The Princess Curse (29 page)

Authors: Merrie Haskell

BOOK: The Princess Curse

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My Castle Sylvian has a lot in common with the real-world Hunyad Castle (
Castelul Huniazilor
in Romanian) in Hunedoara, Transylvania. Both castles were built on Roman ruins, and each houses a deep well that was dug by Turkish prisoners. The well at Hunyad Castle doesn’t have a warning about the Underworld, however, but rather a message that is rumored to say “You have water, but no soul“ (but actually says something like “He who wrote this inscription is Hasan, who lives as slave of the Christians”).

During the Middle Ages in Europe, medicine and herbalism were pretty much the same thing. After the fall of Rome, writings on medicine and herbs were preserved in monasteries, which became centers of official medical knowledge (Brother Cosmin, Sister Anica, and Reveka all studied in monasteries). However, the fall of Rome probably had little impact on folk medicine, as people also grew herb gardens and made observations about plants in the countryside (the way the herb-wife Adina worked).

A few notes on invisibility and herbs: Some medieval herbalists really did believe that fern seeds were invisible, and that the seeds also conferred invisibility. Fern seeds, of course, don’t exist: ferns reproduce through spores, and have a strange life-cycle compared to other plants. If you’ve ever hung around any ferns (I spent a lot of time staring at them from underneath during ambushes when I used to play paintball), you know that they get funny, warty things on the undersides of their leaves. Few people would guess that those warts, or the fine-grained black dust they release, are the equivalent of seeds. Can’t blame the medieval herbalists for being confused!

Even the great herbalist Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) had some magical ideas about ferns. She wrote in her
Physica
that ferns cured hearing loss by just being placed on the ear (but never
in
the ear—she’s quite specific about it), and that demons would avoid a person who carried ferns with them. Hildegard is a fascinating historical figure, and besides being a master herbalist and a healer, she wrote music, plays, and poems. She founded and ran two abbeys, went on preaching tours, and corresponded with Popes and kings. Though she is widely referred to as Saint Hildegard (as Reveka thinks of her), she was never officially canonized. Hildegard was an amazing woman, and extremely worthy of Reveka’s reverence.

Acknowledgments

I
want to thank my readers and critiquers. First, the Feral Writers: Julie Winningham, David Klecha, and honorary Feral Julie DeJong. Excelsior! group: Sarah Zettel, Lawrence Kapture, Jonathan Jarrard, Elizabeth Bartmess, Christine Pellar-Kosbar, Karen Everson, and Diane Rivis. The Hastings Point Workshoppers of 2009: Elizabeth Shack, Emily Kasja Herrstrom, Amy O. Lau, Stephen Buchheit, and Victoria Witt. And also Leah Bobet, Marissa K. Lingen, Jason Larke, Sunny Smith, and Kate Riley, and for more than just the reads. Thanks also to Sarah Prineas, Sherwood Smith, Jim C. Hines, Rachel Neumeier, and Stephanie Burgis for kindnesses rendered.

Thank you to my family—Kayla Fuller, Raluca Cook, Iulia Forro, Anne and Rick Fuller, and Bev Cook in particular for specific help on the book and giving me writing space and time, but thank you
all
for your support. Thank you to my awesome coworkers at MLibrary at the University of Michigan: not only for the collections, the articles on Romanian folklore, and the OED, but for all the help and encouragement.

Thank you extremely very much no-more-than-that to my editor, Anne Hoppe, and my agent, Caitlin Blasdell, and everyone on their teams who helped this book along.

And thank you to Dann Fuller, who told me to go to Romania when I dithered and who made me write even when I didn’t want to.

About the Author

Merrie Haskell
, though she was born in Michigan, grew up in North Carolina. She wrote her first story at the age of seven, and she walked dogs after school in order to buy her first typewriter. Merrie returned north to attend the Residential College of the University of Michigan, where she earned a BA in biological anthropology. Her fiction has appeared in
Nature, Asimov's
, and
Strange Horizons
magazines and in
Unplugged: The Year's Best Online Fiction 2008
. She now lives in Saline, Michigan, with her husband and stepdaughter. Merrie works in a library with more than 7 million books, and she finds this to be just about the right number.

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Credits

Jacket art © 2011 by Jason Chan

Jacket design by Joel Tippie

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haskell, Merrie.

The princess curse / by Merrie Haskell. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: Thirteen-year-old Reveka, an herbalist’s apprentice in the Middle Ages,

attempts to break the mysterious curse on the princesses of Sylvania and instead discovers a door to the Underworld.

ISBN 978-0-06-200813-8 (trade bdg.)

[1. Fairy tales. 2. Blessing and cursing—Fiction. 3. Princesses—Fiction.

4. Herbs—Fiction. 5. Magic—Fiction.] I. Twelve dancing princesses. English. II. Title.

PZ8.H2563Pr 2011

[Fic]—dc22

2010040424
CIP
AC