The Princess Curse (23 page)

“What of Corvinus?” I asked. “What is the Underworld region like where he rules?”

“That would be Hekat’s land,” he said. “She has all the German and Hungarian regions under her sway, having killed off most of their gods long ago.”

I shivered. Killing gods was a strange and terrible thought, and one I didn’t want to know more about. “She’s not like Corvinus, is she? Trying to expand into Sylvania—or Thonos, I mean?”

“She is very much like Corvinus,” Dragos said. “She’s the one who sends the crows that spy for him.”

Surprised, I tried to twist my head around to see Dragos’s face, but it made my neck crick—and I couldn’t see anything anyway. I faced forward again, feeling cold and scared, and suddenly glad to be in the overwarm embrace of Dragos. It was all I had in this moment that was familiar—the oddly comforting sound of his bellows breath telling me I wasn’t alone in the dark. Strange, the things you can decide are normal once you get used to them, once other things seem stranger and more horrible.

“Is she going to invade Thonos?” I asked, past the lump of scaredness in my throat.

“No. Not now, anyway.” This reassurance didn’t still my trembling, and Dragos went on. “She has made more trouble than she can handle by killing gods, and now everyone is on their guard against her. No one will deal with her, negotiate with her, even grant her an audience. So she moves in the World Above, trying to gain power there, and interferes with mortal lives and mortal kingdoms.”

I thought about the crows sitting on the castle roofs, controlled by a sinister intelligence. I wondered how far Hekat’s fingers extended, how deep her magics went. Could she be the cause of the blight on Thonos, in spite of Dragos’s certainty that she moved only in the World Above?

I thought again about mirrors, reflections, and shadows. I’d exchanged one threat of warfare for another. In fact—

“If her puppet or whatever Corvinus is gains control in the World Above, does that give Hekat leverage for an invasion of Thonos?”

I thought perhaps Dragos would remind me I was a political novice at this point, and tell me to keep my theories to myself. Or maybe he would try to protect me from the truth with a well-timed lie.

But his words were as bare as a winter tree. “Yes. Hekat would be in a fair position to take over Thonos if Corvinus took Sylvania.”

The promised marsh came into view, and even a starlit night seemed gloriously bright after the journey through darkness. Dragos landed and set me on my feet. I stumbled, trying to regain my sense of balance after the flight, and immediately found a patch of sweet reeds.

“Anything I can dig for you?” Dragos asked.

I pointed out a cluster of marsh marigolds and then white and yellow water lilies, floating on the water. I assumed they were white and yellow, anyway; those were the usual shades, though most color was leached by the faintness of the light.

“If you can reach those lilies, I’ll take them,” I said. My voice came out stronger here. When I spoke in dark places, it seemed the sound was flat, trapped, as though there wasn’t enough air. Light seemed to allow my voice to travel farther.

Dragos decided he couldn’t reach the lilies from shore, so he took wing and collected them from above. He hovered over the water, snatching lily plants from their pool.

Across the black, starlit water, eidolon souls gathered to watch Dragos’s acrobatics. The dim light and the distance made it hard to observe their expressions, but I imagined they were impressed by their King.

One eidolon, a woman wearing a kerchief almost exactly as Thela wore hers, particularly caught my eye. At first, I couldn’t figure out why I watched her. She was thin—not in the way of someone who hungers, but in the way of scraped parchment—and it seemed I could see reeds and bushes
through
her.

Dragos turned and tumbled in midair, dexterous for someone so large, and went back to collect another handful of lilies. The thin soul raised a hand toward her King, and the dark well of her mouth opened. Her body language bespoke an appeal, a plea—though I couldn’t hear her voice over the sweep of Dragos’s wings and the trickle of water flowing in the marsh.

And then the woman thinned out entirely. She disappeared. She was gone, as completely and as surely as if she had put an invisibility cap on her head.

I looked at the other souls and saw no further signs of thinness. The eidolons didn’t seem to notice her disappearance, either, though I stood and stared at the spot where she had been, willing the woman to return, until Dragos landed beside me.

I hadn’t even had a chance to call out to her, or to warn Dragos, or anything. She was just gone.

“Did you see her?” I asked Dragos.

“The soul that disappeared on the other side of the marsh? Yes, I saw her.” His voice was neither gentle nor harsh, but sad. “Let’s go.”

“There was a woman,” I said. “She visited me in the four-seasons forest, the Queen’s Forest; she said she was the nymph of the river Alethe. She told me about these . . . disappearances.”

Dragos lifted me into the air. “I don’t believe I’ve met this nymph Alethe.”

I frowned, concentrating on that instead of my memory of the disappearing soul. “Oh? Well, she says you’ve been King for only a short time, so perhaps you’ve not had the chance yet.”

“A short time,” he said with a laugh. “I suppose someday it will seem like a short time.”

“Fourteen years,” I said. “As long as I’ve been alive. Actually, longer.”

“Yes, well, I wouldn’t have
chosen
a child bride, all things being equal.”

I felt a little affronted by that, but I couldn’t really argue with his sentiment. “I’m sure it would be easier if I weren’t so young, but I doubt I would know my own mind any better.” I didn’t try to keep the asperity out of my voice.

Dragos replied, “I wouldn’t even dream of doubting
that
.” He spoke so lightly, and it was so easy to fill in Frumos as the speaker, and not Dragos, that I felt a pang.

And just like that, I was crying. The memory of the disappearing soul twined with the memory of Didina’s still form lying beside her mother, and Adina’s sorrow-lined face. I bit my knuckles, trying to keep from wailing out loud like a little child. But a sob escaped me.

Dragos’s arms tightened around me gently—so very warm—and for a moment, I was comforted. Not because he could do anything, but because he was warm enough, and human enough, and he cared enough.

We landed again shortly, in a silver glade lit by moonlight almost as bright as the sun—sufficiently bright to cast shadows, in any case.

“Where are we now?” I asked, squeezing my voice out through my tears.

“This is a way station, a place of passage between Thonos and the World Above,” Dragos said. “Or that tree is, anyway.” He pointed to an oak trunk with a hollow space in the center of it.

“Why bring me here?” I asked.

“For a breath of fresh air,” he said. “Go on through. I’ll be right behind you.”

I ducked into the passage and had little difficulty finding my way as the tunnel wound upward. I stepped out of the passage through another hollow oak tree, into gray light and warm air.

“I can see,” I said, astonished.

Dragos grunted but sounded far away.

“Dragos?” I called, turning around to see if he followed. There was no hulking
zmeu
behind me. There was only a thin man with a clever mouth staring back at me.

Frumos.

I gasped. “You—you said you couldn’t turn back into your human form.”

“I said that I had no control over it. But in the surface world, I am human; in the other world, I am
zmeu
.”

“Oh,” I said, gaping like Mihas at his stupidest.

We stood together at the edge of a plum orchard—Castle Sylvian’s plum orchard, the very place where Pa had ordered me to stay away from the curse. Dawn was lightening the World Above, enough that I could see colors around me: the deep green of the leaves, and even their vein patterns. I faced the outline of Castle Sylvian in the distance, a dark hulk against a blue-gray sky, with only a few lights flickering in the windows.

My eyes welled with tears again, though I managed to blink them back. I didn’t look at Dragos until I had them under control, but when I faced him, I found that he was watching me.

His bright human eyes were just as penetrating in their way as when he was a dragon. I noted how his left eyebrow quirked a little more than his right, the faint freckles on his cheeks, and his blade of a nose. He was so very human. His
zmeu
form was so smooth, so symmetrical, so perfect and perfectly terrifying that it seemed unreal. I could not imagine Dragos’s
zmeu
mother, hatching him out of his egg. But the mother of this man, if such a creature existed, would have had the same lively eyes, the same freckles. . . . His father was probably just as lean and had just such an Adam’s apple that bobbed in his throat when he talked.

“Reveka?” he asked in his lighter, less thunderous voice. “This was a mistake. I apologize.”

“Mistake?”

“To bring you here, in sight of your home, which you cannot visit.”

“My home,” I said, and my voice faltered. I hadn’t really considered Sylvania my home, but it was—had become so. “I was raised in a convent in Transylvania, you know.”

“I didn’t,” Frumos—no, Dragos—said. “But you can tell me about it.”

So I did. I told him about my mother, and the convent, and Pa; and the Abbess and Sister Anica, and the lying.

“But you aren’t a liar?”

“I became one, for a time,” I said. “But I don’t really think I started out as one, no matter what the Abbess said.”

“You must have come to some accord with your father on the subject, since you went to rather extraordinary lengths to save him.”

I frowned. “Did Pa and I ever come to an accord about lying? I don’t think so. He forced me to promise to never lie to him. That’s not an accord. But—you don’t save people just because you get along with them. You save people because—well, it beats not saving them. And I saved more than just Pa, by coming to Thonos.”

“Yes,” Dragos said soberly. “Far more.”

In the distance, a church bell tolled. Dragos stirred. “It’s getting late. We should return.”

I glanced around at the World Above, at the color and the brightness. I wanted to bolt for Castle Sylvian. Once the sun was up, Dragos wouldn’t be able to follow me, would he? But then night would come again, and his power would swallow the world. It would be only a very temporary running away, and it wouldn’t solve anything.

I nodded once, fiercely, strode back to the hollowed-out tree, and descended into the Underworld.

When I climbed out of the passage, I turned to wait for Dragos. What I saw made my scalp prickle.

As he stooped to come through the doorway into the Underworld, spines burst through Frumos’s cheeks; his red velvet doublet smoothed and grew to cover his whole skin. His limbs grew longer, and his boots turned into hooves. I could make no sense of the transformation before it was over, and I would have said that I merely imagined the horror of it, save that I could not banish from my mind the bloody image of Frumos’s cheeks sprouting spines.

Dragos was once more a
zmeu
.

And I would never, ever confuse Frumos and Dragos again. The image of the transformation was seared into my memory.

He must have seen my expression of horror, but he wordlessly lifted me in his arms and flew us back to Castle Thonos.

Chapter 31

T
he next two days in Thonos—though it remained hard to call them days with no sun to mark them—passed in a blur. I worried constantly about when Pa’s next food delivery would arrive. Mihas went often to check for the signal from Pa, because not only did time not pass the same in the World Above and the Underworld, but the intervals could speed up or slow down randomly. I wondered how it was that the princesses had never been tripped up by this, but I didn’t quite dare to ask Dragos.

I worked diligently in the herbary, trying to extrapolate magical properties of Underworld plants from what I knew of their World Above counterparts. I dismissed all the herbs known to induce sleep or calmness. Wakefulness was what the sleepers needed; I would go on the principle that wakefulness was what the Underworld also needed. It wasn’t too hard a stretch, really. If no new life could begin in Thonos, that was a kind of lethargy, a sort of sleepiness. Life needed to be wakened in Thonos, vigor needed to be instilled in its disappearing souls, just as with the sleepers in the World Above.

With that logic behind me, I set aside narcissus, the flower Hades used to subdue Persephone; violet, which calms; and poppy, for poppies and sleep are synonymous.

I bottled potential remedy after potential remedy for the sleepers, intending that the next time Mihas met Pa, my possible cures and my notes on them would be delivered to Adina. That was my first plan, anyway; if I actually healed Thonos in the interim, I would concentrate my efforts on turning Thonos’s remedy toward the sleepers.

How to heal Thonos, though? What was the heart of the land? I thought about the nymph Alethe. What had she said? She wanted me to heal the land, the souls, and also . . . herself. “I am not as strong as I once was,” she’d said. “The river Alethe suffers, just like the souls, just like this forest.”