Palace of Lies

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  I doubted that. I couldn’t imagine anyone living in a worse place than this. Not if they intended to survive.

  Janelia brought a steaming bucket of water and a pile of rags over beside me. I was relieved to see that she piled the rags on one of the rickety stools, not the dirt floor.

  “It’s not your fault you don’t remember me from when you were little,” Janelia said, though I could tell from the way she bit her lip that it still bothered her. “And—from the other things I tried, trying to get a message to you. I shouldn’t have expected so much. I just wanted so much to believe . . .”

  “Why did I know you when I was four?” I asked. “How—”

  I stopped myself before I could ask, How is it that Lord Throckmorton didn’t have you killed? even though that was one of the things I wanted to know. Maybe what I wanted to know most. I was working out an odd sort of equation in my head: If poor servant-girl Janelia managed to survive in spite of Lord Throckmorton’s murderous ways, doesn’t that make it more likely that Cecilia and Harper and all my other sister-princesses managed to survive the fire and whoever might have been trying to kill them?

  Janelia dabbed at my right foot with a dampened rag.

  “Oh good, a lot of this is just dried blood on unbroken skin,” Janelia said. “It looks worse than it is—you don’t have wounds everywhere.”

  I winced anyway.

  “But, oooh, here’s a cut and there’s still glass in it and it’s deep . . . Brace yourself,” Janelia said. She seemed to be speaking through gritted teeth. A moment later, she looked up. “How is it that you aren’t screaming?”

  “Sometimes when you know things are going to hurt, you just make yourself stop thinking about them,” I said.

  And once again I had the sensation that Janelia might be familiar, that I might remember her . . . but then it slipped away again.

  Would there have been any reason that I might have made myself forget? I wondered.

  Janelia was watching my face too carefully. I felt the same kind of squeamishness I’d felt listening to Tog breathe. Janelia was too close. It was like she actually knew me, knew me so well she didn’t even see me as a princess anymore.

  Nobody knew me that well.

  “Go on taking the glass out,” I said, and without meaning to I sounded imperious, with a tone of, Do as I command, servant!

  “I’ll tell you the story I’ve always wanted you to know,” Janelia said. “While I work. It might . . . distract you.”

  “As you wish,” I said stiffly.

  Why did I feel like hearing the story might be as painful as having my wounds cleaned?

  11

  “ ‘Twas odd that I was given over to serve the queen,” Janelia began.

  “Odd?” I murmured, holding back a wince. Just when I had bragged about how good I was at not thinking about pain, the tactic failed me. Maybe it didn’t work as well on physical pain as on other types. It was starting to feel like Janelia was rooting around under the skin of my feet with razors and knives and swords.

  “Before that I’d only ever been a scullery maid,” Janelia said. “Plucking feathers from chicken and geese, scrubbing dirt from potatoes . . .”

  “The lowest work a servant girl could have in the palace,” I agreed.

  “Oh, no,” Janelia corrected me. She paused to brush away a curl of hair from her forehead. “Cleaning out chamber pots is much worse.”

  “But a royal person’s own maid or butler does that,” I protested.

  “Right, and so in the palace, everyone acts like it’s a better job,” Janelia said. “Because you’re close to the royalty, see? If they like you, they give you treats and favors, they tell you secrets. . . . You’ve got prestige.”

  I tried to remember if I’d ever given servants any treats or favors. I was certain I’d never told them any secrets.

  Secrets shared had a way of escaping, of spreading further than the secret-teller wished.

  “So you agreed to be the queen’s servant girl for the prestige?” I asked.

  “No,” Janelia said. She reached back for a rag that wasn’t covered in blood. “I was chosen to be the queen’s servant girl because everyone else was afraid. And . . . I was too stupid to know that I should be afraid too.”

  I flinched, and I couldn’t have said if it was because of what Janelia had said or because of the way Janelia was digging into my wounds.

  “But the queen—everybody loved the queen,” I protested.

  This had always been treated as gospel truth around the palace. The queen’s universal appeal had played a huge part in the lies I’d originally believed about myself, as well as the fuller story that emerged once all of us “true princesses” got together and began comparing stories.

  “The queen was dangerous,” Janelia said, dropping a large sliver of bloody glass onto a bloody rag.

  That was in my foot? I thought, suddenly so queasy that I thought I might vomit or faint.

  Janelia evidently misunderstood the expression of dismay on my face.

  “Oh, of course, Queen Charlotte Aurora was also beautiful and gracious and kind, and all the servants loved her,” Janelia hastened to say. “I can’t speak for the likes of Lord Throckmorton.”

  I kept silent. If I tried to speak I would surely scream or wail or maybe even curse.

  “But the queen was . . . reckless,” Janelia said. “She was so good herself, she didn’t understand that other people could be evil through and through. She just thought they were misunderstood.”

  “Like Lord Throckmorton,” I muttered. Saying his name was almost like cursing. “The queen didn’t know he was evil.”

  Janelia nodded. She paused, looking off toward the door.

  “Servants hear things,” she said. “They may not understand it all, but . . . everybody knew the king and queen were in danger. The queen was pushing for the end of the war, and she couldn’t see why it wasn’t easy. She didn’t see that . . . that some men would kill to keep the war going. Because they were profiting.”

  I shivered. Had the other girls and I been as reckless as our supposed mother, the queen? We had wanted to end the war too; we had actually accomplished a peace treaty. Well, all but the formal signing of the document. I knew for a fact that Lord Throckmorton had made a fortune from the war, as had some of the other advisers we sent to prison. Were there others we didn’t know about who still had reason to want war? Who were willing to kill to get their way?

  Someone burned down our palace—is that proof that warmongers are still out there? Someone knocked out at least Fidelia and me in the middle of the fire—was that because of the peace treaty? I wondered. If Madame Bisset is to be believed—which she isn’t! She isn’t!—then someone made sure that all the other princesses besides me are dead. Because . . . because . . .

  A great sob rose inside my throat but I didn’t let it out. I clamped my lips together and hoped that Janelia thought I was grimacing only because of my wounded feet.

  “Fourteen years ago, none of the other servants wanted to serve the queen because of the rumors,” Janelia said. “Some said her enemies would strike in the middle of the night; some said they’d strike by day and they’d probably kill everyone in the room with her, to kill all the witnesses. . . .”

  “Lord Throckmorton did kill all the witnesses,” I said. “Even the men who’d worked with him to kill the king.”

  Janelia shook her head, ever so slightly.

  “Not all the witnesses,” she said softly.

  My eyes widened, and for a moment I really did forget the searing pain in my feet.

  Janelia gave a heavy sigh.

  “The queen’s last chambermaid quit in hysterics the same day the queen gave birth,” she said. “The rumors . . . I didn’t know this at the time, because the girl peeling potatoes is always the last to know anything. But everyone believed that the assassins wouldn’t strike until a new prince or princess was born.”

  “Until there was an heir,” I said b
itterly. “Until there was a tiny royal baby who would be totally dependent on her advisers for years to come. A tiny royal baby who could be molded and shaped and manipulated . . .”

  I knew now that I hadn’t ever been the real true princess—the one with the actual blood of her parents running through her veins. But I had played that role long enough to know how this part of the story went.

  “Yes,” Janelia said, She seemed to be concentrating hard on my wounds. “I’m not sure how many girls they asked to attend the queen, but eventually they worked their way down to me. And—I was a foolish child. All I knew was that the queen had just given birth and was seriously ill, and I’d seen my own mother give birth, and I thought . . . I thought the queen needed me.”

  “You were brave,” I whispered.

  “I didn’t know any better,” Janelia said. “And—it gets worse.”

  For a moment she was silent, focused on washing away blood. She inched my nightgown up to an indecent level, and even though I’d been used to servant girls washing me and dressing me all my life, I felt strangely exposed. Was it because I worried about Tog and Herk coming back too soon? Or was it because Janelia seemed to be laying bare her own soul?

  Being washed and dressed by servant girls only worked well if the servant girls were anonymous, impersonal, practically unnoticed.

  “Oh, this isn’t so bad,” Janelia said, dabbing now at the scrapes on my legs from sliding down the pillar. “None of these wounds are deep—they’ll be healed before you know it.”

  Did that mean that the wounds on my feet would take a lot longer?

  I felt better when Janelia pulled the skirt of the nightgown back down and moved to attending to my left foot.

  “Pray, go on with your tale,” I said.

  “I hauled bathing water for Queen Charlotte Aurora,” Janelia said. “I washed her brow when she turned feverish. I listened to her babble about the king, the baby, the king, the baby . . .”

  “Did you see the dead baby?” I asked. “The . . . corpse?”

  I felt cruel asking that question. But it’d been a point in the story I’d always stumbled over. Who wouldn’t want proof?

  Janelia shook her head no.

  “I was given to believe that other servants were caring for the child,” she said. “A wet nurse, a nursemaid, a nanny . . . And the queen was too ill to hold an infant, so it was no surprise to me that the child was never brought to her to admire and coo over and dandle.”

  “But didn’t you want to see the new princess?” I asked.

  “I was the queen’s only servant girl,” Janelia said. “I didn’t have time to do anything but tend her. Day and night. I even slept on her stone floor, an hour or two at a time, no more than she herself was able to sleep. . . .”

  “So you were there the night the assassins killed the king?” I asked in horror. “They killed the king, they killed his guards, they left the queen with fatal wounds . . . How is it that you survived?”

  Janelia had stopped gingerly dabbing at my feet, and was just staring now at all the blood.

  “I fear that another servant girl died in my place,” Janelia said in a hollow voice. “I’ve learned that one servant girl looks much the same as another to men like Lord Throckmorton—unless she is unduly beautiful, which I was not.” She swallowed hard. “And neither was Lena.”

  Janelia stopped talking, and I had to prompt her: “Lena?”

  Janelia winced and took a deep breath.

  “Lena . . . my friend . . . I had asked her to bring more wood for the queen’s fire right before midnight,” Janelia said. She seemed to be looking off into the distance, at something I couldn’t see. “Lena tarried coming up the stairs. If she had just gotten there faster, put the wood on the fire, and been out of the room again before the last chime of midnight, before the assassins arrived . . .”

  Janelia dragged her gaze back to me now. Her eyes burned.

  “Lena tried to defend the queen,” Janelia said. “The way her body fell near the bed, not over by the fireplace—I’m sure that’s what she was doing.” Janelia swallowed hard, a shamed expression on her face. “And I—I lay frozen, half under the bed. I couldn’t move. It was like I was under some evil spell or something . . . the spell of cowardice. And the assassins never knew I was there because they never came around to that side of the bed. That’s the only reason I lived. Because I was a coward.”

  “Who wouldn’t have been afraid?” I murmured. I remembered how terrified I’d always been of Lord Throckmorton. And, until the very end, it had been in his best interest to keep me alive.

  Suddenly I realized that Janelia had spent the past fourteen years thinking about that night the wrong way.

  “I’m sure the assassins knew you were there,” I said. “They were experts—they would have been watching. They would have kept track of who entered and left that room. They probably killed that other girl—Lena?—because she saw them. Even if they were wearing masks or disguises, she could have described their stature, their physiques. But you . . . you didn’t see them. You only heard what happened. And . . . it was in their interest to leave a witness, as long as she didn’t know too much. So you could spread the terror to everyone else in the palace.”

  Janelia gaped at me.

  “I—I never thought of that,” she said.

  I shrugged, as if knowing the minds of evil men was something to be modest about.

  “I know how Lord Throckmorton and his minions thought,” I whispered.

  Janelia still didn’t go back to cleaning my wounds.

  “So I was supposed to not be terrified, as well as not a coward?” she asked bitterly. “I have more to feel guilty about?”

  “Or less,” I said. “You shouldn’t think Lena died in your place. It was her own fault for tarrying on the stairs.”

  I felt clever saying that. But Janelia snapped, “Don’t you dare ever tell Lena’s son that! He thinks his mother died a hero!”

  I didn’t think there was much chance I’d ever meet the son of a dead servant girl from the palace from fourteen years ago—especially now that the palace had burned down.

  And what of your sister-princesses? a cruel part of my brain asked me. If they are dead, are you going to remember them as dying heroic deaths? Or as being at fault?

  “I don’t want to hear anything else about the murders right now,” I said. My imperious tone was back, simply because I was trying so hard not to cry. This tone had always sounded perfectly fine in the palace—it was something I’d aspired to and practiced when I was younger, and it didn’t come naturally. But the tone felt out of place in Janelia’s hovel, when my blood was soaking into her dirt floor. And when my palace was gone and my sister-princesses might be dead and some enemy I couldn’t even identify had apparently tried to kill me, too, and I had had to rely on Janelia’s ragamuffin sons to rescue me from Madame Bisset . . .

  “You were brave later on,” I told Janelia, trying for a tone of kindness. It came out sounding condescending. “Even after the assassins, you stayed on as the queen’s servant. Even as she lay dying.”

  Janelia picked up her rag again and started scrubbing away at the blood caked on my left foot.

  “Is it bravery when your only other choice is starvation?” she asked. “When you’re the only one bringing in money in your family, and you don’t want to watch your little brothers and sisters starve too? Or watch your new baby sister die?”

  I remembered that Janelia had claimed that the two of us were sisters. Maybe I had lost too much blood; maybe it just seemed too incredible. What Janelia had said just kept floating out of my mind.

  Does she mean . . . Is she saying I was the new baby sister she didn’t want to see die? I wondered.

  “But surely at the orphanage . . .” I began. I had little notion of what orphanages were like. I tried again. “Surely the food was adequate, even if it wasn’t as elegant as palace fare . . .”

  Janelia gave me a look that I wouldn’t have been ab
le to identify even a month and a half ago, before the other girls arrived at the palace. It was a look of pure incredulity, the same look that my sister-princesses almost always gave me when I made any supposition about life outside the palace.

  It made me feel like a fool. It made me wonder, Has everyone at the palace thought me foolish all along? How is it that everyone except my sister-princesses—and Janelia—have always been able to hide those looks from me for the past fourteen years? And . . . is this proof that Janelia really is another sister?

  “Children starve to death in orphanages and outside them,” Janelia said. And maybe her rag hit another hidden piece of glass in my foot, because an extra jolt of pain shot through my body. “Especially babies. That’s one of the things the queen was so upset about. That’s one of the reasons she wanted to stop the war.”

  Belatedly I remembered that the queen herself had written about her concern for orphans in the letters she’d left for all the sister-princesses.

  Janelia dug at the glass in my foot.

  “But you and me and the rest of our family . . . we were never in an orphanage,” Janelia continued.

  I jerked back not just my foot, but my whole body.

  “What?” I protested. “But I saw the queen’s account myself, in her own handwriting . . . She said all of us princesses came from the orphanage!”

  Janelia kept her head bowed, her focus on my foot.

  “The queen thought she was telling the truth . . . ,” she murmured. She let out a deep sigh. “I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was just helping you stay alive . . . if I could keep you alive . . .”

  I felt chills that had nothing to do with the blood I’d lost or the fact that I was sitting on a dirt floor.

  “What did you do?” I demanded.

  Janelia winced but went on.

  “The queen was dying,” she said. “I thought it might be her last day, and maybe you can’t believe this, but I was genuinely fond of her. In spite of the danger she put me in. I wanted to do anything I could to keep her happy. So she could . . . die in peace. She sent me to the orphanage with instructions to bring back thirteen orphan baby girls of no more than a month or so old.”