The Princess Imposter

by Vivian Vande Velde

  Mumsy sighed. Either that, or she was blowing her toenails dry. “Something besides that she’s inconsiderate and expects me to indulge her every whim and coddle her and jump up and make special meals for her on her schedule?”

  Indulging? Coddling? Gabriella said, “I don’t—”

  “Yes, something else,” Parf interrupted. “It’s about the laundry.”

  Mumsy looked at Gabriella darkly.

  Gabriella gulped. “I … may have lost a couple articles of clothing to the current in the river.”

  The ever-helpful Parf clarified, “That’s a couple only by people-count, apparently. We would say several.”

  Mumsy flapped her wings in irritation, then swung her leg around to stand up, oblivious to the fact that she knocked her tea over in the process. The brown liquid pooled on the wood, then seeped to the edge and beyond. Drip. Drip. Drip. “You clumsy girl!” Mumsy shouted. “Humans are so careless with things! Magic doesn’t come cheap, you know! Do you think it grows on trees? And, speaking of growing, look what you’ve done to your shoes! Shoes I made! Those were some of my best work!”

  Gabriella looked. The purple monstrosities had begun to sprout pale mauve buds.

  “Now I’ll have to take inventory,” Mumsy said, “and see what I need to replace. Do you think I’m here for your own personal convenience?”

  “No, Mu … ” It was one thing to think of the fairy as Mumsy. Gabriella couldn’t bring herself to call her that—though she tried, several times, so that what she actually said was, “No, Mu-mu-muuum.” Her words came out barely a whisper, and she didn’t look up from the offending shoes.

  Mumsy swept from the room, pausing only to snap from the doorway, “The least you can do is clean up the kitchen!”

  The least I could do, Gabriella thought, is to sit down on the floor and refuse to do anything.

  But, really, the floor was too sticky for her to consider that seriously.

  Do what they want today, she told herself. Surely after one full day they would send her home.

  “There’s water in that vat,” Parf told her. “You can heat it up in the cauldron that goes over the fire.” (That one must have once been a pumpkin.) “Wash the dishes in that. But then, of course, you’ll have to go fetch more water from the river to replace what you’ve used.”

  “Of course,” Gabriella said. The poor people of her father’s kingdom would have to do the same, and she was not the kind of princess who thought herself better than simple farmers and tradesmen.

  Dish after dish she scraped and scoured. And pans—lots of greasy pans. And pots, some so big she practically had to crawl inside to chip away at the dried food accumulated at the bottom so that bits ended up stuck to her and her dress.

  Parf picked a leaf of limp kale from her hair. “I’m guessing you ain’t so upset about missing the midday meal that you’re saving this to eat later.”

  “Maybe,” Gabriella said, not quite sure if she was joking.

  Parf snorted and tossed the leaf into the bucket of wash water before she could make up her mind.

  Just about every dish had been used and the cupboards were all but bare. Gabriella couldn’t stand to put clean dishes on dirty shelves, so she wiped down the shelves—and the doors. And mopped the floor. And went to the river—twice—with a bucket to refill the vat.

  In between all that, she had to take down the finally-dry laundry from the line, then fold the basketful of clothing and put it away in the closet using a system of organization that—if Parf wasn’t making it up on the spot—never became apparent to her.

  She was staggering from fatigue by the time she made it back to the kitchen from her second trip to the river.

  Parf took the bucket from her to empty it into the vat, the first help he’d been all day.

  Gabriella was so surprised that she momentarily wondered if Mumsy had come back into the room. Parf might want Mumsy to think he’d worked all afternoon, too.

  But they were alone.

  “Here,” Parf said sourly. At first she was too tired to even focus on what he held. It was a peach, golden pink and just soft enough to show it was perfectly ripe.

  Was this some sort of trick? Gabriella knew there were legends where humans were trapped in a magical realm by eating something—but her teachers had told her this wasn’t true. It was just the way overprotective mothers tried to discourage their children from accepting food from strangers. Gabriella was too tired and hungry to try to work out Parf’s motive, beyond that it was a momentary lapse into kindness. “Thank you,” she said, her voice coming soft and shaky—maybe from weariness, maybe from gratitude.

  He grunted. “Yeah, well, don’t get used to it. And don’t tell Mumsy.”

  “Certainly not,” Gabriella agreed, even though it was bad manners to speak with one’s mouth full. The peach was juicy and tasty and wonderful.

  Perfectly timed—perfectly badly timed—Mumsy chose then to walk into the kitchen. “Don’t tell Mumsy what?”

  Parf looked at the ceiling as though he had come to inspect the architecture.

  Gabriella hid the remainder of the peach behind her back and swallowed what she’d already bitten off, hoping there was no juice on her chin.

  If nothing else, Mumsy knew children—be they her own or someone else’s. She twirled her finger, a gesture for Gabriella to turn around. Parf wasn’t standing close enough for her to try to hand off the evidence to him. Besides, it had been so long since she’d eaten, she couldn’t bear to give up this tiny meal after only one bite. Gabriella brought her hand out from behind her back, wondering if she could stuff the whole rest of the peach into her mouth before Mumsy took it away from her.

  But Mumsy only shrugged. She cooed at Parf, “Well, isn’t that sweet?”

  Parf’s glowering face and stiffened spine showed very clearly that he did not appreciate being called sweet.

  Mumsy continued as though he hadn’t reacted. “If you see fit to feed her, that’s your business.” To Gabriella she said, “And if that ruins your appetite and you don’t want your evening meal, but then you get hungry later, it’s Parf you can go to for meals between meals.”

  Gabriella doubted any one peach—as scrumptious as it might be—could do more than take the edge off her hunger.

  Mumsy looked around the kitchen and grunted, which Gabriella supposed was her understated way of saying Good job. What she did say was, “You can help me get the evening meal prepared and on the table.”

  Parf took that as his cue to make himself scarce. Either that, or he was still stinging from Mumsy having called him sweet.

  Preparing a meal was another of those tasks Gabriella had never done or spent much time wondering about.

  “Fetch the cucumber plate,” Mumsy would say, and Gabriella didn’t know if that was a plate to hold cucumbers or one that had been made from a cucumber. In either case—even though she had surely just put the plate into the cupboard minutes ago—she had to ask, “Where is it? What does it look like?” And, “How much salt is a pinch of salt?” And, “How much of the onion do I peel away? Just the papery part, or the first layer after that? Is there a center that can’t be eaten? How thin are ‘thin’ slices?”

  Mumsy called her hopeless after every question. “If you’re trying to get out of helping by acting useless,” she warned, “it won’t work.”

  “I just want to do it right,” Gabriella said.

  Mumsy snorted but told her, “What you’ve got is not done half badly.”

  Apparently the biggest meal of the day was at midday. This was a smaller one, with various fruits and vegetables that Mumsy did appear to have a knack for fixing and presenting. No meat, Gabriella noted, but she wasn’t sure if that was coincidence or due to a conscious choice for this meal. Or if it was just the fairies’ way.

  Next was trying to corral the children—Mumsy made more of an effort to get everyone to the table than Gabriella would have expected from her attitude earlier—and to get hands and faces at
least somewhat clean.

  “Is Daddy coming tonight?” one of the children asked.

  “Not that he’s let me know of,” Mumsy said. “No-account sluggard.”

  Gabriella was curious but didn’t want to be nosy, so she didn’t ask about the children’s father.

  And then they started eating. It was—as Parf had indicated—a bit of chaos. Children reached over one another, grabbing food from bowls (and occasionally from one another’s plates) with their bare hands. There was kicking beneath the table, elbows atop the table, and conversations with mouths full of food. Despite all this, Gabriella found the meal was unexpectedly delicious, and she didn’t think this was just because she was hungrier than she had ever been before. “This is so good,” she told Mumsy—several times.

  Mumsy grunted the first time, didn’t answer at all the second, looked suspicious the third, but after the fourth she announced to no one in particular, “It’s nice to have someone appreciate your efforts.”

  The children—except for Parf, who was still sullen—were eager to please, and they too started chanting, “It’s good, Mumsy.”

  Mumsy’s face softened for the first time that day.

  Which did not mean that she softened. “It’s your job to clean up,” she told Gabriella, once the meal was finished.

  “Ah,” Gabriella said. “Because I’m taking Phleg’s place, and that’s one of Phleg’s duties.”

  Though kitchen cleanup had clearly not happened in a much longer time than Phleg had been away, Mumsy just looked at Gabriella levelly and said, “Yes.” Then she said, “Children, off to bed. We have an early day tomorrow.”

  “We have an early day every day,” Parf groused.

  “Gabby didn’t,” several of the others said. “She slept halfway through the morning.”

  “Well, we can’t all be princesses,” Mumsy said, shooing the children out of the kitchen, “with our own personal helpers.”

  Gabriella thought Mumsy was referring to the castle servants, but Parf’s face reddened, and Gabriella realized Mumsy meant him. Not that he’d been any help, but he had hung around all day.

  Unfortunately, the children realized the same thing. Gabriella could hear their tinny voices chanting from their bedchamber: “Parf’s got a girlfriend! Parf’s got a girlfriend!”

  And Parf protesting, “Do not!”

  Parf? How could any of the children think that, when he clearly despised everything about her?

  Well, but he had given her that peach.

  Still …

  Parf? Gabriella thought. PARF? That was … unbelievable … disgusting … Well, maybe not disgusting, but unsettling. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that possibility. She wasn’t even sure how she felt about being betrothed to Prince Frederic, and she’d known since she was seven that she was to marry him.

  Prince Frederic! Gabriella had forgotten all about him. He and his parents had arrived from Rosenmark yesterday for the official coming-of-age betrothal ceremony. She had seen him briefly at supper the night before. He certainly didn’t know her well enough that he would realize a fairy had been substituted for her, any more than she …

  No, she told herself, picturing Parf substituting himself for Prince Frederic. She would notice such an exchange.

  Gabriella sighed at the state of the kitchen she had spent so long cleaning. How could it have gotten so messy again so quickly? She mopped the splattered lingonberry relish off the floor and walls. Swept up bread crumbs. Washed the dishes and put them away.

  By the time she was finished, the sounds of everyone else settling down for the night had quieted, and the fairy house was silent.

  She could run away.

  If she had any idea where she was.

  But running away now would just further complicate things. A full day—dawn to dawn—was such a round, even amount of time. The kind of limit that fairy children would give to the duration of a spell.

  I’m going to wake up in my own bed, she told herself. Three times, she told herself, as a charm.

  It wasn’t that late, wasn’t even all that dark, given that the walls glowed gently. But once she was finished with her tasks, and now that her hunger had been satisfied, it was replaced by exhaustion. Gabriella staggered into the children’s bedchamber and to the pile of straw on which she had awoken what felt to be days ago.

  Tomorrow I have to get fresh straw, she thought—but then immediately caught herself. Tomorrow morning she would wake up on clean satin sheets that someone else had washed and hung to dry. And pressed. She felt fortunate that the magically made fairy clothing did not need pressing. Just the occasional trimming.

  Gabriella had kicked off her eggplant shoes during the preparation of the meal. Now she saw that someone had brought them in and set them by her bed. The vines and buds had been cut back for her.

  Parf?

  Judging by the soft snores, both from the boys’ side of the room and the girls’, everyone was asleep already. Miss-mot and the next-youngest girl were on Gabriella’s straw, and she had to rearrange their arms and legs to give herself enough room. Which was no reason to feel sorry for herself. Princesses don’t cry just because they’re tired and miss their parents, she told herself. The only reason her eyes were scratchy was because of the straw. Even so, once Gabriella was lying down, the next-youngest one shifted to snuggle against her.

  “Good night,” the child mumbled sleepily.

  “Good night,” Gabriella answered, though she suspected the girl mistook her for her sister Phleg. It gave her a nice feeling, while at the same time it made her eyes feel even more scratchy from the straw.

  Still, she was sure—sure!—that tomorrow she would be home and everything would be back to normal.

  Phleg ran.

  People were running after her, calling for her to stop, come back, she didn’t have to marry Prince Frederic if she didn’t want to—or she could, if that was what she wanted—somehow they’d fix everything and work things out with his awful father.

  Obviously, King Leopold was not one of the chasers assuring her of this.

  On the other hand, his wife—she of the big voice—was.

  And so was her father—no! Princess Gabriella’s father. Stop thinking of him as YOUR daddy, Phleg commanded herself. But it was sweet how long King Humphrey followed the girl he believed was his daughter. Who’d have guessed such an old man could run so fast?

  Her mother—Gabriella’s mother—barely made it out of the castle. Phleg heard the commotion when the queen tripped over her long skirts and fell, and the other queen and several of the servants stopped their pursuit of the runaway princess in order to attend to her. Phleg also stopped, turning her head at the cry of dismay from the onlookers. Gabriella’s mother motioned for the pursuers to keep going.

  That’s what comes from too many undergarments, thought Phleg, who had hoisted her own gown and flouncy underskirts above her knees to prevent just such a mishap. She hoped the queen wasn’t hurt. Phleg’s coming here was supposed to be for fun—admittedly fun for Phleg, not necessarily for Princess Gabriella or her family—but it wasn’t fun for anybody to break up betrothals and injure parents.

  Phleg was far enough ahead that she could spare a moment to watch.

  Torn between helping wife or daughter, King Humphrey wavered a moment after he realized what had happened behind him. A cluster of servants had been running close on his heels. (They had been holding back out of respect for their king, in order not to outdistance him.) Now that he’d faltered, they surged past and quickly closed the gap on the hesitating Phleg.

  The queen again waved her hand dismissively—which Phleg took as evidence she was not seriously hurt, and which King Humphrey took as permission to leave his wife to the care of the servants. He once more took up the chase, but it was clear the servants who were ahead of him were superior runners.

  Phleg, too, resumed running, putting on a burst of speed of her own.

  Past the flower garden and the kitchen gar
den she ran, past the stables and the blacksmith and the tradesmen’s shops. The servants weren’t catching up to her, but she wasn’t pulling any farther ahead. She could see the wall that surrounded the castle precincts, and headed toward that.

  The servants began yelling and waving their arms at the castle guards. There were two of them, positioned by the drawbridge that allowed access to and from the castle over the moat. It took the soldiers a few moments of gawping at the approaching mass of runners, led so improbably by their princess, before they finally caught on. They began turning the winch wheel that would raise the bridge—and block her in.

  Phleg kicked off her blue brocade slippers—she often went without shoes at home—to give herself better traction as the bridge began to angle up, up: a steeper incline with every thud of her bare feet across the wood. The guards hesitated. This was, after all, the princess. They must have doubted themselves, thinking that surely they were not being asked to prevent their princess from leaving the castle if that’s what she wanted—and that gave her just enough time to get to the end of the drawbridge before the slope became too steep to climb. Then she threw herself into the air, off the drawbridge and in the direction of the farther shore.

  Oh yeah, she thought, about one heartbeat too late, no wings.

  Her fairy wings, puny as they were, would not only have slowed her descent but would also have given her some control over direction. But they had been enchanted away along with her face, her spiky silver-white hair, and her much more reasonable height.

  Fortunately, her momentum wasn’t enough to carry her to the hard, gravelly roadway on the far side. Instead, she landed in the moat with a spectacular splash that knocked the breath out of her.

  She came up sputtering, algae draped over her head like green, dripping locks, just in time to hear the drawbridge thump flush with the castle wall.

  So much for those chasing her.

  For the moment.

  Her layers of clothes weighed her down, but Phleg managed to paddle to the shore and hoisted herself up onto the grassy bank.