The Princess Curse (24 page)

My only other idea was to ask Dragos to bring a selection of thinning souls to me, so I could try the potions on them. I didn’t think I could bear to watch another soul disappear in front of me. But I would pursue that course as well, once I had enough potions to make the testing worthwhile, and once I’d visited Alethe at her source.

When I wasn’t in the herbary, I haunted the land around the castle looking for new plants.

I saw Dragos only intermittently, as we, of course, did not eat together and he had some sort of duties to attend to. Perhaps I should have been paying attention to what those duties were, but the need for healing this place was paramount, and if I could find a way to do it without learning the duties of the Queen of Thonos, well, I preferred that.

So I was surprised to smell Dragos’s peculiar scent while I was digging rue outside the dancing pavilion.

“I know you’re there,” I said offhandedly over my shoulder. Dragos stepped within my circle of lamplight, hooves digging into the soft dirt. I bit my lip and looked away. Sometimes, the reminders of his
zmeu
nature made me ill.

When I looked up, he was staring into the darkness of the pavilion, not looking at me at all.

“Do you miss it?” I asked.

“Miss what?”

“The, er. Dancing, I guess?”

He considered. “It would be strange to miss it.”

“You were not keen on dancing, then?”

“I danced more than I wanted to. Why, do you want to dance, Reveka?”

I blushed. I felt like a child who hints about sweets so overtly that the adult is forced to take pity on her and ask if she’d like one. I didn’t
want
to dance. I didn’t know
how
to dance. And it had looked horrible, the dancing, when I first saw it, with the half-fainting princesses and the blood in their shoes. . . . And yet . . .

You courted twelve princesses with dancing, and I didn’t even get one turn around the floor,
I thought, but I didn’t know how to say it. It would come out either coquettish and coy or childish and whiny. And I was none of those things, or at least I didn’t want to be any of them.

Dragos held his hand out to me. “Come along, then.”

“Oh, no, I . . .”

He gestured impatiently, and I folded my arms. “No. It was a ridiculous thought. I don’t want to be danced breathless and bloody.”

“That’s not how I always danced with them,” he said. “In the beginning, it was all quite decorous and lovely. I’ll show you.” He clapped his hands sharply, and the pavilion glowed, softly at first, then brighter.

Reluctant, but intrigued, I let him guide me to the dance floor. When he clapped his hands again, the noise of tuning instruments swelled around us. The same insects that had made the place beautiful the first time I’d visited were waking up, not yet in full throat—or in full bum, in the case of the glowing bugs. It was like dawn. It was lovely, even if I hadn’t been light starved.

Dragos bowed to me, and I curtsied to him, and we danced.

Which of course sounds much more elegant than it actually was, since I didn’t know the steps. It was the same dance he’d performed with the princesses, and while parts of it looked familiar, I’d never had much chance to practice this skill in the convent or while traveling with Pa.

But Dragos taught me, very patiently, tracing the patterns tirelessly with me until I memorized them. Even though it was sort of like dancing with a tree given our size difference, it worked well enough.

Halfway through our first complete dance, I asked, “What’s this called?”

“The
presoniera
,” he said. “The ‘prisoner’s dance.’”

It was altogether too appropriate a name.

Not much later I asked, “Are you enjoying this?”

“More than I thought I would. It is novel, not to
force
someone to dance.”

I was silent for a moment. “But surely you must have known after even the first
year
that it wasn’t going to work. None of the princesses were going to marry you.”

His voice was low, almost a growl. “I didn’t have any other choice,” he said. “I had no other way to find a bride, so I had to hold them to their word and hope that one of them would give in before our agreement ended.”

“I told you this when we first met! It’s stupid to take the only choices offered, if they aren’t any good.”

He gave a huge-shouldered shrug. “I inherited a dying world. I thought I could bring it back on my own, but I—” His face held an expression I couldn’t interpret, and I was angry, for a moment, that I wasn’t looking at Frumos’s face, which I had at least a chance of deciphering. “I tried, for the first years—I tried everything. But Thonos has to have a queen or the whole place will die, and everything and everyone in it will disappear.”

“There’s got to be a better way to get a bride!”

“How?” Dragos asked bitterly. “Hades got Persephone through kidnapping! And here am I, stuck as a
zmeu
—my choices came down to lying or extortion.”

The vivid memory of the blood lining the princesses’ shoes like red silk returned to me. “So that’s what it was? Extortion?”

“Yes,” Dragos said, his voice grim. “The first time one of them refused to dance, she would have had to marry me. I had to make it harder and harder to choose dancing.”

The music crashed to its ending, and I slipped my hands from Dragos’s and stepped back. I stared up at him. “I’m not sure that is better than kidnapping,” I said.

His cheek spines bristled. I’d made him angry. “When you’ve been the monarch of a dying country for a few years,” he said, “I’ll let you judge me.” He strode to the edge of the pavilion, spread his great crimson wings, and took flight.

My food ran out that night.

Chapter 32

A
day later, I woke to the hollowest feeling in my midsection that I’d ever had, and to the taunting, crushing Darkness.

Thank goodness for Thela; she bustled in with a branch of candles, lit a fire, and gave me the Water of Life. The Darkness receded, even while my hunger clamped down like a vise.

As soon as Thela departed on some mysterious errand, I changed into my old, comfortable clothes—she had not been brazen enough to throw them out—and left to go somewhere, anywhere, else. If I stayed in the castle, I just might eat something.

Pa had to be coming today, I decided. He just had to be. I divided all my remedies in two, copied out duplicate notes, and put the notes and potions into a basket, then headed down to the lake.

I decided to row one of the boats to the Queen’s Forest. I didn’t get very far before I discovered I was raising blisters on my hands, but I pushed on. Halfway across, I got the bright idea to use my stockings as mittens, and that helped, though it did make me a smidge clumsy.

On the other side of the lake, I climbed a small, barelooking hill and found, to my surprise, a succulent plant with jewellike, jagged leaves growing at the top. Burn plant, here in the Underworld? Brother Cosmin had a pot of it growing on a windowsill in his herbary, because it didn’t like the cold winters very well.

I broke open a leaf of the plant, hoping there’d be a goopy juice inside like the burn plant I knew—and there was, though it shone like quicksilver. Hesitantly, I applied it to my blisters.

The effect was instant cooling, as if I’d plunged my hands into a snowbank. In the World Above, burn plant has a gentle soothingness for broken or burned skin—hence its name—but nothing like this. Astonished, I collected half the patch of the succulent and tucked it into my basket. This was too useful an herb not to know! Too bad I couldn’t think of a way to apply its property to the problems of Thonos or Sylvania.

I settled to wait next to a tree in the very edge of the spring forest’s morning sunlight. If Pa came, it would be to this spot, or very near it; from here, he would signal Mihas—then Mihas would have to come all the way down the mountain and across the lake, giving me plenty of time to discuss things with Pa.

Hours passed. I collected moss, I took a nap, I wrote more details on my note to Adina. I began cataloging the kinds of blight I saw in the forest and considered the treatments I would try if the plants in my herb garden were ill like these.

It was a long time later—hours and hours—when a shadowy figure in a heavy cloak stole into the grove.

“Pa!” I cried.

The figure pushed back the hood of its cloak. It was not Pa. It was Lacrimora. I recoiled.

She held out a basket to me. I reached for it eagerly, but then hesitated.

“What?” she asked.

“You did poison my friend,” I said. “And dozens of other people, too.”

“Better asleep than a
zmeu
’s wife,” she snapped.

“Oh, is that what you tell the dead-alive in the western tower?”

“I sleep at night, if that’s what you’re asking. None of them could free us from the curse, and serving in the Underworld seemed a fate worse than death. Perhaps it was—most of the men Dragos sent back don’t remember anything about their lives before his service.”

“You selfish, selfish princesses!
One
of you could have made the sacrifice. But not a single one of you would.”

“And who among the rest of us could live with the shame and guilt of that, for the crime of sending a sister into the darkness forever?”

“Maricara could, I’m sure.”

“We wouldn’t give her the chance! Maricara was the one who got us into the mess in the first place. We never listened to Maricara once she sold us to Dragos for her own relative freedom. She was the one who stumbled into this realm and, like a fool, ate the food that was offered her. When Dragos claimed her, he asked for her hand in marriage, and she bartered for her parole instead—‘Oh, Your Lordship, I have eleven sisters. Perhaps one will want to marry you!’ And she sold us out. Brought us down here and tricked us into eating the food here all by herself! But the rest of us—we couldn’t let any of the others go to this darkness. Not when there was a chance we could
all
go free.”

“What chance?”

“If none of us gave in for twelve years, we would be released from the curse,” Lacrimora said. “We were halfway there.” I thought she might sneer at me then, but she held out the basket to me again and said, “We’ll get you free, too, Reveka.”

“Where’s my father?” I asked, taking the basket. I rooted around inside it immediately and found a chunk of bread to pop into my mouth.

She reached up her sleeve and showed me the second invisibility cap, the one I hadn’t had enough fronds for. I had wondered where that had ended up. It was starting to unravel. “There’s only one of these,” she said. “And I took it from your father. Dragos wouldn’t hurt me if he found me here. But if he caught your father, Dragos wouldn’t let him go. Not a second time.”

I scowled. I was torn between admiring her for taking the risk out of my father’s hands and being annoyed that she thought she knew Dragos so well. Did she really think that Dragos would kill
my
father and yet forgive
her
anything? Did my betrothal count less than all her stupid years of dancing?

“Tell yourself whatever you want,” I said. “I appreciate the food. Next time, bring more.”

“Hopefully, there won’t be a next time,” she said. “Your father
is
going to get you out of here, Reveka.”

I snorted. “Except that I
promised
Dragos I’d marry him, in exchange for all your lives. And Pa is very insistent that I keep my promises.” Of course, if I figured out how to heal Thonos, Dragos and I wouldn’t have to marry. But Lacrimora didn’t need to know that.

“It was a forced oath,” Lacrimora said. “He was going to kill your father.”

“Why does a forced oath mean less?” I asked, irritated at her casual dismissal of my sacrifice. If it was so easy to rescue me, what meaning did my action hold? “I had a choice! I made the bargain and gave my word.”

Lacrimora rolled her eyes. “Look, you’re what, fourteen years old?” she said. “You’re a child. Your word is largely meaningless.”

“I’m thirteen, and I’m old enough to be apprenticed, so my word is as good as yours. And I’m old enough to know that Pa needs to trust me. He can’t fight Dragos!”

“Why not? He’s a skilled soldier.”

“There’s a fair bit of distance between ‘skilled soldier’ and ‘dragon-demon King of the Underworld!’ Pa could die.”
So could Dragos
. “Just. Tell Pa to please, please,
please
let me handle it. As long as I don’t eat here, I can figure out how to leave.”
All I have to do is stop the souls from disappearing. All I have to do is heal the land.

“Don’t worry,” Lacrimora said. “I know how to kill a
zmeu
. I winkled it out of His Lordship during all those years of dancing.”

“What?” All the air left my lungs. “Why would you kill Dragos?”

“It’s the surest way to free you,” Lacrimora said. There was a hard glint in her eyes. “He’s a
zmeu
. You know what a
zmeu
is, Reveka! A dragon, a deceiver, a seducer, and a thief—”

“Dragos isn’t like that—”

“Isn’t he? He lured Maricara into the Underworld, he tricked her into a duplicitous bargain, and he tortured us for six years. He
happily
took a child as his bride by threatening to kill her father, and—”

“Shut up!” I cried, nearly screaming with frustration. My voice rolled back to me, echoed by the trees, and I was embarrassed—by my voice, and by the angry tears that sprang to my eyes. I blinked them away. I didn’t want Lacrimora to see me cry.

“I’m leaving,” I choked out. “Take this basket—give all the flasks and the notes to Adina and tell her to try to wake the sleepers. Is this all the food you brought me?”

“That’s all of it. We’ll bring more soon.”

“Soon! What does that even mean? You know that time doesn’t run the same down here as it does up there, don’t you?”

“I know.”

“How was that never a problem, when you came down here every night?”

Lacrimora snorted. “Hasn’t Dragos told you? He’s the one who controls the pace of this world. He can make time stop or speed, whatever he likes.”