The Princess Curse (6 page)

“Before Brother Cosmin arrived, I was the castle herb-wife,” she said, stretching out her half-netted sock and checking it against a finished one. “I retired to take care of these folks here. I’ve nothing against Cosmin. I just think that calling him ‘herb-husband’ keeps him honest. He puts on airs, and uses fancy titles like ‘herbalist,’ because he has books.”

I considered that and decided it might be safer to have no opinion on this subject, even though I took my future as a master herbalist very seriously. I would be annoyed if people referred to me as an herb-wife, someone who knew her receipts by rote instead of being able to read and write.

But I didn’t want to annoy Mistress Adina, and I had great respect for her age, so I kept my mouth shut about all that.

Pa and the Abbess both would have been proud.

“Mistress Adina,” I said, “have you considered yew?”

“Yew!” She rocked back in her chair, sucking one tooth thoughtfully. “What for? It’s poison.”

“It’s been . . . it’s been known to raise the dead.”

She laughed. “I never heard that!”

I flushed. “I read it! In a book!” I had, though it was about a year before, in Moldavia.

And she laughed again. “Who taught you herb lore, Reveka?”

“Well, before Brother Cosmin, I learned from Sister Anica. . . .”

“Brother Cosmin aside—and I know you’re lying there, because I’ve heard you’ve taught
him
more herb lore than he’s taught you—Sister Anica probably never mentioned yew, did she?”

I didn’t see her point, but she was correct. “No, Sister Anica didn’t mention yew—except that it’s a poison, as you said. What does that matter?”

“Don’t believe everything you read in books,” Mistress Adina said. Her needle darted in and out of the sock slowly taking shape beneath her hand.

“But—”

“Did your book tell you how to prepare the yew?”

I had to admit the truth. “No.” Or if it had, I didn’t remember.

“So what would you do with it?”

“Um. A tincture, to, um, drip down their throats?”

Mistress Adina shook her head. “I’m afraid not, dear. Too dangerous. Do you have anything else to try?”

“I have santolina,” I said. Its scent was similar to rosemary, though folk sometimes called it cotton lavender.

“Santolina!” She set aside her needle and reached out, and I placed the packet of herbs in her hands. She opened the packet and sniffed. “What’ll you do with it?”

I felt more confident with this herb. “Rub it on their foreheads and beneath their noses,” I said. “Sister Anica did it for a monk who had fallen from a tree he was pruning and banged his head. He’d been sleeping for three days. . . .”

“Did it work?”

“Not then. But she’d seen it work other times. So shouldn’t we try it?”

“Please do. Try.” She gestured toward the man sleeping at her feet. I knelt beside him and rolled the santolina sprigs between my hands, collecting the plant’s oils. I dropped the sprig and smoothed my fingers over the man’s forehead, across his temples, down his cheek, beneath his nose. I massaged the pulse points on his neck and wrists, watching carefully for any signs of stirring.

Nothing.

I stood up and brushed the leaf bits and dirt off my apron. “Well!” I said, trying to sound cheery even though tears of disappointment clogged my throat. I sat down on the low stool beside Mistress Adina and made a great fuss over straightening my shoes so she wouldn’t see me sniffling into my apron. “I guess I’ll have to try something else.”

When I looked up, Mistress Adina wasn’t even watching me. She was staring out the window. I followed her gaze across the forecourt to the shadowed bulk of the eastern tower. Lights flickered in the princesses’ window. Mistress Adina turned back to the room to regard the sleeping figures.

“What?” I whispered, afraid to disturb this moment, whatever it was. “What’s happening?”

“Wait,” Adina said.

I waited.

As one, the sleepers opened their mouths and shouted: “Don’t go!”

Goose bumps rose on my scalp and scrabbled down my spine. Mistress Adina stabbed her netting needle toward the window, urging me to look: The princesses’ tower was dark, the light extinguished.

“Every night,” Mistress Adina said. “It happens every night when the light in the princesses’ window fades away.”

My throat was too dry for words to rise.

I went the next night at the same time to sit with Mistress Adina, and the next night, and almost every night thereafter while I was the herbalist’s apprentice of Castle Sylvian. And every night, as the light faded from the princesses’ tower, the sleepers beseeched, “Don’t go!”

Chapter 8

T
he next day, I woke to find a murder of crows had descended upon Castle Sylvian. I’d heard them cawing in my sleep and thought I’d dreamed it. But there was no dreaming involved in picking a path around the lacy gold-and-white patterns of their poop splattered across the courtyard on my way to the baths.

Marjit was uncharacteristically silent while I assembled my herbs. She didn’t respond to any of my efforts to jolly her. But when I made to leave, she murmured, “Stick around,” her voice barely audible under the chatter of the arriving princesses.

I shrugged but stayed. Marjit had me hand her sponges and scrubbers, while the princesses and I tried to ignore each other. When Marjit had settled the princesses in the soaking pool, she pulled me into the bath antechamber, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll just be attending to your toweling, dears.”

I was halfway through the door to the far passageway when Marjit yanked me backward into the antechamber and slammed the passage door loudly. She held up her hand in a “Wait” gesture, then tiptoed back to listen at the door of the bathing chamber.

Eavesdropper! I stared at her with big eyes, uncertain what to say, or if I should say anything at all. Marjit, the root of the castle’s grapevine, apparently gathered her information from illicit eavesdropping. People thought they were alone in the baths, but she was really on the other side of the door with her ear pressed to it.

The princesses were talking about the crows in the courtyard. “It’s an omen,” one of them said decisively. “The Hungarians are coming.”

“At least there won’t be more Saxons.” This was Ruxandra’s voice, sounding disgusted. Her tavern wench’s accent was unmistakable. “Every single Saxon, insisting on dancing with every single one of us, for every single dance. Like we don’t already get enough of
that
.”

“The worst of the dancing Saxons learned his lesson,” someone else—Maricara, I think—added with grim humor.

“His name is Iosif,” someone else put in quietly. “And if Corvinus is coming, Iosif’s the reason why, so maybe we should remember that name.”

“What’s Corvinus going to do?” another voice asked. “It’s the Wallachians we should worry about.”

“Oh, la, Wallachians. They’ve no bite without the Impaler.”

“Oh, la, Wallachians!” This new voice was mocking, harsh. I imagined it belonged to Lacrimora. “If your precious papa doesn’t produce an heir soon, the Wallachian Prince is going to insist on being named the heir to Sylvania. And if Vasile agrees, the Hungarians will attack. And if Vasile doesn’t agree, the Wallachians will attack.”

“Then Papa had just better get busy with his little bride, hadn’t he!”

I wanted to hear more, but Marjit flapped her hands like the wings of an excited chicken, motioning me to open and close the far antechamber door. We tromped loudly back to the bathing chamber, and when we came in, the princesses were silent, their faces as smooth as peaches.

After this, Marjit had me help with the scrubbing and sponging and hair washing. The time went quickly.

When the princesses were gone, I turned to Marjit. “What was that all about?”

Marjit shook out her towels with a snap. “One of the Saxons, Tereza’s betrothed, went missing just last night. The one called Iosif.”

“But why . . . what’s that have to do with crows?”

“The crows are probably sent by Corvinus, the Hungarian king, to spy.”

“Well, how do you know that?” I asked, astonished.

“
Corvinus
means ‘crow,’ doesn’t it? And he’s the one who supports the Saxons who live in Transylvania and fight the Turks. Which the Transylvanians are not so fond of, I might add, except for when the Turks invade.” I knew this. I’d grown up with Saxon nuns in Transylvania. “The Saxons sent a delegation to us, including this Iosif, who was minor nobility of sorts, to lobby Prince Vasile for the Hungarian cause. But now Iosif is missing, the latest victim of the curse, and Corvinus is going to be angry.”

“That’s silly! Corvinus must know there’s a curse. How can he get mad when someone gets caught up in it?”

“Corvinus doesn’t actually believe the curse is real. Corvinus thinks that Prince Vasile is just imprisoning everyone who disappears, and is working dark magic on the ones who fall to the sleeping curse.”

I stared at Marjit. It had never occurred to me that people would think the curse wasn’t real. Or that they would think it was all part of a political machination on Vasile’s part.

“The only thing that has saved Sylvania to this point,” Marjit said, “is that whenever we tried to send the princesses away, storms and earthquakes rose up to chase them—and we had to bring the princesses right back to make it all stop. So Corvinus may not believe in the curse, but
everyone
in this region believes that Vasile controls a great magic. That’s protected us more than anything else. They think,
If this is what he’ll do to keep his daughters at home, imagine what he’d do to an invader!
”

“I see,” I said, though it wasn’t true; I was just barely beginning to see. “It was . . . nice of you to let me overhear the princesses with you.”

Marjit snorted, spreading out her towels to dry. “It en’t kindness. I need a second witness if the princesses spill one of their secrets. I thought this morning, with Tereza’s betrothed disappearing and all, we’d hear sommat useful.”

“We did! They said the dancing Saxon learned his lesson.”

Marjit shook her head. “Not enough to go to the Prince about.” She sighed. “Trust me.”

I considered. “If we did overhear something useful . . .”

“We’d split the dowry, of course.” She examined my face. “Why, do you have plans for the whole of it?”

“Of course,” I said, blushing like I wasn’t planning to use the dowry to join a convent.

“I knew it,” Marjit gloated. I refrained from asking her what she thought she knew. Instead, I thanked her and left.

I scurried off to the herbary, passing Armas and Pa and several other men loading harquebuses. Their volleys of gunfire echoed through the courtyard, scaring the crows away and awakening Brother Cosmin early, so he came to set us many tasks in the herbary long before noon.

Didina didn’t come back from the midday meal. Brother Cosmin kept forgetting she wasn’t in the room with us—she was much quieter than me, so perhaps it was easy to forget, especially with me there. When he called for her the third time, only to look up in puzzlement when she didn’t answer, he said, “Reveka, go
find
Didina, please!”

I went, and gladly. The herbary was stuffy, with the shutters drawn to keep out the sunlight.

I was arrested right outside the door by the sight of a golden-haired boy near my age seated on the edge of the Little Well, pulling up a bucket of water.

Now, there were three wells inside Prince Vasile’s walls: the main well by the kitchen, the sour well down past the stables—which gave perfectly healthful water that reeked of rotten eggs—and the Little Well near the herbary. I was told no one ever drank from the Little Well. I’d believed it had run dry long ago.

The boy, who was prettier than any boy had a right to be, with forget-me-not eyes and a rosebud mouth, scooped a wooden cup full of water from his dripping bucket. He paused, the cup held halfway to his perfect lips, and stared at me, slack-jawed.

I knew I wasn’t anywhere near pretty enough to receive this kind of reaction—but neither was I ugly enough. I frowned at him—and still he stared. I felt the blood rise in my cheeks, and I grew angry. He stared like I was wearing a duck on my head. I didn’t like it. It was rude.

I don’t know what came over me then, other than that I was parched from working in the hot herbary and annoyed beyond belief. I marched right up to the boy, snatched the cup from his hands, and gulped down his water.

He was so astonished that his fingers didn’t even fight to keep the cup. He just gawped at me. I glared back over the brim. “Close your mouth,” I told him when I’d swallowed. “You’ll catch flies.”

I handed him the cup and turned toward the archway leading from our tiny walled garden into the rest of the castle. I glanced back at the boy: He held the wooden cup limply in his hands, his mouth open so far that his chin practically touched his chest.

The door of the herbary slammed open. I thought Brother Cosmin was coming to chastise me for lollygagging, but he didn’t seem to notice me. He bolted for the Little Well, shouting at the boy. He punched the wooden cup out of the boy’s hand, knocking it into the well. Then he sent the bucket and rope tumbling after.

The rope hissed away in the silence, until there came the distant splash of the bucket hitting the water.

Now it wasn’t just the boy who stared with an open mouth.

“
Never
drink from that well,” Brother Cosmin said, as though scolding a small child. He looked over at me; I tried to shrink around the corner, but it was too late. “Reveka! You hear this, too! Never, ever drink from here! It’s contaminated.”

I was going to die from drinking poisoned water! I clutched my belly, preparing for spasms. But nothing happened.

The water hadn’t tasted bad. In fact, it had been very, very good. A little bit sweet but with the tang of stone and . . . almonds? And it had been oh so cold.

“Contaminated how?” I asked, afraid now of a more spiritual than physical contamination. Perhaps someone had drowned themselves in the well. Everyone knew better than to drink from a suicide well.