Should I believe her?
You can think about all that later, I told myself. After you’ve rescued your sister-princesses in Fridesia. After there’s no reason for anyone to suspect you of murder.
I realized all the boys were arguing about who deserved to go to Fridesia with me. Who was worthy to carry a princess.
“I’m the strongest!” one bragged.
“But I can run the fastest!” countered another.
“But I know the most about traveling in the wilderness!” argued a third.
“You’re scared of ants!” a fourth boy sneered at the third.
“Herk and Tog will take me,” I said. “And Janelia.”
I couldn’t evaluate the usefulness of the attributes the boys were arguing about. I didn’t even know how to judge whether the boys actually were strong or fast or knowledgeable, or whether they were just making hollow boasts. I was simply looking for another trait: loyalty. Herk and Tog had already rescued me once, at risk to themselves. And if Janelia’s story was true, she’d spent the past fourteen years wanting to make amends for her mistake when I was a baby.
Show quiet authority, I told myself. Don’t go on explaining. That would just leave an opening for someone to argue against you.
I shot a glance at Janelia and saw there was no need to worry. Janelia was nodding.
“If you wish,” Janelia said. She gazed out at the crowd of boys and narrowed her eyes warningly for a moment. “I’ll expect that all of you will stay out of trouble while I’m gone. And watch out for one another.” Then her face eased back into a more thoughtful expression. “But I think we should have one other person go with us so we can switch off more with the carrying—Terrence?”
The tall boy who’d bragged about being the strongest made his hands into fists and pumped them up and down.
“Told you,” he crowed to the boys around him. “Told you I’m the best!”
“It’s not necessary,” Tog muttered through gritted teeth. “Me and Herk can handle—”
“This journey won’t be easy,” Janelia muttered back. “We don’t know what dangers we’ll face. And Terrence doesn’t get scared.”
“Even when he should,” Tog muttered again. This time he spoke so softly that I may have been the only one who heard.
I looked away from Tog and studied Terrence, now in the center of a crowd of boys slapping him on the back.
If nothing else, at least he has a proper name, I thought. Somebody named Terrence wouldn’t have been out of place at the palace.
Like the other boys, Terrence was dressed in rags, and his shirt contained just as many crazily placed patches as Tog’s or Herk’s. His light brown hair was just as haphazardly cut; his feet were just as bare and filthy. But somehow he didn’t seem quite so much like a beggar.
It’s how he carries himself, I thought. He looks like he’s ready to say to anyone who might challenge him, “You think you’re better than me? Oh, yeah? Well, you’re not!”
Terrence’s stance would have fit right in at the palace, too.
Terrence turned his head and caught my eye—caught me staring at him. He raised an eyebrow, quite cockily. Invitingly.
Quickly I looked away.
It’s not like you think, I wanted to explain to anyone who might listen. I’m not staring at this beggar boy the way certain ladies of the court stare at certain, uh . . . particularly handsome . . . courtiers. I’m just looking more the way a stable master might look over a horse, to make sure there’s little chance of it going lame on a long journey.
Something seemed wrong about thinking that way too.
To cover my confusion, I turned to Janelia.
“How quickly can we leave?” I asked. “I assume the others will be going by carriage, and they might have even left already. To catch up, we should hire the fastest horses we can find, and—”
“Desmia, we’ve no money for the hiring of horses!” Janelia protested.
“Maybe there’s enough for hiring a cockroach,” Herk said.
I guessed that was a joke. But I didn’t see how anyone would think it funny.
“Could you perhaps . . . ,” Janelia began. She stopped, cleared her throat, and began again. “Do you think there’s any safe way for you to get money from the royal treasury? Anyone you trust who could help you pay for the journey?”
I considered this. Until my sister-princesses began reigning with me, I’d never given a thought to money. Everything I’d needed or wanted had simply appeared: dresses for the palace balls, food for the palace feasts, even new exotic birds for the cages in the palace tower. It was only because of Florencia always going on about the royal budget that I understood that hiring horses might cost a lot of money.
I thought about Lord Oxnard, the chancellor of the treasury. He was a short, fussy man who had taken over after Lord Throckmorton and his minions were unmasked as traitors. Florencia had worked with him closely. But did she actually trust him? Should I? Could I trust anyone who’d been at the palace the night of the fire?
You’ve been ruling with the other sister-princesses for a month, and you still don’t fully trust any of them but Cecilia, I reminded myself. And you just think of her as the one you trust the most.
Somebody had burned down the palace and endangered all of us. Somebody had done that on purpose. And I didn’t even know whom to suspect.
That fact made it impossible for me to trust Lord Oxnard. It made it impossible for me to ask anyone for money from the royal treasury.
“Perhaps . . . perhaps you could get a loan from someone you trust?” I asked. “And then after we’ve rescued the other princesses and restored the palace, I can have the royal treasurer pay them back?”
Beside me, Herk snorted as though this was the funniest suggestion he’d ever heard.
“As if anyone we know has any money!” he laughed. “As if anyone who has money would loan it to us!”
I decided it was good most of the boys were still so busy congratulating Terrence that probably only Janelia, Herk, and Tog had heard what I’d said.
Janelia seemed to be trying very hard to smile encouragingly at me.
“I’m afraid that idea won’t quite work,” she said, in such a carefully tactful tone that both Herk and Tog snorted even more derisively. “But perhaps it will turn out that we’re safer and maybe even faster walking. We can go cross-country undetected. Horses would attract a lot of attention that we won’t want.”
Beggars on horses, she means, I thought. They’d look out of place.
But for all I knew, maybe any travelers with horses were rare in the remote parts of Suala and Fridesia.
“You’ve forgotten I can’t walk until my feet heal,” I said, and too much of my despair seeped into my voice.
“And you’ve forgotten you asked to be carried,” Tog said, and there was something in his voice I didn’t like. Disdain? Contempt?
I looked down at the rug I was still sitting on, the one Herk and Tog had used to carry me away from Madame Bisset’s prison house. Janelia had slid it back so at least my feet and shins hadn’t continued to bleed on it as Janelia cleaned my wounds. But, just in the time I’d lain hidden in the rug, my blood had left rust-colored stains all over it, along with the less-identifiable blotches of equally unsightly colors.
“Wrapped in this . . . all the way to Fridesia . . . ,” I murmured. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
I could feel my nose wrinkling up; even without a single mirror, I could tell how haughty and disgusted and ungrateful I appeared.
“Don’t worry—we’ll have to sell this rug to have money for food, anyway,” Tog said, and there was definitely scorn in his voice this time. There was.
“We’ll come up with a different system for carrying you,” Janelia assured me. “Something more comfortable. Or, at least . . . cheaper.”
I couldn’t imagine anyone being desperate enough to buy the filthy rug. I couldn’t imagine how much worse being carried in something cheaper would be
.
“Isn’t there anything else you’d want to do before leaving the capital?” Tog asked.
I looked back at him blankly. Then I glanced down at my bloodstained nightgown.
“Oh, of course. I need decent clothes,” I said. “Especially for once I’m at the palace in Fridesia. But . . .” It seemed a little tactless to say, But if you’re worried about money for food, how can you afford the gowns a princess like me deserves? An idea occurred to me that made my whole face light up. “But I only have to worry about traveling clothes. I’m sure when I get to Fridesia, I can have Ella help me with the more impressive gowns. My friend Ella Brown, I mean, whose fiancé was the Fridesian ambassador who negotiated the peace settlement . . .”
“We know about that,” Herk said, crossing his arms stubbornly. “We’re not stupid!”
I thought about apologizing: I’ve never been around beggar children before, so I’ve got no idea what you would or wouldn’t know.
Somehow I didn’t think that would help.
Tog hadn’t actually crossed his arms, but he looked just as insulted.
“I meant, are you going to leave Suala without letting your royal subjects know if you’re dead or alive?” he asked. “Letting them know which rumors they should or shouldn’t trust?”
I hadn’t thought about my royal subjects. I was used to palace opinion being the only thing that mattered, and the palace was gone.
But the people who burned it down will be watching and listening . . . and feeding the rumors that help them, I thought.
I jerked my chin up again.
“You’re right,” I said. “There’s a way to fight back against my enemies even before I get to Fridesia. I’ll need a quill pen and high-quality black ink and four—no, five—sheets of the finest sheepskin paper. The kind we used at the palace for royal proclamations.”
“Do you know how much money that would cost?” Tog exploded.
He had his hands out like he was about to grab my shoulder and shake me. I shrank back from him. I’d forgotten about the other boys in the room—they’d been so loud and raucous their voices had become background noise. But Tog’s voice soared above the others’, and everyone else fell silent. Now they all stared at Tog and me. I felt the full weight of more than a dozen pairs of questioning eyes.
I didn’t know these boys. Despite the promised possibility of an eventual introduction, the only ones I could identify right now by name were Terrence, Tog, and Herk. Of course these boys were, as Tog had put it, my royal subjects. But they were also completely alien—beggars, not royalty; accustomed to life in the filthy streets, not the palace. I warranted that any random resident of the palace in Fridesia would seem less foreign than these boys.
And yet I felt like I knew what each of them was thinking: This is the princess we’re supposed to be revering? What’s so royal about her? She’s as dirty and bedraggled as we are right now. She’s just as much of an orphan. She would have been just as poor as us if it hadn’t been for Janelia’s mistake. She doesn’t even have a good answer for a beggar boy ranting about money! Why should we do anything to help her? What’s in it for us?
“I—” I began, and the one word stuck in my throat, blocking whatever else I might want to say.
And then Janelia leaned in and put a hand over Tog’s hands, gently pulling them away from me. With her other arm, Janelia hugged me close.
“We’ll get what you need,” Janelia promised. “We’ll find a way to work it all out.”
14
I lay flat on my back with a sheet over my face. This was the solution Janelia and the ragamuffin boys had settled on for carrying me until my feet healed: They had put together an improvised stretcher for me, with a narrow length of canvas held between two poles. Tog and Terrence walked along carrying opposite ends of the poles.
Tog had told me this was how the men who’d fought in the Fridesian War carried wounded soldiers off the battlefield. Corpses, too.
And, at least until we left the capital city behind, I had to pretend that I was also a corpse—just the ordinary dead body of someone whose family was too poor to pay for burial and so was sending the corpse to be thrown onto the paupers’ bone pile outside the city. Janelia and the boys had decided this was the best way to keep anyone from seeing me and figuring out who I was. Nobody would look too closely at a supposedly dead body hidden under a sheet.
I had never thought before about how corpses on battlefields were disposed of. I’d never thought before about burials or paupers. I’d certainly never known that there was a bone pile just outside my city walls.
Are there people in this city right now who think I deserve to land in that bone pile for real? Who wish I really were dead? Was that why someone set that fire? I wondered, as Tog and Terrence jostled the stretcher up and down. I had had no trouble back in the palace sitting through interminable meetings, pianoforte practices, and court dinners. But somehow it seemed to take every ounce of self-control right now to force myself to lie as still as death on this stretcher.
Because you’re thinking about death. . . . Because you don’t want to die and you so easily could have, back in the palace fire. And you don’t want your sister-princesses to be dead either. And you don’t know who burned down the palace or what Madame Bisset was planning. . . .
I decided to occupy my mind instead by listing the people who might even now be wondering if I was alive or dead, who would rejoice when they found out the truth: Cecilia, of course. And Harper.
And the other sister-princesses?
I decided to skip over the rest of them for now and move on to people who wouldn’t have heard about the fire yet but who would absolutely wonder and worry about me when they did: Ella Brown and her fiancé, Jed Reston. And . . .
And is that it? Is that really all the people who care whether I live or die?
“When the sheet slides around, I can see your hands clutching the sides of the poles!” Tog’s voice hissed in my ear. “Stop it! A real corpse wouldn’t hold on! Either make your body absolutely stiff, like rigor mortis has set in, or let your limbs go all floppy. But don’t hold on!”
And then, probably to provide an excuse for bending down low enough to put his mouth near my ear, he pulled the sheet slightly to the right.
I let go. I didn’t think I had it in me to flop around right now—especially with so many wounds on my feet and legs. The wounds throbbed even without movement. So I concentrated on holding my body rigid instead.
See, Tog must care if you live or die, I told myself. Janelia does too. Janelia cares a lot. And probably Herk and Terrence do too. . . .
Somehow none of those names seemed particularly comforting except Janelia’s. For all I knew, Tog and Herk and Terrence were protecting me just to keep Janelia happy.
Or to have an adventure, I thought. Hasn’t Terrence been acting like this is all a great adventure?
With my face covered by the sheet, I had no more idea of what parts of the city they were carrying me through now than I had the day before, when I was wrapped in the rug. It had taken all afternoon, evening, and most of the night for Janelia and the others to make arrangements for the trip. They’d conjured up the stretcher and paper and shoes and a dress for me. The dress was every bit as worn and ragged as Janelia’s, but at least I wasn’t wearing a nightgown anymore. The others had mentioned buying food, too, but I hadn’t seen much of it. By the weak slant of sunlight filtering through the heavy sheet, I could tell we had met our goal of leaving at sunrise. And by the general silence around me—interrupted only by the slap of Tog’s and Terrence’s feet against the cobblestones—I guessed that sunrise was not a particularly crowded time on the streets we were passing through. I couldn’t even hear Janelia and Herk behind us, because they’d decided to follow at a goodly distance so they could rush forward to help if Tog and Terrence got caught, rather than everyone being captured all together.
Are we in danger of being captured? I wondered. Are my enemies so plentifu
l that everyone we pass might be a threat?
I strained so hard listening that my ears rang. Was that a horse’s whinny off in the distance? The lapping of water along the riverbed? The cry of merchants in some marketplace four or five blocks away?
And then suddenly I felt the stretcher beneath me twist around a corner, and there was crowd noise for the first time, people whispering and muttering and exclaiming.
“What’s everyone looking at?” I heard Tog ask. I thought I could detect the same tone of faked innocence in his voice as he’d had talking to Madame Bisset.
“A letter from the princesses posted on the wall,” a man’s voice replied. I pictured him middle-aged and paunchy and prosperous, like a lot of the ministers and advisers and counselors at the palace. Already I didn’t trust him.
I trusted him even less when he sneered, “Not that we can believe it’s from an actual princess. Not that anybody would tell us the truth.” He paused for a moment, as if looking Tog and Terrence up and down. “Not that the likes of you would be able to read it.”
I was pretty sure Tog could read, because I’d seen him looking over each copy of the letter I’d written out in my best hand the night before. And his eyes had scanned the words just like someone reading. But I heard him reply in a perfectly affable tone, “Then maybe it’s best you tell me what the letter says.” He swung the poles of the stretcher slightly, as if bringing it to the middle-aged man’s attention. “Because no one in this crowd wants us pushing past them with this, trying to see the letter.”
The man sighed, sounding aggrieved, but intoned, “ ‘Be it known, royal subjects of Suala, that we, your rulers, are safe despite the appalling attack upon our palace. We are temporarily in hiding until such time as the evildoers are brought to justice. But rest assured, the evildoers will be brought to justice.’ And then it’s signed, ‘The thirteen princesses of Suala.’ ”
“It’s good to know they’re safe,” Tog said mildly. He didn’t just sound innocent now; he also sounded slightly stupid. “I heard some of them were real pretty.”
There was a smacking sound, and the stretcher swung oddly to the side. I put the sound and the motion together and realized what had just happened: The man had hit Tog so hard he’d almost dropped onto the stretcher.
Palace of Lies Page 9
