the water, she could see the silver trees moving in a breeze that no one could feel.

The trees had grown from a blessed silver cross their mother had once dropped on her way to the Midnight Ball, and their wood had proved to be deadly to Under Stone and his sons. Now Petunia wished she could get to the little wood, not to escape, but so she could gather some of the branches of those trees. She imagined whittling daggers or arrows from them, weapons that could be used to attack Rionin and Kestilan and the others.

She felt in her pockets for the little scissors she carried to snip yarn with, and remembered that this was just a dream. And even if she could get across the water and break off some of the branches, she wouldn’t wake up in the morning with the silver in her hands.

“Come here,” Kestilan ordered, crunching across the coarse black sand of the shore.

The sand, too, was more than it appeared: Galen had
brought a handful out with him during their escape from the first King Under Stone, and it had turned out to be tiny black diamonds. Galen later had them set into a bracelet for Rose. Petunia bent and gathered up a handful, rubbing the sharp little jewels between her palms.

“What are you doing?” Kestilan’s nose still bled, and he was flushed to an almost normal human ruddiness with his anger.

“This is just a dream,” Petunia said. “So this won’t hurt.”

She cast the diamonds into his eyes.

As he howled and clawed at his face. Petunia reached into the sash of her gown. It was just a dream, so the rules of the real world didn’t apply. She normally didn’t walk around with a pistol stuck into her sash like a pirate in a romance, but in a dream she could do as she liked. She drew the pistol she found there, cocked it, and fired, shooting the ground an inch from Kestilan’s right boot.

“Don’t worry, it’s just a dream,” she told him, her voice sounding strange and faraway.

“Have you gone mad?”

Servants and courtiers came running at the sound of the shot, and Petunia brandished the pistol at them, causing them to draw back. Among the crowd she saw Blathen and Telinros, and she aimed at the latter. He was Pansy’s partner at the Midnight Balls.

“If you can do what you like to us in our dreams, then we should have the same freedom,” she said as she drew back the hammer and heard the bullet click into place. Telinros put his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Coward,” she muttered.

“Petunia,” said the King Under Stone, arriving at last, the servant who had summoned him cringing at his heels. “Let us not be foolish.”

“I am not being foolish,” Petunia said, and now she aimed at the king. The pistol shook only slightly. “I am merely taking my cue from you, Your Majesty, and doing what I like with these dreams. A pity this isn’t a real pistol, and that I am not really here. You are not immune to bullets, as I recall from the last time we met in the flesh.”

“That has changed now that I am king,” Rionin said with cold pride. “Though my brothers have not that advantage.”

“Good to know,” Petunia said. She readied her finger on the trigger.

“But Petunia,” Rionin said with a smile. “When next we meet in the flesh, and that moment is rapidly approaching, you will not have a pistol. You will have nothing but what we give you.”

“How enticing,” Petunia said, her voice just as cold and distant as his. “I can hardly wait.”

She squeezed the trigger and shot the King Under Stone. And woke up, in a sweat, in the bed she shared with Pansy at the grand duchess’s estate.

“Are you all right?” Pansy’s voice came in a mumble, her face half buried in her pillow.

“I just shot Rionin,” Petunia gasped, sitting up.

“You did what?” Pansy pushed herself up on her elbows. “You shot Rionin?”

“In my dream,” Petunia said.

“I wasn’t there,” Pansy said. “I was sleeping, just sleeping.”

“I dreamed that I was there with Kestilan,” Petunia told her, “and I got so angry that I hit him. I threw the diamond sand in his eyes, and then I thought of having a pistol and it appeared. The others came out of the palace and I shot Rionin,” Petunia said, panting. “He made me look at the room he said would be our room—his and mine—when we are wed. Kestilan, not Rionin. Rionin wants to marry Lily. Still. I think. But Kestilan said that Rionin is going to give Jonquil and those of us whose partners are dead to some of the courtiers, to increase his power.”

“What are we going to do?” Pansy asked, her face white.

“Did he say when you would wed?” Rose asked when Petunia had awakened her to tell her about the dream. “Do you have any idea when this will happen?”

“No,” Petunia said, and tried not to feel guilty that she hadn’t thought to find out.

She and Pansy had gone to Rose’s room, which she was sharing with Jonquil for the night, to tell them what had happened. Jonquil was sitting up, and Lily was trying to coax her to drink some chamomile tea and try to sleep, when the two youngest sisters entered. Soon they were all huddled on the wide bed, with Petunia describing her dream in detail.

Maybe she should have asked more questions of Kestilan,
she thought, and done less hitting. And shooting. But she didn’t particularly enjoy these dreams, and attacking Kestilan and Rionin had been deeply satisfying.

“Galen thinks … he thinks Rionin will make his move soon,” Rose said with a little catch to her voice. “I just wondered if they’d hinted at how soon.”

“Now, Rose,” Lily said comfortingly. “It was three years ago when Blathen went after Poppy in Breton. We thought then that Rionin would try to do something, but there was nothing except the dreams.”

“Yes, I know,” Rose sighed. “But now the dreams are coming nearly every night. And they’re more than just dreams … the line between dreaming of the balls and being there physically is blurring somehow. Their father couldn’t do such things.”

“And they’re trying to come into the house, through the garden, like they did that time at home,” Petunia said, then rather wished she hadn’t when Jonquil made a small sobbing noise.

But Rose just nodded. “Keep whatever charms you’ve got on at all times,” she said.

Petunia self-consciously checked for hers. She had both a knitted bracelet and a charmed garter on, even though she was in her nightgown and not wearing any stockings.

“I gave you those sachets to put under your pillows, though it doesn’t seem to have worked for Petunia tonight,” Rose went on. “Also, keep your pistols handy, and plenty of bullets. The silver daggers that Bishop Schelker blessed for us too.”

“I feel strange carrying weapons around,” Pansy admitted.

“We’re at war,” Petunia told her. “A soldier needs his weapons close during a war.” It was something both Galen and Heinrich had always told them.

“I don’t want to be a soldier,” Pansy whined.

“I don’t think we have a choice, Pan,” Lily said gently.

Petunia’s pistol and dagger were hidden under her mattress. She hadn’t been carrying them at all, here at the estate, even though she knew it was foolish. But it wasn’t as if she could wear a leather belt and holsters over a morning gown. She’d tried cutting slits in her skirts so that she could wear her weapons underneath them, but Olga kept sewing them up again. She supposed she’d just have to settle for hiking up her skirts, flashing her legs at Kestilan, and then shooting him, if it came to that.

“I keep thinking about the silver wood,” Petunia said. “Galen and Lily shot four of the princes. But if they become king, they have to be killed with blessed silver and their true name. Do we know Rionin’s true name? Is it Rionin?”

“We can hardly ask to look in the family bible,” Pansy grumbled.